october 29, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world


I had a memory yesterday of playing catch with my dad as a kid. More accurately, I laughed to myself remembering how, sometimes, he would throw a baseball at me as hard as he could. It wasn’t every time– part of the point of the exercise was to be unpredictable about it. I must have been six or seven, and he must have been out of his mind, but I hope one day I love my kid enough to trust they’re able to catch whatever I can throw at them. 

I was listening to “Mythological Beauty” by Big Thief at the time, which as far as I can tell, is about children raising children, forgiving your parents through reconstructed memory, and seeing them as adults, as an adult, and coming to a new understanding because of that perspective. Hence, why I was chuckling to myself about my dad throwing missiles at me up in Massachusetts. At least, at the time they felt like missiles, but given that my dad and I both top out at 5 foot 8 and are aggressively average in terms of athletic prowess, they were probably moving at cruising altitude. 

Gentle comedic self-deprecation and paternal ragging, aside.

I remember being pissed at him when he would do that, but the lessons he was imparting are obvious now—about handling situations as best you can even if you aren’t quite ready for them, about believing in yourself and trusting yourself, about accepting challenging situations as opportunities for growth, yadda yadda and blah blah. 

With the added benefit of getting better at catching the ball, too. I was always a headcase on the diamond and therefore very hot and cold at the plate, but for the most part, I could always field a decent third base.

Anyway, there was so much else going on inside at the time, both literally and figuratively, that it was good of him just to get me outside. Out of that house. People frequently joke about the emotional unavailability of fathers, particularly regarding my own father’s generation (which is luckily one problem I didn’t have to deal with, as my dad is a complete and total softie). But I think most of the time, men generally tend to talk and connect more over shared activities where there’s something else to focus on. It makes the words smaller and therefore easier to put out and to receive. Not to say that some fathers aren’t genuinely emotionally unavailable– but I’d wager at least some of the time, the sense that they are is borne of misunderstandings.

I think it’s part of the reason that some of the best conversations I’ve had with male friends have been on barstools—there’s a loud environment to distract us, we’re sitting parallel and not facing one another, there’s a shared social lubricant to consume and distract. 

Just because you aren’t facing one another in the lotus position holding hands and talking about your feelings doesn’t mean you aren’t talking, is basically what I’m saying. Not that I’m not down for that, too, either.

I owe most of these recollections to Adrianne Lenker, I guess. The only reason I was listening to “Mythological Beauty” in the first place is because a video of Adrianne Lenker playing it acoustically popped up while I scrolled TikTok, a habitual rut of an activity I’ve sunk into before work these days. The vestiges of the attention span I built up in college and grad school won out, and instead of scrolling past to watch videos of simulated car crashes, or some guy replacing a floor, or some sappy hopecore art video (all three essentially producing an amalgam that functions as a bullshit adult equivalent of Cocomelon), I stayed and watched the whole four minute video of her playing the song.

She has others about parents and childhood, too. “Half Return,” “Come,” and “Free Treasure” come to mind. It’s good for you to hear someone else grapple with issues you’re, as yet, too scared to face yourself. If you (like many others) have ambivalent relationships with one or both parents, or you’ve ever thought moving to Bushwick or dying your hair might fix you, check her out. Side effects may include choking up, buying houseplants, aggressively working out to reassert your masculinity, and/or obsessively trying and failing to play her songs on guitar the way she plays them.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about her before, and I have a cold and am therefore too lazy to check if I did, but her album songs (2020) is one of the best of the last decade, and I had the good fortune to take a wildly over-attended workshop with her that gave me some fresh ideas last winter.

Not that she’s a secret, of course. Far from it, and I’m sure most of you who read this probably know about her already, but I digress. 

Most of these thoughts are part of a concerted effort of mine to focus on the small. The election looms a week out, and I’m sure my dread is not unique. Nothing I could say here would add much to the conversation, and it surely wouldn’t change hearts or minds. These rambling performative journals have gotten rather political in the past, and it seems all things these days are political even if only by omission, but my only advice is to get off Twitter, talk to people that are actually in your life, and focus on the radically small band of things that are actually within our control (like voting, for example). 

And if you still like the guy, there really isn’t anything I could say to you that I think you’d even be capable of engaging with in good faith. 

In the meantime, I’ll be pounding vitamin C to get healthy, trying to get some sleep, embracing the quiet dignity of daily work, and focusing on being ready for whatever comes. Just like dad taught me to do, while throwing missiles at my head. 

october 22, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I’ve noticed a recurring tendency with these posts: I feel a strange allegiance to being negative. I’ll go to write something, anything, and it almost always feels too positive to be worth sharing. With everything going on in the world, and the title of this “project,” whatever that word “project” means, I often feel like I need to be excavating truths about the bad things going on in the world, or at least providing some sort of incisive cultural commentary referring to whatever big thing is happening in the ever-shortening media cycle, for these to be worth it. But the truth is, it’s been a good week, and I’m in a good mood, and I don’t want either of those truths to go to waste.

I spent way too much money to watch the Mets lose game 3 of the NLCS at Citi Field last week. Owen and I sang parodies of “Meet the Mets” while we sat in apocalyptic traffic on 678, which devolved into me just busting out with a fervent “MEET THE METS” in a stereotypical New York-adjacent accent in any gap in the conversation. Spirits were high. We walked up the stairs in Citi Field and immediately saw Jeter, David Ortiz, and A-Rod sitting behind the desk for MLB Tonight, which was pretty surreal—their celebrity, and the fact that I watched them as kids, made them almost look like wax figures. Hyperreal, celebrities that have eclipsed a combination of fame, nostalgia-tinged importance from my childhood, and sustained relevance that has morphed them into something beyond reality, to me. Then, I followed Owen’s aggressive lank through the growing crowds to find our nosebleed seats, the only tickets we could afford.

Of course, the Mets struck out like thirteen fucking times and they left a million runners on base, en route to an emphatic shutout trouncing at the hands of the motherfucking Dodgers (MFD for short). We got to see Shohei Ohtani hit a 3-run playoff home run which was, despite my seething hatred of the Dodgers, pretty cool, though. It also made me think that maybe Mets fans and Red Sox fans are spiritual cousins. Their teams frequently do well enough to inspire hope, only to lose in dramatic fashion. The heartbreak around me made me feel at home. It was pretty lame to see Mets fans giving up and leaving in the seventh inning though, especially considering how pricey even the cheap seats were. 

