[1188] Self On A Shelf

Self On A Shelf

2/10/2025

Yesterday, I was wandering around a re-sell store. I had time and nowhere to be. That recipe is often an invitation to waste money, experience foreboding dread, or stay in a paralytic ADHD haze as I think about who I'd like to be one day, if only.   

  

That day, I found myself wandering and waiting for something to call out to me. Surely, I thought, I'll find something I want in the midst of a selection of everything we've ever produced. I'm a man of many interests, goals, and talents, so it follows naturally that I should locate the next step on one of my many paths within so many invitations. What did I find? What called out? $1.25 air freshener, because I cleaned the cat box earlier and considered the dust. $1.25 Valentine's Day paper airplanes because it was cheap, it's close to Valentine's Day, and my Y kids make a lot of paper airplanes.  

  

30 minutes earlier, I had made a decent amount selling some Pokemon cards at a shop that shared the plaza. The money wasn't burning a hole in my pocket, and in many ways is already spent. When I was a kid, superficially, those cards were explicitly something I wanted. My dad told me a story of my grandpa throwing out my dad's beer can collection, thinking it trash. It would have been worth thousands. That was enough for child me to make Pokemon my collection investment. I've never played a single game with my cards, and they went immediately into cases. 25 years later, the amount of remarks the cards got for their condition is certainly a point of pride.  

  

Here, we can see how it gets easier to answer questions about just what it is I really want. I want to show that I understand the value of treating things nice and investing in their preservation. I want to reflect that I understood the lesson and lament of my dad. I want to hear from someone who also appreciates what it takes to search for, save, and protect things, praise my effort and intention. As I've gotten old enough to value experiences more than things, I'm thrilled about the prospect of the money I make selling the cards turning into pit tickets for my favorite bands and trips.  

  

I didn't want the "stuff" of the cards. I wanted the hunt, the solidarity, the pride, and the story of what cashing-in represented. All of that is decidedly missing from aimlessly meandering around a store with an endless array of odds and ends.  

  

I think a lot about what my environment invites me to do. Always, the answer is "buy." I've spent the better part of 2 months looking for spots around the greater Indianapolis area where it's okay to just sit and do something like this. I've found exactly one answer, the library, and the moment you feel tired you recognize how specifically useful and limited it really is. There aren't places to lounge, mingle, be informally taught or engaged in any way that don't, first, revolve around buying something.   

  

I don't know how often I ever truly wish to consume. I get hungry, but a meal or two a day and I'm otherwise then contented to stay occupied. Maybe that's occupied with TV shows and music. Maybe that's occupied with a phone video game. Nearly every job I've ever had is truly occupying time more than challenging or pushing me to learn anything beyond it's brand of hopeless intransigence. The battle then becomes looking for a way to avoid getting consumed by such an environment. Can I find the things about me that I want, can I recognize what's calling out to me, beneath the Pokemon card collecting?  

  

That not-so-hidden world of desires comes up a lot when I listen to comedians or band members talk about their careers. I get flashes of it when I see familiar names on early movie credits in the "thank you" section. What everyone had, gets, or presumably finds, when they become big enough to put their stamp on culture is a community of people aimed at the same thing. The, not Skrillex, lead singer of From First to Last talked about 7 people living in a 1 bedroom and 5 of them just sleeping on the floor. Regardless of what else was in their heads as they slept, they were dreaming together.  

  

I get the impression that everyone who has a healthy relationship to their career, success, or scene deeply appreciates that sensibility more than anything. They find people who help them translate their ideas. They find people who will sit in a room with them for months until something feels cool enough to share. They find all the reason they'll ever need in the pursuit and moments trying to create together.  

  

I think this sensibility goes deeper than merely designating someone as a "friend" or laying claim to them as "family." I think it's why so many of my own friends and family, practically, play out in unfulfilling and empty ways. What, besides ever-fleeting history, and maybe a facebook page, do we share? What are we working on together? What do we both care about enough to sacrifice money, comfort, or something "more practical" than whatever it is we're choosing to do together? I don't have 2 friends I can consistently get lunch with, and haven't for over a decade. How are these fuckers starting and keeping bands? It's a miracle if I've ever seen one.  

