february 11, 2025 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Have you looked at the sky lately? It’s the talk of the town. This morning, a sun burning through a sheen of clouds, making a sunrise of pastel pink and orange, last night, a big bright moon surrounded by stars – it’s hard not to look up. In prettier moments, it makes me feel small in a good way. 

Waning poetic. 

I’ve been told that I’m a writer and therefore have no choice but to write. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. Surely you’ve noticed, waiting weeks with bated breath, that I haven’t been doing this very much. Any writing I have been doing has been squirreled away secretly in notebooks that will remain unread until I die and my literary executor, swept away by the artistic value of even my most casual thoughts and feelings, defies my dying wish to burn all extant writing materials, instead opting to publish them, and I get catapulted to post-mortem fame. 

Forgive the fantasy—forgive the bravado. I didn’t sleep great last night, and it fills me with a flavor of mania. It’s kind of an effective tool for making things, or at least for getting the inspiration to make them. Rest assured that everything I’ve said so far has been bullshit. 

Pithy edginess aside, I’ve determined that I do much better in every way when I’m working on some sort of project. So, in an effort to do much better in every way, I am working on a project—the specifics of which will go unsaid, but can easily be surmised by the fact that it’s been over a year since I released any music. 

I also do better when I’m reading. Currently, I’m reading Sandman at the behest of the same friend that insisted I’m a writer and therefore have to write. Despite my hesitance to read a graphic novel (in other words, pretentiousness), it’s pretty good—a nice change of pace after soldiering through Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, which I enjoyed, despite at times feeling too stupid or too drunk to fully appreciate the depth of the stories. 

After Sandman, I think I’ll read The Bluest Eye or Beloved because apparently I love whiplash. If anybody has something worth saying in a time like this though, I’d imagine Toni Morrison is one, and her work presents a significant gap in my reading. I’m looking forward to seeing what all the literary fuss is about, so to speak. 

If a prospective employer is reading this (and why would you do that?), note well that I am an interesting and artistic person outside of work, and I am desperate to deliver value to your shareholders—truly, it’s my biggest dream. 

Truthfully though (sarcasm aside), I just want to make enough money to finance a simple creative life. I don’t need to derive all my fulfillment from work, despite the vestigial Protestant work ethic that makes me feel guilty when I don’t in fact make my life solely about working. When the dreaded question is asked in interviews of why I want to do something like, say, office administration, I wish it was an acceptable answer to say that I have bills and I want to do a job that is straightforward and allows me to daydream about creative pursuits, because I can truly do that and be a good employee. Despite my snark, despite the consistent façade I project that I’m a hip, creative, ‘lax guy, I actually am a good worker. I can promise you that. Ask me—really. Go ahead. That’s a better question, because I’m not going to bullshit an answer on why I’m passionate about office work. 

The fact that I won’t bullshit you about it is another reason, I think, that I’m a good candidate. 

Whatever though– that’s enough of that. Given that attention is one of our greatest currencies, I’m not going to waste any more (at least in this blog) about shit I have no control over, like the questions one gets asked in interviews. Limiting attention to that which can actually be improved upon or influenced in day-to-day life can’t be a bad thing. Why else would I feel like I’m giving myself brain damage when I zone out on my phone for extended periods of time?

There’s caustic image after caustic image of a world evidently falling apart, and good people trying to do something about it with their “platforms,” and truly I don’t know what kind of noise to contribute to that torrent of noise. 

That’s why I haven’t really been writing this thing. I don’t want to add to the torrent. Having expressed that to a friend, I was told, “well, just don’t make it noise, then.” But I think it’s noise. 

Or, noisy, at the very least. 

Then again, I suppose it isn’t up to me to decide. Lately, when I feel anxious about doing anything creative (and rest assured, the feeling is frequent), I realize that it happens when I think about the end result before the thing is even done: of posting the blog, or putting out a record, performing the song in front of an audience or, god forbid, submitting a story for potential publication (yeah, I still write those now and then, but I haven’t submitted anything for like, 18 months)—basically, thinking about presentation over and before production.

It just kills the joy of making the thing. Cart before the horse, et cetera et cetera. Ironically, parsing that out in writing is somewhat cathartic. And I had a good time; did you? (Don’t answer that.)

But anyway, to lend this thing a semblance of circularity, look at the sky later. The moon will be big. It’ll make you feel small, but along with it, all our problems too.

january 28, 2025 – performative journaling at the End of the world 

The title of this blog is starting to feel less metaphorical.

Until a little over a hundred years ago, we thought you could cure things by bloodletting. This occurred to me last night with bloodied fingertips from flossing a particularly angered area of gum. We know now that bleeding out bad blood doesn’t fix things, but metaphorically I think they were on the right track: sometimes, to be healthy or to approach health, you’ll bleed along the way. 

Call it a response to perceived helplessness, but I’ve been trying to live more healthily lately. As of yesterday. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve been told by others, some of whom I actually trust and believe, that I’m my own worst critic, and often excessively so, and I have a penchant for anxious hyperbole. That is to say, my health isn’t bad, per se; there are things I just want to do better, and I have habits that die hard, or linger in a lifelike liminality between active and dispensed. 

Work sucked yesterday, for a blend of reasons both valid and in-. Come 4:30, freedom time, I was in dire desire for a beer or three, but I convinced myself to drive to the gym just to see what would happen. I proceeded to attend a successful and restorative jiu jitsu class, go home, eat healthy, bathe and moisturize for maximal integumentary integrity, read a short story, and fall into a relatively unstrained sleep after one of those creepy (but evidently effective) guided sleep meditations. 

There’s no real lesson here. I tend to believe most of us know the solutions to our problems, and that their perseverance is not owed to the simplicity or evident nature of their solutions. Simple doesn’t mean easy—truly, some things seem harder in relation to their simplicity. Try not to think of a white elephant, et cetera et cetera. 

So I’m trying to be healthy. 

Simultaneously, it seems insidious to write one of these things and to focus only on my corporeal health, and the musings that arise in relation to it in typical navel-gazey fashion, with everything going on. With everything going on. How vague and safe, on the off chance my employer or a potential employer were to ever read this. The handcuffs aren’t even golden anymore, either. They’re not even bronze. If you knew what I made an hour, the best response I could hope for from you would be a pitiful laugh. Don’t go to art school. 

Anyway.

Every uttered word is inherently political—if not through what it signifies directly, then by what it negates or avoids through omission. To not talk about the rambling orange McElephant in the room would be just as political, today, as it would be to talk about him. So, the anxiety I feel about writing political shit here is somewhat inevitable, as anything written here will inevitably be political. The only evitable thing, in this situation, is cowardice.

