Look at banner, Michael!

Sometimes when I’m particularly bored or particularly procrastinating, I read about various proclamations of my personality. Partly it makes me feel good about myself (because pretty much all my personality profiles say that I’m smart and sexy and basically awesome, which I am, so that’s cool) and partly it helps me conceptualize myself from a perspective outside my own. I have a problem pretty often where I’m unable to see other perspectives, instead replacing the perspectives of those around me with my own. I expect a lot of people, at least in certain areas, mostly because it’s what I expect of myself. I’ll assume that certain people possess the same knowledge that I do, or the same frame of experience that informs that knowledge. I even often assume a similar vocabulary.

I’m sure I’ve written this before. It’s about the same sort of semi-hubris pridestuff that both fuels and unsettles me. Blah blah I can’t tell if I’m arrogant anymore and I’m not sure I feel bad about it. I highly doubt this is a relatable story. Here’s a more relatable story, I hope:

I’m sitting in a 89 degree house with a single box fan on me at 1:44 in the morning drinking store brand apple soda with a shot of vodka in it. I could probably sleep now but I’m choosing not to for reasons that aren’t wholly clear to me. I’m writing this very sentence instead. How meta. The A/C’s line is frozen, which according to the internet could mean a couple of things, from a lack of Freon to clogged filters. There should be someone out to fix it tomorrow, but in the meantime it’s heat city indoors. Not that I really mind. This isn’t that bad. I’ve got a box fan running now even.

Summer five-ish years ago was pretty hot and I was absolutely mortified of having to pay the electricity for air conditioning because I had little enough money as it was. I just spent a lot of time naked with a floor fan and took a ton of cold showers, since water was free. Same thing in the winter. Cold? Take a hot shower. It’s pretty amazing how well it works.

Three years of New Orleans later and the heat doesn’t really phase me. Sure it’s unpleasant, but I took a walk about 2 miles today just to grab lunch and get back and I didn’t really feel like I was dying.

Anyway before this gets into more rambling about heat, I’m going to get to the point of this essay, which is creativity. The creative process is a tortured sort of thing that works differently for every living being on this planet, including a complete lack of creativity by some. For me, the process is about compulsion. Maybe I’ll be awake one night late into the night staring at personality profiles and feel the urge to write no matter the heat. Maybe I’ll go two weeks without thinking at all about anything past whatever happens to me day to day. Maybe what happened with the unending beaddventure review will happen and I’ll start to write and then peter out and realize I have pretty much nothing to say. Who knows! Not me, that’s for damn sure. On the one hand maybe I should be jealous of people with a good work ethic. The kind of people who can diligently work day after day churning out word after word of a project and ultimately culminate in some kind of impressive finished work. I don’t know. I don’t really think they’ve got a handle on the process either, since so much of it is about forcing themselves to just get something onto the page.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it flows out of them like a broken dam. I wouldn’t know: that kind of consistency is wholly outside my experience. The point is, I write when I can, not when I should, and when I can write is pretty uncommon. Maybe after a drink. Maybe when I’m woozy and halfway heat stricken. Maybe only after 1 am or midnight or something. Maybe only when I’m in love. Maybe only when I’m not in love.

Here is probably a good place for a nugget of wisdom or a peal of truth or a bauble of rectitude. I don’t really have any for you tonight, and I’m not sure I ever did. The more I end up living, the less happy I am with anything anywhere and if I don’t know how to be happy, I don’t know how to make you happy either. Heck it’s not that bad. But it really is. Comprende?

Veering away from relatability again.

I am constantly saving the things I write to various places on and offline, and I’ve kept every school notebook I’ve written in for the last fiveish years. I’m doing this because I hope to one day be so famous and so successful that my myriad writings are considered valuable resources for studying my vast intellect and spurious character. Sometimes I think about convincing people I’m actually immortal and know everything. Sometimes I want to adopt the character of some obscure spirit or foreign god and march about demanding kow-tow (and later reciprocating, of course) and generally make a nuisance of myself.

I have trouble determining whether all of this is delusions of grandeur or just raw ambition manifesting in idle fantasies, but nevertheless on the offchance I do become very famous and endlessly debatable, the endless doodlings and scribbly notetakings and some small portion of the pining that has made it to print will be available for public consumption. At time of death too, unlike Twain’s 100 year clause. The prospect of actually earning that fame fills my mind with dread, though. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. That’s the third reason I read personality profiles: hoping to get some sense of how to make my life, how to make me work. 

Rebelde

I’ve been on the bus for just over two solid days now. I have slept for a total of perhaps 4 hours, owing largely to my personal inability to sleep upright. Much of today has been punctuated by accidental microsleeps, closing my eyes and following my mind down some irrational track.

I traveled out of New Orleans on a bus headed for Shreveport, wide eyed and bushy tailed. The bus was crowded, but quickly became less so as people left. In Shreveport, though, the connecting bus to Dallas was about 2 hours late as the earlier bus broke down and a new driver had to be found to make the trip. More delays in Dallas meant the trip through texas had much smaller breaks than indicated on the little itinerary slip. Consequently I was able to see much less of Texas than I wanted.

