Indivi/dualism

In college type papers, the introductory part of an essay is where you define your terms so that when you go dropping dat literacy like turds in a bowl, people know exactly the smell of yo shit, which is a heavy-handed similie/metaphor that both describes the functionality of term definition (its purpose) and implies that collegiate writing is shit. 

Anyway anyway, defining terms is pretty important because as you learn partly through life and partly through a liberal arts education, everyone defines everything differently. What I say when I say “good” is an entirely different concept than what, say, a catholic priest says when they say “good.” This is because we come from completely different socio-cultural backgrounds and our experiences, which shape the opinions we have, are entirely different. I find this concept to be shockingly obvious, but that’s because my socio-cultural background encouraged “out-of-the-box” thinking and lead to a sort of reflection that many people do not have the opportunity to. It’s a dangerous and sort of insidious arrogance to assume that those around you are operating with a similar background as you, but it happens all the time anyway. We make it even worse by supporting things like “idiocracy” and political cartoons and the sorts of thinking that says that people who think differently than you are dumb, ignorant, intellectually inferior, incapable of making rational decision, crazy, deluded, brainwashed, possessed by demons, or whatever. When we do that, we’re saying “my way is the only way to think.”

Everyone does this. We do it especially to our friends and lovers, who we assume to be of similar mental capacity and opinions to us, and in a lot of ways, they are. People habitually make friends with other people they assume to have similar socio-cultural backgrounds to them, both consciously by group association and unconsciously simply by having similar interests or places they visit. Our world, whether this is our intent or not, becomes pretty homogenized because of it. Even our attempts at broadening our friend base have a tendency to fail, as those you may be attempting to make friends with are either not looking for friends outside of their socio-cultural standard or they’re basically similar to you in that they are also looking for friends outside of their socio-cultural background.

It’s a toughie, but nothing to worry overmuch about. The attitude that “broadening your horizons” is a good thing is itself a construct of a certain socio-cultural set of morals that define the ideal person as being open-minded and broad as possible. If that were true, however, there’d be no real differences between anyone to be broad and open-minded about. We would all exist as part of an amorphous mod-hippie blob of, like, peace and love, man. What I’m telling you here is that people are all different because of their set of experiences and that set is what makes them have the opinions they have. No one is “wrong,” we just have different perspectives on each situation. This is the core of individualism as I’m defining it here. The generation and culmination of unique perspectives through years of experience in varied socio-cultural backgrounds. To be individualized is to become or express that individual perspective.

Individualism is valuable. There are potential problems with individualism, such as entitled behavior (or in broader terms, solipsistic thought) and libertarianism, but on the whole it’s important to recognize how absurdly miraculous emergent behavior can be. Did any of you guys read Watchmen? It was pretty big a while back. There’s a line by hyper-rational god-dong Dr. Manhattan where he talks about recognizing the sheer miracularity that humans exist at all, that the swirling eddies (it’s a bunch of tough looking biker dudes spinning around in place) of time would lead to the creation of this human and not that human and indeed a human at all. It’s so commonplace today to be really blasé about it, or to be blasé about all things (the less you care, the cooler you are) so it’s hard to keep this kind of attitude on the forefront of your thoughts (Manhattan’s problem). But we absolutely should and must and have to.

Dualism is the idea that things exist in opposition to each other. Not as detailed an explanation as individualism, but then it’s not as detailed a concept. Dualism is another way to describe black and white thinking, binary thinking, dichotomous thinking, and etcetera. There’s a lot of words for it because we as people have identified it as a problem many times over. Every so often someone comes up with a new way to describe it for a renewed audience so it can be railed against once more. “There are two kinds of people in the world: those who employ binary thinking and those who do not.” The critical thought portion of that quote (I’m hoping you’re paying attention, but I won’t hold it against you if you’re not) is that railing against binary thinking as a clear and definite problem is itself a form of binary thinking. It is immoral to think in black and white terms. It is moral to think in shades of grey. There is no middle ground.

