In my dreams last night I was walking around a mall in a wealthy suburb of New York (Scarsdale, I think) and I ran into a guy I haven’t seen in years—once a close friend of mine, but a person so remote and oddly autonomous in his thinking that “friend” isn’t really the right word. “Influence” might be more accurate. In the mall of my dream, I ran into him, walking around a men’s clothing department. I was deeply moved by the shock of recognition: this person has always had an inexplicably profound effect on me. I can only compare it to the charismatic pull of a David Koresh (or perhaps a less sinister, but similarly magnetic personality).
We sat down on a bench and I asked him how he was. He told me that he was living in France (entirely possible for this guy) and that he had joined an anti-American terrorist organization (also not beyond the limits of imagination, for said friend). He had done some illegal things with this group, for which he was being pursued. He began crying as he told me this, and I was moved to a profound, piercing kind of pity. I saw this friend as a deeply troubled, perhaps mentally disturbed person who had always needed help and had instead received only baffled admiration from his so-called “friends,” like me.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Joy
I was talking the other day with D and E (no this is not some sort of cute little alphabetical allegory) about this goddamn soul-crushing American fear of wasted time—the relentless drive to be productive at every moment of the day. Not to oversleep. Not to take a vacation that is longer than ten days, lest your life fall apart completely in your absence. I have heard my nearest and dearest griping/gloating about how France is finally having to face Reality and question its two-month Summer holidays, now that it is economically plugged into the European Union. I have heard same respond to news of joyful, non-job-related happenings with a sour “It must be great not to have responsibilities.”
Over the past few years I have made my money as a teacher, first of middle school, now of community college. In the faculty lounges of these institutions (as I guess is typical of any lounge in any government facility) I have listened to the complaints and the tirades of those whose spirits have been crushed by too many unpleasant responsibilities and a general lack of joy, to the point where any manifestation of joy seems suspect to them, to the point where even the desire to experience joy seems childish and unrealistic. Their words, their faces, I can say without the slightest fear of disingenuousness, have been knives in my heart. Always are. They drive me to madness and despair. Madness because I want to grab them by the collars and scream: THEN GET OUT OF HERE! Change your job! Change your life! Divorce your husband! Dismantle whatever it is you’ve imprisoned yourself inside of and MOVE ON? What have you got to lose? The alternative is seeping out your miserable, small, complaining, disgruntled existence for another, say, forty years until you die.
Or, um, is it NOT THAT SIMPLE? Anyway, that’s the madness.
Despair because their words are acid, poison. If you don’t exorcise the stuff by spitting back in their faces (which I tend not to do, being basically a nice, polite boy), it threatens to worm its way into you. To make you think that this disease of smallness and discontent and enslavement to unwanted “responsibilities” at the expense of joy is somehow inexorable, universal.
By far, the most attractive response to all of this, theoretically speaking, is “fuck it.” Maybe practically speaking, too. At any rate, my oversensitivity to this tendency a lot of people seem to have to be poisonous, suppurating sacs of bitterness has led me to keep most people at a distance. This is probably, no, certainly overcompensation, in that, paradoxically, good, healthy contact with others is one of the things in life that can be most joy-bringing and life-sustaining. Trapping yourself with nobody but yourself, unless you have a particularly positive and autonomously content Self (which I don’t), can lead to long periods of decided un-joy.
What I’m questioning here is what seems to me to be an unspoken agreement between a lot of people that Responsibility = Unhappiness and Happiness = Irresponsibility. Some kind of artificial distinction between those activities and modes of thought which are appropriate to grownups (i.e. Seriousness, Responsibility, Sobriety (spiritual and literal)) and those which are not (i.e. Playfulness, Joy). This duality, which seems to me to be all-but-all-pervasive in the adult (and possibly, particularly American) world has (as I guess is abundantly clear at this point) been a source of great distress to me for as long as I can remember. I struggle with it both outside and inside of myself. But whatever the outcome of my struggle at any given moment, or in the long run, I swear this: that I am the Enemy of Joylessness, of Unromantic living. Of the celebration and fetishization of Responsibility at the expense of happiness and personal freedom.