  

I suspect that before the internet, it was mostly taken-for-granted that you had people, consistently, meeting your interconnected needs in those unspoken existential ways. You were in clubs. You had to talk to everyone to get anything done, not disappear into your phone and hide from, I promise you, your lonely DoorDash guy. You had to call and pick up to get anything moving. You had to anticipate and invest emotional energy deliberately versus provoked via auto-scroll. I think people felt a certain reasonable license and wisdom to share and correct in ways that contributed to the betterment of the whole, because an isolated perspective would prove more immediately fatal.  

  

I still look for solidarity, in spite of there almost always being little on offer. Let me tell you how it tends to go, particularly in a work setting. Most of the people at rung 1 or 2 of "middle management" all complain about the same things. Maybe their boss agrees, but she's also suffering from the same fundamental problems of the organization writ large. That is, no one's getting paid, it's poorly organized, general laziness and ambivalence contribute to arbitrary and contradictory pieces flung out for the lessers to navigate, inevitably poorly, providing endless fodder for talking in circles to complacency.  

  

While this is going on, I'll find the one other, more insistent, person and they'll see that I'm stuck on seriously speaking to and tackling the problems. They'll feel tinges of emboldened hope here and there because I'll articulate something well or give specific examples of how and why something does or doesn't work. They'll chime in with their hopes. Then, an hour will go by, and it's, "Good luck with that." They want nothing to do with it. They immediately feel the weight of "the modern era" in which nothing is possible, everyone's complacent, and believing in things making sense or being fair will feel like torture.  

  

I don't want more interactions like that anymore than I want more Pokemon cards. I really don't want the underlying world that makes them the air I'm otherwise choking on, like a million opportunities to buy junk I don't want and certainly don't need. They want to be in a band, but practice their instrument? That's for *those types over there*. Surely, we can use a droning preset drum beat, and that's good enough.  

  

I sometimes wish I was more enamored or invested in the "stuff" of it all, because for as overwhelming and hollow as I might feel wandering around, it doesn't feel like an attack on being alive altogether. It doesn't feel like I'm attending a series of wakes mourning a new dead ideal or chance to act. One of the few times I see or hear myself anywhere in the world is from those within their current success. I shouldn't have to come across a particularly insightful, articulate, and famous enough emo singer to find remote solidarity.  

  

I have a friend driving 2 hours down today so we can go see Silverstein, incidentally the band with the singer leading the interviews of Lead Singer Syndrome from which I'm drawing some inspiration. Before she moved back to this godforsaken state, she lived in the Indiana of the South, Florida for a decade. We've spent more time together going to shows, eating, or marathoning movies than I have with dozens of "friends" who've lived an hour or less away from me since college. We don't need a bigger goal or agenda than the next show or meal, all of my screams for broader revolution aside.  

  

Am I not good enough for the rest of my friends? Good enough, for what? They were good enough for me when I needed to fill a house with cool people every weekend who could talk and joke about anything. Anyone who's even glanced at my writing in the intervening years knows I'm not the friend who gets "weird" and is so far removed from their memory he's practically unrecognizable. Think any one of them is going to catch this and call or message to meet over the weekend? Think they won't be weirded out if I take it up on myself to, once again, be the one to force it? Do you think Billie Joe Armstrong spends 10 minutes a day or hours a month smooth-talking and cajoling and bending over backwards to get Tre and Mike to play with him?  

  

My friends are smart kids too. I know that part of us getting together makes them feel bad because we inevitably talk about how fucked up things are. While I'm writing out the existential crisis every few days attempting to actively cope and navigate, they're normal. They're trying to disappear into their relationships, jobs, hobbies, families, or TV shows. I'm not a good friend for not talking about things, and we can't maintain this hopeless suffocating culture unless we're mature enough to shut up and bear it in faux isolation. I don't talk in memes, and yet memes is all I'll ever read from them.  

  

I'm extremely thankful that I get to viscerally suffer and celebrate simultaneously. It doesn't let me pretend like the world is infinitely bleak, but makes me feel incredibly justified in explicating the depths in which that bleakness I think is bound to kill us all. I think I'm like that re-sale shop. I'm a standing invitation that can quickly become overwhelming if you don't know what you're looking for. You can get buried under a pile of things desperate to be consumed. I sit here, like it all sits there, waiting to be picked up, the value inherent in perpetual limbo. Feels like a bizarre thing to suffer as though you can't get off the shelf.