What I did see a lot of was poverty. Greyhound serves millions of travelers each year, but thanks to its low price, long travel time, and simple amenities, Greyhound also serves what is essentially the lowest classes of people, the homeless, the destitute, the working poor. The construction and execution of air travel has always been an upper/middle class endeavor, with servants and in-flight entertainment. Even the modern conceit of commuter air still holds the trappings of former affluence; food amenities drastically pared but still extant.

When airline travel is threatened, it becomes national headlines. When these symbols of decadence are twisted and used against still other symbols of decadence, it sparks war. Air travel is the bourgeoisie, air travel is a target. No one assaults a bus line, since there’d be nothing to prove. There’s no message in killing the oppressed when you yourself are oppressed. No one ever looked into my bag, despite large regulations thereof. No one checked my carryon. The driver is “protected” by a frame of plexiglass and a door and the same legal statues that protect your municipal busdriver.

Compare this to traveling across New Mexico, in the highway closest to the border. We were stopped en route at a specific border patrol checkpoint. Other cars and automobiles simply have an officer stand outside and glare into the car, hoping to determine citizenship with a piercing glow and gut instinct (and license tags). He then waves them on, those droids being not the ones he was looking for. For our bus, though, two armed men entered the bus and began down the row on either side asking each passenger one simple question: “Are You a U.S. Citizen,” only slowing to look at the one Canadian passenger’s details and to glare more thoroughly at the handful of Hispanic passengers. Then they left, our freedom obtained and secured, jobs protected, taxes mad sacrosanct. A large wooden sign advertising for people to join the border patrol and a handful of shiny less-than-three-year-old cars painted in the green and white of the force closed out the scene.

The most common rhetoric in anti-immigration literature and arguments is some kind of variant on “they’re going to take our jobs” which is a fear generally based on the fear of loss of resources. The sheer poverty of the border fuels this fear, since there is so little success to be had, giving up any must feel like a zero-sum game, where any loss on your part is at a clear gain to the other and vice versa. But even still, even as the dead empty scrubland of Texas cringes softly at the concept of an invading force (of people who originally owned and occupied the land, and who constitute the majority of its residents), the destitution persists and the unequal relationship between the maquiladoras of Chihuahua and their NAFTA enabled goods shipping across to El Paso and massive warehouses and onward to supply America with things to buy maintains a steady parasitism. No amount of border patrol agents are going to stop the influence of money and tantalizing hopes of a middle class American lifestyle.

One of the things I notice most about New Orleans as a whole is the utter lack of Hispanic people and the ensuing paucity of Spanish being spoken in public places. Churls and pedants will be quick to note that the city does have a Hispanic population, though largely relegated to suburbs or generally marginalized by their low proportion of the population. Louisiana in general is not much different, Dallas similarly so, but as our bus crossed Texas the concept of what was “American” and what was “Mexican” blurred and merged and created whorls and eddies of symbolism. Former Spanish Catholic missionaries became town halls and meeting sites, rancheros proudly advertised their allegiance to the U.S. of A. Midland, Texas has a sign celebrating the town as the hometown of President George W. Bush and Laura Bush; the town is comprised of at least half Hispanic people.

By the time we arrived in El Paso, the transformation was complete and I was the only white monolingual I saw for the entire hour I aimlessly wandered outside the station. The rhetoric at this point becomes useless. If there’s an invasion, they’ve won. If it’s a hostile buyout, they’ve made the best offer. They don’t just take American jobs, they’re making the jobs in that part of America. The city itself is very nice and clearly has had a good deal of effort put into transforming it into a major player, with tourist destinations and nice hotels and fairly clean streets, all of which serve as a jarring contrast to Juarez, just on the other side of a very persistent fence . Juarez is a scrabbled together city built out of adobe houses erected on top of and to the side of dirty, ungreened hills. Juarez is the city famous for pancho villa and famous for a perpetual and ongoing gang war that leads to weekly shoutouts on public streets. The police are either shockingly corrupt or obviously afraid and the entire town is built on a framework of hoping and praying that the next day isn’t the last.

It’s poor, and it’s the kind of poor that we as Americans like and need, since they’re poor enough to make our clothes for dirt cheap while we deport their families and maintain the system that keeps them in the maquiladoras. A day later we drive by the American Apparel factory with a big sign that declares it to be “la compania rebelde.”

Parents

My dad once told me that the reason he quit facebook after his very brief time using it was because he wasn’t a narcissist and didn’t think anyone should care to hear about whatever random thing pops into his head or whatever. This is sort of fitting with his generally reticent and private approach to life and is not something I really on any level understand. I know some people do eventually end up becoming great friends with their parents and I imagine some even learn to comprehend their reasoning, but that’s never really been an option as far as I’m concerned. My dad is a bit scary and unfathomable and I always feel guilty and odd and generally uncomfortable around him. Not really a Kafkaesque terror of him and his virility or superiority or anything like that, just the sort of unease around someone who is or was or has been something of a distant relative for most of your childhood while you were raised by someone who was vituperatively in opposition to him, popularly blaming him for behavioral mishaps or occasionally summarily labeling you as “just like your father” when you don’t think you did anything particularly wrong but anyway it creates a lot of odd tension there.

