What am I going to do if he wins again? I asked myself this question earlier in the summer after the first debate. I didn’t watch it (too anxious), but I immediately felt the ambient political crisis, radiating in waves through my feeds. I am not a politically sophisticated person, but it seemed like B had “confirmed the political narrative” that had developed around him: that he was too old, too mentally furry, to effectuate the gargantuan task at hand. T has always maintained his myth of vigor via the Foghorn Leghorn syndrome: loud sound as a stand in for coherence, or accountability, or wisdom. Bluster is all. I don’t know if the relatively quick trade out for H was the correct choice or not. I do think at that point in the election calendar, there was little else the D party could have done. And while I do think that running another woman ineluctably triggers the vast reservoir of misogyny in U.S. society, shared, I’m sad to say, by all genders, the instant contrast between the rage-faced, verbally incontinent king, on the one side, and the Type A, corner-office queen on the other, is stark.
I agree that there are meaningful policy distinctions to make along the political spectrum, but none of this ever altered my opposition to T, who conveniently encapsulates every human impulse I abhor and who proposes policies I consider wrong, both economically (tariffs) and morally (mass deportations). There’s more to it, but I’ll spare you.
How would I go about persuading my peers to not vote for T? I don’t know. Some people argue that no one can actually be persuaded, but I feel like that’s wrong. People can change their minds. It just doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t happen smoothly. It is usually not the direct result of a well-informed, rational conversation or argument. But people can make a turn. After T won the first time, I resolved that I would never again interact with a T-voting person. But then I quickly realized how lonely I would be, that I lived in the Land of Progress, and that my little bubble of like-minded, aspiring professionals was tiny and not nearly as homogenous as I might hope. And further, that my fleeting hope for always agreeable peers was slightly antidemocratic. What is democracy if not the hell of other people? Politicians spend all this time trying to get people to vote, and then they vote incorrectly and for all the wrong reasons.1 I’m not the best political thinker, but I’m not the worst either.2 I wish there were something I could say that would change people’s minds, but we are literally watching different channels, reading different books, thumbing through different memes. We almost speak a different language.
A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Chicago attending a lesbian rally for H. I was neither a host nor a contributor. I was just tagging along with a friend, but I was happy to be there, so far from my usual climate. Those lesbians were fired up, and I found this exciting. In my day to day life I am as apolitical as possible, both as a professional prophylactic and as an expression of personal sensibility, and also, yes, as a kind of defense mechanism. I think the phrase is “conflict-avoidant.” Even so, I am not immune to eloquent political rage, which is what the speakers exhibited. A couple of people there asked me what it was like living where I lived, and I said that it was mostly fine but that it occasionally grew awkward, usually when a peer decided to do an in-person re-post of some right-wing meme, a hand-off in the relay race of ideas. For a while this took the form of Hunter Biden fentanyl jokes having to do with contaminated money? (I don’t know. I am tempted to google it but I don’t care.) It takes the form of “well they say that there’s never been a hurricane that started in the Gulf.” It takes the form of the guy showing me “this year’s scariest Halloween costume” and the picture being a Biden mask. These people are eating from an entirely different salad bar. A more combative person might begin arguing. I instead treat these moments as I would a tic from a person who is obviously, helplessly, psychologically compromised, and start politely scanning for the exits.3 Perhaps I am part of the problem with my reluctance for immediate intellectual confrontation. I am writing this on my little blog, after all.
I do know that I am tired of the discourse, if we can even call it that. Discourse implies some kind of organization of the rhetoric, where instead it’s just a daily primordial stew of new ingredients reacting to one another in a fractal manner. I am tired of the T show, and the people who continue to watch the T show seem self-compromised in some way, as if in a cult or in the late stages of an addiction, an inner struggle tied up inside their particular circumstances, and not really having anything to do with me. How do I help them help themselves? Etc.
Perhaps I am just a smug, aspirational, paraprofessional, yuppie reboot who is both too polite for aggressive lefty rhetoric and too Episcopalian for the pro-wrestling, redneck stench of the modern right. That might be true, but also I think both sides are still wrong in specific ways, aside from the fact that they offend my tastes. I’ve never listened to the Joe Rogan Experience for a couple of reasons. One, podcasts are like audiobooks. If I’m going to let someone whisper in my ear, I better like their voice. Two, Joe Rogan was the host of Fear Factor, a show that was on in the evenings when I worked at the NBC affiliate in Birmingham, and I found it revolting. That show, if you recall, was about people performing weird stunts in order to get money, which turns out to be a good description of contemporary American society, or at least a portion of it, the online portion of it — doing weird, revolting stunts for clout, online attention, with the hopes of spinning that straw into gold. The Hawk Tuah girl is instructive here: she made an ostensibly offhand joke (conveniently under the eye of Sauron) that went viral and now she has an agent and makes media appearances. It’s the American dream: do or say something that would appall your grandmother but which can be monetized via its appalling attention. We used to make widgets; now we make wisecracks. Anyway, I don’t really care. Get that money, queen. Or whatever the kids are saying these days. (Having teens at home makes me feel old, linguistically.) Anyway, I assume the Joe Rogan Experience is just a continuation of Fear Factor: people motivated to say appalling stuff in his presence for the hope of it becoming a vector of attention and consequently an engine of money. And one reliable way to do that is to stoke everyone’s worst impulses, their darkest paranoias — a fear factory, if you will.
Fear Factor went off the air, but now the air has been replaced by this new show, this seemingly inescapable show, that’s everywhere always at once, and I guess the question to pose to myself is: can I escape the show? This feels irresponsible; it feels like I should pay attention. A thousand tote bags cry out: This is not normal! But the show is slowly making me insane, slowly corroding my sense of proportion and ability to move about the physical world, slowly taking away my ability to do anything outside the show. Entertainment, if that word even suffices, at an industrial scope and scale. Move those jokes down the conveyor belt! We’ve seized the memes of production, but we are still alienated.
1. I know that inflation was bad, but it’s getting better, whether you feel like it’s getting better or not. And what did you think was going to happen when all that pandemic stimulus hit the streets?
2. Precious few people seem to vote for a president based on that person’s foreign policy experience or plans, though that seems to be the area where presidents have the most actual control.
3. That old saw about not talking about politics, religion, or your personal income in social situations: good advice!
Category Archives: essays
Redundancy Logistics
Well, it happened. After a number of years playing live music in a semi-professional setting, my amp died mid-gig. This was a statistical inevitability, like hail damage on a roof. I had skated by blameless for so long, dancing through the raindrops and not bringing any kind of backup, thinking I was different. Depending on who you ask, this was akin to blasphemy or professional malpractice. If you read the music-related internet forums (please don’t; let my squandered time be your warning), showing up to a gig without adequate backup is hubris. It invites the wrath of the gods.
