With an ungainly bump and a thud, I’m off on another internet adventure. Come journey with me through the rippled silliness of my grey matter, as I project it (word-wise) onto the screen before me. All for your consumption, my special special friends. Meaning anyone who bothers clicking onto here.
Which I hope is everyone, really. I hope there are people learning English just so they can read my half-baked and all-skewed take on things. Written in styles borrowed from any number of semi-popular authors, all mixed together in the blender of my brain into a pancake batter of this-is-a-bad-metaphor.
So what to write about? Not a whole lot has changed. No thoughts strongly provoked, other than those of food, in the past 24 hours. A few paranoid delusions, to be sure, but which one of us hasn’t sat in an awkward silence with the eerie feeling there is a small projector on the back of your head, shining your inner thoughts of murderous rage on the wall? None, I say. None of us.
The thing about paranoia is that it’s so wonderfully unfounded and narcissistic. Normally narcissism falls (in most people’s minds) on the other end of the spectrum, an overly positive imagine of oneself. But I argue that paranoia is the same thing, in that one believes him or herself important enough to be the subject of plotting and planning. Most of the time it turns out, when you’re well and truly paranoid, that no one notices you at all. Except for maybe sticking briefly in their memory as “that twitchy guy with the shifty eyes.”
I admit it. I’ve got shifty eyes. I am self-obsessed and take damn near everything personally. It has damaged my career prospects, my interpersonal relationships… And oh! To speak of romantic ones is something I’d rather not do. Trying to remember when it developed is a bit like trying to remember when you got a shirt you never wear. Not a horribly ugly one, but the one you just can’t find an occasion for. It’s probably yellow, or worse puce (or one of those other colors that sounds like a disease), and sits insultingly in your closet. You see it, you don’t throw it away, but you don’t like it.
That’s how most neuroses feel, to me. I can spend my life navel gazing with a professional witness (read: in therapy) and get basically nowhere in terms of the cause or origins of these little quirks. My foibles. All my little getting-to-know-me’s. But that doesn’t do much good, does it? It’s better to explore them, to dive in headfirst into how they make me feel right now and get to the bottom of each individual situation, like a large-lunged Southeast Asian boy snorkeling for clams. Except instead of a pearl, it’s an even greater prize. An instance of my being wrong about things.
Not wrong like “I am factually incorrect” or “I did something reprehensible.” The subtle, tasty wrongness of misreading a situation, making it about myself. Sometimes other people are damn near autonomous! I know! Hard to believe. There was a time I would have chortled at the thought, being a self-centered disgust-o-phile.
Aside: Do you know that if we all spent the energy we spend hating each other on productive things, we could have antigravity technology right now? I firmly believe that. In a sort of metaphorical way, which it turns out isn’t the firm at all. If we bitch less about the present, the future will get here, brighter, shinier, and quicker. I firmly believe that too, as it is my original point restated in a less ridiculous fashion.
An example is in order: I am convinced that people speak badly about me behind my back. Meaning they say bad things, not that they fail to use correct grammar and diction when I’m not present. I am intensely sensitive to criticism, so much so that the wrong person chuckling about one of my foibles causes blood to flush my cheeks and my pupils to dilate. At least that’s what it feels like. I’ve never been in an eye exam when it happened.
Rage! Instant and shattering. I’ve had a bad temper my whole life, and been picked on a fair bit. And responded a fair bit in kind. Perhaps too much so. I’ve evolved defenses capable of rendering the strongest psyche unbased, its owner tearful. This is not something I’m proud of, you see. It’s something that happens. Something that I do.
When this kind of thing happens, instead of avoiding it, pushing it down, or passive-aggressiving my way out of it, I find the truth, by hook or by crook. Now asking someone tends to lead to an response that you can’t believe. Of course they wouldn’t tell you to your face, gleaming and open with eyes and mouth, what they say to others behind you. But if you can get someone else to probe them or employ a little covert surveillance (including but not limited to: Eavesdropping, checking the email of people who don’t sign out, other nefarious and varyingly technological things) you’ll usually find what I find.
When you’re that way, people don’t talk about you much. People don’t think about you. The fact is, I think, people don’t care. It’s too much of a hassle to deal with a volatile human being. It’s too much work to constantly reassure someone that they’re okay in your book. Or maybe you just aren’t bothered by the things they think you are. It’s interesting.
All of this is in reference to specific recent examples I won’t get into. Specifics aren’t the point, the point is a mindset.
People who believe themselves to be victims will always be victims.