It’s not to say I don’t like my dad, in fact I like him very much. It’s not to say I don’t emulate him either, it’s just a weird uncomfortablility. Like a scar that didn’t really heal right so now you can’t quite flex your middle finger without some awkwardness or you can’t fully curl your toes or putting your knees on the ground just so causes you intense pain.

Personal writing gets compared to masturbation a lot, with the same connotations of the sort of thing you should do in the privacy of your bathroom or not at all and sharing it is kind of privately looked down on. It’s a sort of “keep it in the family/stop snitching” thing that serves as a social force actively preventing expression. The idea that no one wants to hear what you have to say or that you’re just repeating other people but worse or the idea that you’re whoring yourself out for attention and on and on. They’re all constructs of the mind; excuses and rationalizations and justifications for the sublimation of your self or your ego or your character or your internal monologues.

And they’re understandable. Nothing in the world is more understandable than insecurity. Literally every being who has ever lived on this planet grapples with some form of insecurity. Insecurity is just the difference between your mental idea of what you should be and who you are and no one lives up to their internal idea of who they are. And we can only blame ourselves, ultimately. Every single day we wake up and go literally or metaphorically outside and expose ourselves to image after image after icon after symbol of perfection and beauty and moral rectitude and every single day we go outside and get ourselves into vicious knife-fights with each other about how badly we’re failing to live up to standards and we invent news standards by which to appease ourselves about the other being that much worse so at least even if we’re failing to be perfect we’re more perfect than they are and it goes on and on until we’re all aged and infirm and judging each other in the gated communities right up until they find us dead in the kitchen trying to eat a 100 calorie yogurt cup or sitting in front of The Real Life mouth open midway through complaints about the imperfections of kids these days.

It’s a wonder anyone gets out of bed at all and not at all surprising when many of us don’t or would like not to except for our need to feed ourselves and cover our surroundings with distractions from our imperfection.

So I don’t know what to tell you. Insecurity is a force in your head and it’s a force that paralyzes you with fear, more or less, and stops you from achieving the full expression of your personhood. Yes it does bad things but it’s not like it’s for me to tell you that you should stop it or anything so trite as the idea that since it’s only in your head then it’s somehow any less real or physical or deadly. Conceptually this is just me describing the problem, attempting to find its true name so it can be bound or banished like any other demon or spirit.

Personal writing has benefits, chief among them being the sort of organizational power they can have for your thoughts. Through personal writing you can discuss a certain set of emotions you feel and read them back to yourself on paper and think about them in a new way and come up with new conclusions. With personal writing you can synthesize information that flows through your brain on your daily slog through underachievement world and turn it into something coherent and meaningful. With personal writing you can escape the flesh and bone and keratin shell you’re trapped in and at last interface with the world around you, if only in an instantaneous, photographic way.

It’s also a weak point. A vulnerability, a sort of handing keys to your car to whoever happens by except those keys are to your feelings, or if you’re at least a little more guarded it’s like exposing a tiny bit of yourself underneath the armor you wear out of doors as you walk through the hell-world that is social interaction, not enough to get seriously wounded but enough to hurt and enough to bleed and enough to keep you awake until you bind that wound or eventually forget about it or find yourself attentively deleting every attack and rationalizing away every attack and booting them all out of your restaurant because they hurt you and your world. It’s admitting to the world that beneath your armor and behind your façade and below your cool you are “only” human and “only” human in a way that denies or disrupts or destroys your pretension otherwise. You are “only” imperfect, despite all the attempts to say and prove otherwise and everyone is there to steal your perfection from you, cutting you down and making you that other because it’s the way to become more perfect.

I understand, I know there are things about yourself don’t say. You don’t say them because you don’t want to deal with their implications or their complications or their consequences. I am bisexual and I don’t say it to gay men because it turns into a conversation about inevitability and I don’t say it to straight people because it becomes an inevitability and I don’t say it to the progressive enlightened because it becomes a conversation about the injustice rendered by what they assume to be bisexuality, the transphobia that they insist it implies, so it becomes another conversation about inevitability, that ultimately I must not be bi but homo/hetero/pan. So I say nothing and let what assumptions will pass wash over me. Better this than to listen to an endless litany of nonsense and overt erasure. Dan Savage would be mad, but then Dan Savage thinks I don’t exist anyway, since Dan Savage has invaded my brain and determined for me who I am or am not attracted to.

But that’s not really much of a thing. Depression is another one of those things. You don’t tell friends or family members about your suicidal ideation, really, because it’s not likely a ton of people are really going to understand it and their attempts to do so are usually inadequate at best and it’s not like they can actually do anything other than suggest debilitating drug regimens and a cavalcade of well-meaning but ultimately terrible professionals that act out a devised script based on a handful of academic theories loosely derived from a crackpot with way too much influence. People who do talk about depression are inordinately brave, since there’s always always always someone in the crowd who is gonna yell “why don’t you just get over it, loser?” or you grow up with a parent who thinks you should just willpower your way out of all the problems she described you as having and all the problems you actually had and then later a pre-jilted lover tells you “wow it’s a wonder you don’t hate all women” because all of literary criticism theory and much of semiotics is based on that same crackpot and his weird obsession with children’s relationships to their parents.