Other highlights include that I witnessed a Drunk White Mets Fan (DWMF for short) ~racistly~ accost an Asian man about Shohei Ohtani while waiting in line for the bathroom. The Asian man stood behind us wearing a strange hat that had the Mets logo on one side and the Yankees logo on the other, which made me wonder if he was a tourist or something since sports fans generally tend to be so tribal and loyal to a particular squad, and never to two in the same city. An obvious example is the enduring hatred White Sox fans have for Cubs fans and vice versa in Chicago, but Mets and Yankees fans don’t seem too cuddly either. The dual Yankee/Mets hat made me think of that time Rob Lowe wore an NFL hat to the Super Bowl. Like, dude: you gotta pick one. But I digress, and it’s certainly not to imply blame on the Asian man’s part for what comes next.

“No, you’re with them, you’re one of them, did you bet the under or the over? You’re one of Ohtani’s guys I know it,” the DWMF yelled, while the Asian man grew in confusion and shrunk in stature, eager to avoid a conflict, I assume, pointing to his hat and saying “No, no, New York.”

All the while, full bladdered, I stood there, thinking “for fuck’s sake, am I gonna have to pull this idiot off this poor guy?” Plus, what the hell does that even mean, “one of Ohtani’s guys?” As if the best baseball player alive and maybe to ever live has goons in the stands, double agents posing as fans of the home team, like life is a cartoon. To, I’m sure, everyone in the vicinity’s relief, the DWMF then said, in true New York fashion, “I’m just breakin’ balls.” I hope the Asian guy enjoyed the game, and I hope the DWMF cried about the Mets losing, even if it disappointed me too.

We proceeded to stand shoulder to shoulder at the urinals. No time for shy kidneys, kid. Piss and move on. 

Baseball, beer, hot dogs, and racism. A true American experience. 

I got home way too late that night and took a PTO day from work the next day. It pays to have baseball fans for bosses. I made good use of it, sipping espresso at a bar at lunch with Brian, where we chatted like old men about bands of yore (specifically Pinegrove, who remain really fucking good [RFG for short]), nostalgia, youth, heartache, things of that nature. He’s good for that sort of thing. And that night, I made music, and so did my friends, at a tiny open mic in the middle of nowhere for me, or the center of everywhere, I’m sure, for someone else. 

The weekend was full of a barbecue, hiking with Maddy, and an easy Sunday with her too. 

Which brings us to last night, in which your correspondent met up with aforementioned friends again and yelled his fool head off singing vulgar parodies of songs, fueled by whiskey and two and a half cigarettes, and the enthusiasm that only comes from exhaustion and good times with friends. I got very little sleep, but I pounded water and woke up feeling like a spring chicken. And I made it to work. No hangover callouts for your correspondent; those days are decidedly in the past.

A not so sexy but very fun fact (and borderline non sequitur) about me is that I don’t have a large intestine, it having been removed for being diseased and decidedly shitty, pun intended and unavoidable. Amidst privileged friendly conversation last night that will not be expanded upon in a public forum, I was described as “all heart, no guts,” in a literal, comedic, not at all unfriendly sense.

I’ll take it. 

Who needs guts anyway, if you have heart?

And this morning, driving in to work, I watched the sun rise over the awakening bustle of Waterbury from the height of I-84. The whole city was bathed in the kind of light that makes even decay look like it’s blooming. The clock tower stood alone silhouetted against the retreating night, and lights from tons of houses dotted the landscape in the distance. From there, it was impossible to see it as anything other than beautiful, which makes me think that half of perception is projection from where you’re at. 

When I pulled up early enough to work to take a quick walk, I saw a bunch of birds sitting shoulder to shoulder on a roofline. I wondered what they were talking to each other about up there. That’s the only kind of news I’m interested in for today. 

So the world might be ending, and we may be getting collectively dumber as a culture and species, and the problems the world faces may dominate many of our consciousnesses and fill the era with a unique but timeless dread. But I can’t and won’t pretend that it was a bad week. 

I’m not one for good advice, but I’ve heard tell that a good mood is worth holding on to. I may aspire to an enduring allegiance to the truth and to honesty, and part of that may include situating my happiness (or lack thereof, at times) in a larger global context. But for today, for me, things are good, and I’m going to let that continue, and also stop here, before I ruin any of it.

october 15, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

If it hasn’t been brought up before or if people have just met me, they tend to guess that I’m older than I really am. I think it’s a skincare thing: I’ve gotten a lot of sun and not enough sleep for years, and I boozed pretty hard in my early twenties, so my almost-twenty-six-year-old face often elicits guesses of twenty-nine or (god forbid) thirty. You wear hard years harder on your face.

Maybe their guesses of twenty-nine or (gulp) thirty have as much to do with how I act as how I look, which is a polite way of saying I’m usually quiet at parties these days. 

I found myself at one of those on Sunday night for a good friend’s birthday. I was preoccupied—my hip hurt, the only beer I had to drink was Shipyard Pumpkinhead (real ones will know I’m a nasty IPA drinker), it was kinda late, I was tired, and most importantly, I felt old. Mostly for the reasons I just listed, but also because I found myself standing in the kitchen making small talk with others who don’t feel at home in the big bustle of a party, notably Maddy, whose birthday we also celebrated happily this weekend. 

It wasn’t a bad time by any means. But it did elicit a feeling I’ve been feeling more and more often, lately: that my version of twenty-five is somehow inferior, old, tired, wrung out, compared to other people. It could have something to do with momentum. I work a nine-to-five, and between open mics and jiu jitsu classes I’m rarely home early unless I’m sick or so exhausted that I can’t bring myself to go out. This leaves me slacking on sleep, excelling at consumption, and feeling “old,” when really I’m probably just sleep deprived. 

The question is what I expect myself to be doing otherwise, though. What would a “young” twenty-five look like? 

The best advice I ever got came from a mentor/professor from grad school. I shudder to admit it, but at the time I was working on what I thought would be a memoir, which consisted at the time mostly of vignettes about misbehavior, heavy drinking, impulsive decisions—you know, the stuff that characterized twenty-two and twenty-three, for me. That project has since been abandoned or, looked at with as much optimism as possible, lies dormant at best.

I was talking with the previously-mentioned advisor about the project and I said something about wondering what would happen to me if I didn’t change, if I didn’t abandon recklessness for discipline, and “become an adult.”

He said: “It’s simple—eventually, it stops being cute.” 

When you’re in your early twenties, say fresh off twenty-one, you can get away with a lot, at least physically and socially. You can go into work hungover and, depending on your job, your performance won’t suffer much, and even if it does, you have leeway to be somewhat of a mess because other people see you as young. There’s almost a societal expectation, at least in jobs I’ve worked before, that when you come in on a Monday, you might be haggard from an ill-spent weekend partying and doing “young people stuff.” You can drink and eat and not sleep and, assuming some level of exercise and an occasional salad, you won’t get fat. At least I didn’t, until I turned twenty-five and gained thirty pounds. Not that I’m fat, no matter how much I feel like I am. Whatever, that’s not the point of this.

