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.
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.
It’s Father’s Day in Australia, today. I remember that once I saw a bunch of American posts about it and wished dad a happy FD, and he responded and told me that it was the American FD. I still told him I loved him. I always think of that every father’s day – it wasn’t really a big occasion for us, at least him and me. But it was still nice to do that with him. One of the few interactions we had exclusively over text.
My mother died in June. I haven’t really had any steam to write anything about it, at least any sort of thing that I want other people to read. Maybe a bit of poetry here and there. I haven’t written much poetry before now. Maybe it’s just some long-stymied impulse that’s breaking through, maybe it’s just the only form of writing that I have energy for at the moment. I was still having problems with my motivation after dad’s end of life process, which I was a pretty big part of. This has skittled me pretty hard. I have found myself simultaneously wanting to isolate and take time to myself, heal and get the wolves away from the door, and also be with other people – enjoy some sort of connection, talk to people and distract and cry and just enjoy the sense of connection that I’ve been so long without.
I went for a walk this afternoon. It’s something that I often find myself having to work up to, but then when I’m out the door and in the streets, or at least outside with fresh air and sun and space, I can’t believe that I didn’t do it sooner. I think that at my most normal – I think of it as the most connected – I think I’d like to be working outside, in a natural environment. People around but only at a distance, close enough to see but not enough to easily talk to, a feeling of detached companionship with people I don’t know. Sounds lovely to me – notwithstanding the feeling of intimacy that comes with having a partner at home who I can just be with, drop the walls and enjoy. the company of in a deeper way. Wasn’t that how it was meant to be?
On my walk this afternoon, I sat in the sun and a lady and her little dog came into the park. The little dog wanted to play with me and kept bringing me the ball her owner was throwing for her. All the lady did was apologize for the disturbance and tell me that the little dog would adopt anyone who played with her. It was a nice little interaction and I felt better after it, though I also probably found the sun and all the outsidery that I was in healthy, too.
I need to write here more often. I have a burgeoning To Do list, but the problem is that most of it is also stuff that I want to write. I keep getting these great ideas, scribbing them down. I’ve even gotten to the point where I’ve organised them in a vague sort of way, or at least organised the process of idea capture enough to where very little gets through. Maybe the occasional thing that occurs right before I fall asleep, but even then not often. But nothing is elaborated on, nothing is fleshed out properly. I’ve got so many names and ideas and concepts and little paragraphs typed out, and they’ve never gone anywhere. I should get into that sort of thing. I’ve either been too locking in to what my poor brain has perceived as a battle for survival to have any time for the frivolities of writing, or I’ve been trying to rest and recuperate for the next situation that I can see arising in the future. I’ve been in fight or flight for so long that I suspect that’s the principle lens through how I see the world.
Stupid thing is, even this is out of whack. I have never actually been in imminent danger of losing my life, at least for the last ten years or so since I quit drinking. But I’ve also been so fixated on that idea that the stuff that matters to my mental health – actually writing – has fallen by the wayside for most of these finite years I have. I’ve neglected spiritual survival for physical survival, and this shows in the excesses of my body and horrid self perception that I have of my mental health. I need to try and tune these things up. Stop acting like I’m in the line of fire for some imagined threat, but also give my mental space the nourishment and output that it seems to need to grow. Even just typing this has felt good, and it’s not even about anything in specific, really.
Eventually I think I will get back on track, start writing something creatively instead of bemoaning my lack of output. In the meantime, I think I just need a rest. Maybe I need to stay off youtube as well as the bottle.
And eventually, I’ll feel okay to talk about my mother, my father and everything in between. Might be a little while before that happens, though.
Well,here I am, yet again. Hopefully this one sticks. I paid for this one, after all. I’m currently in my final year of a Masters degree, majoring in Writing, Editing and Publishing. I have nothing left to do except my dissertation. Feels like I’m standing at the bottom of the tallest mountain of all, looking up at the grand vista in reverse, from the vista itself. Maybe that analogy bears out, we’ll see.
The degree has been great. I quit a social work undergrad to get back into something that I was more motivated to do. I have a lot of thoughts on social work and even how it plays with what I’ve been doing in the Masters, but that can wait.
The main thing that I’ve discovered, at least in terms of unearthing knowledge, is that editing is fun. I used to be of the opinion that you had to write it perfectly the first time around, and that editing was for someone else to do. But, it’s been a great part of the process to learn about and I can really see the value in it now. Second, Creative Non-Fiction has been the discovery of a lifetime. I was aware that the genre existed, of course – it just wasn’t something that I ever thought I’d be particularly interested in writing, never mind that I’d be good at it. This has also been connected to something else that’s come crashing into my life in this strange period of it – the awareness of a class consciousness, which I think I’ll also have more to say about in the future.
The short version is that I appear to have lived a life that is at least entertaining to other people. For me, it’s often been so challenging and saddening that I haven’t thought it interesting in any way at all. But this is also a feature of people in lower socio-economic positions, it seems – they don’t see themselves as being worthy of being talked about. Since I’ve been at the university I’m at, I’ve met dozens of upper middle class people who have lived completely prosaic lives, right down to the stereotypical and completely boring way they take holidays and relate to their families (in particular, the younger people at the end of their undergrad seem to be fascinated by their families and things that their relatives have done, and think that everyone else will find them enrapturing as well). But they are all the same, from their conduct to their dress to their attitudes, and I have found my eyes glazing over the longer they talk. It’s all very uninteresting but they think it’s amazing, and have no problem with telling you all about it. By contrast, people in the ‘lower’ class have much better stories to tell – true, many of them involve pointless dramas and are entirely epics of self-destruction, but at least things are happening. There is frisson, action, movement. Their stories matter more to them because there are stakes. There’s nothing in a rich person visiting Italy because they’re never in danger or excitement – everything that’s interesting comes from outside themselves.
Perhaps I am being uncharitable – these thoughts are still in a very early conception. End of the day, I don’t imagine that people better off than me money wise give a shit about what I think about their situation or their stories. I think the negative space generated by class consciousness – that is, awareness of my Self – has come into being. It explains a lot of things in my life, from the relationships I’ve had to my lack of understanding about my place in the world.
I wonder what other tools I have available to me that I don’t know about, and where all of this will lead me. Either way – it’s good to be back on the keys again.
Bodie Van 