It’s a product of the sweet, intellectually anesthetic environment of social media algorithms that it always feels like the vast majority of people in my life aren’t happy about what the deshelled crab in the oval office is doing. But then you remember that a majority of the people in the country voted for him and that he increased his margins in every single voting demographic. The juxtaposition between what feels evident based on online consumption and what is can enhance this growing feeling I’ve noticed, at least within myself, that I must be insane. 

I’ll admit it – I thought Kamala was going to win. There were massive problems inherent to that too, but they weren’t of the comical, borderline unbelievable variety that we have to contend with now. I wrote one of these journals on election day, and thinking back on it, it already feels naïve. Naïve in the way a child is naïve when he asks a doctor if something that will very obviously hurt, and hurt badly, if it’s gonna hurt. “Is it gonna hurt?” Puppy eyes.

I haven’t reread the essay back and I’m not going to do that to myself this morning, but I vaguely remember talking about the pervasive effect technology has on our ability to humanize each other, and I probably paid lip service to how bad social media algorithms are, and I probably tried to go for this semi-contrarian take that no matter who won, we’d be fucked. But now I see that that was a preemptive attempt to soften the blow of a Trump victory—an intellectual copout, a means of coping now, thinking, “well, Kamala would have been bad too.” And strictly, I guess we’ll never know the full extent of how bad she could have been, but my imagination strains to think it could be anywhere near as bad as it is now, which is why I voted for her in the first place.

This is the biggest reason I don’t speak about politics in here, at least explicitly, very often. It feels like a goddamned funeral. But for whom? I won’t sit here and pretend the disastrous effects of all this will be felt equally. We all know they won’t.

I’m not sure if he ever thought it would be applied in this way, but Fernando A. Flores (on instagram @f.a.flores) has a story called “Nocturne from a World Concave” in which a fictionalized version of Frédéric Chopin in Mexico City goes on a surreal quest to retrieve his piano, which has been seized by customs. Chopin is unwell – he has a pervasive cough. The line I’m thinking of, which I believe is spoken by the narrator, is that Chopin “laughed at the cough.” The story, and the collection it comes in (Valleyesque, 2022) are excellent. But the point is, “laugh at the cough” became something of a mantra for me, or at least a North Star by which to navigate. No matter what I was going through, I tried to inhabit this stoic, borderline spiteful perseverance encapsulated in the idea of laughing at a cough that will eventually kill you if nothing stronger gets you first. And while the tide of my mental health has risen and fallen, with various peaks and valleys since, that sentiment bolstered me through some pretty low valleys. 

I’m finding it impossible to laugh at this cough, so to speak, though. 

I have a friend, a good one, who in many ways is my opposite. Where I am severe and serious, he is light, comedic; where my work is lazy, often feels inconsequential, and takes place in an office, his is frontline, often life or death, and of the utmost importance; where I get lost in reveries and let the siren song of nostalgia create entirely unbridgeable berths between what is and what could have been (primarily in my career), he is entirely focused on forward momentum, on what comes next. And while, like any human being, he has been known to indulge negative emotion at times, he doesn’t let it flatten him like, at times, it has felt like I’ve let myself be flattened. 

When I think about politics, and where we are, I try to think about what he would say. Or, if I have a specific question, I just harass him over text. His input is less bleak than mine, and his relative hope remained rigid in the face of a semi-drunken and lightly-nicotine-fueled oracular tirade of mine for the ages last week, in which my cynicism and doomerism knew no earthly bound. 

While I respect and admire the tenacity of his hope, I was dismayed to find, driving home, that it hadn’t created any more within me than what I had showed up with, which, it goes without saying, was pretty minimal. That’s not to say that my hope is his responsibility, either. If anything, I see it as a failure all my own.

So, I’m trying to be healthy. By that, I mean, I am trying to maximize behaviors within my immediate control that will promote health because, as those of you who know me well already know, my health is a fickle, tempestuous son of a bitch sometimes, occasionally to the point of threatening life. It’s the only area of my life, at least recently, that feels within the bounds of my control. 

I also imagine there are people out there who, reading this, would scream at their phones or laptops at me that there is work to be done, that my hopelessness is completely maladaptive and unhelpful, and that I’m pathetic for sharing it publicly this way. My anxiety at this fact is mollified only by the hollow reassurance that people like that are most likely not reading this anymore. But to those people, who I greatly admire, who see the world’s problems and feel a responsibility to fix them instead of a hopelessness about them, I would ask: do you ever feel resentful of the responsibility, the one that seems to be held particularly by artists and younger people, to save the world? 

It’s also strange to realize that the last time things felt politically stable to me, i.e., the end of the Obama years, I was a relatively immature if intellectually active eighteen-year-old. Because of this, the feeling of relative peace is clouded now by an uncertainty: was that feeling of stability owed to the ignorance and naivete of still being a child? Were things really better, or was it just pre-covid, pre-Trump, pre-the mild soul-deadening effect the monotony of adult life has on hope, pre-, pre-, pre-? 

The obvious answer is: it’s a little of both. Obviously it was more stable in the sense that norms were adhered to more closely, the national conversation was constrained by stricter guidelines of formality and austerity, and the idea of Trump holding an actual office of government was still seen, by many, as an impossible joke. But weren’t the seeds that grew into this hell plant sown way back then too? Is our current situation not explained by the evil of Trump republicanism as well as the failures of liberal democrats to ameliorate the material concerns of massive swaths of the voting public? 

Isn’t Trump just a symbol of a growing, cancerous mass of resentment and vengeance against performative, often hollow liberalism, that is now enabling a rapid fascistic rise of an anti-human tech class of oligarchs? Has his brand of politics not transcended individual political iconoclasm, morphing instead into a multiheaded hydra?

Was that enough buzz words for you?

I don’t know. I don’t feel confident in much of anything anymore, related to this stuff. And trying to write anything that doesn’t explore the current situation feels just as bad as writing something that explores it badly, or, more charitably, inadequately. 

I wrote a story the other day, a full draft—something I haven’t done for like, a year. Having finished it, now I remember why. The story doesn’t approach anything related to current, topical reality aside from this general thrust of arguing that the written word has failed, and continues to fail, to improve reality, continuously losing to the worst, most anti-intellectual impulses our country can muster. 

Real uplifting stuff.

But I think part of the reason I can’t seem to write anything politically relevant is that we live in an age that demands unsubtlety. How do you resist what’s going on with subtlety? 