That’s the mindset. That’s the thing that gets in the way. And it’s selfish. Oh so selfish. And I don’t write this accusingly. I write this with the cheerfully painful burden of self knowledge. The knowledge that I have been so consumed by this issue of what others think of me that it nearly destroyed me. And ultimately, it was in no way—NO WAY—what others thought that nearly destroyed me. It was in my head. It was me playing games with myself. Self-destructive mental masturbation. Navel gazing with a professional witness.
That’s about it for now. This was a bit weird, a bit personal, but hopefully interesting or at least comical in some regard or another. Comment below.
RJC
1) Is Australia racist? Following the Harry Connick Jr Blackface Outrage (see here) and the ill-fated release of Oreo rip-offs entitled “Creole Creams” (evidence), Australia finds itself being asked that question. As a completely unqualified outsider, I’m going to answer it right now. On a whole, no more so than anyone else. In specific clusters, perhaps in a greater percentage than other places? Yes. Part of the Aussie aesthetic seems to be tactlessness. They come out and say or do things without real regard for consequence. They charge forth recklessly and hope to laugh it off later. It’s an interesting personality
On the one hand, they have great humor and seem like laid back anything goes types. On the other hand they also wax hateful about “Abbos” (Aborigines), “Wogs” (everyone who ever immigrated here and isn’t white) and various other groups that seem to irritate them. Or simply seem dumb. Which I find a little funny, as Australia’s international reputation pegs them as drunk and horny, not Nobel winners (this past year excluded).
This verbal diarrhea that seems inherent in Australian life isn’t bad in and of itself. The problem is that there are many thoughts, regarding how much your life sucks because of someone you’ve never met (in particular), which oughtn’t really be aired. Just saying. As for the above examples, the first was a bad joke and the second was a marketing faux pas. That’s all there is to it. It doesn’t prove Australia racist, but I would argue that Australia kind of is. It’s still got the vibe of a group of white people trying to keep out others. And that kind of sucks.
2) Earlier tonight I watched a program on the forensic investigation of King Tutankhamun(done by the 8th Earl of something or other, whose great-grandfather found Tut.) It struck me as amusing that he had inherited his “life’s passion” as he would an antique pocketwatch. Then I started thinking bigger, and decided the following. Why is Egypt the only country that has an entire branch of Academic study based on it. “Egyptology” is such a crock. It’s archaeology, or I suppose sometimes physical anthropology, with an unwillingness to compare cultures or step out from behind years of tomb-raiding colonialist claptrap. I just don’t dig it. Egypt’s fascinating, don’t get me wrong, but why does it get a whole “-ology” suffix?
I think it plays into the whole British aristocrat-turned-adventurer schtick that became popular in the 19th century. Dr. Livingston and all that crowd. The problem is that nowadays, it’s not. Nowadays it’s actual people with actual doctorates that they scraped hard to get (some of them even *gasp* EGYPTIAN) doing fine work on a fine subject that might be better funded, shared, and appreciated (comparitively, no less) under the purview of a different discipline. Not one set up 150 years ago for some rich inbred jackoff to get his jollies and see the world. Perhaps I’m overly cynical.
The other option is that every country with a vast archaeological history gets its own discipline. Babylonology, Greekology, and Romeology will all have to step up, to say nothing of the plentitude of -ologies we’ll reap from the heart of the Holy Land, which will be a fused blend of Israelology, Palestinology, Egyptology, and Romeology. It’ll get confusing. HolyLandology might be the way of the future.
I’ve been rambling, but I did it to make a point. It gets silly after a while. Egypt is exceptional in its gold and arbitrarily valuable artifacts, but it lacks the written history of the Sumerians, or the political interest of the Greeks, or the faith-based interest of the aforementioned Holylandology. It is one old empire amongst a bunch (and by far not the oldest). So, in short: Egyptology is bullshit. Take that, Lord Fuffington the Seventeenth of New Fancyshire.
3) Staring at the stars can blow your mind. I know, I know, this sounds like something that someone who takes drugs would say. I don’t do that, but I do occasionally have moments of lucid insanity during my normal life. At least that’s my personal prevailing theory.
The point is, the stars here are different. I see some of the things we see on our natural orbit around the sun, but in a totally different orientation. Dim memories of constellations go out the window. Orion I found because of the belt, but he doesn’t look right to me. Latitude and longitude being totally different, it actually makes sense (in that cold logical way), but from a the perspective of random dude it’s weird. Random dude is my usual perspective, by the way. Except in matters on which I am an expert, which is approximately none.