My impromptu solution was to plug the electric guitar directly into the mixing console. Please do not think this was something fancy or complicated. This was not a show. This was not a concert. This was a standard Sunday evening restaurant/bar gig. This means there was no “front of house” soundman. There was just the small mixing board next to me, because on this gig I was running sound from the stage, in between playing guitar and (humbly, intermittently) singing. It worked, but it sounded terrible. It functioned. And this only happened after I sat there helpless for a song while the other players stared at me like roadkill.
If you ask the online mind if you should bring a backup — amp, guitar, anything — the answer will be an overwhelming yes. And I see their point. Stuff breaks at the worst time, and you can’t show up unable to complete the job. But then you start thinking through what this actually means in logistical terms. A backup for everything? Does that mean an entire second amp? An entire second guitar? Pedals? The whole P.A.? This turns into a lot of tonnage to sit waiting in the wings. And remember there are no wings to this stage. There are the walls of the corner of the bar that you are wedged between. There’s hardly enough room for you to stand, much less a place to put your gear, much less a place to store your cases, much less a place for other gear that you will hopefully not even need. This past weekend, playing drums, I had to set up in some bushes, and my high-hat stood Bambi-tipsy atop a decorative strip of river rocks. It’s a good thing that sound itself doesn’t take up too much space.
And this predicament quickly morphs into a larger societal problem that I refer to as Dudes with Gear. I am now going to generalize about cisgender, hetero, male people, so, you know, brace yourself. All dudes like toys; and furthermore, they like accouterments for their toys, stuff that kits out the toys to make them more “useful,” which is the male catch-word for beauty. When they were children, boys liked toys, and now that they are men, these toys are called “tools.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and these observations are so cliched as to be unremarkable. And yet the utility/beauty can quickly become obscured by the amount of stuff, or the rhetoric/belief system underneath the stuff becomes overwhelming, so that rather than making your life easier, more attractive, more convenient, you’re now carting around a bunch of crap so that you can take a picture of it and show it to your online buddies. See, e.g., any musician dude on Instagram. I am also thinking now of the Everyday Carry crowd. I remember years ago, eons in online time, when there was the “What’s in My Bag” trend on Flickr. Remember Flickr? People would disgorge the contents of their bag, and dudes especially tended toward a proto-MacGyver collection of objects. (The amount of camera gear that people purported to carry was insane.) This has devolved into the Everyday Carry meme, which is what some people purport to carry on their person every day, wherever they go. At the smallest level, it’s interesting to see what people need to have handy over the course of a day. (Does one really need that many knives?) But on a larger scale, some people are obviously prepping for some kind of confrontation, by which I mean the unlikely scenario that the Black Hawk helicopters land in the Kroger parking lot, and you’re suddenly participating in a real life Fortnite. Thus this meme trend combines several elements: the dude need for stuff and ever expanding sub-stuff for the stuff; video games as overarching structural metaphor; and prepper ideology, which entails the paranoia that something systemically bad is certainly going to happen and you’ve got to be ready. You have the moral obligation to be ready. Extreme examples of this are off-site locations where you can hoard canned goods and weaponry in case of a Red Dawn–like invasion. That reference dates me terribly and shows just how little I know about or understand the prepper aesthetic or motivations. I’m not sure what or whom these people are afraid of specifically, but the entire project off-gasses notes of conspiracy theory and apocalyptic thinking. And as the writer Freddie DeBoer has pointed out in a somewhat different context, one way of ensuring that you are special is the constant fear/hope that you live in End Times. A devotion to the coming apocalypse is a grand form of narcissism. Perhaps being a prepper is the fruitful offspring of video game thought and gear, a kind of apotheosis, or literalization of game life. Here we prepareth for the ultimate leveling up.
What this means for the bandstand is a Boy Scout on amphetamines, or a middle-aged man on gin, buying too much stuff under the justification of being prepared. It becomes a morally fortified excuse to buy stuff, which feels good. Hey, I like buying stuff, too. Well, that’s not actually true. Spending money makes me ill, but I still do it, and I am not totally immune to the endorphin high of clicking that Buy Now button. All of this is exacerbated by living in a car city, which makes it much easier to bring more stuff than you need.
Interestingly, if you observe a professional local musician, you will notice they bring very little stuff to the gig. They bring only what is absolutely necessary. I define such a creature as a person who plays professionally full time and yet who does not have a roadie for the majority of their local gigs. They are the performer and the schlepper all in one. And they don’t treat their gear like a yuppie going camping. One person’s device of convenience is another’s extra weight to hump across a parking lot. One of the best guitar players I know doesn’t even bring a guitar stand. He just leans the thing up in the corner on set break. Asked why and he’ll say because it’s another thing to tote. He is not there for the pics; he’s there to do a job. There are so many obligations in life that are actually optional, but we don’t realize they are optional. They are the default settings of the mind. I hardly ever change my default settings, but this guy did. I haven’t asked him about his amp backup situation.
I’m not trying to be irresponsible, but I loathe taking stuff I don’t sufficiently use on the gig, which is why I mostly don’t take toms anymore on drum gigs. They just sit there, their chrome rims smiling placidly at me, which probably says more about my skill level than it does about any rigorous commitment to stuff maintenance. For backups, there is the equivalent replacement and then there is the good-enough replacement. How can I get by in the simplest way possible? These solutions are much less attractive and don’t sound as good and usually can be accomplished with the crap you already own. We have to remember that MacGyver made do with what he had on hand. That’s what made him cool. He didn’t use every predicament as an occasion to go shopping. The ultimate practicality is to be more resourceful and less precious.
To placate the gods (i.e., the forum in my head), I bought one of those small pedal-sized amps. No, not one that’s a computer that mimics the sound of Clapton at Wembley or whatever. There are no Impulse Responses. Get out of here with that mess. I don’t want to program anything. I don’t want anything that has options that you select through a menu. I don’t really want any choices. I want toggle switches, pointy knobs. I’ve plugged it up. I’ve tried it out. It weighs less than three pounds and sounds fine. It’s so small that I’ll probably forget it’s even in my bag. It should be more than adequate. I pray I never use it, but at least now I am protected from the normal distribution of myself.
Author profiles are bunk
There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.
First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)
That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.1
“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.”
Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983?
Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to.
“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire.
“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”
First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet.
“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.”
Really, Lauren. Really?
“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.
Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know?
“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.
“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat
“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”
Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids?
To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.
Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile. She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs.
I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure?
“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’”
It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle.
“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.”
Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism.
“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.”
Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now.
Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people?
Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”2
“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.3 & 4
But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.)
Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.5 She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.6
So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom.
All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due.
- The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
- Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
- She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks.
- The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone.
- I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia.
- To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.
All houses are haunted
Moving is terrible. “It’s traumatic,” more than one friend said. “It’s the second most traumatic thing after a death in the family.” Well, I don’t know about that, but it has been an old-fashioned pain in the ass, a pain not quickly remedied because the infection is the mountain of your own stuff and how to organize it within a new space. There is a brief moment of excitement, trying to figure out where the golden-spined series of Faulkner novels is going to reside, strategizing about the best drawer in the kitchen to house the spatulas, which hid from you for three days after the movers left so that you were left to flip your eggs with your mind, like some yuppie jedi. But this feeling quickly leaves, and what’s left is all your crap and the endless march of assigning it new places within the home.
All my routines are shot. I’m writing this at 5:42 in the morning on a Tuesday on a desk that needs a shim. I pray the arrhythmic clicking I’m creating with each space bar doesn’t wake the dogs. I haven’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. I don’t know when to shower. I can’t find the kids’ lunchboxes. I need a USB cord. God only knows where that blue umbilicus lies within the boxes still unpacked, and we’re mostly unpacked. But there are always the straggler boxes, the boxes scribbled “whatnots,” the boxes that should just as well be incinerated because if you’ve lived without the USB cord for three weeks, you probably don’t need it and should learn to live without it. Purge your sins.
Plus, it’s not just my stuff, but my entire family’s, which brings to mind George Carlin’s bit “A Place for my Stuff,” the central conceit of which is that your own belongings are your stuff, while everyone else’s stuff is indeed shit. Which pretty much sums up my entire theology regarding material plenty. I’m sorry I have to briefly pause my avoidance of cursing with this post in order to make my objects/waste point. I am overwhelmed by my stuff. And I’m horrified by everyone else’s shit that they’ve brought into this house. Brought into the old house and now moved across town to the new house. It’s like the beginning of White Noise except it’s all in my house, and I’m tripping over it. We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.
Plus, all houses are haunted. The sounds in a new house are maddening. The air conditioner kicks on in an odd way, with clicking beforehand. And then the air return is like a giant seashell of swooshing up in the ceiling. The washing machine is inexplicably loud. The laundry room is the coldest room in the house for some reason. I have yet to fully determine the hottest room in the house but tradition indicates that it will be the master bathroom. The ceiling light in the kitchen is not centered, thereby destined to inch several members of my family just that closer to madness. The garbage container area sticks and must be yanked with egg-yolk covered hands. There is a bug in the garage that I can’t find, though it flies by my ear in Top Gun-ian fashion. Part of the yard is a swamp. The garage is still half filled with alien crap, there is entirely too much of it, none of it seems relevant or needed, and yet I can’t find whatever it is I have decided I need to find. When I get home from work, goddamnit the dogs have heard me, when I get home from work I feel compelled to re-enter the trench of unpacking, but I seem to be the only one still at war with our household. Everyone else has settled in. I’m in the trench (the attic), being shelled by the enemy (the invisible insect), while I dig further for shelter (organize our Christmas decorations). We moved because we wanted to change and now everything’s different.
Perhaps this entire project would be easier if I were not so extravagantly uptight. I am like the Liberace of stress. I am like the Pavorotti of coming unglued. I am like that pickle jar your uncle dipped his fingers in over Thanksgiving and then wrenched back so tight that no one has been able to unwrench it since. The briney thoughts are swirling around and off-gassing and creating a further vacuum of anxiety. I can barely enjoy anything for longer than ten seconds without my mind undertowing all that came before. I realize this analogy could be workshopped. My pickle jar is a riptide is what I’m saying. The dogs are whining and perhaps they’re right. Perhaps I should just flip on the lights and start the coffee and get on with my day. Chores are at least manifestable, accomplishable. I haven’t finished the novel but by God I have taken out the trash.
The complete eruption of routine triggers the motion-sensitive driveway light in my mind. My routine, as it was, was not the best, and I need to fashion a new one in this strange environment that I have put myself in. Are you writing? Are you still writing? What are you working on? Please, friendly acquaintance, don’t ask. Please forget I ever wrote. The landfill turnover of my accumulated personal affects reveals just how hopelessly sentimental I am, how hopelessly aspirational I continue to be, even at this late date. Did I really think I was going to read Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination? How vain I still am, hoping someone, anyone will come over one day and admire that small-format Mary Miller short story collection, the one put out by Hobart. Even better, I’ve got her first chapbook, too! Or perhaps someone will appreciate my unblemished run of the first three years of n+1. But no one is coming over, no one cares, and literary theory is an ugly hill. There is not enough space to house every book I have ever read and every book I thought perhaps I might read one day. There are libraries for this, even here in the suburbs, though of course none of them stock the right books. So sayeth the permanent grad student.
The dogs have a hierarchy of discourse in the mornings. First there is the high pitched whistle, a kind of test whine. I am the only person on the planet who can hear it. It’s like my own version of dog ears. Then the whining gets lower pitched, becomes more vocal, more syllabic. Finally the little one just barks haughtily. A couple of paws stamped in the dark, then quiet. If I sleep too late, he will really get going as if he’s barking at an intruder from his crate. But the only person he’s barking at is me. That’s the only intruder I ever find when I stumble in. I thought I wouldn’t be able to hear them in this new and improved house, but even though I’ve reached middle age, I still won’t learn.
Thick in Orlando
In Terminal B of the Orlando International Airport, there is an art installation. A cube of glass contains a man, sitting on the ground, resting against his bags. He is the Weary Traveler. He has fuzzy hair, a mustache, a Polo shirt, bad sneakers, love handles. He looks tired. The mannequin is eerily lifelike, so that there is a vibe of “is this man alive and sleeping? Or is this man actually fake?” outside the glass cube. Spectators, all in some stage of arriving or departing, circle warily, take pictures with their phones. It’s an unsettling scene, because the man is so lifelike and also because the level of irony is difficult to detect. Is this a sincere depiction of weary first-world travel, the culturally compelled hauling of children to tourist sights that are brand extensions of intellectual property franchises owned by an international entertainment conglomerate? Or is this installation making fun of everyone for doing the schlep? Are we being represented or implicated? Both? When headlines ask rhetorical questions in the New York Times or the Atlantic — “Will AI change pancakes forever?” — the safe answer is always No. But whenever I think of a binary question and wonder aloud if a particular situation isn’t both , the answer is yes, of course, it’s both. If it can be both, it is both.