Good art demands subtlety, I think. To fully express the anger, feelings of impotence, and wishes that things were different than they are now in a story would make something about as subtle as a brick. 

Or, my faculties as an artist aren’t such that I can do so with any subtlety.

So, if you excuse me, I might crawl back under a rock for a while—but while I’m there, I’ll be sure to floss.

january 7, 2025 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Holiday leniency has ended—not least of which for this silly blog, if at the very least, for my own benefit. I’ve always been more apt to be creative and productive in a frenetic, spontaneous way, but the inevitably long stretches between periods of inspiration have left me longing for more discipline in artistic pursuits. So even if it’s a push, I’m going to make myself do this. 

It goes beyond creativity too, though. It would be easy for me to blame the time of year, as a perennial hater of the cold, with all sorts of naturalistic metaphors about the “dead” of winter, and how this is less a time of year for growth than for rest, for my lack of productivity, or I guess, general lack. But I’m not a plant, and so often, metaphors like that just feel like excuses to me. My ability to finish much of anything lately (be it songs, these journal entries, or even anything beyond a basic thought) has been lackluster at best. 

I took a month off of jiu jitsu, that thing I do but never write about, in December. There was a gap in my health insurance (happy 26th birthday, deadbeat), and even though Brazilian jiu jitsu is about as non-combative as a combat sport can get and relatively lower-impact than something like MMA, it felt unwise getting on the mats without the umbrella of, at the very least, shitty insurance.

With my luck, I would’ve blown my knee out or something and either gone bankrupt from the bills or waited to get it fixed until bureaucracy caught up.

Reasonable enough. But again, something about it smells vaguely of excuses to me. Maybe the health insurance thing was partially a cover for some necessary time off, because I went back last night for the first time and felt much more invigorated about doing it, found myself enjoying rolling (what you might call “sparring”), and discovered that the dread I was feeling in November about it had dissipated. But there’s always the possibility that I was just being lazy. Whatever—now I’m back.

Good timing, too. I think my diet was like 60% cheese from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. My arteries will certainly welcome some renewed higher-intensity movement. 

Most of the people who quit jiu jitsu do so when they reach the level I’m currently at, which is blue belt. I’m an early, overweight, hobbyist blue belt, which is to say, not the worst on the mats but also not very good, relative to everyone there. 

The more sensitive parts of me have been concerned over the past year that consistently training a combat sport that sees the body as a mechanical system of leverage and breaking points has made me less kind, in some vague, intangible way. The thought that maybe the sport isn’t for me has certainly crossed my mind. It makes you look at people out in the world differently and, for me, has made me feel even more physically vulnerable in some ways.

One thing about myself that I consider a strength though, even if it isn’t always a fun one, is that I hate quitting things. When I start doing things, I want to see them through, and historically have gone to great mental and physical detriment to do so. That isn’t to brag, because I don’t think it’s necessarily something to be proud of—if anything it speaks to the presence, size, and insistence of my own ego, and a pathological inability to let go. The sunk cost fallacy made manifest in man, looked at another way, if you will. 

But simultaneously, another part of me loves to make excuses, which isn’t to say there aren’t times when they’re valid, but I’m sensitive to any explanation I give myself that tells me I can’t do something. 

When was the last time you gave yourself an excuse to do something you should do, as opposed to giving one to not do something? You get my point. 

So I went back. And it was fun. And if New Year’s is good for anything, it’s reflection, and when I think back on who I was before I started doing it, I see someone entirely out of balance, drinking like a fish, lacking the unique community that can be offered by things like sports, and, really, lacking male friendship. 

Balance. There’s such a thing as too sensitive.

An arguably more controversial opinion of mine has to do with kindness, and whether universal kindness is a virtue. I’m inclined to think that kindness that comes from desperation for approval and acceptance, and not from a place of self-confidence, doesn’t have any moral value because it doesn’t involve choice. It’s motivated by an ulterior motive, even if it’s a subconscious or hardwired one. 

Sure, it’s nice. And I don’t mean to adopt a cynical capitalistic outlook on human relationships (i.e., a scarcity mindset), but I do believe that human friendship has value at least in part because of the exercise of choice. I try to be a good friend, but I’m also somewhat skittish around new people, and I think genuine kindness, like trust, is best earned. 

Yet again, maybe I’m making excuses again. I play lots of open mics and try to be active in the local scene, so I come across plenty of eccentric people, some of whom I like, plenty of whom I do not. Maybe this whole line of thinking is just a way for my brain to let me be lazy, to not strive to meet people where they’re at, to stay within a narrow band of selfhood unaltered by the influence of new people. An excuse to withhold kindness. An excuse to project the unfair standards I hold myself to on to other people. 

But then again, who are you? What do we really owe each other?

It’s tricky, at least partially because the guy sitting here writing this is much more confident and physically capable because of things like jiu jitsu than he was two years ago. It’s hard to see that as anything other than positive. So maybe I don’t think that grappling a couple nights a week has made me less kind—maybe it’s more that it’s made me more confident, which has dissolved some desperation for approval, which has just made me more selective with expressions of kindness. Which, one could argue I guess, is less kind.

Necessary caveat: kindness is not the same as basic decency or politeness, which I think should be strived for until someone gives you a reason to withhold it. By kindness, I guess I’m referring to the intangible “work” of friendship: labors either emotional or physical, intimate conversations, expressions of vulnerability, stuff like that. We’ve all found ourselves in the unenviable position of listening to someone spill their guts about deeply personal things when you really don’t feel comfortable being the recipient of all that, either because you aren’t that close with the person, or the timing is completely wrong. I’m sure I’ve been on the other side of that one, too.

I think, at least, being selectively kind feels more honest. I’m hesitant to make a grand statement about it, but generally, honesty is far more important to me than kindness. Yet again, maybe kindness can’t exist without honesty—one without the other would be something entirely different. 

But what’s the virtue in being honest in unkindness? A hollow one, I suppose. 

And what does that really look like, anyway? Making short, terse responses intended to communicate discomfort, in the hopes that this hypothetical social punisher will realize you’re not into it and move on? Seems harsh– rude even. But I’ve done it. I’ll probably do it again.

At the heart of this is an idea akin to something like, not all growth is necessarily good. Once again, we aren’t plants—we don’t necessarily grow towards the light. All you can do is your best to keep growth that suits you, and prune whatever doesn’t. And hope your internal “good” meter is calibrated right, which probably has something to do with having good friends who will call you on your bullshit, which I am lucky to have. 