At any rate, this got me to thinking. It’s fairly widely accepted that at some point, human beings will once again begin thinking about traveling outside of Earth’s kind-hearted, life-giving boundaries. It remains to be seen whether or not a Doomsday scenario is required to ignite the second space race, but it’ll happen. If for no other reason than because of that monkey-brain instinct to see what’s in the next tree. Or the other side of the mountain. The scales change, the instinct remains the same.
This got me to thinking about perspective, and how radically different it could be if space travel was a reality. Rather than thinking about the Earth as a flat map of continents, poorly projected and distorted, or even as a globe, we would think of it as a central sphere in an everchanging three dimensional field of stars. People would walk around with that in their heads. It would be taught in school and fade into common knowledge, the way gravity, electricity, and all those other crazy concepts from past years have.
Imagine driving a vehicle capable of moving in three dimensions. A real three dimensions, with a Y-axis, basically. Think about the number of subconscious semi-instinctive decisions you would have to make. Think about the processing power required in our heads. That’s pretty nutty stuff.
Imagine really understanding that you are stuck on a rock hurtling through space so fast you can’t tell. Or you can’t tell because you’ve never been anywhere else. Yet. That gives me both heebies and jeebies.
So, through painfully amateurish astronomy comes another shift in perspective. Imagine what it would be like if I was really on drugs. Damn.
That’s all I got for tonight. Hope all is well with whoever’s reading whereever they are reading. Comments are more than welcome, and in fact encouraged.
RJC
See, the issue here is that while it raises an interesting point, it’s ultimately stymied by the number of crudely drawn phalluses that dominate the walls. Admittedly, the crudely drawn phallus has been a staple of art going back some 20,000 years now. And seeing them in the bathroom stall, they were drawn with a certain haste, a sort of time-limit performance art. Unless the perpetrator was a pervert who is comfortable spending all day atop a fetid toilet.
Well damn this argument actually gets better by the moment. In a gallery, there are expected to be critics, canapés, and the trappings of intellectualism. In a toilet, there are expected to be humans, odors, and embarrassing sounds. Which one is really more honest? Should we give equal attention to the Sharpie-armed shitter and the design school virtuoso?
Before you answer that, consider this: Unless you are an art gallery owner, the president of a publishing company, or a film executive, you DO give more attention, statistically, to the Sharpie-wielding toilet bandits. Odds are you will spend more of your time viewing the creative works of rest stop interlopers than you will the serious, high culture artistes who lobby for patrons like pigeons fighting over crumbs. And they, in what is arguably the biggest difference between them and our toilet-graffitiosi, think their shit doesn’t stink.
Food for thought.
RJC
Surroundings: Unpleasant tiny fluorescent bulb in lamp, as white as light can be. So white it sucks the color out of everything it hits. Myself included. Headphones in, music blaring. Cheap office chair not built or adjusted or whatever for someone my height, or width for that matter. Large glass of water.
Sounds like a decent setup for writing something mostly pointless and putting it on the internet. All that’s missing is mouthbreathing and acne. Those I can do without.
I can’t say I’ve been terribly active since last writing. I’ve been living, breathing, reading, writing, but not… doing. Which is alright. I needed a bit of a break, some me-time, as they say. It’s interesting the relationship we all have with personal time. On some level we feel guilty, as though we should be doing more. Thus taking time for oneself is often viewed as pointless or selfish. At the same time, we relish in it. We need it.
Personally I think it’s necessary to maintaining sanity. If I didn’t have those quiet hours of decompression, I would likely be in jail by now. I get an itchy feeling when I’m in constant contact with civilization. All that chatter and useless content—More useless than anything I would call pointless on here. I’ll give an example.
Like any show that has been nation-franchised and tailored to suit the “needs” of the target audience, American Idol (or Pop Idol, or Indian Idol, or Deutschland sucht den Superstar—Those are all real, by the way) has been repackaged for Australia. It is in no way different from American Idol. The accents aren’t even noticeable, when everyone’s doing their “heartfelt” rendition of the same pop song from the night’s appointed era. You get the same broadway belt, the awkward “vocal pyrotechnics,” with slightly different inflection and haircut. It’s interesting.
But, these are the type of things we need to escape. Globalization is all well and good, in its ethical and communication aspects, but the mind-shaking same-ness of it is offensive. It has been said that we all create our own world in our perception of things we see. What if we’re all seeing the same thing?
I feel like that will be our undoing. It won’t be nuclear war. It’ll be the loss of diversity. True diversity, not college-approved racial quotas or gender percentages. The regionality of things: the idea that you can only get this thing in this town. It’s the only place to see it, or at least the only place touch it, smell it, feel it.