Captain’s log stardate June 3, 2013

 I’m sitting on my bed in an empty 15’ by 20’ rectangle that contains a whole buttload of stuff I neither need nor particularly want. Also food and musical instruments and cloth genital coverings. The power is out. I don’t know why it’s out this time, but I assume it has to do with the complete disregard for financial stability the roommate property manager drag/welfare queen drug dealer has. 24/7 he runs the A/c in the front room. 80* in the winter, 68* in the summer. It’s obscene. I paid a bill for him one, in that I motivated my self to the bill paying place with money he gave me. $382 for a month’s electricity. I assume this is why the power is out, but this is new Orleans still and basically power is optional.

Stuck in a Rut

Y’know now that I’m older and I’ve consumed a lot more (and debatably weirder) porn the phrase “stuck in a rut” seems kind of weird to me. On the surface level it’s pretty easy to explain since modern English is practically built on a series of innuendos (thanks in no small part to the reification of sex and sexuality) and shortenings that’ve lost any relation to their original meaning. On a semantic level you’re still equating a repetitive pattern of behaviors with an animalistic mating scheme. I have a love/hate relationship with statements that society is built around sex or the procurement thereof. It’s a universal formed out of limited observations and an uncharitable interpretation of events so I am almost politically opposed to the idea. Still in this society and in this context the interpretation works fairly well in a broader sense. Thing is, it’s still about as provable as a connection between the metric fuckton of violence and misogyny we consume and the violence and misogyny that’s perpetrated in real life. That’s only one interpretation of rut, even, which also has a secondary (or really in polite society primary) meaning of a sort of track created by wagons and other wheeled things in the mud and dirt back when Europe used to be covered in mud and dirt. Totally innocent meaning, your wheel is just stuck on one path. Bam, the word has been rendered profane. Brofist.

But I’m getting away from the point. Being stuck in a rut is also a loaded statement, filled with interesting assumptions about ruts or being stuck or the person it’s applied to. Being stuck implies that leaving the rut is impossible, or at least very hard or maybe not hard at all but anyway there’s some resistance to it. The equation here means that a pattern of behavior cannot change without some resistance. Is it true? Maybe, but it’s still an assumption. Rut, if we take the more innocent and polite meaning, is a track laid out by previous wheeled vehicles. There’s an assumption here that if a rut was created it was created by other people who also followed the same rut. “Rut” itself is a bastardization of “route,” which means more or less the same thing. So if we take these two meanings when we say we’re stuck in a rut we have a phrase that means “(the object) is following a previously formed path and there is some sort of resistance to (the object) leaving it.”

Ironically this describes almost every living human. The path is our culture; the resistance is also our culture. We’re rarely doing anything that no one else has done, and most of us do those things up until the day we die.

What about the other meaning, though? A rut only lasts for a certain period of time, specifically the period where births occurring from pregnancies during the rut would survive the weather. There’s a lot of activity and competition over mates and all of those things that white male internet nerds would gladly tell you is basal human nature, but then it ends and those behaviors stop. So being stuck in a rut would mean that you’re in a period of excessive activity esp. regarding mates and there’s some resistance for that rut to end. It’s a bit different than being stuck in a path and a lot closer to simple mania.

Just some things to think about.

Fuck you Isaac/entergy/landrieu/who//whatever.

Welcome to day 3 of Isaac aftermath. 80% of the city is still without power, I’m short on rent, my living room’s ceiling fell in, assorted other minor inconveniences. Civilization broke down pretty fast. And by pretty fast I mean not at all, people here are just doing what they do, yanno.

It’s pretty ridiculous, though. The power company out here, Entergy (New Orleans’ only Fortune 500 company), has had a response to outages best described as “lackadaisical.” Most recent update for today, August 31, is that power will be restored with emphasis on areas where lines are lightly damaged moving towards the more heavily damaged folks, with an estimated date of having 90% of outages fixed by September 6. That’s next Thursday. About a week. Thankfully most of Chalmette and New Orleans East and the French Quarter and the CBD all have power, so we’re not all totally fucked or whatever. I am in fact writing this from the inside of Flanagans, which has power and internet and plugs and has thus been pretty much packed since the storm eased up.

All told, it’s really not a huge dealio. People here are going to be more or less okay. It’s creepy as all hell driving around in the darker neighborhoods that don’t even have sporadic lights, but life continues more or less unabated. Buncha queers are in town ready to party for Decadence, most everything in the quarter is operating as more or less normal, though with less supplies. It looks like the play is getting cut short, since the whole area by the venue has been without power since the storm. The director is doing the whole “show must go on bit and  holding out hope they’ll be able to get lights on today before 8 or whenever we’d be running. If it does work out, I might end up running up and acting.