I try to avoid being didactic, but in this case it makes for a pithy closing:

Go forth, be kind, but more importantly, be intentional when you do.

december 17, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Sometimes you just have to shut up and eat a banana. Maybe go for a walk, too. Doing so today allowed me to spare you from a long, self-flagellating blog post bemoaning how little I’ve been writing about “real” stuff on here lately. No, really– I have the crossed out paragraphs in my notebook to prove it.

It feels like going against the essence of this blog to stop and start over, on some level– I wonder if it will just attenuate the genuine thing I was going for in the beginning. But to save you time, the past two attempts (there were two attempts, actually) I made to write this today were both astoundingly negative. “Performative” is in the title of this blog after all, and bad moods aside, you don’t need to bear witness to all that. The fact that these are public makes me try to be at least mildly positive.

But I’m firmly in professional and creative ruts lately and, for various reasons, feel like a waste of space or a loser much of the time. And commenting on that in a long form blog feels wildly egocentric and pathetic, so I made a very pretty spiral in my notebook when I crossed those paragraphs out.

The truth is, the blog in general has felt egocentric in general, lately. Perhaps that isn’t a bug, but a feature of these sorts of things, since who except someone with a considerable ego would even do this in the first place? But when I set out to start writing here, I envisioned more posts about culture and current events. I’m inclined to blame burnout, a 40 hour work week turned 50 hours by a daily 2 hour roundtrip commute, and the fact that I can’t seem to accommodate more than seven seconds of thought at a time lately before my brow ridge flattens and my brain produces an internal dial tone and I pick up my phone to scroll,

for the fact that I rarely write about “real” stuff since at least the election. But really, what is there to say?

I’ve said it before: the bad guys seem to keep winning.

Why do I even do this, again?

I saw a headline this morning that Trump wants to privatize the postal service. I can’t even waste time talking about how stupid an idea that is. But fewer and fewer things are allowed to exist in America unless their sole raison d’être is to produce profit (oooo look at him, using French. Just say “purpose,” you pretentious schmuck. [hey, this blog wouldn’t be authentic without a modicum of self-hatred, that paradoxically narcissistic tendency of the ego to consider itself so important that it’s worthy of self-directed anger]).

I might be losing my mind.

But my basic point is that, if someone thought of them as a concept today and they never existed before, libraries wouldn’t be invented today because they don’t make money. The bill would just get voted down.

I’m crossing out so much bullshit today. If you’re endeavoring to read this, thank me for that– I’m saving you from myself. Keep that in mind when you see the quality (or lack thereof) of what remains; just imagine what garbage didn’t survive the chopping block. Or just curse me for writing it in the first place.

Which makes me wonder: why is it so hard to write anything lately without shuddering and erasing it? I think it’s because adult life, or at least the monotony and endless repetition of full-time work, seems like a sort of psychic thresher to me. It’s boring. It’s tiresome. It has all the bad qualities and none of the good about school, and as it is now, I make very little money because I chose to go to an arts school instead of learning to plumb, or something. Which I could still do, mind you, but I don’t, because I have soft hands and want to be a rockstar instead.

But anyway, my reactions to the boredom and monotony of such a life tend to leave me tired, grumpy, getting fat, and increasingly thoughtless. More and more, except for during quality time with the small circle of those I cherish, my heart isn’t in anything except music. What was that saying about eggs and baskets and all that, again?

The sun is out. Maybe I’ll just go out there. You should too.

december 10, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Kendrick Lamar and Father John Misty both dropped albums on November 22nd, which means I’ve been able to be obsessive and annoying about two wildly different albums at once.

“Coffee and a cigarette. Found no better means of revolt yet” – Father John Misty, “Mental Health.”

“Hey now, say now, I’m all about my Yen. Big face Buddha get my peace from within” – Kendrick Lamar, “hey now.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking I only listen to dour and gloomy songwriters from at least thirty years ago because of the music I occasionally post on my Instagram stories, as well as my general schtick as a performer if you’ve seen that, but I try to stay at least mildly current and enjoy plenty of shit beyond drunk acoustica. While we’re on the subject, the whole sadboy songwriter type is a skin I’m trying to molt anyway– my next record has a happy song or two, and might even have a guitar solo here or there.

Music is the last bastion of creativity I’ve been able to really enjoy lately. You may or may not have noticed that I didn’t write one of these last week, and instead posted something akin to a cryptic telegram about not having anything to say. I suppose I shouldn’t apologize for having a flare for the dramatic. I consider my refusal to write and post last week the result of a healthy choice not to force a thing that, a couple years ago, I almost certainly would have forced, especially when I was in the throes of an MFA in writing.

I had much more of a chip on my shoulder then. Every artistic endeavor had doubly high stakes: high stakes for the sake of the quality of the work itself, and high stakes for my chosen identity (and shield) as the Artsy Guy. Back then, I worked an even more menial job than I do now (which has an office– as opposed to the cubicle I wilted in back then), and I staked almost the entirety of my self worth on “finishing” songs and stories while working full time, often to considerable detriment to my mental and physical wellbeing, if not just from stress alone than from poor decisions I’d make trying to elude the scope of the stress. It’s a habit I’ve since tried to abandon– if not for my own wellbeing, then at least for the quality of the stuff I make. All art takes work, and it might not always only be fun, but I think I make better stuff when I’m having fun with it.

And even if I don’t, I’d rather have fun with it than suffer for a folk song anyway.

So, long story short, I didn’t feel like writing this dumb little blog last week, and so I didn’t. Maybe it was a momentary lapse in discipline or whatever, but it has no bearing on my worth as a human being. At least, that’s the notion I’m currently clinging to, or at least missing one week doesn’t mean I’m worthless in isolation. If I am, there are certainly other, heavier reasons for that. But at least for now I don’t think I am.

I think the way out of the sort of mindset that compels you to do creative things when you really don’t want to is to realize you’re never only just one thing. I’m not just the Artsy Guy. It’s so easy to typecast ourselves. Other things I am, for example: hobbyist blue belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. Friend. Partner. Son. Brother. Admin in a maintenance office. Reader. Drinker. Thinker less and less these days, but thinker still. And at least now, precisely, I am a writer, at least for as long as I drag this pen over the page.

The older I get, the clearer it becomes that the actual admirable things about creating anything, whether it be sonic, visual, textual, or whatever else, is the process by which you do it, the discipline with which you approach it, and the reverence you hold for the connections you make in the process of doing it. They emphasized the first two quite a bit in grad school, but not as much the third. I understand why– truly I think there are multiple reasons, one being that grad school, at least the way I went about it, is expensive, and it would be pretty silly to spend a bunch of time harping on how art facilitates human connection when you’re spending 26 grand a year to hone technique. I’d also bet they assume that you already know that, given that you have the mettle, economic abandon, and artistic chops to go to a selective arts program in the first place.