And thus I find myself ruminating on park benches, on scraggly ground. The earth here is cracked from years of drought, despite recent rain. The rain actually makes it look stranger, a cracked map of dark brown, the consistence of chalk. The bench is painted the same forest-y green as any other bench in any other park in the world. I sit there, under a sky that is basically foreign. It’s too big. The sunlight feels ever so slightly wrong. The smells are those of flowers I don’t know the names of, a different species of grass. Et cetera. It’s a whole experience of difference. If I give into that for a while, I feel recharged. Different myself. I’m conscious that the atmosphere has a slightly different make-up. That the sun travels still East-West, but along the North side of the sky.
This is what me-time is all about. The details. If you can come to appreciate anything, really take a look and evaluate it and decide it’s not-half-bad, then it’s a good thing. I don’t care if it’s me marveling at the horrible krakkawing of a magpie or you studying the scaly top of an acorn. It just helps.
Helps us escape the franchised same-ness of everything else in the world. Little unique experiences, holistic and sensual. Not in the backrub way, in the using my 5 senses way.
At any rate, I’m rambling. So I’ll stop with the simple claim that in your life, you should make time to sit somewhere you’ve never been and, as clichéd as it sounds, just be. Take it in. Recognize the foreign qualities, and the similarities.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t watch Australian/American/Canadian/Singapore/Malaysian/Vietnam/Croatian/Indonesian Idol. Again, all real.
RJC
Again I’m treading into the waters of writing without the foggiest idea where I’m going. Bad metaphors aside—I assume they’re just a given now—I feel good. Weirdly good. Able-to-do-a-handstand good. No joke, I checked earlier.
I don’t necessarily think Australia is the reason for this, but I think decontextualizing myself (leaving everything I know, normally inhabit, and do behind) has been an extremely cleansing experience. Australia is incidental. It’s scenery; it’s things to do. But it’s not what I want out of life. For one thing, I miss a lot of my home life dearly. Things like late night rant-offs with friends; the shared excitement of watching a fight, of planning an event or simply of being in the company of people I have selected to be my peers. Not that I would be peerless outside of my context. I just don’t have my pick of the litter, if you will.
I miss standard measurements. The metric system, while great for scientists and Europeans, is simply foreign. Buying pants in centimeters, attempting to explain your height and weight, trying to figure out why “27 degrees” means a nice day— These are all things that are hard to do when you’re wired with inches, feet, pounds, and Fahrenheit. Frankly, I surprised these people never figured out a way to tell time that wasn’t impenetrable to those of us still brazen enough to use non-base 10 systems. I can imagine it now.
-What time is it?
11:30
-Oh, so it’s 9.75, metric.
Bastards.
Anyways, what the hell was I on about? Ah yeah. My stay here, now at about 6 weeks, a little over half way. This has kind of done some interesting things to me. It began, obviously, as a vacation: a heap of new places, new experiences. Then there came a bit of bitter homesickness, combined with the odd sameness of English speaking culture. At that point what differences there are (brand names, slang, etc) seem more like inconveniences than anything else.
The third state, which I seem to occupy right now, is a bit different. It is a strange source of mental power for me. I am a bit transient, which gives me confidence. I am not long for this particular world, this Australian sphere. I can do most anything I want. There’s no self-confidence when out in the world. I can stroll through the mall with head held high, speak to people in my intriguing “foreign” accent, and be on my way. I can chuckle on my walk out, thinking how the girl working the counter at the supermarket seemed legitimately clumsier in my presence. Americans are interesting here, apparently.
Back home, I would have trouble working up the nerve to skulk into a place of business to buy something I desperately needed. Here I spent 15 minutes sitting on a bench in a mall, drinking a Diet Coke and people watching. Even made eye contact with a couple. Today I picked up a belt and a phone, because I needed them, but padded the excursion with culture-soaking. I didn’t learn much, but how much is there to learn from a mall, anyways? They’re all the same, although here McDonald’s is charmingly referred to as “Macca’s” instead of “Mickey D’s.” Big culture shock. But that sense of familiar alienness is what’s tickling me right now. It’s fun, without the thrown-in-the-deep-end sense one imagines getting in other places.
All I can hope is that I can hang on to some vestige of this when I return. If I can make it through Christmas without my spirit being crushed, I should be good. This trip has inspired me to move to a city where I don’t know anyone, to pick up a strange job and live a strange life. I will smile easily, and one day have rippling six pack abs. I think, in a really weird way, when it all condenses here on a computer screen: I found the American dream by looking outside of America.