Anyway, ultimately, it’s a patience your body and your peers will afford you a finite number of times before it starts to get old, i.e., before it stops being cute.

I stretched this patience from twenty-one through twenty-two years old, into twenty-three and twenty-four. Maybe it was owed partially to covid, and turning twenty-one at the height of lockdown, and using the subsequent years to overcompensate for some vague FOMO. Maybe it’s owed partially to arrested development on my part, trying to scratch some itch or to act a certain way to fit in, or (more likely), to stand out. Maybe it’s owed partially to laziness and complacence, telling myself things were fine because I feared the unknown presented by the prospect of changing, even for the better. Or maybe it’s explained even just by boredom: finding the day-to-day of an office job easy and trying to make it more difficult and therefore more interesting via halfhearted attempts at self-sabotage. As if to say, “look at how much I can do even when I’m not at my best.” Writing it out now makes it appear so obviously fucking lame to me, but at the time, that wisdom eluded me. I guess that’s what makes it wisdom: you rarely know it when you’re supposed to, always later, and only via hindsight.

Now, at twenty-five, as a stable and reliable employee who still tries to have fun during the week with friends, I feel old when I spend my weekend doing “normie” things like enjoying lunches, having a bonfire, sleeping in. Maybe that feeling is just an extension of another feeling that I’ve tried, in the past year or two, to leave behind: the feeling that somehow I am exceptional or different from most people.

The reality, which was always the most likely situation, is that I am not different from most people. What’s wrong with being a “normie” anyway? My parents were normies and their meeting resulted in me being here. When I’m acting like a “normie,” I’m usually spending quality time with people or pets I love. What am I subconsciously trying to prove?

Life isn’t an action movie.

Where I used to think, evidently, that I needed to make life more difficult just to show off, now I wonder how much I could achieve if I just got out of my own way, like I wrote last week. 

Do I feel old, or do I just feel more responsible and therefore boring? 

Even if I did, what’s wrong with being boring? 

Well, it’s boring. There you have it, folks—never say I didn’t teach you anything. Boredom is boring. 

But, it’s not a moral failure. And being responsible doesn’t necessarily mean you’re boring, either. I was not bored this weekend—just because I’d prefer to be in bed by eleven p.m. these days doesn’t mean I’m boring as a person. 

Maybe I feel old because, for the first time, I’m acting my age. At least I’m not sitting on the side of the road with binoculars watching the birds. But I have to admit, that doesn’t sound half bad either.

october 8, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

Writing feels best when it’s surreptitious, a secret, the act of a child reading past bedtime with a flashlight under the covers. What is usually a leisurely, contemplative activity is, today, a combative rush, something done quietly in a found moment at work. It’s a busy day, is what I’m trying to say. 

Today, I’m thinking of Florida. Milton looks like a son of a bitch of a storm, and it’s been a preoccupation now for a couple of days. It illustrates that my challenges today, notably a bureaucratic one at work in which I am, somehow, semi-important, are completely immaterial and unimportant and that any stress I feel about them is misplaced and unnecessary. It also illustrates how, for all our power, for all our feelings of separation from and supremacy over nature, we are still often powerless in the face of it.

May those who can, get out, and those who can’t, fare well.

I spent time last night with great friends laughing into the early night, swapping absurdities, staving off dread for today. 

I’ve always felt comfort from the indelible passage of time. No matter the good or bad, time will always march forward. How horrible life would be if it never ended. Every experience is like the old adage about New England weather, which is less and less accurate as our climate continues to change: “don’t like the weather in New England? Wait fifteen minutes.” 

I’m trying to enjoy the changing of the leaves. They’re particularly vibrant this year, and we’ve had something somewhat reminiscent of an autumn this year. In year’s past, if memory serves, it was hot late into the season—temperatures in the eighties in October, kind of thing. At least this year, it’s only low seventies. Not quite the fall temperatures of youth, but close. 

Sometimes life here is so beautiful I can’t stand it.

The sun is gentle and the breeze is faint. When the fog burns off in the morning, an open sight line of full autumnal colors fills the horizon. In parts of life in which I used to feel unnecessary and redundant, I now feel somewhat important, necessary. It’s good for the mind for you to be expected somewhere at a certain time.

And past feelings that nothing mattered have been replaced: partially with the fear that accompanies having things to lose, but mostly with a bittersweet presence of knowing how good things can be, how good they are, how time keeps moving forward, and how things change.

If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait fifteen minutes. A quote that doesn’t need to have anything to do with weather.

october 2, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I’m a day late, according to an arbitrary schedule I came up with myself, but usually treat as absolute. Extremes are kind of my thing, and my tendency for the all-or-nothing has helped as much as harmed me. 

Roughly three years ago, I was in Denver with Stove. I wrote a few weeks ago about the time my lungs filled up with blood clots, and subsequently grappling with mortality. I’ve alluded plenty of times to my capacity for impulsive decision making and masking anxiety with poor choices. This trip was an exception to this habit.

I’m not sure if it was due to the grounding effect one feels when traveling with someone they’re highly comfortable with (Stove is one of my best friends, and we had been playing in bands together for years at this point), but the trip had balance. I drank, but not too much. We went for hikes, but we had fun. We did touristy shit, but we also watched Clone High and laughed late into the night, and shared things we hadn’t told each other yet. 

Details matter. One of my favorite memories is walking through River North, the artsy section of Denver, hunting a good cocktail and looking at murals. It was hot. This was in September, but the air was arid in Denver as it tends to be, and that high up, it felt like you could reach out and grab the sun. There were also very few trees, which often leaves a New Englander feeling lonely and hot without shade.

We ended up finding some hip place with craft cocktails and, despite my pretentiousness for pizza coming from Connecticut, admittedly decent slices. I drank a negroni and thought about Anthony Bourdain, and about how I wasn’t dead. 

At the time, I thought a lot about the fact that I wasn’t dead. In fact, there was a mania that followed the whole lung debacle, fueled by the euphoria of almost dying but not quite. Read about it in that other blog post I linked before, if you want more on that.

Anyway, this is a roundabout way of communicating that balance isn’t typically my thing, and I opt instead for an all-or-nothing approach. This suited me in grad school, when I was working full time and writing hundreds of pages a year, drinking like a fish and sleeping very little. When I graduated and lost the artistic scaffolding of being in a grad program, this intensity morphed into a renewed commitment to music in the form of writing folk songs. It also led to me virtually abandoning fiction and not writing anything at all for months.