Moral statements are all like this. You’re either good or you’re not. There’s no “kinda good” or “sorta bad” only the idea that you’re going to hell or heaven, aligned with satan or god, fallen before the eyes of allah or pure and upright, a slut or chaste, democrat or republican, conservative or liberal, gay or straight, man or woman, us or them, human or animal, land or sea, day or night, dead or alive, god or man, so on ad infinitum. It’s a part of how we arrange the world around us, how we describe differences. There’s no escaping it. We can’t just decide that from now on everything is going to be plotted on a scatter graph. We’re not installing analog logic gates into our computers so they can measure exact charges and theoretically store an infinitely large number in one bit depending on how sensitive our detectors are. Binary thinking is just how we do. There are a number of potential reasons for this, but they’re neither here nor there (but instead inhabiting an invisible grey area that we can’t see or describe).

Daoism is on the surface dualist. It’s actually very heavily so, with an idea of yin and yang as forever in contention with each other. Later mysticism added the eight trigrams as describing the eight basic energies that comprise all situations and things on earth. They’re actually little sets of three bits each, capable of expressing a value from 0 to 7. It’s the very definition of binary thinking. But that’s mysticism and the attempt to turn Daoism to practical uses, such as Feng Shui and divination via the I Jing. The core idea of the Taijitu ([) is that we have all of this energy in us. We embody all of the principles that embody the entire universe. We’re capable of expressing ourselves in all of the myriad ways the universe can express itself. Even yin possesses some part of yang within it, and vice versa. That’s what the little dots inside each side of the Taijitu represent.

What do the two have to do with each other? Well, “individualism” and “dualism” are the same word plus or minus (but not neither) “indivi,” for one. But what I’m really here for is the interaction of the two ideas. Individuals experience life differently from one another by virtue of their social situations. Those situations are absolutely not binary in any capacity, except that you could possibly describe them using a large enough list of yes/no questions (this is how computers work, by the way) but the amount of data generated by describing their perspective through binary means is prohibitively large and possibly approaching infinity, especially as time elapses (this is why computer simulations will never be perfect, by the way).

(Sorry, that was a bit of an intellectual integrity break and beside the point. I just get anxious if there’s a significant problem with a broad statement I’m making like “life experiences are not binary” and I don’t point it out. In my head lives a little curmudgeonly forum shitposter who comments on all of my thoughts in the most negative/unkind interpretation possible. The dude’s a total douche, seriously.)

Anyway, experiences are not binary and thus individuals are not binary, yet we as people use dualism to describe the world around us. The world around us includes other individuals. It’s incredibly easy and common to reduce someone into “that kind of person” or a group to “those kinds of people.” We habitually make statements that we know are logically impossible, like “republicans hate women” or “religious people are all crazy brainwashers” and when we’re called out on it, we don’t abandon the statements entirely, we just dial it down a bit until we’ve used enough binary descriptors to feel comfortable with our statements. “Extremist misogynist male conservative republicans hate women” or “fundamentalist Christians of specifically evangelist sects are crazy brainwashers.”

Both of those statements describe people, but neither describes individuals. People aren’t a series of labels accrued over time and political change, people are people. We’re all different, even the people we don’t like and the people will never be able to make a connection with. Reducing people to a series of labels with our own individual definition for each of those labels is folly of the highest order. It’s going to happen anyway, but you must absolutely be aware that you’re doing it. You must be aware how you’re doing it. You must be aware why you’re doing it. You’re alive in a world filled with nigh-infinite (at least so many that it may as well be infinite) other perspectives. To throw all of that away just to live within yourself and your perspective is to waste what precious time you have on Earth.