People in America (meaning me, mostly) seem to languish for motivation. Fear of success outweighs fear of failure. Ambition is a sign of derangement. To be truely free is something no one seems to be able to experience. No one says what they think, I’d be shocked if most people really think what they think. I was what I’m talking about. I might have been the worst. Wasted potential, scuppered energy. I refused to do anything, on the grounds that it would be work, or that it would be difficult, or hell, that it would simply be. I didn’t want to see the other side of the mountain. I had lost that basic nugget of monkey curiosity that makes humanity great.
I don’t know if it’s because I was forced or if it’s because I just did, but here I got ahold of something. Some energy, some vitality. I don’t really do anything different, other than be harangued by small children, but I get the sense that that isn’t it. I think it’s the thing I’ve needed to get from every seemingly life-shaking event I’ve experienced: distance. Hard-fact, physical distance. Not that emotional “closure” bullshit, with it’s multiple steps and confrontations and endless nagging. Just some simple removal. Absence.
That’s the best part of being here. I know that my life is going on as it would have. Someone somewhere is in America, probably in NY or CT, bored, fat, lazily contemplating big dreams with a knowledge that he’ll never go after them. But it’s not me. I’m here, doing something else. Not even anything better. Just something else. And when I go back, I will be changed. I’ll be a different shape, and I won’t slot back into the soporific ennui, the yawning failure.
And that, more than anything else I encounter (more than echidnas, wallabys, friendly drunks, women with neck piercings, whatever) makes me smile. A broad, unconscious smile. Some might even call it a grin, if they were so inclined, but I always thought that word has an oddly sinister spelling. Too close to grimace, to grim, to grind. In fact, a quick google of its etymology suggests it comes from an Old English word meaning “to show one’s teeth in pain or anger.” So it does indeed fit somewhere between grind and grimace, in the teeth-word-starting-with-the-letter-G spectrum. Which is a scary spectrum indeed. Anyways, enough of me and my Googlings.
Back to the point, to anyone who has the means, or the opportunity, or as I did, the luck to get out of your own life. Do it. Take the chance. Go abroad. Get lost. Be ridiculous in the face of judgmental strangers. Don’t pretend to be Canadian. That one’s important. Not because Canada is terrible, or boring, or entirely populated by hockey fans named Doug. Those aren’t even true. Mostly. But because pretending is all anyone does in America. Sure, we were a great nation of revolutionaries (for about 8 years 230 years ago). Now we’re fake tans and political correctness. Inner selves and outer veneers. A much more profound and shattering dualism than DesCartes’.
Get out of that. Learn how to be yourself. It does wonders for you.
A note of self-commentary: This is very likely to be the most positive thing I ever write on here. While I don’t think I will sink back into the cesspool of self-doubt and neurosis that I used to occupy, I also doubt that I will feel a need to express most of this again. I feel a great hope that it will be background—a subroutine running unseen in the recesses of my brain—or if I’m truly lucky, part of a new context which will be formed when my old one is blasted out of shape by my newness. So, if you ever take anything from my scribblings, take this one. Print it out, bookmark it, make a mental note to be less of a jerk, whatever form it takes. I don’t demand great applause. Only slight changes to the lives of others.
Someone asked me recently, or at least ranted at me, that she didn’t understand the point of so many pursuits. The things people build their lives around. Academia, careers, that kind of thing. I replied with a two-fold objection. The first is that there is no point in arguing that there is no point to something. The second is that the best we can hope for is to positively affect the lives of a few individuals. To be remembered as someone who helped. In a possibly delusions-of-grandeur-based way, I’d like to think, as I come up on the 1 year renewal for this domain, that some portion of what I wrote here sank in. Made a difference.
If it did, tell me. Not for egotistical reasons, but simply because I like to know someone’s reading. You’re also welcome to inform me that I’m a useless meandering twat who doesn’t know how to use a semicolon. Although I will take objection to that; my punctuation is proper.
In closing, I will say that that’s all I’ve got, and I’m off to sleep. Good night, and good luck to you all.
RJC
Foo Fighters covering Gary Numan. Modern production and rock aesthetic meets a futurist anthem of alienation. It’s basically the perfect music for me to write by. Paranoid lyrics mixed with some haunting stuff.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Goodnight all.
