March 2008 Interesting Links, State-Of-Affairs
As often as several times a week… okay, let’s not lie, seven times… I bounce around to different social events greeting people and trying to pick brains. I sometimes horribly fail at this… let’s get into that in a second… but at least I try, and try often. My track record is excellent. However, it’s rarely an equal exchange. There’s a reason for this. While it is true that I am generous with opinions and observations (and sometimes, accidentally, personal feelings and insecurities… leading to aforementioned horrible failure), I rarely consciously volunteer my actual thoughts. I simply cannot do that. It’s hard to explain without sounding conceited, but I really think about many things. All the time. The weight of it all becomes unbearable if not displaced occasionally - it’s the stuff of headaches and oversharing and, eventually, poor decision making and burnout. I have methods of displacement, which usually involve… talking to you. And drinking with you. And other, um, stuff. (I am an expert at vices) Pretty much anything that clears the mind, even if it’s a fucking awesome turkey sandwich, is needed and needed constantly. So, if I wind up giving you a twenty-part answer as to why I stopped taking photos, it’s all bullshit and the primary reason is pretty simple - I cannot carry a coherent line of thinking more than 48 hours without flushing it, baby and bathwater alike, all down the drain in order to achieve mental clarity and placidity. The only thing that I can consistently achieve are daily repetitive tasks, because they’re stored in the the brainstem and that’s generally a safe place for memory and learned skill. Photography is not a daily repetitive task for me, it’s been phased out. Anyway, I’m about to try an old-but-well-tested exercise in flushing the brain, right here on the old-but-well-tested personal blog.
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“Every society produces its own distinct brand of social misfits, I suppose…” And here we begin an essay that rightfully and painfully flagellates the type-A overlords who have dominated our society in recent times. Please learn words like “Achievatron” and “globaloney”, because William Safire will be testing you later.
But then, gradually, some cruel cosmic joke gets played on them. They realize in middle age that their grandeur is not enough and that they are lonely. The ordinariness of their intimate lives is made more painful by the exhilaration of their public success. If they were used to limits in public life, maybe it would be easier to accept the everydayness of middle-aged passion. But, of course, they are not.
And so the crisis comes. Perhaps alpha male gorillas don’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling sorry for themselves because “nobody knows the real me.” But those of us in the business of covering the great and the powerful know that human leaders have an almost limitless capacity for self-pity.
Yes.
I am not afraid of any of this because I feel confident that my moral center has held all the way through all the good and the bad times. But the piece is definitely food-for-thought and it certainly makes me afraid of where my ambition is going to take me. My priorities are starting to reach a conflict point, and perhaps not coincidentally I am entering my Saturn Return. Even on a day-to-day basis I’m finding it difficult to reconcile commitments among my close personal associates and my creative and political ambitions. (”political” used in the non-governmental sense) I cannot be there for the people I value the most - even myself - if I insist on being everywhere with anyone always. New York City feeds into this through it’s limitless potential and possibility.
Which segues to…
The Anxiety of the Middle Class New Yorker
Imagine my shock at finding an article from The L Magazine, of all places, to be incredibly poignant! I am particularly afraid that my “middle-class anxiety”, seeing that I’m decisively middle-class and totally anxious about finances and life goals, will lead me to places where I don’t want to be. I can accept that I am single, I have no equity, I share an apartment with a non-relative and that I work at a job that provides very few benefits (at great expense). But that is conditional on the fact that I’m 28 years old. What about when I’m 40? That state of affairs is unacceptable no matter where I get to live. Bonislawski speaks of the eventual outcome of the “hard-core bohemians”, and I am decidedly not one of them. I want children someday, and I would never bring a child into the world and willingly decide to provide a lifestyle inferior to the one in which I was raised, just so that I could meet my own material or emotional needs. I can leave New York for that. Instantly. No regrets. My concern in advance is that I’m already setting up myself for an inferior lifestyle (in which even leaving NYC is not enough to fix the problems I’ve created) and whether or not that is worth the possibility of meeting my own creative and political aspirations in life. My life, kids, NYC - pick two.