My personality is fairly consistent over time, as far as I’m aware– always the brooding, sardonic type. Changes come for me in the form of different elements of my personality taking over for periods of time, and then shrinking again into the background. What was once an era of me being the “grad school fiction writer” guy morphed into me being the singer-songwriter guy, as I’m sure any of you are aware by my frequent attempts at IG story self-promotion. But the grad school fiction guy and the songwriter guy are only shards, like individual colored glass pieces in a larger mosaic of the self. Diluted, bastardized slivers of the self. 

Writing this blog is an attempt to marry a few different elements of this fractured self—music meets writing via subject matter, and is coupled by this public expression of the intimate self, which creates a sort of paradoxical tension that sometimes wins out in convincing me not to write. Yesterday is a prime example of this. Some things feel too interior to share, which is my choice, but the absolutist in me has set a weekly deadline that must be met but yesterday, I missed.

The absolutist in me was quietly expressing a wish to terminate the practice altogether, even. This week’s attempt at balance is coming in the form of writing and posting this a day late and not just giving up because I missed one “deadline.”

Pendulums have swung in other areas of life recently, too. I’ve been drinking much less. Much less. And by “much less,” I mean not at all for the last two weeks, with the exception of two days (a music festival for one, and a dinner with a long-unseen old friend of mine). This is not a problem—truly, I’m sleeping better, my thoughts are sharper, I think I’ve lost a pound or two. Sure, I approach the end of a workday and crave a beer most days, but it isn’t an unconquerable urge. It’s an easy longing to replace with something else, like a seltzer or a mug of hot chocolate or just time with a book, even. Paradoxically, this ability to enact strict control over my drinking at any arbitrary moment is what rationalizes my decision to drink again, since obviously it’s not a problem since I can just turn it off at any time, and given my penchant for extremes, you can imagine how my consumption fluctuates. I see the flaws in the logic.

But occasionally I’ll think back on that trip to Denver in relief, remembering an example of actual balance. It’s something I am capable of. It simply requires presence and effort, and a resistance to relying solely on routines. The mind is a powerful thing, and that’s what can turn routines from glorious to insidious—depending on the rut you’re in, you’re either enjoying the ride or headed for the ditch. 

Right now, I think I’m enjoying the ride. I’m not without human problems, of course (I haven’t yet achieved Nirvana), but on the whole, personal things are fine, due in part to positive momentum. 

The exact opposite seems true for the larger world out there. This reality makes it hard to write. Already it’s been about 900 words here, and this entry has done nothing to save the world. Yet again, why should it? It’s another extreme: my writing either needs to fix everything or it isn’t worth doing at all. At least, that’s how my mind seems to operate sometimes. 

In East of Eden, Steinbeck writes “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” It’s the kind of thing that simultaneously tells the truth and sounds good– two things which don’t always coexist in any given statement. Its truth is obvious on its face, and yet it’s something that hasn’t fully lodged in my thick skull. 

So, this entry fixes nothing. But I wrote it anyway. The hope, as always, is that you and I are both better off for it compared to if I never wrote it at all. 

I’m seeing a friend play live music tonight. I’m sharing a meal with the woman I love. If a beer will add to that experience, I’ll order one. I’ll drink it and enjoy it, and move on. Then, we will go home and I will rest and I will wake up for work tomorrow with a clear conscience, well-rested enough to face the day. I will spend a little bit of time on Twitter, I’ll take in some of the world, but I won’t let it capsize me.

I don’t need to be perfect; I just need to be good.

september 24, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

I wonder often about what I could be if I just got out of my own damn way. 

My bad habits have ranged over the years from innocuous to injurious, from seductive to sad. I’m going on two months of not biting my fingernails, for example. Aside from an extra cold now and then and the stigma of habitually doing something gross, it’s not that bad, and now just a small bad habit defeated. A clearing of the throat and a test of resolve before tackling larger ones, perhaps. 

I didn’t have a drink last night. It’s a habit that’s not always sad or injurious, as far as habits go, and in fact has facilitated plenty of unique conversations late into evenings, generated fodder for music, provided gustatory pleasure and cerebral intrigue. But abstaining, for a night or several, is a corrective measure regardless. 

I talked with a mentor of mine in grad school about what happens to people who never grow out of going to the bar, being sloppy and reckless, fully beholden to the romantic image of the barfly. “Eventually, it stops being cute,” he said.

Something like that.

If I didn’t feel so good physically this morning I would be furious at the obvious realization that my own bad habits are usually what leave me so worse for wear. I’ve been yapping about my joints hurting and being tired and gaining weight for months, and it turns out 800 extra calories of beer a night might contribute in a meaningful way to any or all of those things. 

I’m grateful at how easy it was to take a night off, too. I even sat in a bar watching the Sox actually win a game with a buddy of mine, and I didn’t succumb to the gentle urge to order a Headway, and then three more, while we waited to celebrate Bruce Springsteen’s birthday with perhaps the most heterosexual activity ever performed: three grown men, two of them sober, sitting in a living room listening to Bruce Springsteen on vinyl. 

It was a good night. Its recollection is made even better by the fact of clear memory, the knowledge that nothing I said could be attributed to anything other than who I was when I said it, and the simple pleasure of being with people one cares about without any added haze. Last night, the only haze was laughter. 

It implies that maybe, after a little break, I can resume consumption at a reduced, more socially and professionally compatible way.

Before we vomit together from naked sentiment, we can move on. Accept my apologies for being aggressively earnest.

Last week I wrote about the insularity of writing about the self and everyday rhythms while so many bad things are happening out in the world. I still feel that, acutely in fact, to the point that the idea of terminating this weekly writing practice entirely is appealing to me sometimes. The problems of the world are so big, and I’m so comparatively small. 

But I didn’t set out to save the world when I decided to start doing this. It’s about discipline. So I’ll continue—consider it another instance of me getting out of my own way. 

Truly, I seem to do better when I dispense with the notion of a “big world” out there, anyway. There’s only so much that’s within our control. Worrying about the things that sit largely outside my control usually just leads me to barstools or friends’ couches trying to drink away an imagined shame at my own inadequacy to save the world, when in reality I should probably be going home to sleep, waking up early to replace that burnt out headlight bulb, doing some laundry, petting my dogs. Things I did last night and this morning.

There are still other things that can and should be done. I will continue to at the very least acknowledge that a situation with moral imperative equivalent to the Holocaust has arisen in our lifetime, and yet so many of us sit idle in consumptive inaction, while others actively dispute the situation’s existence, or worse, applaud its progress. The region inches closer to full-blown conflict as Israel edges its way into Lebanon and kills nine-year-old girls with pager bombs, while the US continues to aid and abet it with funding and free PR. 