Over the past few years I have made my money as a teacher, first of middle school, now of community college. In the faculty lounges of these institutions (as I guess is typical of any lounge in any government facility) I have listened to the complaints and the tirades of those whose spirits have been crushed by too many unpleasant responsibilities and a general lack of joy, to the point where any manifestation of joy seems suspect to them, to the point where even the desire to experience joy seems childish and unrealistic. Their words, their faces, I can say without the slightest fear of disingenuousness, have been knives in my heart. Always are. They drive me to madness and despair. Madness because I want to grab them by the collars and scream: THEN GET OUT OF HERE! Change your job! Change your life! Divorce your husband! Dismantle whatever it is you’ve imprisoned yourself inside of and MOVE ON? What have you got to lose? The alternative is seeping out your miserable, small, complaining, disgruntled existence for another, say, forty years until you die.
Or, um, is it NOT THAT SIMPLE? Anyway, that’s the madness.
Despair because their words are acid, poison. If you don’t exorcise the stuff by spitting back in their faces (which I tend not to do, being basically a nice, polite boy), it threatens to worm its way into you. To make you think that this disease of smallness and discontent and enslavement to unwanted “responsibilities” at the expense of joy is somehow inexorable, universal.
By far, the most attractive response to all of this, theoretically speaking, is “fuck it.” Maybe practically speaking, too. At any rate, my oversensitivity to this tendency a lot of people seem to have to be poisonous, suppurating sacs of bitterness has led me to keep most people at a distance. This is probably, no, certainly overcompensation, in that, paradoxically, good, healthy contact with others is one of the things in life that can be most joy-bringing and life-sustaining. Trapping yourself with nobody but yourself, unless you have a particularly positive and autonomously content Self (which I don’t), can lead to long periods of decided un-joy.
What I’m questioning here is what seems to me to be an unspoken agreement between a lot of people that Responsibility = Unhappiness and Happiness = Irresponsibility. Some kind of artificial distinction between those activities and modes of thought which are appropriate to grownups (i.e. Seriousness, Responsibility, Sobriety (spiritual and literal)) and those which are not (i.e. Playfulness, Joy). This duality, which seems to me to be all-but-all-pervasive in the adult (and possibly, particularly American) world has (as I guess is abundantly clear at this point) been a source of great distress to me for as long as I can remember. I struggle with it both outside and inside of myself. But whatever the outcome of my struggle at any given moment, or in the long run, I swear this: that I am the Enemy of Joylessness, of Unromantic living. Of the celebration and fetishization of Responsibility at the expense of happiness and personal freedom.
Thursday, October 26, 2006
More About New York
The other day I was walking down the street, thinking to myself “what am I doing here in New York?” A long time ago, when I was 18, I came here to visit NYU with my father. Walking around Greenwich Village, I thought: Yes. This is it. I belong here. It was something incredibly dumb like the store Trash on Vaudeville—a glam-rock boutique on St. Mark’s Place that sells stuff like sparkly green Doc Martens—that made me fall in love with the city. That was IT. I was moving here and staying here forever. As they say, hideously, bafflingly, in the Bible, my heart was circumcised on the subject.
Like just about every New Yorker (and I guess I have earned the right, now that I no longer care much about it, to call myself a New Yorker), I have a love/hate relationship with the city.
I Hate:
• Traffic, all the time, everywhere.
• Loud idiots yelling outside my window.
• Car alarms.
• Standing in a subway car that is so crowded that I can’t turn the pages of a book, and being asked to step further into the car.
• Rats. Man I hate rats.
• Park Slope Moms and their murderous baby-carriages and their relentless, age-inappropriate chatter to their little Tristans and Charlottes about upcoming “play-dates” (whatever in God’s name those may be).
• No trees, no sky, no grass without rats on it.
• Clusters of horrible teenagers saying horrible things right next to me on the subway.
• Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• The idea of raising kids here.
• Burglary, mugging, murder.
• Corny New York Kitsch, like those awful Robert DeNiro American Express ads.
I Love:
• Constant access to art: theatre, music and paintings. Not so big on dance or opera, though.
• Delicious, amazing Japanese fusion cuisine. Restaurants of every conceivable variety and caliber.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• Opportunity. Everywhere.
• The pulsing, tremulous energy of the city.
• The skyline of Manhattan from the BQE at night.
• The fact that everybody I could ever possibly know will at least come here to visit sometime.