I have traveled to Orlando, Florida, for work and pleasure more than any other American city. There are other cities where the in-laws live that I have traveled to more often, but that’s different. That’s for family reasons. It’s almost a sub home. Truthfully, I mostly come to Orlando for work. I’ve been here maybe fifteen times for two to three-day stretches, and what I remember every time I arrive is how little I remember about Orlando. Nothing in Orlando seems familiar, while still always being familiarly shallow. The sites of Orlando: toll roads, retaining ponds, screened-in swimming pools, flat highway vistas under construction. Palm trees. Malignant levels of sunlight. But there’s no emotional familiarity. The town feels conceptual, abstract, a 3-D printed version of a city. It possesses no nostalgic pull.
I have a friend who calls some locations “thin places,” and I think he means it in a kind of C.S. Lewisian sense of thinness, that is, a place whose pull on you is so strong that it seems to pull you into another dimension — of memory, of nostalgia, of friendship. This is unscientific, admittedly. And it sounds hokey, but I feel it, too. My prime example would be Oxford, Mississippi, a college town built on a square. It has the right mixture of incremental change and decade-upon-decade of sameness, so that it always feels utterly familiar. Also, it has an uncanny ability to act like a portal that leads to everyone else in Mississippi. I often joke that if you want to find someone in Mississippi, just go to Oxford and hang around for an hour. They will appear. Something will have brought them there. In this way it’s much more a hub of cultural activity than the capital city, Jackson, where I live. Oxford possesses a magnetism, and it’s not because of the football team.
In Orlando thickness reigns. I wonder if it has to do with the amount of construction in the city. Perhaps I just always go to different places? But that’s not quite right either, because I’ve stayed several times at the same hotel, though I don’t know what it looks like or how to get there. Its geographic relationship to the airport feels arbitrary, ad hoc, improvised each time upon my landing. The very entrances to the hotel property feel re-drawn before my arrival, deliberately unmemorable. I know I am near the “parks,” but I don’t know how near, or which ones.
At the Brookstone, in Terminal B, they’re selling the new Metallica LP. I read somewhere that Metallica had to purchase their own vinyl pressing facility in order to keep up with consumer demand. Life just keeps getting stranger. The electrical outlets inside the rows of chairs don’t work. Everything here is life As If. It’s not a trip if you don’t take notes.
Perhaps it’s because Orlando is in many obvious ways a deliberately fake city, a city whose primary economic engine is tourism, and not just tourism but a kind of live-action role playing of childhood entertainment, a deliberate fantasy land, a structured nostalgia. (Which I have taken my children to, and yes, they enjoyed the Uncrustables, just like everyone else, so what of it?)
It’s Vegas for children. (No smoking, no copulation.) It feels temporary. It feels season-less, and yet the buildings are simply this season’s model. It’s not necessarily bad. This is old news. This is meant to be observation not indictment. This is what happens when I show up too early for my flight. It’s a place that makes me want to buy a nine dollar coffee-adjacent beverage that contains a thousand calories. I feel there will be no great stories set on a Monorail.
Maybe the fact that I have no sticky memories from my trips to the city is just a consequence of middle age. Maybe I’m late to the magic of Orlando, or anywhere. Maybe it’s not the city but the traveler who is too thick to retain detail. Maybe I am the fake man, weary from my adventures through the fake landscape. The prepared environment. Is it any wonder that Terminal B is the only place that feels familiar, that feels somewhat homelike? It’s where I always end up. It does, after all, have a Chik-Fil-A.
On giving up
Well I finally quit Twitter. As in I stopped going there everyday, all day everyday intermittently, little bursts of scrolling, the networked reading version of smoking. For the first couple of weeks, Twitter would send me emails saying that I was missing notifications, and I would dutifully (that is, addictively) click over and see that the notifications were bogus. Someone had retweeted someone else, etc. No one was actually talking to me or about me. These emails seem to have stopped. Now Twitter doesn’t even care that I’m not there.
It’s a strange feeling. At first, I felt completely lost regarding the news. For some people, for normal people, this would have felt freeing, but I felt anxious. Something out there was happening, and I didn’t know the first thing about it. I didn’t even know the bad jokes about it. I didn’t know the memes. I hadn’t followed its digestion through the memeplex. I was losing touch with the references. Has my other internet usage increased to make up for the absence? For sure. I admit this with shame. The problem is that Instagram is, at its core, hopelessly boring. It’s mostly bad pictures that are advertisements. Even the people who think they are being sincere are posting advertisements, ads for their own vestigial sincerity. I gave up reading the Facebook wall a couple years ago (helpfully blocked by an app). Youtube is briefly distracting, but it is filled with so much algorithmic garbage that it’s like the broader streaming services: unless you already know what you intend to watch, you’re already lost. Plus Youtube is enough like sitting on the couch and watching an old-fashioned TV that it triggers my goofing-off alarm more reliably. It doesn’t have the academic veneer of reading. It doesn’t give the clean-burning freebase jolt of Twitter.
So there’s nowhere to go now. I have nothing to do. There are about five sites I routinely check, even though it’s mostly muscle memory at this point. They no longer spark joy, as the saying goes. There are three individuals whose tweets I miss. I will not name them. About every other day I google their names, and the search results include their last five tweets, which I can read without visiting the forbidden site itself. This has proven to be enough, a methadone for my madness. I don’t want to see all their tweets all the time anyway. I just miss their voices, their quips, their amusing links to other bits in the web of distraction. It helps that there are only three people who I can remember to google. There are others who are totally lost to me, who I only knew via Twitter and their prose-forged personalities there. I miss them, but I am also happy to be free of them because their near-constant presence was agitating. This is especially fraught for writers who are so composed in one form and so un-composed on Twitter. We’re all just so annoying on Twitter, myself included.
I wish I could say I quit because of Elon or some political reason, but the truth is that I quit because it was ruining my life, if just in a small way. When your kids joke that you’re addicted to Twitter; when you go to the bathroom in the middle of a dinner out mostly so you can look at Twitter; when you keep erecting barricades to prevent yourself from seeing so much Twitter, only to figure out ways to tunnel through regardless, it’s time to stop. It’s embarrassing. It’s a waste of time. It’s corrosive to your sense of proportion. If you could have moderated your interaction with all that decontextualized language, you would have done so long ago. Except for the occasional promotional link to a blog bost I had almost entirely stopped writing tweets. It was the reading that was always a problem, getting caught in the machine zone, which had been fun, could still be fun, but in smaller and smaller proportions. One went scrolling for the 5% of fun to be found, somewhere. When had it stopped being fun? I don’t want to depress everyone, myself included, by doing that math right now.
