There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things.
I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why, exactly, something seemed so amazing to our younger eyes…but this feels less bad for me as I get older in the same way that opening a can of almost textureless factory-made “ravioli” in a sugary orange sauce loses its comfort and becomes more of a moment for a satisfyingly rueful chuckle at how low my standards once were.
I’ve been indulging myself with some comfort reads, as well, revisiting old and beloved books for a little of that satisfying feeling one gets from retreading old paths where great stuff lies, and I’ve largely been finding new details tucked into the old like little notes pencilled into the margins of a book that inspires such annotations. It’s a task intentionally not taxing, and a pursuit to wage a proxy war of the thought-out against a stretch of external idiocy, but I find, more and more, that I reveal more than just another strata of narrative in the familiar.
Ringworld, the 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, is a terrible book.
…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in my mind) overly vaunted Very Important Novelist and other towering figures of literature. I write because it’s inherent to me, I think, but giving it a name, even belatedly, is a useful thing.
I write, sometimes for my stage act as a combination stand-up autobiographer and house band, sometimes entirely for myself, and sometimes for an imaginary newspaper that would print my occasional columns like a rambling and often profane aspirant to the space Armistead Maupin occupied back in the day, but I’ve been reading E.B. White as a sort of post-election therapy and I’m struck by how much of White’s take on the task of the essayist truly nails my own assortment of flaws and strengths:
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.
I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).
We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
—Blaise Pascal, Penseés
But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.
So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.
The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.
I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: schoool begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.
But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.
—Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes
I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head:
I am closer to 70 than I am to 40.
How did this happen?
But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t and done worse things to people I cared about, though I reassure myself that I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
It’s certainly the truth that, unless science makes a major breakthrough and quick, I’m in the last third of my life, or fourth, if things turn on me.
What’s it mean to age beautifully, to look to those ahead of me who somehow managed to slide this way in lush embrace of what life is, in its silky, spiky, wild wholeness, and not that mythical thing we all seem to chase for far too long—the imaginary, perfectly, finely-tuned life that we aspire to?
What’s it mean to look to the people who were our friends when we were just kids and they were where I am now and really seek what magic there was in that?
It’s where we live best, and live longest, slowing the swirl to the drain, when we can master what those people knew and I didn’t, except to be drawn to their energy.
I used to have an ongoing conversation, with an old crank I dated briefly before we friendzoned into a contentious state of casual simpatico, on the nature of human happiness. His take was a fairly Buddhist one with grumpy extremes, in that he regarded the impetus to stay positive and happy all the time as a simultaneously foolish and undignified.
“Humans were meant to suffer, Joseph,” he said, in his usual gruff tone. “We’re not meant to be stuck in dimwitted emotional California sunshine all our lives, grinning like idiots.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it works, though.” I said. “I’m happy most of the time.”
“You don’t look happy most of the time.”
“Well, I think my thermostat for what constitutes happy is set somewhere between contentment and quiet optimism. The giddy stuff is just the icing.”
The old crank rolled his eyes. This was a frequent rejoinder, and it, in its way, also made me happy.
The thing is, I am happy most of the time, with the aforementioned setting, but that doesn’t mean I trip lightly in a constant state of doe-eyed ecstasy. You can be happy and worry about the registration due date of your truck, the broken coil on the air conditioner, a complicated schedule for a get-together, a too-complicated calendar at work, and why the dishwasher isn’t cleaning things properly—those are the details, but when you work on a baseline of being generally satisfied with the nature of existence, it’s easy to drop in and out of frustrations, if only briefly, to notice the contemplative comfort within direct reach.
Just a fresh reminder that Tom Lehrer stands among the great artists of all time for, among other things, relinquishing copyright to his life’s work as he nears the end of his time here rather than having his clutching, wealth-hoarding estate or some atrocious corporate creeps hold his “intellectual property” behind a locked door to generate never-ending revenue as long as possible rather than to give his work to the culture that helped him create it. So McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan and all the other money-grubbing famemonsters sell their catalogs to monstrous LLCs to make the pile of obscene wealth they sleep on each night a few feet taller, while better humans give back. The guy’s a mensch, and his music is fun.
Visit his site to download his wonderful work, and share some the generosity:
These things come back like ghosts, faintly but present, and pull the few little threads of regret that have any purchase in my heart. It’s hard to explain that strange little stretch in the middle of the hateful eighties when people like me were dropping like flies while the everyday people in the rest of the world yawned and turned away in between sharing the hilarious jokes about fruits and vegetables and pointing fingers to say “well, didn’t you all bring this on yourselves” at best, and to share their churchy nonsense at worst. Thing is, being in the midst of it as a little half-formed person trying to figure out where he fit, when the people who could have explained any of it were dying by the thousands, was a shocking, traumatic thing that you couldn’t really see from the ground level, and overview would take literal decades.