But obvious as it is, that art can bring people together, I think it’s something I either forgot about or considered unimportant while I was making stuff for a couple of years. The human connection piece, that is. To forget that is a fast track to staking your mental stability on your ability to produce, and to making things that exist not to bring you closer to anyone or anyone else closer to another, but solely to reassure your ego of your talents and that you matter and that you aren’t wasting your time in money (which, in hindsight, maybe I was).

It also makes for pretty shitty art, unless you’re an undeniable genius, a con artist, or both. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think my music and writing are both their best when they function as a hand reaching out.

Trying to be creative for reasons other than being the Artsy Guy over the past year has made me think about what keeps me writing and playing music anyway. I do it because on Friday, at my next gig, probably the only people who will show up to hear me play will be my friends, and we’ll laugh over drinks afterward. While I play, I’ll feel the bronze in my hands. The heat of light, and the pound in my chest that both inspires fear and invigorates, a physical referent proving I’m alive and striving for… something, I don’t know what. But then I’ll look out at my friends and be reminded: they’ll sit there enthralled in conversations punctuated by laughter, and while I have the privilege to sit up there in front of ’em making sounds, even though I won’t be a part of those conversations while I play, it will feel like I am. And for a minute, I’ll be able to think, “I did this. I made tonight happen.” All the while, I’ll be reinforcing callouses on my fingertips, and later that night, when I stumble to bed likely buzzed and wired from the latent energy that comes from facing the inexorable fear of performing, as I feel those callouses I’ll be reminded of that laughter, and I’ll sleep a better drunken sleep than I ever get any other night.

Which brings me back to this. As I become further trapped in adulthood, ensnared by more and more responsibilities at work for the same meager pay, busier and busier every week for consistently valid reasons, not getting any younger, and watching the feasibility of long held dreams dwindle, things like this stupid little blog and two hour sets in niche bars on random December Fridays become more and more important. They aren’t just an escape– they’re a ballast that ground and strengthen me to face all the rest, to make the rest of it worth it. Not for the sake of my ego– at least, not entirely– but because I simply enjoy doing them. And, though I remain skeptical, apparently some of my friends and loved ones enjoy the fruits of my endeavors too.

And what would otherwise be only a dreary, fog-drenched Tuesday morning, feels full of… meaning? I don’t know. But it feels full.

november 26, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

You wouldn’t know it from the way you’re reading this now, after it’s been typed and lazily proofread, but I’m changing up the PJ this morning by writing it first by hand. My hope is the change in rhythm will return me to a voice more approximate to something genuine, closer to something more approximate to me. I’ve always found something charming about writing at a pace with more evident physical limitations, anyway. A pen in hand can only move so fast.

So now, our throats cleared, let’s begin.

On my morning commute, I drove by a murder of crows feasting on trash in the parking lot of a notorious local strip club two miles from my house. I won’t list it by name, but I will tell you that its name rhymes with “Sister Crappy’s.” It felt significant to see them there, in a parking lot deserted in the early morning hours, garnering energy from the waste left behind by whomever found themselves in the parking lot of “Sister Crappy’s” the Monday night that came before. One hopes the birds don’t eat anything that will hurt them, or come across truly destructive trash, but when I think about the havoc that will most likely be wrought by climate change, it comforts me to imagine how the ingenuity of animals and birds and microbes and fungi will alchemize the shit we leave behind into something useful, into fuel sustaining life even after this rock shrugs us off. One man’s trash…

You gotta find the optimism where you can, I guess.

Reading this blog, you could be forgiven for thinking maybe I’m not all that thankful for much, given how dreary my chosen subject matter can be. But I’ve been drinking less poison, and sleeping more, and in light of the looming Turkey Day, regardless of whatever political issues certainly exist surrounding its existence and inception, I think it’s worth mentioning the things I’m thankful for: firstly, how lucky I feel to have so much love in my life. It comes primarily in the form of dear friends and a lovely partner who continues to invigorate me each day, and despite hiccups and hangups from the past, also in the form of family for which I remain grateful. If this blog is to serve as a snapshot of this moment, then it’s necessary to mention these things, even if I’m uncomfortable with the naked sentiment it requires of me.

I’m thankful for the work that has wrought whatever level of talent I might have, musical or otherwise. I’m thankful to be able to work and walk around and write nonsensical, self-indulgent two-thousand word diatribes about the degradation of culture seen through the lens of a Mike Tyson fight (interested parties: see last week).

My outlook on the way things are out there in the larger world is likely clear by now: cynical, often without much hope, and reminiscent of alarm bells presented in the form of a lowly blog. I think I’m often right to feel this way, too. But to be able to even bear witness and discuss these things is itself a privilege, one that often isn’t afforded to the people who suffer the most at the hands of the things I write bullshit about much of the time, because they simply don’t have the time– they’re busy actually dealing directly with the climate crisis, or with the regression of our governmental policies into archaic resurgences of what we maybe once thought were prejudices safely stowed in the past, and are certainly outdated modes of thought. Or, people are working paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the time to think about it much at all. I have the time to carve out of my day to sit here wringing my hands about it. And in a weird way, I have to be thankful for that.

I’m trying not to be so bleak all the time. A wise friend of mine once said, “every day can’t be a rainy day.”

I’m thankful for the sunsets I see, when I take the time to watch them, and for the bone-level cold of New England winter which will surely be upon us soon. I’m even grateful for the wince of pain in my chest I feel with every deep breath, a vestige of the PE I took on the chin, so to speak, a few years ago. Pain, even in its discomfort, is proof of life, proof we can still feel, which beats the alternative so long as one isn’t suffering. Which, I’m thankful to say, these days, I am not.

I’m thankful that there are levels of suffering present on this earth that I will never know. One can be thankful for that while also trying to rectify that suffering in others. Acknowledging that such suffering exists outside the scope of your experience only serves to grow your empathy.

It’s easy to cry for the world. Many people suffer. But it isn’t moral or correct to let the existence of that suffering suffocate or paralyze us. Joy is that which gives us the energy to endure in trying, in our own petty little ways, to reduce suffering in the world. Letting the existence of suffering blind us to joy only provides suffering with another victory, and why give it another one for free? At least, that’s what feels true to me on this drowsy Tuesday morning.

I’m thankful for the rain, too.