Because writing is a time-lapse process and I took a break to check the internet and drink a reasonable amount of alcohol, I know now there will not be a show. Thank the lord, I can cut my hair now. One theme that runs through this storm is meeting people I haven’t seen in a while cause they’re hanging out outside or something. I’m really very proud of my social circle. I don’t associate with many people that fled the city. I made friends with sterner stuff. And everyone’s been pretty good about doing the whole “coming together” stuff, though enough people are also doing a fair bit of the “coming apart” stuff also. I went out with Jo cab driving last night, which was an interesting experience in dealing with the lack of streetlights and dispatch being on generator. The passengers were appropriate to situation, one being an on call nurse headed up to ochsner, another a woman headed home from Ochsner, a third a drunk guy trying to get home from the burbs to uptown.

Like I said, I’ve run into a small crowd of people I know here so far. The people I’ve played magic with, school friends, some people I know from steampunk stuff or Noiseco. The haunted tours that run usually are running tonight, of course. Them being closed for almost a week is a good reason to start that stuff back up again, gotta make some kind of money. It’s been great so far.

Yeah, it’s pretty crazy that a storm can come along and basically throw everyone out of whack for about a week or so. And we just live with it. It’s no big. It’s harder for the impoverished of course (it always is) but this has still yet to be outside of the normal experience of a New Orleanian. I cannot tell you how much I love this place.

Recursion

Hey, listen to this as you read, yeah? Multimedia chops, I'm the big bad boss man from a dot com start up, revamping internet 0.5 to 1.0 :



My favorite novel is Stephen King’s Insomnia. Well, no, that’s not really true, but only untrue insofar as I don’t have a hierarchical rating system for things I enjoy. I’d find it incredibly difficult to try to stack Insomnia next to Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a pointless distinction anyway. The only purpose of a hierarchy is to be useful in rationing out a limited resource. My enjoyment of things is not a limited resource, especially my enjoyment of things I no longer need to put time into. A more realistic measure might be “which of the two are you more likely to read in the future?” though that’s not a particularly useful definition either, because I own both and have plans to read neither and anyway there’s new things to try all the time. I digress.


I liked Insomnia because I felt I could really thoroughly relate to the main characters in their creeping insomnia. I think King did a fantastic job of portraying the feeling of lacking sleep, the sort of hazy “I am going crazy” cloud that descends over the entirety of reality, distorting some noises, making lights brighter or dimmer, sapping your attention. It’s like trying to drag yourself through a awkwardly acoustically designed stage through clouds of weed smoke while a rave is going on. It’s awkwardly designed because every so often there’s a multisided and mirrored convex pillar distorting the noise and light so if you stand just so, you’ll be blinded and deafened or maybe not. Being sleep-deprived is like reading that paragraph over and over.


I’ve been insomniatic since I was old enough to have a notion of set bedtimes. No amount of guilt-tripping, diet changes, lifestyle changes, no place I’ve lived, essentially nothing I’ve done has ever produced any more than a temporary shift in a stereotypical sleep pattern. I am a fraud, so to speak. I don’t have any problems sleeping. I can sleep all day if I so feel. This is why I garner no sympathy, reap naught but shame for how I sleep. Perhaps here I could rail against the establishment, justify my sleep schedule and feel superior in the knowledge that the typical hours that the rest of society runs on is a socially constructed system of moralistic and disconvenient bullshit. I don’t really feel like it. I just wish I were asleep right now because I have to get up in four and a half hours and listen to a health lecture (or watch a ridic movie) covering genetic ideas I already know. I won’t get to go home until 7:15, and I won’t sleep then even, as my roommate will be home and making noise and all of that. Eventually I’ll pass out and everything will be okay supposedly because it will be the weekend or something. I dunno.

And listen to this why not:




I’m not really sure why I’m writing this either, I have other things to write. I have stuff to do, I am busy, perpetually busy. Why? Because I keep putting it off. I keep putting everything off because I don’t want to deal with it. I want to deal with other parts of my life. I need to go resolve some interpersonal shit with a ton of fucking people, but I can’t do that either. Instead I have to stare at a screen and convince myself to be particularly passionate about tourists and tourism when the class has reached that magic moment of recursion where the class isn’t really introducing anything new anymore and instead is reinforcing concepts or identifying things taken for granted. I worry all the time that I’m going to be an academic failure because I literally can’t reconcile the bullshit with my conscience. I can’t imagine doing anything if I don’t feel really good about it. I’m not really principled, I’m fickle and petty and what makes up my “conscience” changes from week to week, if not day to day, but if nothing else I’m a god damned stubborn asshole about some things and I’m well aware that that is what will inevitably hold me back.


I’m also way too damn smart. Inevitably everything I think ends up coming under self-scrutiny. I’m not even really an author anymore, as I sit here and reinterpret what I’m writing as I write it. I consider “well, you just wrote that to reinterpret your sloth as some kind of ennobling behavior, when in reality it’s just a moral failing that you’re refusing to deal with, in part by writing about it in ways to ennoble it and justify it to yourself” or I consider “well, it’s still true on some level right?” until I don’t really know how I should feel about it anymore and whenever I do feel something I feel guilty about feeling that something because I’m not sure if it’s because I am making a calculated effort to present it or if I’m sincere and if I am sincere what does it mean about a person who is that way and how can it be criticized and should I change it so I’m less criticizable? I’m a walking, breathing argument.