Of course none of this has solved the main problem, that being the internet and how it is the perfect complement to my own will to distraction. I don’t really mean the useful parts of the internet. Google maps is great. Zillow is provocative. Uber is handy on a trip. Having a boarding pass on my phone? Also neat. I like texting everyone. Big thumbs up for texting. Sending pics of the dog doing something cute. All that. I do have a thing now where the sound of texts arriving throws me into a medium panic, but that’s an essaylet for another day. What I mean really is the news, the updates, the media. I would say social media but really it’s anything that’s remotely close to “media.” Anything that moves faster than an ebook. (My review of all ebooks: convenient, but hard to browse.) Wikipedia is addictive in its own way, but it’s like gorging on steel-cut oats. You’ll get full before you do any serious attentional damage. Instead it’s the trolling for stimulation under the guise of being informed, checking one’s internet traps for tasty bits of dirt. What would it be like not to check anything, not to feel the need to check on stuff, to use the internet purely as a tool and not as a mechanism to goof off, which really is mechanism for entertainment, which really is a mechanism for self-soothing, self-care, if you will, a soothing agent, a drug, an opiate for the masses. Hey, if that phrase hasn’t been taken yet, dibs!
I like the idea of Lent, even if I never give anything up. Lent is a reminder, an italicization of the last third of winter, the final blow, the bleakest turn, the unambiguously worst part of the year. You should give up something for Lent, because you have to give up something for Lent, because the root cellar is nearly exhausted along with one’s patience for shoveling snow. My affinity is mostly gestural here in the south, where today it was in the mid-80s. This is one of our false springs.
For years I have joked that “this year for Lent I am simply giving up.” But perhaps I should make it more literal and give giving up a try. I should give up keeping up. Stop reading the news. Stop diverting myself. Stop checking in. Stop refreshing. Stop looking, stop searching. I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Thus spake Bono, so many moons ago. You probably didn’t realize that he was singing about my problems with the internet back then.
I don’t know what I would do with this free time created by not checking on the internet. It would take me being a different person to accomplish it, but through this effort I maybe then could become yet another different person. And maybe I would like that person better? Or maybe I wouldn’t recognize that person at all.
How to gig outside
First, get a fan. I like this Lasko fan. It pivots. It comes with outlets built in and it has one bitchingly thick power cord. This fan don’t play. You can angle the breeze so that it blows directly up your keister, should you wish. Or you can do what I do and position it in front of you, so that the hair I still have blows like I’m singing in an 80s music video. Don’t fool around with a box fan. Please use my years of box fan failure as your guide. Those things are top heavy, and they take up too much room. Yes, these Lasko fans are pricey, but that’s a realization that comes with middle age. Sometimes the nicer things cost more money. I don’t care if it’s conspicuous consumption. I’m about to have a heat stroke out here.
Second, forgo alcohol. Forgo anything that’s not straight water. Stop drinking Gatorade! You’re not a child. You don’t need Death Water, or whatever the rebranded water is called. Are electrolytes even real? Just get a bunch of regular water. You don’t need a cocktail. You don’t need that IPA. You’re not celebrating. You’re working. Is the event staff drinking? No. Are they doing illicit drugs in the van? Well, maybe. But that’s their choice. You’re a responsible adult, and you’re not going to do any of that foolishness while you’re working outside in the elements.
Relatedly, don’t eat too much. Eat a third of what you want to eat. Don’t go hungry during the gig, because then you will eat too much when they save you a plate of barbecue. Again, let my mistakes guide you. Instead, a banana is your friend. It’s too hot for much more. You can eat a decent meal later at home under calmer conditions. If the idea of finishing that plate and then running around the block seems like a bad idea, then step away from the plate. Because when you’re gigging outside, you’re running on the inside, if that makes sense.
Fourth, compromise is a part of adult life. Remember you can’t spell travel without disappointment. And you can’t gig outside without being uncomfortable. It’s like camping. I mean, I don’t camp so this analogy might not track. I’ve got friends who go camping with the inflated air mattress and fan systems and a battery pack for their CPAP machine. I don’t get it. I don’t choose hardship. But sometimes gigs happen outside. People love to put the band outside. I think they’re afraid of the sound. People want live music. It’s like a vestigial desire to see actual fire. It feels primordial. But then, as soon as the band sets up, you can see the mother of the bride’s eyes go wide at the size of the PA. And I get it. We’ve all been at events where the volume was just excruciating. But the answer is to tell the band to turn down and then not hire that band next time, rather than hire live music and then put them out back, behind where the staff parks the golf carts. The solution isn’t just to hire DJs. God knows they can be too loud, and no one needs that much bass.
Five: remember that everything sounds different outside. Do your drums sound deep and pleasing, thickly warm and exuberant to the touch inside your house? Well, they’re going to sound like wet grocery bags outside. An unamplified acoustic guitar just disappears outside. Amplified it sounds like chopsticks chewing on pine straw. The electric guitar player is going to turn up even more. The only thing that still sounds semi-okay is an electric bass. Everything else sounds like hell. It’s okay. You’re not a DJ! You’re a bunch of human beings creating music on the spot. You’re not robots. You shouldn’t sound like them, especially when perched in a gazebo that’s held together by spiders.
Remember the fundamental riddle of live music performance: what you hear is never what the audience hears. We try to affect but ultimately don’t control what happens in the outer dark.
Hats are your friend. As is sunscreen. Don’t be a child. Put on sunblock. Your mother was right about all that stuff. You’re not less of a man by copping to all this quality knowledge. It’s a cliché for a reason. Screw getting a good tan. What you want to avoid is a difficult conversation with your dermatologist, the one that ends with you getting cancer boogers cut off your face. Do you really have time for that? Getting tan is for teenagers and professional models. Everyone else should know better. An adult with a tan line is an adult who doesn’t know how to take care of themselves.
An extra shirt is your friend. If, again like me, you’re going to sweat like a halfback while unloading the trailer, and you are then supposed to play for a wedding, sometimes it’s prudent to bring a change of clothes. In Mississippi, it’s too hot to wear pants nine months out of the year, and that’s if you’re just sitting there. Throw in some speaker cabinets and it gets grim. But also, you’re not in the Pips. Let’s not be too precious. What’s the gig? Are you being paid enough to bring a change of clothes? If not, just wipe your face and truck on.
Screens disappear in the sunlight. You’re not at work in your cubicle. You’re not at home on the couch. I know that contemporary middle class society has rather rapidly disappeared almost entirely into a touch screen interface. Look, I can control my monitor levels with my iPad! While also reading my Tweets! Sure, that’s great, but first, as soon as you get that backlit screen anywhere near direct sunlight it becomes essentially invisible. (This goes for those little clip-on tuners, too.) Second, you know how annoying all that technology is to use in the comfort of your own home? That place is perfectly climate controlled with very little chaos energy, the exact opposite of an outdoor gigging situation. Remember all the precious crap that you haul to the gig is going to get rained on. Not if, but when.