• That New York is just always completely fucking COOL.
• Crazy cultural, ethnic and religious juxtapositions of the sort that happen every semester in every community college class I teach here.
• Subways, when they’re not too full.
• Dog Runs (spaces in public parks for dogs to run around. I don’t have a dog, but sometimes I sneak into them anyway, just to watch the dogs.)
• The random bits of historical flotsam scattered around everywhere.
• Timely access to obscure and great films.
So it seems that there are exactly the same number of things I love (thirteen), as there are things I hate about New York. I don’t know--my folks live in Suburban Maryland, and I don’t think they’re any less neurotic or frustrated than I am, in spite of the ostensible preponderance of stressors here. And as Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman have amply demonstrated, it is entirely possible to drive yourself to suicide in a pastoral setting, beneath a cloudless, azure sky.
But this place is addictive, and arguably all addictions are unhealthy, in that they enslave you. If I were to move out of New York at this point, I would probably have to live with the eternal sense that something cool was happening and I was totally missing it. At least here, if something cool is happening, I have the option of being there. Even if I rarely am there, at least I could have been if I had wanted to. In fact, I am almost never there—but by virtue of the fact that I live here, it’s still mine, anyway. It’s all very pathological, really.
Like just about every New Yorker (and I guess I have earned the right, now that I no longer care much about it, to call myself a New Yorker), I have a love/hate relationship with the city.
I Hate:
• Traffic, all the time, everywhere.
• Loud idiots yelling outside my window.
• Car alarms.
• Standing in a subway car that is so crowded that I can’t turn the pages of a book, and being asked to step further into the car.
• Rats. Man I hate rats.
• Park Slope Moms and their murderous baby-carriages and their relentless, age-inappropriate chatter to their little Tristans and Charlottes about upcoming “play-dates” (whatever in God’s name those may be).
• No trees, no sky, no grass without rats on it.
• Clusters of horrible teenagers saying horrible things right next to me on the subway.
• Ambulances, fire trucks, police cars.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• The idea of raising kids here.
• Burglary, mugging, murder.
• Corny New York Kitsch, like those awful Robert DeNiro American Express ads.
I Love:
• Constant access to art: theatre, music and paintings. Not so big on dance or opera, though.
• Delicious, amazing Japanese fusion cuisine. Restaurants of every conceivable variety and caliber.
• Freakish and spontaneous happenings.
• Opportunity. Everywhere.
• The pulsing, tremulous energy of the city.
• The skyline of Manhattan from the BQE at night.
• The fact that everybody I could ever possibly know will at least come here to visit sometime.
• That New York is just always completely fucking COOL.
• Crazy cultural, ethnic and religious juxtapositions of the sort that happen every semester in every community college class I teach here.
• Subways, when they’re not too full.
• Dog Runs (spaces in public parks for dogs to run around. I don’t have a dog, but sometimes I sneak into them anyway, just to watch the dogs.)
• The random bits of historical flotsam scattered around everywhere.
• Timely access to obscure and great films.
So it seems that there are exactly the same number of things I love (thirteen), as there are things I hate about New York. I don’t know--my folks live in Suburban Maryland, and I don’t think they’re any less neurotic or frustrated than I am, in spite of the ostensible preponderance of stressors here. And as Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman have amply demonstrated, it is entirely possible to drive yourself to suicide in a pastoral setting, beneath a cloudless, azure sky.
But this place is addictive, and arguably all addictions are unhealthy, in that they enslave you. If I were to move out of New York at this point, I would probably have to live with the eternal sense that something cool was happening and I was totally missing it. At least here, if something cool is happening, I have the option of being there. Even if I rarely am there, at least I could have been if I had wanted to. In fact, I am almost never there—but by virtue of the fact that I live here, it’s still mine, anyway. It’s all very pathological, really.
Long Time No Blog
So I am going to pull the dubious move of blogging about not blogging, on the assumption that it is preferable to not blogging at all. I have not, in fact, disappeared off of the face of the Earth. Blogs are funny things, in that they feel old and stale if not regularly updated. That’s funny because not every blog is based on current events. Mine, for example, is based on whatever the hell I feel like writing about at the moment. I started it solely for the purpose of having a place to do that, publicly. I told myself that I would write on it when, and only when I felt like it, regardless of the reading public (should there be one). Yet, for the past few months, the BLOG has been lurking somewhere in my lower brain, heaving and seething and humidly accusing me of slackerdom for not updating it more regularly.