RJC
Earlier today, I assaulted Facebook and Twitter. This is nothing new: those are my tools for the most part when honking malevolently into the silence of net-space. It’s also how I keep in touch with friends, (some) family and the construct we all possess known as the “outside world.” At any rate, I came up with a plan which is utterly flawed but I am in love with. I said, simply:
New challenge: Go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, balance carefully on railing, drop pants. Shit into the skull of the T-rex skeleton. Become an American hero.
Followed by:
Embrace heroism through utter stupidity. Make a stink, not a statement. Doomed are we, the generation of dino-defecators.
Now, I was clearly being extremely silly. And I recognized later the flaw in my artfully constructed neo-copro-anarcho-revolutionary plan: The fact that the Smithsonian has an elephant in the rotunda, and the National Museum of Natural History is the one with the T-rex. As seen in Night at the Museum. A startlingly fun film which sadly included no public feces-flinging (Arguably it should have, it was rife with monkeys! RIFE!).
At any rate, I began considering the idea of founding a revolution on ignoring the most basic of human decencies and found the idea continually amusing. Imagine, if you will, little emo teens picking dingleberries from their old lady cardigans. Imagine goths worrying that their vomit might somehow bleach the black out of their clothes. And imagine a bunch of too-hip-to-bathe folk not noticing a real difference! Or, knowing those people, becoming squeaky clean just to do what no one else was doing.
See, that’s the rub, right there. There’s already a bunch of greasy, unwashed assholes out there, ruining it for the true revolutionaries. The heroes. The would-be self-dehumanizers. They wanna claim they have no hygeine when, in fact, they get up in the morning, shower, then put a gelatinous goo in their hair to manufacture the look of filth! They buy shirts with bleach marks and pants with paint stains built in! They are the enemy! And they will be dealt with. When the revolution comes, and a tidal wave of body odor travels down 5th Avenue in New York City, making even the incense-swilling cab drivers gag and dry heave into their burnt coffee, they will see the truth! When the grease stains left on park benches begin to fester and go rancid, so much so that even the homeless won’t—Nay, CAN’T sleep there, they will see! When the waste accumulates so that the entire eastern seaboard looks like Staten Island: banana peels and little crunchy balls of mucous piled into heaps, the foundations of which are caramelized hair clippings and crusted socks and corduroy pants stained with God knows what and cans of beans with a hole punched in them just so they rot and swell and bulge uncomfortable beneath their putrescent labels—Deep breath—THEY WILL SEE. They will see that by carefully managing our descent into animal madness we can become that most human thing of all: THE REBELLIOUS HORDE.
Ahem.
Seems I got a bit carried away there. Sorry about that. I forget what my point was, if I really had one. Had something to do with crapping on a dinosaur being amusing. Lost a bit of time there. That’s a little unnerving.
Right. I’m not going to scroll up to find out what that was all about, so do leave comments, if you’d be so kind.
RJC
I just wrote an extremely lengthy entry and deleted it. First time I’ve done that.
My reasoning was that it was unsound. Not as a piece of writing, because that’s a fairly arbitrary decision; but as a representation of my own thoughts. I don’t think it did me any good to put out a confused jumble of anger-tinged words. Clarity is the whole goal here. Expression and in a very real sense, catharsis. That’s why this site exists. It’s selfish and ridiculous, but occasionally might have a nugget of truth or goodness in it. And, I do feel the need to remind you, it doesn’t cost any of you anything.
At any rate, in the piece I had just written I was once again puzzling over what I find to be the crux of my position. The key difference between myself and the other adults involved. The problem is that I honed in on a difference, but it wasn’t really the difference at all. In fact, there may not be a “the” difference. Before I get overly confused, I will begin numbering thoughts.
1) I had decided that the chief distinction between myself and the parents was a matter of love. They possess it, quite naturally, for their children. This is no great surprise. Nor is it a surprise that I don’t. I’m not the parent, and have known the children for a month.
2) After de-bunking the biological explanations for parental love, and doing a long-winded exploration of it’s forms throughout time, I discarded it. I examined the child instead. This was a waste of my time and would have been one of yours.
3) My final conclusion was that the children of this generation weren’t innocent. But that it was the fault of the parents, and their generation. This was because the thinkers left when you eliminate anyone who makes reference to the innocence of child… They’re nihilists. Just like the parents. See below for a bit less harsh look.
I realized that this was doing a great disservice to everyone involved. I had mixed personal feelings with attempted social analysis. Admittedly the blog isn’t really the most serious medium of social criticism, but I felt like an ass. Venom and logic don’t get along. There’s no room for bitchiness in a proof.
