fuck I’m supposed to do this still? like, every day?
i’m making brownies for the first time in a while. i pulled them out a bit too early, but didn’t realize it til after i transferred them from the pan to the cooling rack. some hemming and hawing. transferred the parchment paper and brownies back into the pan and turned the oven back on. now the oven timer is beeping at me. nope, still a little underdone. typing typing typing for about a minute more, didn’t put another timer on just going by feel. this post i think might be an important one, but only for me. up til now i’ve been studiously avoiding mentioning my therapist. who likes to hear about someone’s therapist? no one! fuck “normalizing taking care of your mental health.” like, that’s great and all, (hold on brownies are done) but a real conversation about mental health would involve how social conditions are making everyone depressed anxious borderline bipolar whatever, and so when employers and corporations are all saying like, “normalize mental health!” i can’t help but roll my eyes and do the jackoff gesture.
but my therapist and i have been working on a lot of the blocks and neuroses i have about writing, why i can never finish things, why it’s hard for me to broach certain topics, what emotions i feel like i can and can’t express. i haven’t talked to her about this project yet because i haven’t seen her since starting it, but i think this is a good project for brute forcing me into facing some of the things i avoid thinking about and therefore writing. if you read me at all, i think it’s pretty obvious i feel a lot more comfortable writing about things that aren’t me, and not just because i say all the time that i don’t like writing about me. the confidence and skill that comes through when i’m, i dunno, explaining what i understand about the FTX collapse, it’s very different when i try to talk about myself. i become evasive, less playful, more vague. but what this project will inevitably run up against is: i won’t always have something to explain in a pithy way, just because coming up with something like that, and doing enough research to sound convincing, isn’t possible on the time constraint i’ve given myself. sometimes that’s what these posts will be, for sure. but today, i avoided even thinking about what i’d write because i had no idea what to write about. started this with what i was doing at the time: making brownies.
alright, the straight dope, what’s been bothering me the last few days, and not some abstracted geopolitical problem that yes is important but does not actually affect my day to day life right now. my therapist thinks when i abstract into complaining about “social conditions” or political issues that that’s me subconsciously skirting something in my psyche that’s uncomfortable, upsetting, whatever. like i mentioned yesterday, the repressed always returns, but in mutated, veiled, symbolic, or some other disfigured form. so what’s bothering me? well, the way my life is right now, no one around me, not among the people i interact with daily, face to face, in non-virtual spaces, no one has any of the same interests as me. that’s fine, i guess, i have niche, particular interests that most people don’t share. what the problem is is that i’m not someone who will be sort of arrogant, or publicly standoffish, about that fact; rather than tell people i think the books they’re reading are popular trash that offend my sensibilities, or else are works intended for children that adults shouldn’t read, i say “oh no I haven’t read it, I’ve seen it at work a lot, I know a lot of people like it smiley face.” this requires that i continually dumb myself down so as to be pleasant dinner company, and repeatedly performing that role becomes an impediment to fully being what it is i feel i am, namely, an intelligent and gifted literary artist who is overall disgusted with the present cultural and social landscape.
when my radar senses that someone, or the company i’m with, is not someone who i “vibe with,” my tendency is to half-dissociate, avoid looking at anything in particular, pay enough attention to smile or laugh or make a witty comment, but otherwise just sort of wait til i can get the fuck out of the scenario. this prevents me from being a present and fully observant person, which makes it hard to, you know, write from my experience. if my experience is always being halfway to checked out, then all the details to draw on melt into a miasmic haze of indiscernibility. why this is my tendency is not something i’ll divulge here: see, cody, writing plainly here can help you tease out what you should save for fiction! it’s working!
anyway, i recognized myself doing this, this strategic deployment of an attention deficit, last night at dinner with my girlfriend’s parents, who know the chef at a popular ojai restaurant and so chatted with him. i did not like the chef, but why isn’t important: what i realized though is that instead of depriving the situation of my attention, giving just enough to survive the interaction, what i ought to do when feeling that way is pay extremely close attention, and start tactically clowning. withdrawing is one way to create space for myself, but it’s passive, and strategically weak—there’s probably an Art of War quote to support this notion but this post i think i need to work only with my thoughts. advancing, by playing a ridiculous character, this also creates space for myself (not to mention potential writing material), but actively, assertively.
on a separate but related thread, i saw a carl jung quote in a dumb meme somewhere today, the quote about how loneliness isn’t about being physically alone, but is what happens when you feel like what you have to express won’t be understood by those around you, making the prospect feel helpless. loneliness is the isolation of perceived solipsism. and not only do i often feel lonely in this way, but also i feel it is a detriment to my prospects as a writer. great artists almost always come out of scenes where lots of other artists are thinking about and discussing ideas about art, culture, politics, together, and i don’t have that, especially not where i live, which is as culturally barren as it is geographically beautiful. it’s possible this is a me problem: i don’t look hard enough, or i don’t make myself open and vulnerable enough to potentially be surprised in places i might have already written off. i’m feeling this more acutely lately since some of the online spaces i once found stimulating no longer satisfy the need for interesting conversation, plus i’m just not sure i’m the type of person who can navigate The Internet™️ effectively. i just never really figured out how to interact with Platforms in that way. i was always a lurker and a lowbie. not that i want to be Internet Famous, but there’s not much hope for an artist these days if they don’t have connections in their industry or if they can’t independently build an audience so that agents/publishers/galleries can capitalize without doing the work that agents/publishers/galleries once did, namely help artists find an audience. i admit that part of my problem with gaining traction is that i tend to not be very consistent, but hey, this stupid project? it means i have to do this every fucking day. grindset mindset bro.
truly hate this post for how unguarded i’m being but that’s why it’s good for me. if it’s good for you, please comment, or send me an email: palmtreesonfire at protonmail dot com.
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