I’m not sure I’d have it any other way, either. I both admire and totally disrespect people who have any sort of surety in themselves. Confident sorts of people, confident of opinion or attitude or whatever, are totally uncritical of their activities. How could they be? Criticism undermines confidence. But being uncritical means that you’re not thinking, that you’re just passively living in the world without question even if it’s your own world that you’re not questioning. You may as literally well be an animal of lesser cognition who just so happened to be enculturated and look like the rest of humanity. That’s why no real person is without some weakness or insecurity or disconfidence in them at some juncture (except, I dunno, the autistic and Asperger-ed [criticizing my own statement and adding qualifiers. Qualifiers I’m not even all that comfortable with, as I’m sure it’ll draw ire from somebody somewhere {most likely the autistic or Asperger-ed}]) that makes them relatable and related to the rest of the human race.


Criticism itself too is criticizable. You can problematize anything, as long as you have the moralistic cojones to beat off the hordes of people interested in their view of the world. Academia properly expressed is a lot of bullshit authors bullshitting together about their bullshit, and even my opinion under their bullshit rules has merit. The smartest academes are well aware that the system they’re participating in is on many levels complete crap, but they do it anyway because it’s one of the few socially sanctioned places for people who like to do nothing but talk to hang around and talk. It’s the only place in the world where an egalitarian merit-based system will teach you about the pitfalls of egalitarian merit-based systems and then grant you merit based on how well you absorbed the lesson. It’s missing the forest for the trees, or whatever hackneyed phrase works here. I’m still in college, god dammit, not because I really want to be or because I fundamentally support the system, but because it pays my bills and fulfills my fetish for listening to people passionately talk about things they’ve studied for years. If I could find a decent job where all I had to do was listen to people’s stories about what they’ve learned and what they’ve read and where they’ve been and who they’ve met, I would take it in a heartbeat. For fuck’s sake, if I could get a decent job building houses or fixing bikes or some mindless-yet-unionized factory work, I’d do that. But jobs are hard to find and colleges are pretty much right there and that’s where we’re at.


If you want to know a secret, I added that last bit because I had a momentary pang of guilt/realization that I’m still writing in a super-rich country as a member of a fairly privileged segment of society. As the phrase goes “my privilege is showing” (a hilariously awful method of criticism, as my privilege is not and never has been “mine,” even as the phrase indicates that I have some sort of control over it [problematizing the concept of “privilege” {I’m sure I can find at least a dozen papers to cite}]) and I need to acknowledge it, lest some random stranger come along and point out how good I have it and what an awful whiny person I am for complaining. Except that person already came along and he lives inside my head and follows me wherever I go and I can’t sleep because

"I'm just going to type until the feelings stop."

No one is immune from self-delusion, it’s a product of life as fragile constructs influenced as much by instinctual emotions as by rationality. We all lie to ourselves, sometimes in big ways, sometimes in little ways. Sometimes the lies are necessary, self-preserving, benign. Other times the lies we tell are harmful to ourselves and those around us. But we all have them, each and every one of us.

I lied to myself for a while. I told myself that what I wanted would inevitably come to pass. I seized on every scrap of information that affirmed my lie and minimized any data that denied it. Even now, after confronting the truth, I still hold out hope in my head that my reassessment was wrong, that I haven’t interpreted the data correctly. It’s the hardest thing in the world, and one of the most painful to break through, to accept as fact something your very subconscious doesn’t want to believe.

Popular morality believes that any sort of lie is anathema to existence. (Good) religion believes that self-knowledge is the path to enlightenment. The idea of the fully self-aware as the pinnacle of existence is pervasive throughout region and worlds. This is a convenient belief: where the goal is clear and obvious and the objective world deemed the most important. But it loses sight of the function of self-deception. We lose sight of its purpose.

People don’t lie to themselves forever as a sinister method of shading the divine from their eyes, they do it to protect themselves from what emotions they cannot practically deal with. In a world that is constantly moving, no matter the era, no one has the time to spend two or three weeks resolving some kind of emotional problem for themselves. We can’t all spend three days on the couch crying and refusing to move every time we’re hurt. We don’t belong to monastic orders, practicing peace and dispassion. We’re humans with hopes and fears and dreams and beliefs. Shit can and will affect us, and we don’t have the time to deal with it.

It sounds bad, to be sure. Maybe a better world would be one where we could throw all obligation to the wind, sit on a couch, and stuff ourselves with ice cream and watch sad movies. Maybe we should be able to call into work and take the next month off, going on a wild drug binge, trying to avoid the incipient emotion through altered mental states. The best possible world, of course, would be a homogenous world, where no one has any hopes or dreams or indeed any passion at all. Events would pass before us as wind through reeds, as snow falling on a quiet night. Pain, though, is but one side of existence, and without pain we would not know pleasure.