If there’s a 10 percent chance you will be cold, bring a jacket and a hat and don’t leave them in the car. Put them right next to you, perhaps underneath the floor tom so they can be donned at a moment’s notice. Again, I know whereof I speak. Last April we played outside, and everyone in the crowd was fine. They were under those propane heat contraptions, vibing. Mingling generates warmth. Meanwhile I was behind the drumset, arms folded in a pretzel knot of rage between each song. It was awful. And I had a jacket. I just left it in the car like a moron.
And remember cold and heat are relative outside. I maintain that ideal conditions to gig outside are somewhere between 74 and 77 degrees. Everything else is just a version of intolerable and necessitates the aforementioned fans and water and layers. If it hits 77, you have to start thinking about the dew point. If it gets below 74, any kind of wind at all can be brutal.
Also, if there is a piece of gear that the wind knocks over, that means you don’t need that cymbal, or whatever it is. That’s the hand of God saying you brought too much crap. Listen to Him/Her.
If the conditions are extreme, treat it like an out of town gig: ask for double. Sometimes you have to vote with your wet frozen feet.
Discomfort is a part of life. There’s no real comfort in the world. Sorry to be a downer. There are momentary pockets, but something will interrupt the comfort before long. The dog will vomit on the rug. The roof will begin to leak. Something. Why should gigging outside be any different? Why should it be less troublesome than sitting at home watching yet another series on Netflix? Once you embrace the inherent discomfort and disappointment of life, then everything becomes a little more tolerable. Is this depressing? It’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be comforting. I just think that everyone would be happier if we lowered our expectations about, well, pretty much everything. I don’t want everything to be crappy all the time, but I don’t want to cruise through life with the illusion that everything is going to be like a commercial with beers and footballs and hot pockets being thrown at my face all the time. Sometimes life is just waiting in line. Sometimes life is trading yet another email with the insurance agent. And rather than these disappointments and logistical aggravations being assaults against my existence, I am instead trying to recognize the ineluctably harsh grain of life. Every day is a winding road, all that.
So: Playing music outside is like eating outside, inherently ridiculous. And there’s a reason bagpipes sound best outside. They’re designed to frighten the enemy.
Place of Safety
I try to avoid the discourse. Writing online has for the most part turned into a game of takes, and the stakes of the takes are always rising. Who can write the fastest on the scandal floating through the air that day? Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were already living through a takes pandemic. They go viral, after all.
But here I am anyway, conscripted briefly into the culture war. At least I’m not writing about that kidney-donation-short-story-litigation disaster.
I was talking with a friend about what books could still be assigned to students and whether certain books, though historically significant, were now so far out of intellectual fashion that they should be replaced by better, different, more appropriate books. We were talking high school, that is, students who are still deemed children. But then, concurrently, out popped articles about Bright Sheng, the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, who was teaching a music composition course on opera in which he showed the Laurence Olivier version of Othello in which Olivier portrays the hero in blackface. His students were “shocked” and quickly expressed their dismay to the powers that be. As a result, Sheng has stopped teaching the class and has written two public apologies.
I don’t want to argue for or against Sheng’s showing of the film in his class. I don’t know anything about music composition, opera, various versions of or depictions of Othello, or the history and implications of blackface, aside from the obvious contemporary point that it’s connected to race relations in America and is thus absolutely radioactive in current polite society. What was Sheng’s pedagogical reason for showing the film? Should he have used a different depiction to better prove his point? Should he have provided a more thorough scholarly context for it? Should he have simply “known better”? I don’t know. I do think that a professor’s selection of course materials is a specific site of pedagogical dominion and an implicit articulation of importance, and that the course itself becomes an arena to debate the very inclusion of its own material. To use Shakespeare as a convenient example, any Shakespeare course, aside from its more top-level focus, is on a sedimentary level an argument that Shakespeare is worth studying and these works in particular are worth studying. Do you agree? Well, by the end of the course, if you’ve done the reading and participated in the class, you should have a fully developed opinion. But aside from that kind of 16-week long digestion, I don’t know if Sheng is right, wrong, careless, careful, or not. Perhaps I’m being too English major-y. I tend to take the teacher’s side in these matters under the assumption that the teacher chose the material on purpose, and it’s their class. I don’t question the tools my plumber uses when he’s working on the pipes at my house, because I don’t know anything about plumbing, and I want to be able to flush my toilet again, and as a result, I operate from a premise of respect toward the plumber.
What I am more interested in is a quotation from one of the students:
“I was stunned,” [freshman Olivia] Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.”
Here I would like to stand on firmer argumentative ground: the college classroom is not a safe space, nor should it be. I mean, it should be a safe space in the way that all societal spaces should be safe; you should be safe from assault, battery, etc. But that is not the sense in which the student uses the term. The college classroom should not be a safe space for the students’ feelings.
An important premise: the college students are purportedly adults and present of their own volition. But after that caveat, did seeing this movie hurt the students’ feelings? Impinge on their sense of propriety? Jump the tracks of a contemporary political taboo? Offend their decency? It doesn’t matter, because their feelings are not to be spared in the college classroom.* Why are they attending college? To learn an academic discipline? To obtain the credentials to get a job and secure a middle-class adulthood? To be immersed in the best of what has been thought and said? Whatever their reason, anytime that students learn about a discipline, they will be necessarily exposed to the history of that discipline, and by virtue of it hailing from the foreign country of the past, it will not comport with their current view of the discipline or society as a whole. Of course the students were shocked. They should be shocked. The film was released 56 years ago — three of their lifetimes. It’s so far out of current performance fashion that it now seems odious to the wide majority of society, and yet covering your eyes and insisting that the professor not show that movie does not make it go away. The bogeyman of the past is still out there killing innocents. Ignoring past cultural artifacts that are now deemed offensive doesn’t make them go away and doesn’t obviate why they were deemed important in the first place. Ignoring Olivier in blackface might make you feel more comfortable in the present moment but it does nothing to address current racism or to understand past racism. All it does is prolong one’s own ignorance of what actually happened. “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear” is no way to learn. It’s difficult to learn anything without having your feelings hurt, because learning is a form of conflict. And you only win that game if you do the reading.
When I lived in Alabama and tornados were a routine part of existence, the weatherman would come on the screen and say, “It’s time to go to your place of safety.” This was a handy new euphemism for basement. It sounds poetic and cozy but it also makes sense. And for tornados, it’s accurate. When the storms are descending on your street, you can better protect yourself by getting to that un-windowed hallway. But intellectually, there is no place of safety from the ravages of the past. Of all the lessons an 18-year-old composition student might learn, this one could be the most valuable.