When you think about it, a blog like mine is no more in danger of staleness than is a collection of essays sitting on a shelf. These anecdotes and thoughts and memoirs aren’t time-bound. So shut up, BLOG! I am not beholden to ye. Over the Summer, I had an embarrassment of free time, so I blogged a lot. It’s Fall now, and with Fall come Obligations and Agendas. I am obliged to make money by teaching people to read and write, and my big, overarching agenda these days is to get paid to write, which has necessitated my writing, editing and hustling stuff other than this blog.
Also, enough with this word “blog.” It doesn’t really fit what I’m doing here—I’m not “logging” anything. And the neologism is a little misleading, in that it makes the “blog” seem like a completely new medium, when in fact it is nothing more than a public forum for publishing whatever you want to. It’s wide open. It doesn’t need to be daily, necessarily, or political, or hip, or targeted at a niche market. It’s words, images, video on a page. It logs chronologically because it’s designed that way—actually that’s the problem. If the software automatically organized writings by subject, length, text color and other categories, and did not prioritize them by recentness, there would be no reason to feel guilty for not updating the thing constantly.
Ah. There. I have expiated the guilt, reopened the floodgates of consciousness and creativity—feng shui-d the shit into a workable chi-circulation system. Things are flowing again. Phew.
When you think about it, a blog like mine is no more in danger of staleness than is a collection of essays sitting on a shelf. These anecdotes and thoughts and memoirs aren’t time-bound. So shut up, BLOG! I am not beholden to ye. Over the Summer, I had an embarrassment of free time, so I blogged a lot. It’s Fall now, and with Fall come Obligations and Agendas. I am obliged to make money by teaching people to read and write, and my big, overarching agenda these days is to get paid to write, which has necessitated my writing, editing and hustling stuff other than this blog.
Also, enough with this word “blog.” It doesn’t really fit what I’m doing here—I’m not “logging” anything. And the neologism is a little misleading, in that it makes the “blog” seem like a completely new medium, when in fact it is nothing more than a public forum for publishing whatever you want to. It’s wide open. It doesn’t need to be daily, necessarily, or political, or hip, or targeted at a niche market. It’s words, images, video on a page. It logs chronologically because it’s designed that way—actually that’s the problem. If the software automatically organized writings by subject, length, text color and other categories, and did not prioritize them by recentness, there would be no reason to feel guilty for not updating the thing constantly.
Ah. There. I have expiated the guilt, reopened the floodgates of consciousness and creativity—feng shui-d the shit into a workable chi-circulation system. Things are flowing again. Phew.
I Used to Think Faulkner Was a Monster
When I was a kid, we used to go to my maternal grandmother’s house for Christmas and Easter. I had one Christian and (still have) one Jewish grandma, so we divided up the holidays. Somehow Thanksgiving became a Jewish holiday, but that’s another story. Anyway, my sister and I always stayed in a room that used to belong to two of my aunts when they were kids. At the head of each bed is a kind of long alcove-shelf in the wall, lined with books from when the aunts were in high school and college. The most prominent book on my shelf, because of the design of the spine (“Design of the Spine” sounds like a terrible mystery novel doesn’t it?) was a paperback Faulkner anthology. It was pea green, with FAULKNER written in what looked like salmon-colored streaks of blood. In fact the font was almost identical to that of Helter Skelter, the book about the Manson Family that grandma had in the den.
As a kid, I assumed that FAULKNER was a monster, like FRANKENSTEIN(‘s monster) or DRACULA. Sometimes, before going to sleep, I had to turn the FAULKNER book around backwards, so the scary name faced the wall.
Ironically, I fanatically love Faulkner now. He’s definitely not warm and cuddly, but he won’t come after you with an axe, either.
As a kid, I assumed that FAULKNER was a monster, like FRANKENSTEIN(‘s monster) or DRACULA. Sometimes, before going to sleep, I had to turn the FAULKNER book around backwards, so the scary name faced the wall.
Ironically, I fanatically love Faulkner now. He’s definitely not warm and cuddly, but he won’t come after you with an axe, either.
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