You might be mad at me for talking about it, especially nestled in a journal like this that started out comparatively cool and meditative. But maybe we shouldn’t be able to escape it.

Discussion of it should be everywhere.

Even if the US reverses course, stops funding Israel, and fights on the right side of history in the event of a future, hypothetical regional war, what has already been done should fester a guilt that can never be absolved. If not for you and me, then for the people in charge, at the very least. 

Should, should, should. If only history was governed by the word “should.”

If only we could know what the world could be if it got out of its own way.

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

These weekly entries have become a prison of my own making. Today’s entry is brought to you by my last vestige of discipline. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, and only boring people get bored; given the size and scope of the world’s most dominant problems, my petty inconveniences and half-baked thoughts on my relatively bourgeois lifestyle feel particularly useless today. The fact that none of you need to click on this is the only reason I’m able to do it, and the idea that maybe none of you will read it in the first place is a source of great relief for me.

I’ll offer the transparent warning now that this one probably isn’t a “feel good” journal. But I’m sure any of you that know me or have read me know that “feel good” isn’t generally my forte.

We’re nearing an election, our government is aiding and abetting an ongoing genocide by funding its perpetrator, our bodies are full of microplastics and so is the planet’s food and water, the climate is warming faster than even our most pessimistic models predicted a few years ago, and all I can seem to write about lately is my own bullshit. This fact speaks equally to my evident egocentricity as it does to my feelings of powerlessness in the face of these problems, which are feelings made worse by my consumption of algorithmic social media timelines that have learned, by studying my behavior, that I am curious about the general state of the world. I swim a river of bad news.

My impulse, when I don’t know what to write about for these things, is to reflect on what has happened since my last entry and try to find fodder there. I played a successful gig, went on a beautiful hike with my love, hung out in the sun with my two-year-old niece, and hit some baseballs with a good friend. It has been a relatively stable week with few complaints. Aristotle said in Nicomachean Ethics that happiness is itself “an end and something in every way final.” Apparently, Ayn Rand paraphrased it really poorly in one of her novels, too. Side note: fuck Ayn Rand. No, I won’t elaborate. 

Ok, I’ll briefly elaborate. Ayn got a whole bunch of funding from US public works programs to produce art, then produced art that no one liked at first that mythologizes the individual as this heroic figure that doesn’t need help from anyone. Then, Ayn pushed this philosophy that Big Government is Actually Bad even though Big Government Money is what gave her a career in the first place. Get bent, Ayn. I’m getting deja vu writing this, so I might have said something similar before, but it bears repeating. Ayn: get bent.

Anyway, the original point of this was to say that writing about being happy probably isn’t ever particularly interesting. And right now, when so many people are suffering for very clear political and genocidal reasons, writing about personal happiness feels disgusting. 

Writing about trying not to write about your own personal happiness feels pretty disgusting today, too. It doesn’t forgive me for my, as of yet, inability to contribute much of anything substantive to help suffering people. 

Michael Brooks, a somewhat niche leftist thinker who died way too young a couple years ago, said to be kind to people and ruthless to systems. How can I simultaneously be kind to myself, and recognize that I am part of a system in which I function essentially as a parasite, or a cancer? I drive a car two hours round-trip for work every day, and yeah it’s a partial-zero-emissions Subaru, but that alone is contributing to the destruction of our planet and the poisoning of our food and water through its consumption of gasoline and its proliferation of microplastics from the degradation of its tires. I eat meat. This is partially due to health issues that preclude me following a vegan diet, but still—I fund factory farming. I buy consumer goods like clothes, and vinyl records (which require fossil fuels to be produced). I have an iPhone, whose battery uses materials that were likely mined in horrific circumstances somewhere in the global south. On said iPhone, I am editing this journal entry in which I try to recognize all the ways I contribute to horrible systems that make the world, and the lives of many, actively worse every day. But what is that worth? It’s not like it makes any of that better, at least in a material sense. 

Capitalism makes basic privileged existence villainous, and it persists because those who suffer from our decision making so often are unseen and/or voiceless.

In season one of True Detective, Marty asks Rust how he’s able to get out of bed in the morning, given the depth of the darkness in his philosophy. I’m paraphrasing because I’m too lazy to look it up, but Rust says something like “I tell myself I bear witness, but the truth is that according to my nature I lack the constitution for suicide.” I’m sure Owen will text me the full quote, from memory, and correct me where I strayed from accuracy.

As a disclaimer and a brief pause to catch our breath, I’m not saying that’s where I’m at. I’m already anticipating loved ones, many of whom likely feel compelled to read this week over week (a reality that horrifies me) reaching out to me to ask if I’m “ok,” troubled by my allusion to suicide given various factors re: my personal history. I’ll respond to all of you with a blanket “yes” here and now: I’m not on any ledge, and you don’t need to talk me off of it. But, Rust’s thoughts apply to this situation: I’ve told myself before that my own awareness of my complicity in the world’s problems acts as a form of bearing witness, but this does nothing and helps no one. If anything it’s just a failed attempt to absolve myself of guilt, and makes my continued relative inaction more morally heinous.

I try not to be complacent about the situation, either—I know I could eat less meat, could buy a tin can electric car, never buy an iPhone again, et cetera. But the best-case scenario, unless the systems that govern the way we live in the West radically change, will always be harm reduction, never harm elimination. I want badly to be a good person, for the world to be “better” because I was here. I’m sure a select few might argue with me until they’re blue in the face that they believe that to be true, too. But I’m not convinced.

None of this is a maudlin self-flagellation, either. I’m not even in that bad of a mood. This isn’t meant to be a pathetic grovel in the court of public opinion or some sort of backhanded ploy for reassurance. It’s just a full-throated attempt at honesty, for once. We can’t improve the emperor’s style if we can’t first admit that he’s not wearing any fucking clothes. 

I’m sure there are some folks reading this, smarter than me, that are aware of even more problems that present grave danger to us not just as individuals, but as a species. My omission of those problems in this discussion is not due to malice, but incompetence. I simply don’t keep up with world events the way I used to, a past obsession which itself was an attempt at establishing some level of control over a world that, as I entered early adulthood, fucking terrified me. Still does sometimes, in fact, depending on the day. 

None of this is meant to bum you out, either, and you have my apology if it does. Smarter people, again, than me have said accurately that our own feelings of powerlessness and complacency serve only the worst people on the planet earth. There is no moral superiority to saying that everything sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it—even if you are correct, saying that out loud does not make you a better person. I don’t want you to feel powerless—I don’t want to feel powerless either—I just want to talk about this shit in the hopes that maybe some people have some ideas pertaining to the whole How to Be a Better Person thing. Let’s collaborate on it.