*Their feelings are important, but they are less important within the context of the classroom.
Time Hex
Sometimes I think about not wearing a watch. Sometimes in fact I don’t wear a watch. But mostly I wear one. I feel odd without it, naked, though I’m obviously not naked. I thought about communicating this to anyone I met in a given week, and thinking of no one who actually wanted to hear me moon about this topic, I have decided to tell you, dear reader.
I am currently wearing a Timex Weekender 38mm Fabric Strap. Before this it was a Casio Men’s Digital Illuminator Sport Watch in navy blue, a Target find and my preferred watch. But the rectangular bitlet strap-holder broke. I keep wearing these vestigial devices though I, like everyone else on the planet, also carry a little supercomputer in my pocket, a remote control for life, a psychological fidget spinner. I also stare at a clock located on my regular computer at work. And there is a clock in my car. And there are multiple clocks around my house, not synchronized but close enough. I’m never without the ability to check my time. Why should I keep wearing a watch?
For some men, it’s a piece of jewelry, covert or not. I’m fascinated by high-end watch culture in the same way I’m fascinated by snake handlers or scientologists; there is a belief system there that I recognize but don’t follow. Spending several thousand dollars for a watch that you have to hand wind seems bizarre and potentially reckless, even though I adore certain outmoded forms of technology whose relevance seems purely sentimental (hello, typewriter collection). I mean, the watches look good, if a little big. There’s also strange terminology which I admit I don’t understand. Bezel? It’s like when photographers talk about bokeh. What? I realize these are actual terms, but they give off the whiff of nonce words, secret passcodes kids invent for the game of the day. Or simply boys being boys.
I do not wear a smartwatch and I take an absurd amount of pride in this. Their presence on my contemporaries is steadily increasing. It’s an object that began as an avant-garde class marker and that quickly devolved through ubiquity to a marker of civilization, a declaration not of money or advanced taste but of reasonableness. It’s just what people wear. It’s the fleece jacket of wrist-wear. But I can barely function as it is with my little supercomputer singing sweetly in my pocket. I don’t need to know anything that a smartwatch could tell me. I realize it could keep track of my heart rate and notify me that I’m not moving around enough, to which, duh. Part of me wants to keep the watch, qua device, and do away with the smartphone. Checking work email away from work was a Rubicon I didn’t know I was crossing lo those so many years ago. And now there is always a social trap one could check; they fill so quickly! And now texting people is so woven into my daily existence that the thought of not having a good texting device seems unthinkable. Device-less, I would surely be less addled, but I would be lonely. Or lonelier. Or even lonelier.
So I wear a watch but with the effortful thriftiness of wearing a cheap watch. It is convenient to check the time so relatively inconspicuously. You can fish the phone out of your pocket to check the time during a conversation, but it signals you’re bored and want to look at your phone rather than continue the conversation, which may be true, but still. Whereas looking at your wristwatch, while insulting, is somehow less insulting to your fellow conversationalist, speaking at least in current terms of the evolution of our personal technologies.
Part of this affection for cheapness is that I’m hard on watches. Briefly in my twenties I wore a Karim Rashid–designed watch from Alessi. It was a single band of chocolate brown polyurethane that housed a raised, square-ish time piece that contained hands but no numerals. It was like a stylish miniature piece of furniture on my wrist, a small gesture toward the Design Within Reach standards that were still yet out of my reach. It was once glancingly admired by a dentist and self-professed watch guy. But I slowly destroyed it by clipping the face against doors, drawers, cars. I am clumsy, unaware of my bodily proportions; I regularly pinball through jambs. Even my current low-profile Timex gets whacked weekly. And then there is the wrist sweat, the slow corrosion of being exposed to my body’s excreta. After a week in the Mississippi heat my watch smells like Satan’s jockstrap. Dear Hodinkee, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.
Perhaps my ambivalence has to do less with my crippled sense of fashion or my showy sense of thriftiness and more to do with my sweaty grasp on time itself. By which I mean the concept. I know enough about time management to know that I am terrible at it — as if time were easily organizable and not in fact fluid, always expanding or contracting with no attention to one’s dominion. Time changes with the activity. You try to save time, you try to capture it, blowing air into a balloon, and you come back an hour later, and the balloon is geriatric on the floor, its face wrinkled. That time you saved was no good floating around unused. It’s worse than an opened champagne bottle. Time flies, yet feels interminable. Is there anything slower than a bad play? But go on Twitter and an hour vaporizes. The brownies are burnt. I have some place I need to be. Is it over already? I am constantly 5-7 minutes late to everything and yet I hate waiting around for stuff to start. I’m always cramming more tasks into those small envelopes of time prior to departure, time I realize too late I should have used for driving. It’s called a deadline because it functions like miniature death. Remember there were goals you wanted to accomplish before you died? Way back when you did not think you were actually ever going to die, but now that you’re old enough to have a fleeting notion on your own mortality, you’re too tired to remember what they were, much less do them. There’s no time for that. You’re worn out. It’s time to go. Lunch hour was supposed to be a half hour ago. Perhaps I don’t want to wear a watch because I don’t want the constant reminder of how time whips me.
I realize this is all totally meaningless, and yet these are the kind of branching thoughts I chew throughout my day. Plus there is the desire to simplify. There is so much detritus that can’t be avoided (papers home from school) or won’t be shunned (Twitter), so much physical and mental lint, that any personal kind of trimming of the sails makes one feel, makes me feel, slightly more intentional about my progress through what is admittedly a fairly unintentional landscape. Maybe Tuesday would feel better without a watch. Would it even still feel like Tuesday?
Clothes Mask the Man
Another day and I’ve got to decide what to wear. It’s the first of many mini crises of my own making, obviously not an actual crisis but enough of a pain that it takes decisional energy. It’s not just an outfit. It’s a representation of myself to the world. It’s enough of a speed bump in my morning that it invites self-analysis. You’re going to wear that? Again?
As a child I wore a uniform. First through fourth grade, I wore a white polo shirt and navy pants. Then, for fifth and sixth grade, I wore a strict variety of pastel polos (pink, blue, lime) with khakis. Finally in seventh I was able to wear normal clothes, and I remember the terror of having to tight-roll my jeans in the then-correct manner. Back then the jeans to have were the Girbaud brand, which had an alluring label right on the zipper. You could tell who was wearing the right jeans by glancing at their crotch, an adolescent detail which seems a little too symbolically on the nose.