I’m not asking you to broaden your horizons (though it’s not a bad thing) or make new friends or stop being racist (though that’s probably a good idea too), I’m asking you to pay attention to your surroundings. Pay attention to your thought processes. Ask questions. Ask all the questions. Ask why you’re asking questions. Spend some time in a quiet place with just you, yourself, maybe a notebook and a pen and just think. Think about why you did what you did yesterday. Think about why you chose to eat what you ate. Don’t let yourself be satisfied with an answer like “I was hungry. Pizza tastes good.” Why does pizza taste good? Why were you hungry? Were you hungrier than you are at other times? When was the last time you ate pizza? What brand of pizza do you like? Did marketing affect your choice of brand? What specific flavors of pizza do you enjoy? Is your taste in flavor a regional phenomenon? What flavor did your parents enjoy? Were other flavors available or did you learn to enjoy what you had? Why haven’t you tried a new flavor? Are you afraid of change in habit or simply eating for the comfort of eating something you know you’ll like?

There are so many ways to interpret and appreciate every event. Living life only planning ahead for the next dopamine hit is (honestly a perfectly valid living strategy) to consign yourself to being just another individual, a sort of non-player-character in your own life. Develop passion. Develop inquisitiveness. Learn to be obsessive and detached and emotional and spontaneous and strange and ruthless and empathetic all at once. We’re not yin or yang, we’re yin and yang.

Tourist Economy

So yeah, tourist economies. I tend to think people know this stuff, but I forget that it’s not something you think about unless you live in one. Tourist economies are incredibly seasonal. There’s a lot of money to be made (mostly by people who own tourist businesses) during the tourism season, which is usually defined as the spring and fall, when weather is temperate and it’s pleasant to walk outside. It’s no coincidence (well, kind of a coincidence for Mardi Gras) that all of the major festivals are scheduled for those times of year. What this means, though is that the portions of the year that are not in season, there’s no tourism and consequently no money. There are no jobs here during summer unless you’re a long-term employee. The town becomes completely dead as few tourists visit and the people in town with money leave to avoid the heat. Crime goes way up as result of broke-ass punks with nothing to do wandering around and forming gangs and shiz, basically shit all goes to hell. Also there’s hurricanes. 

That’s how it works. That’s also why no one moves here really. There’s no real sustainable economy. After the port became more or less obsolete (and no one wanted to spend the money to modernize that shit) Moon Landrieu and his mayoral contemporaries decided that the town needed to be converted into a tourist destination full-on. He built the moon walk, he designed the laws that keep cars off of royal by day and bourbon by night, he allowed for hotel corporations to build high-rises downtown. All of that shit started in the 80s. And it’s now all we’ve got. There are no tech jobs here. There’s some local banks, but they’re losing money to larger national banks due to their conservative and myopic lending practices. There are oil jobs but no one from here gets hired to work in the oil business, at least not in management. And there’s tourism. Hospitality is the official marketing friendly term for this industry, a term that encompasses travel, hostelry, restaurants and related accoutrements. The hospitality industry is the driving force of New Orleans. Nearly everyone who lives and works here performs in some capacity related to an industry devoted to getting people to visit here and hemorrhage money. That’s why we call it a tourist economy. We can’t survive unless people think there’s a good reason to visit, so we come up with lots of good reasons to visit. We’re not a swinging party town solely for our own benefit. We’re a swinging party town because it inspires people to visit and put cash in our g-strings.

So yeah, that’s where we’re at. And no one visits in summer because it’s too hot and all of our biggest festivals are planned for the spring+fall. So everyone is forced to work around that, to save money for summer from the spring or else find themselves shit outta luck cash-wise. It wouldn’t be so bad if the people working in the hospitality industry were paid anything approaching a living wage, but wealthy tourist business owners are well aware that most of their employees (bartenders and wait staff especially) will just end up working for tips as it is and so they’re paid server’s minimum, something like $2.66 an hour. During the summer where businesses can go for hours without a single tip and half the employees brought on for the spring Mardi Gras-French Quarter Fest-Jazz Fest are laid off just to cut costs (hospitality business owners, as you might be gathering, are generally huge dicks, and worse rarely local, usually collecting money from New Orleans tourism and funneling it to Biloxi or Milpitas or something), there’s a severe uptick in poverty around the city.