If you’re wondering how I’m doing, I’m fine, but that wasn’t the point of this one. The world is bigger than you and me. 

 

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

This week marks the three-year anniversary of the closest I’ve ever come to dying (as far as I know). 

Dying is a great reason to do things. It lends a sense of urgency where otherwise, were time unlimited, it would be easy to be complacent. Want to write songs? Stories? Do it—you could be dead soon. 

I woke up one day with chest pain, and thought I pulled a muscle. Then it got worse, and worse. One blood test later and I was in the ER, then admitted, for two lungs full of blood clots. I was told if I waited another night, it would have been lights out. 

I was also told that my drinking habit thinned my blood enough to prevent a heart attack and might have saved my life. That was possibly the worst thing I could have heard at the time, and I certainly used it as an excuse. But a few years later, after plenty of irresponsible behavior, things are a little more under wraps. 

It ebbs and flows, anyway. 

There was lots of time spent feeling sorry for myself. Probably about a solid year, at least while I tried to build some fitness back up. I went from running half marathons in July to struggling with stairs in September. I fixated for most of that time on how close I came to dying for essentially no reason, and thought about how little my life had amounted to up to that point in my own eyes. Laying in a hospital with intravenous blood thinners running through me, I remember thinking I had so much left to write. There was so much left to do. So many relationships to mend. Tattoos to get. Places to see. It felt like oversleeping, and waking up too late to make it to work on time. Except, I felt late to life. I still do, a lot of the time.

But on good days it fuels creativity, the fear; it drives me to write lyrics or parse something out on guitar. On some bad days, it leads to an extra beer. And on most days, it falls somewhere on a continuum between those two, which I consider somewhat opposing forces: the drive to make things, and the drive to numb out. 

One night, over an irresponsible volume of whiskey, I talked with a friend about everything I thought about on that hospital bed, when I was scared that I would die. It was about 8 months afterward, in a dorm in Vermont in July with no air conditioning. My voice felt small, but I raised it to compete with a box fan pointing directly at our heads. The tone was very “woe is me.” My friend said something I still think about, if not every day, then at least once or twice a week: 

“All of this is a gift. Now you know what you’ll think about on your death bed. Because you already kind of have, now.” 

Paraphrasing here: he went on to argue that most people live their whole lives never knowing what they’ll think at the approaching concept of death, and that I’ve experienced something most people realize too late. He then challenged me to follow through, and live life in a way that would ease some of the anxieties I felt at the sudden prospect of dying. 

Most people only experience their death bed once, if they even get the opportunity for that level of clarity. It feels like almost getting hit by a car, and then chuckling while your pulse settles.

Today, I think that maybe I haven’t lived up to my friend’s challenge, fully. My chest kind of hurts today, and every breath is a wince, and it reminds me of the fear, and renews one that wonders if my lungs will ever clot again. It’s something I have to monitor, anyway. There is of course a general anxiety about anything health-related that could happen—I’ve had somewhat bad luck in that department on a couple of occasions, times my body decided for auto-immune reasons or reasons otherwise unknown to almost shut down. 

Before my lungs, it was my guts—I don’t even have a large intestine anymore, owed to it being taken completely out when I was twelve because of untreatable ulcerative colitis. I don’t write about it much because it isn’t a sexy illness, at least as far as illnesses can be sexy. You shit ten+ times a day, and you bleed, and you wither in strength and look doughy and bloated from prolonged treatment with Prednisone, and the whole experience of it is laced with this strange prepubescent shame for me, even though I’m sure no one gives a shit (pun unintentional but convenient) or would think less of me for talking about it. 

Anyway, the prospect of dying is still scary to me, so evidently I have work to do. I’d like to write more songs, better songs, songs that more fully express what I feel I’m capable of as a musician. I would like to write fiction again. I want to get along better with some people in my family before one or all of us die. I want to be kinder, more patient, more curious. My goals range from concrete to vague, but they add up to a sense of longing that I suspect is impossible to fully assuage. 

There’s something intimate, weird, and difficult about admitting here in basic terms that I’m afraid to die, even though it must be something everyone thinks at one point or another. I used to tell people, usually fueled by a beer or four, often wrapped in the haze of cigarette smoke outside a dive bar or at a party, that I wasn’t afraid to die. In technical terms, we call that a complete bald-faced fucking lie, something I’d say if the topic came up, to sound cool. Well, it wasn’t just trying to sound cool, I guess—it was also making death smaller, taking it from the big scary concrete reality I had just learned it to be, and making it nothing more than an abstract concept that I, Cool Guy, Did Not Fear. But every time I said that, I think it just made me more terrified– as if claiming otherwise was to tempt fate. 

I don’t know if there’s an afterlife, but my gut says probably not. I definitely don’t think whatever is out there has been described in writing by human beings, so that means conventional religion isn’t really my vibe, either. But there’s something about saying things out loud, or writing them down, relating to death or the gods that makes me superstitious. Catch me knocking wood after every sentence written here. There’s an adage attributed to a war correspondent named Ernie Pyle that goes “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In days when I was a smarter smart ass than I am now, I’d retort “yeah, that’s because the atheists were smart enough to stay home.” But I see the wisdom in it now, begrudgingly. 

Maybe it’s less about death being big than it is about us being small. Or, death making us feel small. The idea of dying definitely made me feel small, but it also made me feel paradoxically big; there was this idea that we all construct the world in our minds, so when any of us die, a version of the world dies with us. A perspective dies, and in a perspective is a world. 

No thought is too egocentric when you think you’re dying, either. Maybe this speaks to the ego being the one that fears. I’d guess that the Buddhists would say that overcoming the fear of death is about fundamentally rejecting attachment to your own selfhood, and adopting a perspective that contextualizes us as just one part of a much larger whole, to which we are connected inexorably by being alive, which includes the natural thing that is dying. But, I was not, and am not, an enlightened Buddhist.

When it all went down, I was twenty-two and it felt like my world was fading from the edges and it was fucking terrifying. I think admitting that freely is evidence of progress, at least in terms of not avoiding thinking about it anymore, and not lying, I’m sure very obviously so, to the contrary.

It would be irresponsible to omit the fact that surviving the whole thing left me with an all-too-brief sense of euphoria, too. The summer before my lungs shut down, I was super depressed. Like, capital D Depressed, card-carrying, according to my therapist at the time. I spent a lot of time laying in bed, a lot of time stoned, a lot of time mindlessly scrolling on dating apps or Twitter—behaviors that I’m sure contributed to the nuclear bomb of a blood clot that must have formed somewhere inside, before breaking into a bunch of tiny lung-seeking missiles. Behaviors that definitely reinforced the organism’s tendency toward being depressed. Behaviors intended to avoid pain that virtually ensured it, made it a self-sustaining loop.