Causing even greater concern:
Rick Falkvinge: Why the US is collapsing
I get the feeling that this article comes from amateur hour on the world economy stage, but many of those figures - if not the assumptions about what they mean - are very real. I do not have a lot of faith in the American economy or government right now. (Not even Obamamania can save me!) To alleviate that concern, I’d have to move a lot farther afield of NYC than the Jersey suburbs! With my debts in dollars and my salary likewise, I’d like one to shrink and the other to grow, both in real value, rather than the other way around. Inflation definitely threatens my future lifestyle if my inflation-adjusted salary continues to drop like a rock. Among all of this, inflation doesn’t count if they’re talking about energy prices or home prices or agriculture prices (!!!), and unemployment doesn’t count if you’re talking about someone unwillingly working below their competency level or prior salary levels, and the health or failure of my life doesn’t matter to anyone as long as I live in Manhattan and make less than eleventy trillion dollary a year… meh.
But what about possibility in the first place? Where did it go?
I might have lost hope. I had a botched personal relationship in 2007, and the result was that I ended up in a dark place. I thought things that I didn’t want to think. I did things that I’m not proud of. I did everything to make myself functional again, and I did so successfully, but the damage is permanent. I’ve lost confidence in myself in a very big way. It’s not as clear-cut as it looks. I didn’t lose my self-esteem, the ability to converse without fear, or my sexual drive. I still have all of that. What I lost was this: I once had some hope that I could have strong relationships with people without fear. I had problems with it (a lot of paranoia) because of past failings, but I didn’t fault myself and I had hope that I could have people around who would not betray me, who I could rely upon in both times of happiness and in times of pain, who at the very least would be able to recognize when things were not alright in my life and would reach-out a bit. The problem isn’t that I don’t have those people - because I do have family and close friends who are always here for me when I need them. The problem is that I am constantly fearful that NO ONE wants to hear from me. I am constantly afraid that people whose relationships I value have cut me off, are doing something RIGHT NOW without me, don’t want me to know about it, and don’t want me to be present. I now have a completely irrational abandonment complex. I trust no one with my feelings, with punctuality, even with the mere idea of being reliable enough to be someplace when I need them there with months of advance notice. I have had nightmares where friends, family, even my charity touch football team all turned against me.
It might go away with time but, unlike the romantic and sexual needs and urges that dig at you soon after a breakup, this sort of thing does not take a few weeks to fade. It takes months and years to dissipate. I totally wish that I didn’t feel this way. I know that I had hoped for and worked toward a better result, that I had an undependable partner, that at many points in the struggle I became uncontrollably depressed and desperate, that I don’t like the person I became as a result of all those dark feelings, and there is no explanation that reassures me that this isn’t an eventuality with all of my personal relationships. And since several people (including the original offender) have proven themselves unreliable again in recent months, I am freshly discouraged.
And, in that light, imagine trying to work toward having a wife and kids, with all the planning and sacrifice that comes with it. Suddenly being an old and single bohemian in NYC sounds much better, doesn’t it?
————————————————————-Without hope, I don’t know exactly why I’m here or what I’m working for. I’m certainly not where I want to be at the moment, and all of these problems seem incredibly urgent. A man cannot simply live “business as usual” like this. I can hardly focus on life while being afraid of ambition’s perversions, while wondering if NYC will eat me alive, while wondering if America will eat me alive, while wondering if my own friends and lovers will eat me alive.
But “business as usual” it will be. I miss having big ideas, I regret that I lose sight of them when I erase my neuroses. Though it takes only about two days for all of these fears and observations to accumulate and reach an overwhelming weight, I have my ways of simply wiping the slate clean and moving forward with habitual tasks. Take a shower, make a sandwich, commute to work, build a few websites, go to a party, say hi to everyone, meet some other people at a bar afterward, have some drinks, maybe sing a few songs at karaoke, go home, go to bed, repeat. There is refuge in the tedium.