But again, we have no time for pain. Our world demands that we pay attention to our surroundings, that we keep an eye out for opportunity, that we remain steady and constant in our activities, if not our mental state. This is what self-deception is ultimately for: to create a semblance of stability, to maintain the forward march of progress for our species. We’ve even codified a sort of strained sympathy for people who are “unable to move on” or “incapable of letting go,” preferring the mercurial to the constant, at least in emotional concerns.
So rather than solving a self-deception, ultimately I’ll be replacing one for another. The new lie is that I don’t feel bad. That I don’t feel hurt or depressed or angry or frustrated or just plain upset. The hope is that it will eventually even become true.

Jake's Second Mardi Gras

I forgot what I wrote for the last Mardi Gras thing I wrote. I don’t remember much of that time. It was a tough period in Jake-ville, as my girlfriend dumped me while in the midst of a severe depressive episode (indeed, because of that severe depressive episode. “I can’t handle this” she said, ironically walking out after I had put up with her anxiety attacks and nervous breakdowns. Whoops, too bitter.) which then dragged into a several month’s long spiral of drama and bullshit as we had our apartment broken into by a neighbor and subsequently became homeless when we moved out (because said neighbor was being covered by other neighbors) thanks to Jazzfest and then endured a short period of “I think we would be great roommates” nonsense before I kicked her out. I willfully block out the memories from that period, because that is my unhealthy coping method: forgetting that bad things ever happened.

All I do remember from that note was complaining about people drinking and how awful the world was. I think the entirety of my mainstream Mardi Gras experience was Druids, Muses, and Chewbacchus. I hated it because it was everything I don’t like in a group of people: rich white drunken tourists standing around in front of floats of rich white people throwing useless trash on the ground and generally being loutish. The KKK horse riders sealed the bullshit envelope for me as a strong reminder that the world is a fucked up place and it’s everyone around me’s fault. That much didn’t really change this year. I was high as fuck on Mardi Gras evening and I sat at a bar and watched the Rex Ball, some kind of conglomerate of inbred southern fucks milling about at 9:30 at night playing nobility charades. It’s spooky as hell. People still do this! In this day and supposedly enlightened age! I really am pretty naïve. I tend towards the belief that people are basically smart and when they buy a party line it’s just a matter of good persuasive politics or some kind of psychological tribalism that necessitates group identification regardless of veracity in ideals. (or, as is usually the case on the internet, a knee-jerk reactionary contrarianism constructed from the conceptualization of “cool” or “edgy” as being against the expected response toward a situation. See: 4chan) But when I’m confronted with a very clear set of ritualized oppressive politics that is so thoroughly embraced and maintained so as to seem “normal” and be thoroughly accepted, I’m usually dismayed and upset by the manifest reality that these people seriously do not understand the source or inevitable result of their actions.



Carnival is okay! Nothing is inherently bad about parading. Second lines are an awesome community-binding force and a seriously uplifting representation of alternative constructions of life-patterns (I really am just fucking around now. Blame college) accessible in the otherwise monocultural landscape of America. There’s a reason I love living here. I love parades, I love the effort people here put into costuming and creativity, I love the laid-back lifestyle of the artist community. What pisses me off is not the season itself or the people or even really the parades, what bothers me is the clear and obvious demonstrations of subjugation that take place year in and year out.

New Orleans is very much a Caribbean bumfuck third-world island nation, where everyone with a job works to please the rich white foreigners that come along and fuel the economy in its entirety. We’re whores, and in a culture that doesn’t give three shits about its whores, we’re treated as expendable pleasures, temporary forays into the world of sin to be condemned vociferously after we’ve been used. Everyone who lives anywhere else will gladly talk about the wild parties and crazy adventures off the one hand while warning us about the collapsed housing market and hurricanes and the scary n*****s off the other. Kanye wasn’t wrong, that’s not why he was shut up. Kanye made people uncomfortable with the god damn truth. We’re in a city packed with black people. Up to the gills. 60 odd percent. It’s terrifying to the rest of whitebread America, who only see their monocultural media views of the scary n*****s yellin’ ‘bout murderin’ an’ rapin’ an’ whatever.

I’m never going to forget how god damned ashamed I was to sit there at the fucking Marriott in a room full of white male oil execs and chemical engineers waiting on a keynote over a nice (free) lunch and having a black waiter waltz over to serve the old white men and I. It’s terrifying to me that there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t make any of them feel bad about it; it’s all they’ve known. They have years upon decades of ingrained justification for their attitudes and behaviors. All I can do is eat a nice lunch and file away my impotent rage for some other day (probably around Mardi Gras). Since my unhealthy coping mechanism is to forget that there’s a problem when I can’t solve it, I don’t like being reminded of that problem. Watching the KKK march on by on horseback, flanked by floats of moneyed white people, surrounded by white tourists with nothing but abject terror at the prospect of confronting class or race disparities, having a sea of white men in tuxedos leading around their nubile daughters in a display of eligibility to ensure breeding stays amongst the nobles televised during the celebrations, none of it makes me feel any better about the chances of forming a more tolerant and loving society.