To that point in my life, the whole death scare thing was the most life-affirming experience I had ever had. 

After I got discharged, I remember how good the air felt flying past me through the open window of my sister’s car, how blue the sky looked, how sweet everything tasted, how funny the world was. How good it was that on that day, I had not died in a hospital. All stereotypical things, cliches, but cliches for a reason. I’m the kind of guy that understands truisms on a cerebral level, but until I experience them directly, they just don’t viscerally sink in. Life had become one of those, for me—the way I was living, life itself didn’t feel that valuable a commodity. Taken for granted. The universe, with its characteristically poetic sense of humor, said to me, “life feels worthless? Let’s see how you feel when it’s almost taken away.” As if I was some kid and life was some toy I was uninterested in playing with until another kid tried to take it. Then, suddenly, it was mine. 

I’m not sure what this adds up to, other than reflections on almost dying excused by the fact of the calendar anniversary. I try not to think about it that often. Yet again, maybe it’s the only thing I think about at all.

september 3, 2024 – performative journaling at the end of the world

So far, I’ve tried to resist turning these into laundry lists of recent experiences. I don’t want them to become meta-explorations of my inability to think of anything to write about, either. There are pages and pages like that in my personal journals, but to put the “performative” in the performative journal, I feel a need to make this at least semi-palatable, but that also seems to defeat some of the purpose for why they started in the first place. 

An idea that’s been kicking around my head lately, sometimes with chemical embellishment, is that what you do is more important than who you are. Writing, much of the time, has been a means of self-exploration for me. In the personal writings not meant for public viewing, sometimes it’s even been a means of self-authorship, or at least attempts to do so. But the act of putting these entries on a website morphs them from being about the self to being more about the thing itself, the “artistic object,” if they can even be described as such. Therefore, they become a thing I do, much like songs or jiu jitsu or, dare I say it, the work I get paid to do. 

But today, I’m wringing the cloth and it’s coming up dry. I’ll only share one moment from the weekend:

Yesterday, I killed a syrphid fly, because it kept flying close to my face and hands, and I thought it was a bee. It was pretty acrobatic how I did it, too. I got up from the wooden picnic table I was sitting at, brought my leg up, and stomped it down into the plank of the seat with a down kick. Out of mid-air. Its body was perfectly flattened, three dimensions turned to two, its resemblance preserved. Then I looked closer and saw that it didn’t have a stinger. After some basic research, I figured out what it was, and found out that they actually pollinate things and pose no harm to humans, and only mimic the look of the bee. I try to avoid killing bees anyway, and in this particular case, the fly died simply for being annoying. Or, looked at another way, it died for being too curious about a being much larger and more powerful than itself.

It didn’t just die—I killed it.

Some might say I was acting as an agent of nature—that the death of the syrphid fly was actually a choreographed occurrence, a natural law enacting itself through me that says you shouldn’t fly face first into danger. I don’t know about you, but as much as that interpretation would absolve me of guilt, it would also absolve me of too much agency for me to be comfortable with it. So, for lack of anything human to talk about, here’s a moment to think about that syrphid fly, and intrepid beings everywhere that die for wanting to know too much.

Yet again, who am I to ascertain his motives? Ill intent, good intent, it’s all irrelevant when you’re that small. Yet again (again), maybe human shit isn’t always the important shit. There’s an indifference that can go along with being so much bigger than something else. But a bunch of us read Horton Hears a Who as a kid– a person’s a person, no matter how small, yadda yadda.

I hesitate to be didactic here, because if you’ve read any of these things, you know that most of the time I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing or talking about. But, if killing the syrphid fly teaches anything, it teaches that the curious are often killed by the ignorant. The small by the large.

And to the syrphid fly: sorry I didn’t know your name. 

It’s less about who you are than what you do. I’m not maudlin about it and this has turned rather sentimental, but I don’t want to be the guy who kills bugs just because he doesn’t know what they are. I guess, in this case, I thought it was going to sting me. But still. Even if it did, in that case, the punishment wouldn’t fit the crime. Think Aesop, frogs, scorpions, not blaming things for their nature, et cetera et cetera, but is it not human nature to also have restraint?

I hope wherever the thing ended up is nicer than it was here, if it ended up anywhere. Maybe in the end, I’ll have a big karmic debt for tons of little moments like these.

And if the tables turn and our curiosity gets the best of us, irreparably, may it all end quickly, on the wrong end of a big acrobatic splat.

august 27, 2024 – performative journaling at the End of the world

The first thing I said this morning was “fuck you” to my alarm clock. It’s the kind of day when inanimate objects aren’t even safe from the scope of condemnation. But it might also be the kind of day when moods burn off like fog—I only need to find the sun. 

 

There’s nothing wrong, really, aside from perhaps an excess beer last night and some shitty sleep. There was a time such things were routine for me, and yet it was a mystery at the time why everything seemed so bleak. I had no access to natural light or a window at work back then either, and I was in grad school. 

 

Grad school. I finished all that about a year ago now. I haven’t written fiction in any significant way since, and I’m about twenty pounds heavier. Some of it’s good weight, but not all of it—another year’s worth of beers and tasty garbage, another year’s worth of reading, another year’s worth of gigs. More and more the whole grad school thing feels like something I did for lack of anything better to do, desperate after covid to get back out in the world and do something, desperate in general to be anything. I love to write, and I love a lot of the people I met there, but I’m not sure my version of twenty-two years old had much to write about other than hating his job. Now I don’t hate my job and I don’t know what to write about. Go figure. Maybe I’ll figure it out at twenty-six. 

 

Compulsory page requirements led to a lot of forced writing, and I think that made me a better songwriter, though, so I got a direct 1:1 thing out of grad school, at least. My student loan debt balance makes it easy to regret the whole thing but I try not to sink into that. It’s all just numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere and the “World” seems to be edging closer to some sort of calamity every day anyway. 

 

Yet, there’s that apocryphal internet hoax about some Assyrian tablet from 2800 B.C. bitching about kids today, and how the world is ending. Veracity of it aside, maybe the whole “the world is ending” line of thinking is nothing new and has less to do with material reality than it does with my desire to abdicate responsibility for big shit in my life that scares me. 

 

Yet again, climate change. 

 

What keeps me from writing is, when I start writing a story or something, after somewhere around the seventh word, my brain remembers all the big bad shit happening in the world and it makes the practice of pen and pad feel anachronistic at best, joyless always, and ludicrous at worst. I preemptively anticipate the idea of “I know a people is being erased in real time in a highly visible way, and our government is aiding and abetting that, but here’s a little story I came up with to distract you from that.” Our very own grassroots bread and circus. And then I stop writing.

