I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette in slightly slow motion as a camera pans across me at an over-sized desk with my needlessly expensive pens and novelties laying disheveled amidst disorganized papers and a short glass of whiskey. I don't even really like whiskey, but I'd be drinking it to mimic every depiction from 1920s dick to modern titan of industry that's washed my brain with regard to what the sleek and disturbed, yet powerful, men get up to as they contemplate their lives. I'd start out speaking in a voice much lower than my actual tone about the many lives I've lead and the countless souls I've no doubt crushed in an over-indulgent and prideful bout of slick self-delusion. There would be a poignant stench and crust as my sentiments creep over the edge of the desk and sink into the floor that's been slowly opening up and swallowing me for more years than I could remember.
Big changes are coming. If I only look at the kind of things I'm finding new interest in as an indication, it might resonate as merely capitalistic boredom. How dare I investigate an array of fancy and “individualistic” pens? What a privileged joke. What a laugh to look into “box of the month” subscriptions, as though a random array of cost-effective junk shipped to me is going to take up more space in my mind than my tables and trash. The harder truth is still mostly unspoken. The tide and power are shifting, and the people at the front line are doing all they can to keep it off their tongues and out of sight.
I'm excited and willing to keep speaking in the abstract because I like the tension. I like the idea that it's finally not me who's got to suffer every waking moment of anxiety and questions about what's going to happen next. I like being able to treat people like they’re the kid who never knows when the punishment is going to take place, because why pretend I'm somehow above my influences and past or care to not perpetuate a force that played such a powerful role in shaping so much of what I enjoy about me?
“I wanna be the minority. I don't need your authority.”
I was thinking today of writing my mother a letter attempting to explain how my perception of her has shifted over the years. They say you get older and start to realize that your parents are just people too. We know I've read enough psychology or social science to pawn off significant amounts of responsibility on the forces we're born into. My job conjures up a kind of hopeless sympathy for the people you know are going to be...about where they are...their entire lives. So, surely, a deliberately crafted piece of prose about my empty sympathies and mild-appreciation for the times that weren't terrible could act as a nice capstone before a new resolution to never speak to her again. It's poetically retarded.
One of the things that makes me afraid is my capacity for conscious and deliberate evil. It's a place you go to when you're craving a kind of evening of the scales or lash out to “take back” a kind of individual sovereignty your environment or social scene appears to be robbing you of. “Oh yeah? Well wait till I get control.” The cold irrational morality of the “hate your manhood, hate your race, hate your power” community draws from the well in perfect irony. It's only in granting myself the realization of that capacity that I allow myself to grant you equally depraved agency. It's why my heart infinitely breaks when you're all talk and get unduly old. It's why I allowed myself to be deceived in what I thought we could mean to each other.
That capacity is a drug. It's the drug I think Byron took in his politicking. I think the people running around and making their introductions and asking to sit on boards becomes immensely gratifying. I think any criticism of the process, or the reasons he lost, provoked some of his darkest impulses. I think he forgot, or disregarded, that a revolt of 1 amongst equals is a losing strategy when both are excited to annihilate.
What that annihilation looks like is anyone's guess. For me, it's the continuation of what my not-so-subconscious has been telling me for an exceedingly long time. I need my own space, alone, away from everyone, where I can do things independently of the trappings of modernity. Debt from a car payment literally becomes an existential threat when you've been doing it like me for as long as I have. How can you not remember I was willing to get my spine tapped to not fit in? It's not hanging from hooks and face tattoos, but the severity of pain and degree of panic I will never forget.
I draw power from what I do with my own space. When I'm not thinking about anything else but how to flow from one thing unto the next. It's occurring to me that with this job, and the nature of it being that there's just enough to do each day, just enough manageable variety, just enough thinking on the fly to navigate different personalities or juggle the 5 things that fall into your lap at 4:15 on Friday, it lessens the “dragging” nature of me not getting what I want. When I have to figure out how to build, mend, and brew in the off-hours combined with the occupied-enough of my day to day, I'll be right back here at 32 in a too-comfortable position with a radically transformed circumstance. I'll have nowhere else to go, because I'll have cultivated the environment that forces a collapsed set of more likely outcomes.
And then what? It's a story cliché that before you get everything you ever wanted, you have to shed everything that came before. Think Thanos killing Gamora. My theory for why this happens is that you become something so entirely removed from all of the forces that pushed you there, it's basically a mathematical imperative. It's over-filling a cup with water. Yes, technically there's still a cup, and it is indeed filled with water, but each particle was replaced until it was in some exotic or indefinable way different, and the people who used to drink it now prefer pop.
I like the idea of a kind of cold denial and rebuke. Let me get that access or the perks. Let me start living the example people imitate, but never quite feel in their soul. Then let me deny them the invitation. Let me shed the last shells of facebook impersonalities and picture posturing. It'll taste sweeter than that wildly over-priced chocolate I considered ordering the other day.
I'm still persuaded that the more you allow death into your narrative, the more grounded and aware and honest you can be about your place relative to other things. I think the world looks the way it does in a large proportion to what people have or haven't dealt with in regard to their death. What's your “best” if it mirrors the behaviors you've learned about your worst? What's your motivation that pulls you out of bed independent of every obsessive rage-inducing thought or sweet suggestion of seductive suicide? What's the place you occupy when the shelves for your experiences of “love” or “trust” are so cluttered with a dusty and broken mess, yet so devoid of the objects that would encapsulate what they mean to you?
I welcome death, so I don't bemoan watching your suicide. I memorialize the broken relationships. I sing a sad song for the pages left unturned. But I always awaken right back at the end of another step in the direction I want to go. I always manage to find someone, just as erratic or judgmental or contradictory and ridiculous as you, to take your place and ride along until it's their turn to breakdown. It's a crass motivational poster to regard everyone who's ever hurt your feelings as a novel bump or stepping stone and learning experience. The trembling resolve of stolen wisdom in lieu of embodied practice.
I've never wanted to be liked by anyone I didn't like for one reason or another a little more than me. My dad and grandma showed the kind of committed family resolve I thought was paramount until that family decides it wants to eat you from the inside out. I want to laugh and joke, or let you play with my hair, if I know first and foremost there's as much of your individual shining through as the space we're occupying can accommodate. I treat naive-lamb people not maliciously, but like children who need to be listened to and indulged just enough while you account for the things they're over-looking. I don't need the approval of the monied because they're rich. I don't need the fervent insistence that I should be “normal” in social obligations and go through the comfortable routine. I don't need the flip and condescension when I discuss my potential to change the world or my interest in exploring things well-beyond my current level of know-how. I only want those speaking my language, who show up, and who recognize they're either all or nothing.
I have the sneaking suspicion that when the generalized yet modest marginal debt captain of my plane says it's time to walk about the cabin, most of you are going to go down and resent that I offered a parachute. I'm the pilot. The safe and predictable or practical place you occupy all the way down will feel perfectly righteous and reasonable. The power and perks of your path will surely match or exceed whatever it is I'm rambling about that day. And we'll all get exactly to the end of our negotiations as livened or wise as we'll ever be. Let the shedding begin.
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