I’m thankful for you, too, reader. You endure me often high on my own supply, hopefully in good humor, and always with charitable eyes based on the responses that I’ve seen. The audience on this thing isn’t exactly huge, but it amazes me that there’s an audience for it even at all.

For the rest of it, all the things I’m not thankful for and, on my weaker days, I even resent: I will try to take a lesson from the crows, who derive sustenance even from simple trash we leave behind.

november 19, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Prologue: I thought about writing a review of Heretic, the new A24 movie with Hugh Grant playing an eloquent “um Ackshually” guy taking two Mormon missionaries captive, and tying it in with some larger comments on A24 movies in general, but instead the following 2,000 words will deal with a pointless diatribe about the Jake Paul/Tyson fight and my 26th birthday, which was Saturday.

Saturday, I turned 26 years old. To celebrate, I watched a 27-year-old beat up a 58-year-old live on Netflix. Well, at least, that was Friday night, after Maddy and I won a trivia night at a bowling alley. And well, I don’t know if he beat him up as much as he just chipped at him for points, but I digress.

Like I said, we won trivia. We subsequently used the $50 gift card to soften the blow of the bill we had run up. Booze, in acute and enthusiastic bursts, is an intellectual performance enhancer for me—or, at least, so I tell myself. Apparently, the evidence (that we won), however limited and anecdotal (Maddy carried the team), supports this. And this bowling alley, which, for reasons related to the mystique and tone of this as-yet haphazard blog, as well as selfish gatekeeping, will remain nameless, offers “tall” pours of local IPAs and various other high-alcohol-at-low-price-point offerings that result in its bar being perhaps the soundest economic option in the area—that is, if you’re trying to get sloshed. Not that I was. But if I was, I could, because this weekend marked 26 years since my birth, and nothing celebrates the looming expiration of my health insurance like reckless consumption of what is, essentially, poison. 

The tone of the night was celebratory. 

I have not historically celebrated my birthday with much enthusiasm, for various reasons related to my psyche that are likely not all that interesting. But this year, my loved ones convened to pleasantly impose celebratory plans upon me in such a way that I was able to comfortably accept celebration of myself. 

Forgive me—I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace recently and the long-sentences-full-of-subordinate-clauses-and-a-pained-self-consciousness-whose-maximalist-radioactive-profileration-yields-something-like-a-dweebish-sense-of-comic-recompense schtick is proving highly infectious, just like it did eight years ago when I started trying, in a lazy and unprolific if also earnest way, to write fiction. I’ll drop it (the schtick).

Buzzed, with a stoked intellectual ego, I returned with Maddy to watch the Jake Paul/Tyson fight. The fact that I can only refer to one of these two via mononym is telling: one looms over the history of American athletics, and the other looms over American culture in such a way not unlike a Staph infection or some other similar skin malady. It is also telling that, though my brain knew a 58-year-old had a next-to-nothing shot at winning the thing, my heart, foolish as it is idealistic, hoped for a Tyson knock out. It turns out, having an extremely punchable face and then challenging guys who used to be very good at punching faces is a very profitable business model, at least for Jake Paul. And who among us hasn’t wanted to mash the Paul brothers and/or other YouTubers of similar ilk in the face a time or two before? It makes sense why people tune in, at least if you consider the collective hope that a guy that annoying consents to potentially getting hit really hard in the face and then actually does get hit.

It was more than hope. It felt like fate. A Tyson KO on the eve of my birthday felt like a cosmic correction in a country where it feels like, lately, all the bad guys keep winning. 

Luckily for all of us watching, there were entertaining fights on the card aside from the main event, which was really a predictable snooze fest. At least, it was predictable in hindsight. I think a lot of us were holding out hope that Iron Mike could get it done, and when he couldn’t, didn’t feel disappointed, but simply saddened at the inevitable march of time and its sheer omnipotence. Icons, culturally boundless as they are, still live according to physical laws. 

I’m curious what it says about a culture that produces such a spectacle, though, which may be making some of you who know me roll your eyes because, of course I am, but seriously: what kind of culture thinks a grandpa boxing a twerp of a YouTuber turned amateur boxer is a good idea, even if that grandpa was once a boxing legend? 

There are two primary aspects to the question, for me, related to three types of viewers. There are the viewers who watch it and see no problem with it and enjoy it unquestioningly, viewers who watch it due to what essentially boils down to social FOMO (which seems to govern almost everything related to Gen Z socialization, which relies so heavily on referentiality and Never Missing the Viral Moment), either so they can talk about it with friends the next day or just so they can be with friends to watch it, and viewers who see it as the farcical spectacle it likely is and, for a combination of reasons, whether related to FOMO or a sense of obligation to cultural awareness or simple train-wreck-can’t-look-away-irresistibility watch it and simultaneously wring their hands with a sense of superiority and faux moral outrage over what they’re watching. But all three are watching, and all three are helping fill the wallets of the people that made it happen. You can decide which of the three camps in which I sleep.

It’s unlikely that this type of person is even bothering to read this post at this point, but I’m anticipating someone reading this and thinking “ok but also it’s just fun to watch, so what’s the problem?” Which, you know what, maybe you’re right. And you know what, maybe I didn’t drop that DFW schtick I alluded to several hundred words ago. But also, we’re talking about a boxer who already gave US culture the best years of his life, prizefighting being one of those industries that is notoriously cutthroat and dispensable with its talent and hard on the body at best or potentially life-threatening at worst, notwithstanding our growing awareness of the risk and debilitating nature of CTE and other maladies associated with repetitive trauma to the head. Which, if you’re still reading this, you may feel as though I am subjecting you to with these sentences (repetitive trauma to the head, that is). 

The argument just mentioned boils down to “it’s not that serious.” But lately, it seems evident that everything is that serious, and that maybe many of our messes have gotten worse because of the impulse that says “it’s not that serious.”

My point is, as short as I can make it, that I think the whole thing was kind of stupid and physically risky for Mike Tyson, but I couldn’t help but watch it anyway, and though I had a good time, I may have subjected my poor girlfriend to a disorganized IPA-and-gin-fueled tirade on this very subject. Some of you may also be screaming at your screen in a voice I will, mercifully, never hear (as long as you don’t text me or threaten my profoundly fragile ego in any way), that Mike Tyson was also paid something like twenty million dollars for it and it’s not like we held him hostage and forced him into the ring against his will. But at a certain point, I think it’s irresponsible of the larger “us” to even posit it as an option to a guy like Mike Tyson who, while I don’t know this for sure, I would feel comfortable assuming has an ego and mindset that would make it impossible for him to turn down such an opportunity even though it’s dangerous and kind of silly.

