I think that I’ve introduced myself enough on here, gotten a basic hold of processes again. I am still quite griefsick and horribly off-kilter. My sleeping habits are shithouse and I haven’t been eating particularly well. I think part of the issue is that I’ve simultaneously got a horribly overstuffed room and no energy to clean it, but also my entire existence is stuffed with too much shit. I have books and video games and photography gear and my dead parent’s stuff and a large kitchen’s worth of cooking gear and a ton of other shit that will probably never get used.

I want to run through a couple of internet artifacts that I’ve unearthed. I want this blog, at it’s core, to help serve as a bit of an archive, at least until I can perhaps afford my own media server or whatever.

At this point in time, I feel like in my room, I’m at this point:

I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.

— Louise Miller 🐐 (@louisethebaker) April 8, 2021

I still want to hang onto a lot of the shit that is lying around in this room. I like photography, and if I had space, I’d 110% have an ‘art room’, of which a photography setup would be central to that. I don’t have that at the moment, and I might never, but at the moment I think it helps with the strange guilt that assaults me occasionally. It’s okay to have interests – hell, they’re almost all I have left. At least, that’s often how it feels.

I think Kafka, here in his I am a Memory Come Alive – Autobiographical Writings, gets at what I’m trying to do here (I love Franz Kafka. I will be talking more about him at other times):

‘Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres.’

– Franz Kafka, I am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings

This ecapsulates the process of what I’m trying to do (I realise that what I’m essentially talking about is minimising all of my shit – physical, biological, mental, possibly even spiritual and emotional, but I’m trying to unpick this as thoroughly and sustainably as possible). Small, subtle things that can offload, as harmlessly as possible, the strain that I’ve been feeling. That’s not to say that I just want to run from it.

I’ve been drug and alcohol free for quite a while now. Not completely – I still have an antidepressant that I take once a day, and I have had a beer here and there (less than one a month at this point, so negligible). This is partly because I don’t want to numb the sensations down. I don’t think I ever drank in the past as a coping mechanism. It was just an ignorance of the consequences of overdoing it, and my upbringing definitely did not encourage moderation. I’m trying to walk the fine line between giving my grief and trauma the space to breathe, for me to be aware of it, but then I also need to heal from it and integrate and expel what those wounds can teach me. This logic is starting to coil in on itself a bit but the idea is there. I’m just trying to be as honest with myself as I can be, without running from it. You have to make friends with your monsters if you want them to leave you alone.

This sort of dovetails into another artifact – Michael Caine’s adage about using the difficulty.

There is a lot of inertia in my life – at least, that’s how I currently perceive it. It’s hard to get up and go through the day, the few tasks I have annoy me when they impinge on time that I really only spend sleeping and fucking around with pens and paper. I suspect half of this is grief, and the other half isn’t necessarily laziness but just tiredness. That’s a story for another time. The point here is that I think I need to use the fact that I have so little energy to really focus on what matters, and use it to shift the biggest parts of this mental muck that I’ve collected. Again, probably something for another time. I just need to cut through the shit instead of seeing it as a monolithic, immovable thing that makes me want to give up before I start.
Maybe I’m just describing a way of coping with executive dysfunction here. I don’t know. As I say – work in progress.

From this ‘use the difficulty’ idea, I was surprised to almost immediately draw a link between that and this Samuel Johnson quote:

‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.’

-attributed to Samuel Johnson

First off – I initially misremembered this quote as both a Neitzsche quote, and a Samuel Beckett quote. I got there in the end. Makes me wonder what they said that did that (might have just been the name with Beckett).

Second – the link between Use the Difficulty and making oneself a beast is, I think, a delineation of process, or the geneology that I’ve put in the title of this entry. First, realise that the setbacks aren’t actually setbacks (also note ‘The Obstacle is the Way’ from Ryan Holiday here). Then, you can understand that so much of those obstacles are also just painful, stupid ways of being a man that have been learned.

To me, the beast being referred to in this context is that of the true self – maybe there is something of Freud’s Id vs. Ego in here as well. I don’t want to overstate that though, because I think Freud enshrines these terms with some metaphysical quality that means they cannot be overcome or mixed. I think that ‘Manliness’ and ‘Beastliness’, how I’m writing about them here, are merely tools. Complicated tools with a certain amount of biology and society attached to them, sure, but they also aren’t these inviolable truths of existence. Sometimes you need to be a beast. Sometimes you need to be a man. And with regard to cutting through the mental muck, I think it’s another useful thing to remember exactly how much shit is put upon me by my fellow men (that is, society), and how much of my own motivations are my own (the beastly).

Perhaps the link is tenuous but these two little quotes also illustrate different dimensions of the same sort of issue. I’m probably just overthinking all of this shit but at least it’s getting out of my head. That feels nice.

Then third, I come back to one of my first big literary loves (I’m currently on leave from my Dissertation about his process) – old Charles Bukowski. I’m trying to integrate his strangely motivational epitaph into my life a bit more.

Now, it’s a hell of a phrase, especially in this late-capitalism hellscape. Everyone is on the grind, and even the anti-grinders are on their own sort of grind. But I think that this is one of the most honest pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. Basically, it’s that opening chapter of Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, distilled down into two words.

The less you try at things that don’t matter, the more energy you have to spend on things that do matter. But it also has to come without the trying. It’s natural, as natural as breathing. I’m not quite at that level yet but I think that this is because of all of the other words that I’ve written here – there’s too much inertia, too much other shit in the way. I feel bad when I haven’t written. The dreams turn sour, my mind wanders into needless consumption. And it’s all about shifting all of that shit away –

• Realising it’s small things that matter (subtle manouvres),

• Realising that the difficulties are useful,

• Shedding the conditioning of society (making oneself beastly)

So that one doesn’t have to try,

is what I’m trying to get at here. Shed doubts, take the plunge. It’s not like trying to succeed at getting a 9 to 5 has given me riches.

I think I just need to stop overthinking things and give myself permission to do what I want, sometimes.