Fran Lebowitz says that the real tragedy of AIDS wasn’t so much how many artists and creative people we lost, but that we lost a generation of a kind of audience that the world hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t seen since, with a canny understanding of semiotics, camp, and detail forged by a forbidden identity and a long-closed culture just starting to open to something more than just the way things always were.
I remember, once, in the early years of my inexplicable twenty-year career as a frequent operatic extra with the Washington Opera in DC, sitting next to a handsome older fellow quietly singing Sondheim.
“What are you singing?” I asked. I was fourteen or fifteen, I think, and at a makeup mirror next to the gentleman and just on the other side of the row of makeup tables where my father was combing a color into his mustache and waxing the curled end of each handle of the handlebar with a precision that would have pleased Poirot. The guy looked over, half in his foundation and half still patting on the matte tan for the period and class of his character.
The new and as yet unopened interstate was an broad, empty band of fresh pavement that reared up from around a gentle bend and disappeared around another, heading north and south. We followed the freshly-painted lane lines on the family Schwinns, with me buckled into in my child seat on the back of my mother’s bike and my sister marking an invisible wavy line in a continuous slalom through the dashed lines.
“He’s at it again, Cleve,” my mother said, and my father turned back, slowing down just enough to sidle up and reach over to make sure I was still properly strapped in. Their bikes were a matched pair of metallic blue Deluxe Varsity Tourist models with chromed fenders and bulbous headlamps powered by bottle-shaped generators that tipped into the tires a little electricity, and they gleamed in the sun, aromatic with the scent of metal polish and oil.
“I don’t think he can reach, hon,” he said.
“He’s sure trying, though,” she said, and they chuckled at the sight of me hanging off the back of my Mom’s bike, struggling to do myself an injury. I just looked up, furrowing my brow and glaring at my dad, then went back to that irresistible task of self-mutilation.
We breezed southward in close formation, crossing over where the abandoned track of the old Scaggsville Road was cut off by the new pavement, and went as far as the dam before heading for home with the setting sun warm on our backs. The road was raw and perfect, still almost untouched, an empty place that would soon be roaring with traffic.
In the golden light, I grunted and writhed, struggling furiously against the straps on my seat, trying as hard as I could to jam my feet into the spokes.
I’ve begun to properly embrace what I’ve learned is called a “biphasic” or “multiphasic” sleep pattern, casting away the busispeak “insomnia” and all its attendent judgement of a lack of productivity in sleep, for Pete’s sake, as one more of the wretched impositions of a clockwork life in the planet-wide currency mill, and it’s connecting me with parts of myself that I’d glimpsed from a distance for most of my life.
I’ve always loved the blue hours—those in-between spaces when the rest of the world is largely taking place just around the curve of the Earth. I wake up, sometimes at oddly familiar times, like when I stir, tap my watch on its little charging stand to see when it is that I’ve resurfaced, and return, in eye-friendly green text, “3:01” or “5:05” or “4:33,” and wonder if they’re part of that dreamland oracle meant to give some meaning, or if it’s just pareidolia connecting a pattern with random reflections within my memory palace, assigned a value in the way we used to think the patterns of the stars had something to say about our lives.
At 5:05, I stir, quietly as to avoid waking my partner or our dogs, slip out of the bed, gather up my daily devices in a pocket, and quietly tiptoe out, taking care to close the door with all the stickers and one gently snoring child, before I creakily descend the stairs to lurk deliciously in the great empty volume of the house.
Today, I light a candle, take a photo of myself perched in front of my little writing device, as if to document some grand artistic process instead of just letting it happen unseen in the little breakfast nook, sip at a strong cup of tea with heavy cream and no sugar, and start to write, once I’ve irritably solved the problem of what impossible string of letters, numbers, and special characters will get me into my website.
Outside, the sky is going through that gorgeous procession of blue to blue to blue, and the horizon is just taking on the threads of pink and gold that precede the sunrise on that side of the house. I’m a little unsettled, still from one of those dreams that’s not bad at all, but leaves one with a feeling that something’s not quite right, but there’s tea and a candle and music in my earphones and there is nothing to do but do. I was reminded recently how it important it is to embrace a radical incrementalism and write a little each day, or do a little work towards a goal, or otherwise just continue on a track with an endpoint yet to be revealed, so I set to work, in my own way and at my own pace.