We should just leave the guy alone, is what I’m saying. Or, can’t we watch a documentary about what he’s already done in the world of boxing and give him some money that way? At what point is it cruel to make somebody like that put their body on the line for it?

Whatever, maybe this is starting to come off as morally prudish, and maybe you’re curious about how the rest of my birthday weekend went. It was great. Which is part of the reason I feel comfortable and justified spending, as of now, 1200 words on something that will get swept up in the ceaseless torrent of the American culture of the spectacle we find ourselves in, and will therefore be irrelevant in like five minutes, and will likely inspire the kinds of conversations in two years where we’ll turn to one another and go, “hey, remember when Jake Paul fought Mike Tyson?” and the other will go, “oh yeah,” having forgotten and now needing to search the dusty annals of memory to think about it again because nothing now ever seems to matter or even last longer than five minutes. And once the memory recrystallizes maybe we’ll say, “I really wished Mike Tyson knocked that motherfucker out.” 

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, basically.

I’m aware there are way more important things going on, is also what I’m saying. 

Like Saturday night, watching Jon Jones TKO a 41-year-old-previously-retired-Stipe-Miocic instead of fighting the young and hungry Tom Aspinall because he, very logically, wants to preserve his legacy as perhaps the greatest mixed martial artist to fight in, at the very least, the modern era, and maybe also ever. It was a weekend full of watching old men get beaten up, which seems to relate to turning 26 and being on the cusp of losing my health insurance somehow, if not at once in an obvious way. Which also seems to relate to the fact that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr were ringside at the UFC fights Saturday night, and Jon Jones did the dual-wielding ski pole Trump dance after he won, which made my stomach turn at the fact that I had just given the UFC $79.99 to watch the fucking thing. 

The bad guys just keep winning, at least in the realm of the spectacle. 

But maybe when the good guys win, it’s when there aren’t that many people watching, like the usually unknown people who do the nuts and bolts work that keeps society going while I use my lunch break to write 2,000 word essays about, essentially, nothing—the firefighters, the pavers, the counselors, the doctors, the garbagefolks, the teachers—and everyone else doing their best to find their place to contribute and to not be an asshole to each other. 

I just gotta get better at focusing on things like that, I guess.

In the meantime, I will entertain myself and no one else by writing long, breathless sentences about things like boxing and the UFC– if nothing else, as a late birthday present to myself.

november 12, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

This morning, I walked into work against the wind. Fitting. It will be a miracle when I inevitably get through today. 

For valid reasons that will remain secret, I stayed out too late last night. It makes me, today, less than a model employee. Luckily, my laziness over the years has bred an unmatched efficiency, and I’m better on my worst days than many are on their best. Everything that needs doing will be done. Call it arrogance—I call it spiteful ego that, unfortunately, for today, is entirely necessary as a survival measure, or at the very least, a protective one. 

This morning, in the mirror, I thought I looked hollowed out.

Black coffee. Blueberry yogurt. Out the door. Four hours sleep and poor consumption choices the night before be damned. Eyebags and all. I made it on time, too.

Last week, I wrote about how the problems that ail us were going to persist regardless of who won the election. I’m reminded of that as the drought in Connecticut persists, and brittle windswept leaves crack at my feet like winter skin from the seemingly ineradicable dry. 

Short paragraphs today. My thoughts are few and disparate from lack of sleep. More coffee and the girthiest banana I’ve ever seen are doing little to alter that.

Friday, I played one of the best gigs of my solo “career,” if you can call it that. I tend to avoid using names or specifics in these things, usually to maintain a bullshit schtick of contrived mystique, but Friday’s show was so good as to warrant a direct shout. Factory Underground down in Norwalk is a really cool spot, and I was so lucky as to be given a tour of their multiple recording studios, their live rooms, and obviously the lounge where I and two other talented folks played. They even set us up in a green room, which I’ve experienced only one other time, playing at Higher Ground in Burlington with Carbon Based. Of course, back then, I had a panic attack in that green room and proceeded to play the show in a sort of post-panic stupor, but that’s a story for another PJ. 

Maybe the banana helped after all. 

The irony of that statement is, of course, that immediately after I wrote it, the cursor blinked at me for half an hour as I sat here wordless. 

My album “On the Breeze” turned one on Monday, about which you may have seen me post. I hope it’s a testament to continued growth that, on the rare occasion I listen to it, I’m typically filled with a mixture of nausea, dread, and nostalgia for the era I worked on it. If I look back on what I’ve done before as an artist and don’t feel a tinge of shame, I wonder if I’m really growing. 

That said, a few special people reached out to me yesterday to tell me how much they enjoy the record, which is proof enough for me that I’m not shouting into a void. It’s also proof that perhaps all the negativity that often swirls around my head re: Myself isn’t the only data to consider. So for that, I thank you—you know who you are. 

Album two is on the horizon, but there’s much work yet to be done before it becomes anything other than a glimmer in my eye.

Other than all that, it’s just another day in paradise. A good day to walk against the wind.

november 5, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Naturally, I voted this morning.

There’s no getting around it. If you’ve read this blog before, you won’t be surprised that I’m going to talk about the election—but I promise we’ll get through it, and I promise it won’t be what you think.

I had a professor in undergrad who told me to never be “ashamed to be American” as a writer, and I never knew what that meant. At the time, I applied an assumed wisdom to everything he said because, for one thing, he was ancient, and for another, he was the first professor who engaged with me about creative writing and made me feel like I might be able to do it. So at the time, even though I didn’t know what he meant, I never forgot it.

I stood in line at 6:45 this morning and thought about how, assuming you’re not a teacher, it’s rare to stand in an elementary school cafeteria as a twenty-five-year-old man. All around were reminders of being young, a time in memory that feels both immediate and increasingly remote. The walls were covered in various decorations, including a tally sheet of all the kids in each grade who have “soared” recently, which apparently was a play on the school mascot which, I think, was an eagle. Fitting. One can only assume the tally sheet, publicly displayed in the cafeteria, is some sort of stick and carrot-type reward system based on an arbitrary description of good behavior, which I would guess is meant to inspire kids to be socially cohesive and relatively obedient. With an added element of competition because we are, after all, American. We try to teach our kids to be kind and to cooperate, to be patient and to work together, but an important addition is that it’s good (and morally correct) to win.

What terrible role models they have.