It’s a fucked situation, but one that’s been in the making for a few hundred years and perpetuated by the same cadre of wealthy white people that have been in control of this town essentially forever. They’re independently wealthy, they can just put their money into stocks and live off appreciated value (that’s “capital gains”). This power base runs local politics, local preservation societies, and local tourism boards. The system is invested in and self-perpetuating because people (like you) don’t put up a whole lot of fuss over it and blacks are culturally and socially disenfranchised despite being the majority in this town. So yeah, until some kind of major political upheaval happens, New Orleans is a tourist town and we have to deal with seasons.

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.

Faux-ironic title designed to maintain my masculinity

Loop de doop, looking at the blank page. I don’t know what to put here because I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s not totally true; I know what the symptoms are. I’ve been picking internet fights for a week straight. It’s a really obvious sign that I’m frustrated about something. The way I operate is that if I’m frustrated about something but can’t really do anything about it, I end up channeling it into something I’m passionate about and start petty arguments about things I normally would let slide. I assume everyone does this to some degree. The problem is that I don’t know what I’m really frustrated about. My life is going more or less okay. Things are fine on nearly every front. Every idea that I have that I might be frustrated about doesn’t pan out when I try to imagine whether I’d feel any better if those problems were solved. My best idea so far is that I feel like my life is going nowhere or not going somewhere fast enough or that I’m totally unsure of where to go. I think I’ve thought up (And then done little to no work on) half a dozen projects to work on, to theoretically jumpstart the drive and get me back on my feet. It’s so strange, because I’m pretty sure I had peace of mind at some point this year, but it’s gone again and I don’t know where I’ve put it.

Not to help matters, I’ve been getting a bunch more acne than usual, especially on my shoulders and forehead, which frustrates me both on a totally vain “insecure about my looks” level and also on a “for fucks sake everyone told me when I was a teenager that I was going to grow out of acne and not get it when I got older” level. Lying assholes. They should have just told me “well, you better kill yourself now because you’re gonna be ugly for the rest of your life.”

Of course when I look back at it, I’ve been feeling kind of like this since the last queerlesque. I’m restless and dissatisfied and totally inconsistent. I’m not even depressed. I know when I’m depressed, and this isn’t it. I’m angry, is what it is. I keep wanting to unfriend everyone I know and say vicious and mean-spirited things to the people I otherwise like and I want to yell and scream, which is basically another way of me saying I want someone to pay attention to me and give me hugs and reassure me and things like that. But I don’t even think that will help ultimately, otherwise I would be asking for hugs and reassurance. The problem will still be there even after the person leaves.

I hate feeling ashamed for feeling the way I do. Because that’s what I feel. I feel like even posting this is a cloying attempt to garner sympathy, which is ultimately pathetic for me to do. I hate feeling like I need to act this way or that way to satisfy whatever audience I have. I hate feeling weak for writing about my feelings. I hate that I still feel weak for writing my feelings after doing it for years. I hate that I imagine the reaction from people whose opinion I value and cherish will inevitably be tainted with “that’s nice, but boy isn’t Jake melodramatic and whiny?” I hate writing faux-ironic titles where I sort of hint at the idea that I know how silly my emotions are. I hate that anyone else ever feels like this and I hate the people who perpetuate it with non-advice like “man up, son.” For fucks sake, I’m a person on this goddamn planet and I will not be made to feel bad for being as emotionally fragile as I want.

Clearly the solution is drugs or something, but that terrifies me on another level where I admit the ultimate physicality of my being and the completely true concept that I have no independent will except what is chemically expressed by various regions of my brain. I went to a bar just to drink and feel sorry for myself the other week. I didn’t tell anyone. I don’t tell anyone anything important these days. No one tells me important things. I made a hand-turkey for the college of liberal arts office at UNO and dedicated it to someone and then I didn’t tell them about it. It’s still on the wall.