That’s why I’m depressed during Mardi Gras. That’s why I didn’t go to any parades except the ones I was actually in. That’s why I was high as fuck on Mardi Gras and pretty thoroughly wasted on the days proximate. Cause my other coping method is drugs.

Status Update

Good morning. I was asked when I’d be writing, and I told myself I would write and I tried to write back in a hotel in Camarillo, but as it turns out, it wasn’t meant to be. Instead I’m sitting here in Oakland, on 108th street (2380) in a guest room of the house my dad and his fiancé bought. In the room with me, besides my things, is a shelf full of self-help books and a piece of contemporary artwork by said fiancé, which features some kind of word bubble theme on dripping, what I’d guess are watercolors or very watered down oils. The painting sort of clashes with the French design of the siding for this room and the bay window immediately behind me. I woke up late today, as I spent all of yesterday in a car, variably traveling past the endless plains of Californian highlands or driving along a vantage of the deep blue Pacific Ocean. Eventually I will get up and do laundry and then perhaps visit my aunt and grandmother. More likely just google the nearest taco bell and eat there.

As I’ve mentioned on my facebook a few times, I’m a little bit grouchy being here. I’m glad to get a chance to get away and see something somewhat new from new Orleans, but I feel less like I am or have done this under my own power and more like I’ve just ended up in high school all over again.

Tangent: some three people have told me I don’t know anything because I’m only 3 years out of high school or something. Honestly, they’re right, but not because I’m, just because that is the way of it. They don’t know anything either, they’re just blustering for some kind of way to shame me for having the audacity to be younger than them and disagree with them. Age = authority, and often the only authority people can justify any more. Personally I’m terrified of the elderly. They’ve had so many more years to have all their prejudices and irrational thinking etched in. Like petrified trees, they’re the least likely to ever accept or understand change. That is why I mentioned several times when writing about occupy that change will only happen when the next generation of people with somewhat more progressive ideas replaces the current.

I’ve mentioned living in New Orleans to several people here, and the responses were about to be expected, from complete ignorance to frequent mentions of Mardi Gras and how I must party all the time. I am not even remotely surprised, having moved from California to Maryland and heard people ask me whether or not I surf and moving from Maryland to California, which some people seemed to think was actually another school called “Marilyn.” It seems ironic that the most “well-traveled” of people that I meet also seem to have the most skewed concepts of the places they’ve been. Tourists, man. I don’t think I’ve ever been a place just specifically to see it or wander around (fact check: did this for spring break 2010. Went to San Francisco and hiked all of market street and avoided everyone. Not sure if it counts as tourism as I was born there and have lived fairly near there for a substantial portion of my life). I go to do certain things or see certain people. My trips are business trips with a side of scenery.

I actually brought out a collection of t-shirts that are all relevant to New Orleans, and I’ve worn them every day so far and no one has asked me what Noisician Coalition is or who Mitch Landrieu is and why vote him mayor or what the Zephyrs are or what the big five made of hammers and stuff represents (Habitat). It’s a little frustrating, only in the recognition that I could have worn any damn thing and it would’ve had the same response. I think maybe I’m just one of the really few people who would ask about something like that. I remember when a professor brought in a bag from the American Gilder’s society and I was totally fascinated that such a society existed, but he got kind of embarrassed and silly about it. Apparently his wife belongs to it, and yes it’s exactly what it sounds like. He’s kind of a poor representative, though, as he gets embarrassed and silly about a lot of things. It’s just an attitude change.

Oh man, and coming back of age is weird too. I keep being offered alcohol for one reason or another and have been sitting here limiting my intake because I seriously do not want to be inebriated around family. Maybe it’s the holidays or something, but it feels like every day so far I’ve been offered a drink. Maybe they’re trying to outdo Nawlins. I don’t even know. But damn, I would rather be shitfaced around a bunch of complete strangers (which I have) than tipsy around people I’m related to, one way or another. I’m trying to get the people I know to throw some kind of party so I can get comfortably drunk around people I am comfortable with being drunk around (and so I can make Dark and Stormies, which is apparently my new obsession. Yay!) but so far it’s not taking.

I wish I were at home. I know so few people I really want to spend any time with here, and what few I do are still stuck in their prisons, at home with their parents or a stone’s throw from them at some college. I planned this trip out for two weeks partly out of interest in having a complete visit with all of family and all the people I left behind and partly because I really thought I was restless and needed to get out of nola for a time. Maybe I am still restless, but coming here wasn’t the place. I helped my aunt and grandma get skype set up on their computer and the first thing they did was call up my aunt and uncle in Montana and they of course got the kids up and everyone was there in front of the screen and happy to see each other and all and I couldn’t help but thinking “damn, I really should have gone up there.” I like my family up there, and I like snow, and I like hiking alone.

Fortunately, Christmas is over, and besides the two lunches and a dinner that are now planned for me to attend, the rest of my trip is open. I’ll probably just wander around the city and get lost and have fun by myself. Then I’ll come back to New Orleans and throw a party and go to parties and maybe feel like myself again.

p.s.I do think it's a bit sad that I am finding out that I didn't really want what I thought I wanted, but I'm not going to feel bad about it because everyone else does it too. So there.