I can’t help but imagine people reading this and saying things like: “He’s taking this way too seriously” or “It’s just a blog, lighten up.” But I can’t. And the reason I can’t isn’t that it’s a poorly designed website that I spend 20 dollars a year on. Believe me, I see the humor in taking that seriously. The reason is that since arriving here, I have been seemingly blessed with a clarity that has improved my writing and thinking and general well-being. And tonight I felt that shake underneath me. Which is frightening. So in effect, while this might be a bunch of words on a screen, or in a deeper reality a trail of data incriminating my self-importance: it’s an outlet. And one of the only ones I have.
Alright. Now we’re doing well. Of course, now the idea might well be dawning on you that “My God! When I read the blog thingie, he’s… TELLING THE TRUTH!” And all I can say to that is yeah, I am. I had hoped that’s why people bothered reading it (as they actually seem to) in lieu of passing it by for some combination of eBay and pornography. If I recall correctly, that’s the entire rest of the internet. Some combination of commerce and tits. Oh and I suppose the occasional horse penis. Heck, we’ve even got them in here from time to time.
Anyways, that’s lightened me up a bit. I can’t quite seem to shake the distaste for certain aspects of life here. Certain people, certain things. It’s becoming ever-apparent, as well, that it’s generational. After all, I am sandwiched between Gen-X parents and yet-to-be-named-gen kids. I can’t identify with either. The parents are hardened, reformed cynics. They pack away their sarcasm from 9-to-5 in exchange for the payscale, and then stretch out their nihilism in the evening.
Their leftover rebellious mockery gets unleashed at the television, at poorly dressed people on the street. They come off as unpleasant but not horrible. They’re snarky. They think think they’re funny. Sometimes they are. Though not nearly as often as they think. Perpetual critics, they can deftly tear something to shreds without a thought; but find it hard to build.
The children are children. And I do not say that as a good or bad thing. The nuanced definition will have to be contained in that word alone. Children. Beautiful and horrible, heart-breaking in both directions. Creatures of impulse and increasing conditioning.
At first when I was writing about them I found it easier to see them as either brainwashed or lawless. You see them either, frankly, as socialized or innocent. But that’s not really true. It’s a bit of a mad flip-flopping. Within them there’s some unseen power struggle between the internalized parent-voices and the beastly call for excitement. For fun. And you have to respect both, as well as respecting them for having those two in their head and not going completely insane.
In short, they are all human beings. Complicated animals with some visible patterns and some acts that seem out of nowhere. It’s very difficult to know them or predict them. And I have learned a bit of a lesson here. Characterizations and analysis are one thing. Invoking some sort of logical proof that these people are bastards is quite another. And I shouldn’t have done it, if only to keep myself from slipping into madness.
Madness is somewhere I don’t really want to go. It takes you out of touch with reality and causes you to shape the world to your fears. It can be mild, as it would have been in my case (had I gone on believing I had a logical proof that these people are bastards) and it can also range to pure disconnect. I can’t help but shake the feeling that mild madness is a slippery slope to disconnection. A lonely, narcissist place. Where I desperately don’t want to be.
So, clarity retained, writing skills sharpened a bit, I sign off. I realize this wasn’t as fun to read as a long rant of hate would have been, but… I think I’ve been forthright enough for you to understand why. Comment if you will.
RJC
I need to get some things out of my head so I figure here is the best place to do them. Screaming mutely into the abyss of the internet is one of my favorite pastimes, and scream I shall. Let’s number these suckers.
1) I went to a museum exhibit on Pompeii today. When you walked in, the first glass case of bricabrac and household whatsits were coins. Laid out in concentric circles, growing larger as your eye followed them around; they were a veritable fetishization of currency. I suppose it was to allow the moden Aussie to compare them to their own platypus-festooned coinage, but it just depressed me a bit. See, coins, for me, they kind of represent where humanity went wrong. I know that sounds drastic, and don’t get me wrong, I like something shiny as much as the next guy. My point is more that coinage, metallic currency stamped with someone’s head, represents the point at which humans decided to take worth away from things with worth. No longer were you trading with the cows that could feed you, or the sheep that would clothe you, or the pumpkin that would magically transform into a carriage for you. Now you took the symbolism of those things, the “value” and transcribed it to small discs of cold, shiny rock. It was the first puff of air into the economic bubble, really.