The lunch tables were folded up vertically and crammed in a corner, and the air felt surprisingly calm. There was none of the charged atmosphere or fear my more anxious tendencies predicted. You might not even know that the grassroots infrastructure of a contentious election were occurring directly in front of you, while each sleepy voter filled in bubbles in their own partitioned desk area.

Standing in line, I kept thinking of the term “civic duty.” I thought about what the term implies—a duty being something you perform, something you solemnly bear, and “civic” a somewhat archaic word once used to describe a class that is apparently no longer taught in schools, strictly speaking. Then again, trust half of what you see and none of what you hear, so they say.

For a while I thought I wouldn’t vote, and my cynicism on the subject, if not obvious, can likely be assumed based on things I’ve written before. Regardless of today’s outcome, we will continue to arm and fund Israel in its barbarism toward the Palestinians and, increasingly, the larger region; we will continue to move lockstep hand in hand toward climate disaster with no significant institutional or larger societal intentions to change our behavior; we will continue to force our most educated class of citizens to shoulder massive amounts of debt for the crime of going to college; and I’m sure we will continue to endure candidates who are not only completely ill equipped politically and characteristically to meet the moment we are in, but in ways that are becoming increasingly obvious seem to not give a shit about meeting that moment anyway.

But, regardless, we will continue. That’s important.

A good friend of mine unknowingly convinced me to vote when he rightfully pointed out that people have fought and died just for the right to do so and continue to fight and die for that same right elsewhere across the world. Not voting would be to spit on the graves of those who came before, and worked so hard to make that happen for us. Maybe part of the solemnity and responsibility implied by the term “civic duty” has to do with making difficult choices that you believe will get you closest to where you want to be, even if your choice won’t get you very close, and even if you don’t want to choose.

There’s no need to continue litigating the pros and cons of voting. What’s done is done, at least as far as what I can do in terms of this election, and if you’re going to vote, you’re going to vote, and if you’re not, you won’t. You don’t need my help convincing you one way or the other. 

The things I think ail us run much deeper than electoral politics, though. I’ll try to resist this becoming a sermon, because I don’t think I know how to live any better than the next guy, but if I can be sure of anything, it’s that living in a country seems to involve cooperation, participation, cohesion, and some semblance of function. 

If I had to hazard a guess about our larger cultural illnesses, I’d say maybe the more time we spend digitized, reading the anonymous thoughts of other people, and the more we maintain parasocial connections long beyond their shelf life via “friends” and “followers,” the less we see one another as people out here in the real world. The more we numb ourselves with mindless, algorithmically curated entertainment, the shorter our attention spans become, and our capacity for sitting in boredom or sustained, spontaneous thought dwindles. The fertile soil that produces self-knowledge, epiphanies, and creative expression is slowly being eroded by a torrent of nonsense that serves to distract us from… what, exactly? The “pain” of being alive in modernity? The monotony and cruel repetition of gainful employment? Our looming deaths?

The more we stare at our phones, the more information we give to advertisers and large corporations about our consumption habits, and the better they become at creating products and content that will sustain our attention, generate ad revenue, and make us dumber and more prone to our base psychological instincts. But, more importantly, the stronger the algorithm gets, the better we will become at numbing ourselves into something else.

The more we consume “content” in bite-sized pieces, the weaker our jaws become. You might not think that’s a problem, since everything is increasingly blended and softened and chewed up for us already, so to speak, but it only benefits the worst people on the planet for us to lose our ability to think. You have to be able to chew.

There’s so much noise that it gets harder and harder to parse out the music.

These things will persist regardless of who wins today—that is, if we even know who that is by tomorrow, and if no one tries any fuckery to change the outcome once we do. That fact is both a burden and a blessing. These are not easy problems to solve, and they aren’t even problems that are easily identified, or problems whose existence is even agreed upon by everyone. But the power to fix them resides within individuals. Delete Twitter. Take a fucking break from your phone and go outside. Talk to someone older than you and generally try to understand their angle. Read a goddamn book once in a while, and if you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, admit it. 

I admit it, freely—I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about most of the time. But if I can convince half of the maybe dozen or so people that consistently read this on a weekly basis to put their phones down, and try to bite off bigger, more challenging pieces of information, maybe our jaws will slowly restrengthen. Putting this forward isn’t without hypocrisy on my end—I still use TikTok now and then, and I’m no monk in a cloistered dark tower reading all day. But I’m trying. 

There’s a difference between political thought and political action, and there’s only so much good that “awareness” can bring. We owe it to each other to use the tools at our disposal to be informed, yes– but it’s useless to be paralyzed by it in too large a dose.

I’m hesitant to say so, but I wonder if we’ve been given candidates that reflect what we can intellectually handle as a culture, and candidates that further illustrate what we are willing to put up with. If it feels like there are no adults in the room, that there’s no one steering the ship, no one that cares about any of us real people down here, maybe that has something to do with it. We are a culture of bite-sized pieces, and therefore that is what we’ve been given: pieces, shells, and small ones at that. 

We live in a culture that caters to a smaller and smaller sector of the population that gets louder and louder every day. It’s a culture of microcultures, one in which if you stay plugged in, you can stay entirely within a world and a culture of your own creation. What that amalgamates to on a larger, country-level scale is still somewhat of a mystery. It’s very hard or impossible to know what a maze looks like from above when you’re lost amongst the hedgerows.

It’s always been the case that the powerful need to be bullied into working on behalf of the powerless, but it seems like we’re more interested in bullying each other and treating politics like a reality show parlor game than actually pursuing results in the real world. 

The real world: that thing we retreat from, more and more, in favor of a controlled and entertaining digital alternative. Better living through pixels. The digital world will never ask you to demand better of it, because the algorithm gets better every day at giving you exactly what you want a millisecond before you know you want it. 

I know much of this is, unfortunately, classic projection, too. I’m sure a majority of people, even if it’s a small majority, are overworked and underpaid, and they don’t have the time, privilege, or luxury to consume mindless entertainment all day. I have to believe that most Americans are doing their best.

I’m aware of the dangers of consuming media all day because I’ve had days where it’s all I’ve done. I know the strange mental fog and general physical malaise that can fill you after way too much screen time, when you’re reduced to a button that’s been pressed far too many times, a lever that’s been smashed to bits for an increasingly unsatisfying reward.

I just hope my cynicism is excessive, and that the sky doesn’t fall the way I think it might. May the title of this weekly writing habit never become prophetic.

I have to believe that there’s more to being an American than consuming. But if we aren’t careful, that may end up being all we’re capable of becoming. And if we aren’t careful, we may become a culture that doesn’t win, but merely chooses how, and with whom, to lose.