 

Yet again, something big and scary to abdicate responsibility for my inability to write fiction for over a year, on the flipside. 

 

Maybe it’s something to do with genre. If fiction is a filter on reality, it feels like a time when we should at least be looking at things clear-eyed and unabated. That’s not to criticize or denigrate any of my peers who still write and publish fiction—it’s only to try to understand why I can’t seem to do it anymore. When I was in grad school, I had an excuse. There were academic and social expectations that I would produce 150 new pages of fiction every six months, so regardless of how much I felt like my own material was bullshit, I needed to produce it. There were financial and prideful stakes on getting the work done. Now, however…

 

Maybe I just feel like I’m inadequate as a writer to rise to the responsibility I feel fiction writers have in a time like this. Or any time, really. As soon as the world was made it started falling apart, I guess. 

 

I started writing these entries in May. Already it has been long enough that I can look back and see clearly that the title is a strategic ploy to give myself psychological permission to write. It’s self-effacing (performative), minimizing so as to reduce expectations (journaling) and acknowledges the whole “my material is bullshit” paradox I just wrote about (at the End of the world). Also therein lies an implied meaning that none of this is meant to be for anyone else, and so I have permission from myself to write whatever I want. Simultaneously, a couple of you have read these and responded to them positively. If you’ve responded to them negatively, you’ve had enough mercy not to let me know. Please, continue that practice, for I am fragile and don’t want criticism.

 

(That’s not entirely true. While I am sensitive to criticism, I am also a raging egotist desperate at all times to know what people are thinking about me and my work. So if you hate me to my core and think everything I write fucking sucks, feel free to DM me on Instagram about it.) 

 

There are none of those psychic caveats present in fiction, or at least, if there are, I haven’t found the strategy to employ them for myself. Any time I would typically reserve for writing fiction usually gets swallowed up by reading instead. For now, that means Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973 National Book Award Winner, and my second exposure to Thomas Pynchon. I’m on page 20. It’s really funny, batshit insane, and it’s one of those books that gives you permission to write about whatever you want, because clearly Pynchon didn’t give a shit if people found a seven-page scene about bananas to be stupid. He just did it anyway. 

 

I think I just found my strategy: the hard-nosed, austere commitment to just doing it anyway, even if the world sucks and it feels like there’s very little we can do about it in a direct sense.

Simultaneously, if I’m not having fun with it, why am I going through such psychic hoops trying to convince myself to write fiction in the first place? 

 

Is it because I feel like I have to? That’s what I used to tell myself. I also think fun is overrated. It might sound antiquated, but my half-baked thought is that sometimes fun stands on the other end of a dual with duty, and it’s up to you who is quicker on the draw. It’s so much easier to lapse into “fun,” and unfortunately for me, a lot of the time that looks like passive consumption, of media, of beer, of bad food, of lowbrow nonsense, which is very convenient for the worst people on earth. On the flipside, this kind of thinking is also super easy to mock—duty? to write fiction? What year is it? How important do you think you really are? 

 

Sometimes, the way we talked about writing in grad school made me wonder what any of us were doing there. There’s a famous Hemingway quote about writing and how it’s easy, you just need to sit at a typewriter and bleed. There were seminars and lectures about elaborate schemes to coax more writing out of yourself. Basically, a lot of the time, it came across like some people just weren’t having any fun. My favorite writers in the program seemed to be in it for the love of the game, though. Maybe I’m just projecting. Anyway, ultimately, you’re just a kid playing in a sandbox, or another daydreaming about what his stuffed animals do while he goes to school. There’s a childish (in the positive sense of the word) impulse at the heart of making things. It’s play. Or at least, it’s supposed to be. 

 

Is it? What the fuck do I know? 

 

By the powers vested in the president of my grad school at the time and the Great State of Vermont, I hold a professional degree in creative writing, specifically fiction. Theoretically this means if I got published enough and impressed the right people and kissed the correct asses I could ostensibly teach other people how to write things, or lecture at undergrads about Beowulf or some shit. Which, to me, just reveals that the whole time I grew up, maybe none of the people I looked up to really knew what they were doing, and I find that beautiful, liberating, and terrifying at the same time. 

 

Important subtext: my grad school no longer exists in Vermont, really—it merged with some SoCal school. That’s neither here nor there, but the point is that grad school creative writing programs are seemingly disappearing every day, and I wonder how much of that has to do with pure economics and how much of it has to do with the fact that we’re using a fundamentally dated and irrelevant form. Maybe irrelevant is harsh. But, put another way, we occupy the same space in culture as vinyl collectors. The dominant forms for delivering cultural artifacts are visual and have been for decades—first it was movies and TV, but now it’s even dumber, in the form of TikToks and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and other branded bite-size bullshit delivery devices called different things even though they’re all really the same, another instance of the illusion of choice under capitalism. Most people stream their music, and we listen to vinyl, and that’s fine. I think there will always be people who love to read and others who hunger to create things on paper, but maybe grad-level creative writing programs function under the assumption that literature (used here broadly to encompass all written words and not to denote genre) holds way more cultural capital as a significant art form than it currently does. 

 

I do love to read, and as a result I end up spending a lot of time doing so in bars. Inevitably, despite the book I’m holding intending to be a massive neon sign that says “fuck off, I don’t want you to talk to me,” people will usually come up to me and say something akin to “how are you reading IN A BAR?” Depending on my mood and state of inebriation, my response varies from “oh you know, I like the buzz in the background” to a stern “well, I’m not reading anymore.” And I wasn’t there, and I don’t intend to mythologize and valorize the past, but I imagine it was nowhere near as rare a sight to see someone reading in a bar in 1970 than it is in 2024. Novels and short stories occupied more cultural weight as a means of entertainment then than they do now and that’s just obvious. The famous workshops that produced the Cheevers of the world functioned with the implication that there was economic potential in the work being completed. In other words, you could sell books and maybe get a tenured position and survive off of that labor. Now, all the writers I know that publish work I enjoy reading are scraping and clawing away in adjunct positions, or working multiple jobs, unless they’re massively lucky. And I wonder how tenable the whole “spend fifty-thousand dollars to learn to write” thing will be in a few years as more and more people wise up to this dynamic. 

 

This has become a bit long and rambley, and I’m anticipating a bit of disagreement and blowback for this, but I really don’t think anything I’m saying is all that controversial. If it’s obviously false and full of shit, please see my earlier comment re: egotism and my desperate desire to know what you think. 

 

To close this circle, I’ll say the fog has lifted, both literally and over my mood. That felt kinda good. Maybe that is the point after all.