1.5) To continue on Pompeii, the exhibit also boasted a 3-D computer generated simulation of the eruption, with 1 minute or so snippets taken at 4 hours intervals throughout the day-or-two that Vesuvius did its nasty business to surrounding villages. That was pretty darn neat. The other main event was the famed body-casts. When a person dies in a slurry of not-that-hot-but-heavy ash and rocks, their body makes a hole. As the body disappears, the hole does not, and then some crafty scientists come along a millenium or two later and pour some cement in. You crack open the rock and voila, the general cast of a person, taken from the pose they were in at the… moment… of their… death. Wow, that’s actually pretty screwed up, when you think about it. I mean, yeah, there’s a statue that looks like a guy covering his face to avoid choking, and another of two young girls huddled together on the floor, legs caught in the midst of writhing in abject agony, but… No, still screwed up. Maybe more so. The only thought I had was sort of a note-to-self. Note to self: If you have to die in an excruciatingly painful way, make it historically significant enough that people will come see a construct of your death-pose in a museum 2000 years later.
2) The museum continued the bum-me-out-a-thon with it’s natural history section. Of course, children go nuts over dinosaur skeletons and pickled fish in jars. Bugs pinned to cotton backdrops with small, carefully typed name tags. I just don’t like it. The dinosaurs are cool, and give you a sense of the scale of the things that lived in a time of different atmosphere; but otherwise the fish in jars and bugs just make me wish I was, I dunno, outside. Or at an aquarium. Or something something alive and vibrant, and not half-bleached with new car smelling formalin. I’m not a giant fan of watching beetles push around balls of shit, but it’s better than seeing their hollow crusts jabbed through with a pushpin. This is another problem I have with humans, and particularly modernity: the cataloguing impulse. Another weak in the knees caveat: I like having a full set of things I like as much as the next guy. But, when it comes to the animal kingdom, part of the joy of seeing is experiencing the sights, sounds and smells that go with it. A butterfly landing on a large, tropical flower will have an entirely different set of associations from a scorpion seen scuttling in the Arizona desert. But in a museum, they can all be seen in an air-conditioned preservative stench. Good work, entomologists. Bunch of dicks.
3) Alright that last one was a bit harsh, but… You know. It’s a bummer. The chief other thing running through my head is how infuriatingly irritating people who use words incorrectly can be. I don’t mean the usual culprits such as “irony” or “good music” (Ooh, watch the snark!), but a specific example that I’ve run across with one person here. The word “redundant” has basically one meaning. It means superfluous, unnecessary and excessive. Or in the case of words, it means when two words are used when one would do. It’s not a hard concept. It’s redundancy, in all its redundant redundancy. This particular culprit uses it to mean anything that doesn’t work for her. Things like “They gave me the wrong one. This seems a bit redundant.” or “Doing that (thing I would never want to do) would be redundant.” I can’t help but wonder if she thinks redundant is the same as retarded. If so, she is a redund. That is a conclusion I came to earlier and had to share. Because I am so clever it hurts sometimes.
4) Other than all that, today was actually a good day. Not enough sleep, looked at the wrong things in museums, had breakfast food for lunch. All fine and dandy. The afternoon was spent watching the grand final of Aussie rules football. It’s sort of like the Superbowl, but more about competition than new commercials that cost 1.8 million shiny-bits-of-rock to air. In fact, there were only commercials between quarters, which span 20 minutes. Can you imagine if the NFL did that? Television networks in the US would have kittens. Kittens with hooves. Hooves. Perhaps that’s a bit hyperbolic, but the advertising revenue, in many cases, seems to almost be the justification for the playing of sports in America. When you think about the overall picture of it, it’s certainly the only justification for the salaries.
5) Christ, I’m economical tonight. I never really think much about money, although I’m told I have an economic view of relationships. Kind of an exaggerated give-and-take that leads to me resenting tons of people and writing off others as not worth the trouble. I suppose that’s okay though, because, when I do think about it economically, I only have so much to give. And aside from the odd mass-dispersion system (like this one), I am generally giving what I’ve got one-on-one. And there are only so many hours in a day. So, in short, due to the limitations of my reserves and my efforts, some people will be left by the wayside. And this lamentable fate will befall those who disappoint me in their own efforts first. So there you have it. An overly worded version of my personal philosophy on people. When I actually want people around. That last bit distinguishes it from the rest of the semi-nihilistic stuff that flies out of mouth (fingers).
6) Perhaps I’m too negative. I’d like to think of myself as “crabby” but maybe I’m just an asshole, screeching polemics at passersby and dumping anyone who gets close enough to the real me. That’s kind of a depressing thought, but truth be told, doesn’t bum me out as much as Pompeii, the shells of dead insects turned into dioramas, or the misuse of words. So I suppose there’s hope for me yet. Seems like a good place to sign off. G’night, Whoever.
RJC
