I came across a recently created Instagram account for a local “social club.” I’ve lived in Ventura nearly 10 years, and I have succeeded in making fewer than that number of friends in that time, many of whom I would not still consider friends. this “social club” purports to be a solution to a frequent complaint about Ventura, about how hard it is to meet people and make friends. it’s an interesting phenomenon of contemporary American society, once thought to be the land of friendship and democracy, that so many people complain about the lack of meaningful friendships in their lives, yet can’t seem to connect with the other lonely people at the table next to them. Ventura seems especially insular, for reasons I’m not interested in exploring right now.
lately I’ve been trying to figure out what my life is. well, “lately” is a funny, inexact way to put that, but nonetheless, as I approach the middle of my 30s, I feel a pressure to really decide what it is I do, who it is I am, how it will be that I spend my time. I once thought of myself as a pretty great friend: reliable, empathetic, interested and easy to spend time with. I had many friends in college, nearly all of whom I’ve lost touch with, for reasons I’m not interested in explaining right now. through my 20s I was intensely isolated despite maintaining an apparently normal life. things changed, I restructured my life and rediscovered a kind of openness and gregariousness that had been abused out of me. I found myself at the end of my 20s without the kind of social circle people usually spend that time of their lives establishing. for a year or so I “got my groove back,” found some people to get drunk with, participated in drama, felt pretty good about where I was at. then COVID, some weirder drama that lost me some of those people I found, and now I’m here, in a much healthier relationship than I was in in my 20s, but similarly without much social life I could call my own.
sharing lives with people through sustained contact over time, the intertwining of experience and the creation of shared history, this all seems such a powerful source of meaning, one I envy people for, as I envy people with close knit, supportive families. with this in mind, I suspended my usual cynicism and paranoia about such things, and peaked into this “social club” to see if maybe there still is some chance for me to be a friend, here.
immediately upon entering the group’s discord server, after the mortifying ordeal of introducing myself, I was stricken with an intense allergic reaction to the normie millennialness of the group. the tone of the conversations is a noxious mixture of theatre kid enthusiasm, gamer nerdiness, intentional mispellings a la jomny sun, and a general ambience of preening niceness. everyone, of course, overuses the laugh-cry emoji, types “WAIT” in all caps, and repeats “im dead” ad mortem. i’m not crine, you’re crine. the final nail in the coffin of my hopes that maybe I could make even one friend here came as a picture of a tattoo depicting Pikachu dressed in Sith Lord robes. my alienation glows like the light off a UFO.
back at the end of 2024, I had planned to write a kind of call to arms for myself for how to reestablish a perspective and direction as an American artist amidst the apparent stagnation of our culture by neoliberalism and political dysfunction. among the things I thought it important to prioritize was the creation of communities between apparently divergent groups that nonetheless share basic principles. at the time, being jaded from the first Trump presidency, I anticipated the basic problem of being an engaged American artist only becoming intensified. however, the extremity of Trump’s fascistic pretensions and the attendant derangement of the sociopolitical discourse (not to mention the psychosis of the Market) have left me feeling like an exile in the Desert, without a clear view of the City against which I usually define myself.
yesterday my coworker showed me that clip of Brian Eno, one I’m constantly thinking about:
my coworker meant for us to laugh at Eno’s droll call for artists to avoid getting a job. this clip is never far from mind for me, both because I know I spend too much of my time at my job and not enough of it working on what I really care about, but also because I lament that I do not have a community of people engaged in passionate creative activity; there is no “scenius” here in Ventura that I have been able to find. one could say its for lack of trying, and it’s true, I don’t go to open mics or join local writing groups or even strike up conversations at the punk shows around town. but I’m coming to suspect that my reticence to even try is not only a product of my cowardice (though it is that too). it may just be that the time and place I find myself in are not conducive to that kind of creative life, or that kind of political life, or that kind of social life. when even the punks pay for Disney+, to say nothing of the average adult, what hope is there of finding comrades-in-refusal?
“I have arrived at the end of my path, there where the unthinkable presents itself like an abyss. Faced by this nothingness, I can no longer move forward. All I can do is retreat, while contemplating the road I have already traveled. With every step I take backward, I form a reality before me.”
“The Hermit” – The Way of the Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky
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