It's so familiar, yet remains a curiosity. It happens as a little flash, a mild stomach drop, and a little tightening of my chest. It's like my body "realizes something" and the "panic" or "fight or flight" carries out its marching orders. I'm just sitting drinking my coffee and watching the end of a movie. I've only been up and awake about 2 hours. I'm thinking about how I might occupy my day. But somewhere in that ambiguity resides a perpetual invitation to panic. It got me thinking about intentionality.
Last night I made a light trek out to the 24-hour grocery store for junk food. I spent almost the entire day watching movies and arguing with AI about scripts for fixing my show shortcut links and cleaning up my music tags. I'm a night person, so tired of idling inside, I set out. I watched a movie across the drive there and back. Every movie, bad or award-winning, employs mind-boggling amounts of intentionality. That fact alone originally cracked open my curiosity and willingness to be opinionated about all media.
At bottom, I feel like a person who is "trying to connect." I remember a friend in college who mentioned a pretty boring and basic anime, Scrapped Princess, she said she liked and the next day I binged it. The idea was that maybe I would discover what she liked about it and have something to talk about. We already hung out and talked about plenty, but she made a point about speaking to that anime in that way so it seemed like a different kind of opportunity or level. I didn't connect with it. She also mentioned once that she'd be down to film me and my ex having sex, which I suppose was it's own kind of missed opportunity to connect as well.
I find it hard to believe you can not only have an idea, formalize it with a script, share it with people, find money, hire people, buy equipment, travel to locations, navigate setbacks, promote, and ride the consequences of success or failure without the highest forms of intentional being that we have. What manifests from that is fundamentally magic regardless of how bizarre, boring, or distasteful you might find it. I think even that which is cynically syndicated has an interesting story as to why buried within.
Between this paragraph and the last one I had to get up and shit. I didn't intend on that. It was a call from nature independent of my intention to write a blog. Underneath that call, I intend to keep a clean ass and refraining from shitting myself. Surely you can discern the difference between an aspect of my nature and the product of my choices.
I also watched recently a Frontline episode tracking the lives of people who grew up poor. There's a scene where an already hungry and insecure in their living arrangements family are talking about a new baby on the way. The dad matter-of-factly said how he doesn't believe in abortion. The string of hammy excuses and negotiations they were going to have to make followed. It's in our nature to propogate our genes. I think it's also in our nature to downplay the suffering and consequences of doing so indiscriminately. If you didn't plan to have a baby, and do so anyway, what should we take away from that story were we to package it as a desperately low-budget movie?
When I'm intentional, the anxiety disappears almost instantly. That is, I have something to do. The "magic" happens without me noticing. I'm not sitting and ruminating about all I can't, and can never, know. The plan never has to be that precise or coherent, it just has to be a plan. Go to the store. Finish the movie. Write the blog. I'm debating currently how messy and tired I want to get assembling more of my fence. I need concrete with money I don't feel comfortable spending. My intentionality often aggressively bumps up against my practical reality.
Here I may have arrived at a new way of articulating where the anxiety comes from. I intend on so much. I intend to build many things. I intend to learn many more. I intend to travel and buy T-shirts and invest in equally frivolous if not status-indicating things. Often, that intention feels like mockery. It feels like a pipe-dream not situated in the reality of what it costs in both time and money. It feels dependent on too many variables, often derailed by the feelings, opinions, and negligence of the broader body politic. I remember getting routinely, violently, punished as a child for things I never meant to do.
I'm now thinking about religious types, in particular those who profess to care for the unborn like our impoverished Frontline father. Do you forgive him because "he didn't mean to?" In a deep sense, it's not his fault another nearly-starving, mentally challenged child is on the rolls. Or does it feel like you're supposed to levy blame? You don't blame a child who has been indoctrinated. You don't blame a child for being born, unless you're my mother. You do blame a cynic manipulator who recognizes the power of espousing an idea independent of its truth.
I can reasonably gather from your words and behavior how little you really intend. You don't mean to come across so superficial. You don't mean to sound helpless and ignorant. You don't mean to suggest there's only one or two ways in which the subject on hand can be understood. No less, a virulent defensiveness will arrive seemingly intent that I understand the depth of your feelings. When I can't, or do and dismiss them, there's no easier a way to become the enemy.
Do I mean to become the enemy? Almost never. But what I intend, a lesson learned every day, is rendered mute to anyone but me. If I didn't feel better understood, more motivated, and a sense of order and accomplishment from writing, I'd be at the mercy of the negative reviews. Those contain no mercy. Those are not concerned with the "why" or the "how" I arrive at my ideas. That's a realm of complicated reactionary feelings towards the obligation I'm imposing by trying to connect.
Right? You're forced to read, just like I'm forced to watch movies. You have to have the baby. We are at the mercy of our bodies crying out to shit and there's absolutely nothing we can do, no edits, no casting decisions, no budget allowances to make this story better.
I don't depend on the storyteller's capacity for me to develop a view. I can decide to look for the redeeming things about art that doesn't align with my current tastes. I can believe there's a deeper intention trying to escape the cold or rote and superficial. It's not only possible, but extremely likely I'm missing something, perhaps the heart, of what was driving the creation altogether. I don't have to speculate about a fundamental desire to connect. To me? To their "god?" To the zeitgeist? To the art that's inspired them first? At some level it's irrelevant. You need to connect with you before anything else can make its own kind of sense.
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