Now of course I’m purportedly an adult and free to wear what I want. Whenever there is a social function (back when there were social functions) and I ask my wife what I should wear, while staring into the void of my closet, she gives me the Look. It’s a look of primordial exhaustion. It’s admittedly a dumb question because I always wear the same thing, a personality trait that’s conveniently sanctioned by being a male. I can wear the same outfit over and over and no one notices, comments, or cares, whereas being a female, at least according to my admittedly inexpert anecdotal research, entails a much more fraught relationship to clothing and context. Except for perhaps weddings and funerals, I can basically wear this same ensemble every day for the rest of my life.
That ensemble being khaki pants and a blue button-down shirt. I have essentially been wearing the same outfit for twenty years. Sometimes the shirt is blue-ish. There is often a plaid or check pattern, but it reads as blue. And okay, there are a couple of non-blue shirts in the closet. I have an orange plaid and a red flannel, but these minor deviations underline the relentless sameness: button down and pants. It’s the slightly more adult version of my school uniform.
And yet, every morning, I think good lord, what am I going to wear today, even though the spectrum of choice is so narrow as to be meaningless. All of it matches, as if anyone cares. All of it is the same level of moderately decently presentable. It’s as if I have subconsciously chosen a uniform in order to alleviate the anxiety of dressing but every morning I somehow forget.
I will be the first to admit that the reason I am attracted to uniforms is because they lessen cognitive load. Here I’ll name check that President Obama anecdote about how he only wore grey or navy blue suits in order to lessen his then-momentous decision making itinerary. I don’t have nearly that amount of decision making to do in a day. Obviously. And I am aware that absolutely no one on the planet cares what I wear to type on my Dell except for myself. And so this is a non-decision decision. And yet. Whenever there is an article about a writer or celebrity or just some public person who wears a uniform, I am eager to read it and access their gestalt. I am a sucker for any kind of simplifying system. The writer Molly Young for a while only wore white. She said it made her look like a large glass of milk and that getting dressed each day was like assembling an easy piece of Ikea furniture. I read this nodding sagely while also thinking: that last bookshelf took me four days. Tom Wolfe rather famously wore all white, but I think even in these polarized times we can still agree that Tom Wolfe was a pretentious clown. The writer Gay Talese doesn’t wear a uniform per se but always wears tailored suits. But his father was a tailor and Talese was born in 1932. Of course he wears bespoke suits. It would almost be a sacrilege not to. The suit as uniform is tempting, an even more formal, even more adult, in some ways easier uniform than what I have helplessly devised. But suits are too out of fashion as far as regular everyday wear. I’m not a banker and even the lawyers now wear those weird leather shoes with the glued-on white sneaker soles. One wants to wear a uniform but one doesn’t want to wear a costume. The distinction seems to be a set of clothes that doesn’t adversely trigger my self-awareness reflexes.
Shouldn’t I be wearing something different? Shouldn’t I try harder? What are other people wearing? Maybe I should just dress as if I were George Clooney. But this is ridiculous. George Clooney is beautiful and I am not. He can wear anything. Insert the conventionally beautiful person of your choosing. My point is that people like Clooney can get away with wearing ridiculous stuff. It’s like when Brad Pitt grows a gnarly beard. Instead I should investigate what the sharply dressed but average-looking people are up to. But in this sense, too, we are a polarized nation. We have the beautiful people and then we have the average masses, unimpeachably wearing leggings and jeans and some sort of shirt thing because it’s comfortable and easy, and what are you, some kind of big shot? Just put on your jeans and grab that pizza. There is another population, the intentionally well-dressed, the forum-goers, the guys who know what “worsted” means, the fellows who have particular thoughts about the differences between the 511 Last and the 65 Last. These guys go from being well-meaning and detail-oriented to stricter than a military cotillion in about three paragraphs. Fashion, which might be the most blatantly arbitrary of signaling environments, quickly becomes codified. And it turns into dudes talking evangelically about gear, which is just Dad Shopping.
(Sometimes I think that the majority of our current problems in the world are caused by the existence of internet forums. The Gamestop bubble and the Capitol riot could be thought of as examples of forum-logic bursting into the real world. Or the “real world,” if you prefer.)
It’s not that I don’t want to be noticed, thought well of, admired for my good taste and sophistication. It’s not that I don’t want to be appreciated. It’s not that I am un-vain. I am as self-absorbedly preening as an adolescent moonwalking with a selfie stick at Disney. But I am also painfully self-conscious. I remember the first time I heard a recording of my speaking voice. I’ve never fully recovered. I admire people who can dress well, trying hard without seeming to try hard. I admire them the same way I admire people who can juggle or do higher level math. What I want really is the most absurd control freak fantasy. I want to be noticed but on my own terms.
I won’t ever wear a Rolex watch, not because I don’t like wildly fancy things or think one shouldn’t spend money on such, but because wearing such a noticeable device would give me fits. It would be like wearing a bat signal of personal wealth, taste, and sophistication. What I want, I’ve decided, is the equivalent of the Honda Civic of everything, not too hot, not too cold. Think of it as normcore as a way of life. When normcore became a brief fad, I believe it meant young, fashionable people wearing white sweatpants and Reeboks ironically. But immediately I felt it as a system after my own dadland heart. I don’t want selvedge denim, shell cordovan double monk straps, a Pappy Van Winkle neat, a Porsche 930, a Klon Centaur. I want the Honda Civic of tennis rackets, running shoes, beers, refrigerators, sweaters. There are too many choices and the differences between them are small enough to be essentially neurotic. I just want the mild-mannered, generally reliable, historically trustworthy choice that I can choose and then run until the wheels fall off, not out of some larger sense of thrift but because using said object until the wheels fall off forestalls yet another painful decision matrix of existential despair. Sing me those 501 Blues, deliver me the Dell Inspiron, the Bass Weejun, the Gibson Epiphone. Mr. Coffee makes it fine enough for me.
But perhaps my uniform is more like military fatigues or camouflage than I’ve realized. A uniform that’s meant to blend me into my current background. I am not in the jungles of Vietnam or in the Kuwaiti desert. Obviously. I remember when soldiers started wearing the seemingly pixelated tan camouflage. The current background I’m blending into must be generic male with job. It’s a corporate jungle of parking decks and overbuilt planters, VPNs and magnetic identity cards. Read the runes in the whorled cubicle wall. I have been conscripted but in ways I can’t fully perceive. The uniform both is and isn’t a representation of my true self. Today it’s cold and I am wearing a sweater over my blue shirt. There is a man riding a horse swinging a polo mallet embroidered over my left breast. The fact that this grey sweater has this icon is both meaningful and not. I myself have never cared much for horses.