11/4/14

Your Things

Thinking a lot about grunge records. Indie as a genre. I was talking with someone recently and I made this joke about how all I'm really good for, my skill, my "thing" seems to be reminding people about stuff that that they know about, have already forgotten about. Like indie rock bands from the 1990s. Or other things-- I'm usually way behind the curve. My lateness and my... "enthusiasm" could be a great entry point for other people. Maybe you don't know a lot about Miriam Makeba. I don't either but I'm a big fan. It's okay to not know a lot about her biography but to check out her music. It doesn't make you ignorant or stupid. It doesn't make you more ignorant or stupid than me, I mean. So it's okay. Let me be this for you, a doorway, an entry point. Your goofy friend who gets uncool and excited about dumb unhip shit. That's my "thing" I guess, right?

Couple things about that:
- It's not like I actually make or do anything, myself. So there's no glory to me. I know that. I don't want glory.
- It's a way to be in the world without actually being in the world. It's a kind of cop-out. Being a sort of vessel or mirror or something, a way of not being a person.



But then again, even having a "thing" is sort of silly. Who has a thing. Who, really, wants to be better understood, boiled down. Why is being a vessel a bad thing? Why do I have to be a person? I'm not so interested in myself. I don't want to bury myself. I don't want to superimpose myself into the things I love. It's more that I don't feel that I have a self. I don't feel like I am a person, so instead I look for, if not myself, a way of existing. SO I go by what I love, by what turns me on.

I'm not saying that my love or my taste has any meaning. I'm saying, in fact, that it has none. That it's not at all particular to me. That's it's not a way to be a person or have a thing-- it's a way to meet other people, to be less of a person, less of a thing, more general. I don't want what I love to inform who I "am". I want what I love to be, full stop.



But sometimes, in some way, somehow this got lost. At some point, I stopped loving things. Not to be dramatic, but at some point the idea of passion just stopped occurring to me. I don't want to plumb the depths anymore. I don't want to have to go so deep. It's humiliating; depth. Interiority. How silly and strange. I just noticed that things that used to turn me on like writing, music, live performance, talking to people, kissing, whatever. Nothing seems enticing. I wonder. I got some mean feedback. There was weather. I could have been knocked off my post and been to ashamed or too unfocused to notice. Why does it always come down to me simply not being vigilant enough? This is my answer to everything-- I must have done something to deserve this. I could have a physical injury (such as I do right now), one that could and does happen to literally EVERYBODY. And still, I think, I assume-- this must have happened because I'm such a uniquely shitty person. I must have put myself in harm's way somehow. It seems to corroborate my general feeling, my hunch, that I am worthless and that everything is constantly in the process of falling apart. That we live in a chaotic world and that some people can negotiate that and some people fool themselves and others into believing that they can negotiate it, but I cannot fool anyone and am doomed, by my own mistakes somehow, to suffer continually.



I was given to understand that this was like, a nuclear reaction. Like it just perpetuated itself, and all I could do was keep dumping water onto the toxic fuel of my so-called self obsession. Is it self-obsession if you hate yourself? Tempted to draw a comparison, to flatten out all nuances of narcissism. To make everything be the same because, as I said, then it seems to explain so much more. If the theory is stupider it's so much more applicable. The problem is that I think I exist and my pretending to be in denial of my existence is what's keeping me suffering. That was one way of thinking about it. But no, it's not exactly the same. I'm not served, even on an unconscious level, by being so down on myself. I know it's a turn off. I know people don't want to hear about it. But I also know it's not the fuel. Or it doesn't have to be. I also know that it's not because I deserve it. It's so easy to blame nuclear power. It's so easy to judge. I guess I've been listening to the wrong things. I don't know.

These are some videos of songs I hadn't heard in a while. Maybe you forgot about them or maybe you didn't know they existed in the first place. Or that we do too.

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