Ooof!
Today, the contradictions within are doing a do-si-do. My square dance brain is on the wobble. I can’t get my thinking straight on anything. The monkey mind has gone berserk. In one hand it’s eating a banana. The other is flinging shit at the walls. In the cartoon version of this, I look like Fred Flintstone. The factory concerto speeds up to a frenetic pace while inside my head a blue machine with gears and pistons and wheels spins and chugs furiously like a locomotive until the music crescendos with the sound of clocks busting and springs popping. My eyes have that hypnotized spiral glaze. Smoke billows from my ears. Stars circle my head like a halo.
In order to write, I’m trying to be gentle and slow. I’m trying to coax the words into sentences, catch butterflies in this oversized net. Some part of me wants headers and bullet points. Part of me wants an outline. I’m asking myself, what’s going on in there? I’m telling myself to pick a thought, name it, follow it around wherever it wanders. But my thoughts are undisciplined like a toddler that’s recently learned to walk – arms waving and reaching for everything. What it grasps goes quickly into its slobbery mouth and is just as quickly discarded. Yellow plastic block. Remote control. Sunglasses. A toy key ring with oversized plastic keys.
So what is going on in there?
I’m stuck. I’ve been stuck. On just about everything. Not in a bad way stuck, but keeping with the cartoon theme, in a Tasmanian devil tornado-ing around the room stuck. I’m not sure where to locate optimism or where to place my energies. On the one hand, I feel like I have things to offer the world – wisdom, sentimentality, insight, poetry? Something more than what I’m currently doing. On the other hand, I feel out of step with the world. I want connections, yet society sloughs towards isolation. I want depth and slowness, but we’re spinning wildly towards inauthenticity, sheen, marketing, and clicks. One of my browser tabs is open to the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats… “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”
Bigness
I want to create. I want to contribute. I want to make this place better. Over my shoulder, my ego whispers – you want to be recognized, you want to be seen, you want to be known on multiple levels. Maybe.
In the shower, I was mentally composing an email to Stuart of Broke-Ass Stuart fame. He’s a writer, editor, man about town, and former mayoral candidate. I’ve only met him once or twice. We talked in Kerouac Ally. I doubt he’d remember the encounter. He’s got vagabond vibes, but is too stylish and too put together to be a vagabond. He strikes me as an outsized character in a town with a vibrant history of outsized characters – a colorful swath of fabric woven into this patchwork city. The email I was writing was a pitch for a weekly or bi-weekly column that I would write: “Old Man Shakes Fist at Cloud” or “Letters from a Pleasant but Mildly Disgruntled SF Fanboy.” I might use the word fortnightly instead of bi-weekly just to get his attention.
I’d probably sputter out after three articles (which I also started composing in the shower). The first would be my intro – who I am and why I came to SF. I’d quote Everclear’s song “White Men in Black Suits”: “Yes I moved to San Francisco just to see what I could be.” The second article would be a defense of my neighborhood – sure it’s douchey and might lack soul, but it’s aesthetically pleasing, usually sunny, and there is character to it if you get to know the people who work in the restaurants and bars. The third article, and everything that follows, would probably be a criticism of modern culture or some attempt to implore people to slow down and fix things (the opposite of tech culture’s move fast and break things), put the phone down, stop ordering online, spend time in physical world.
I could sense the urge to write was part of something bigger, a feeling (or combination of feelings) that’s hard to pinpoint and harder to articulate. Some days, I feel as though I’m wasting away in the fruit rotting on the vine sort of way. As though I have something to offer, maybe several things to offer, but don’t know how to put myself out into the world or if I even want to. Some days, I want to find new communities, feed off of the energy of people who are doing things. Some days I want to find purpose in place – because I happen to like this place. When I think too deeply about purpose or what one contributes, I have to remind myself that the rocks and trees do not worry about their sense of purpose. I’d do well to remind myself to be more like the rocks and trees.
Smallness
While I may feel that I have more in me than I can possibly set loose, I also feel inconsequential and clumsy amid the crashing waves of modern society. Sure, there’s the awfulness of our current political climate, but there are all of the other forces too: AI, digital surveillance, growing inequality, cynicism, and selfishness. Faced with these things, it seems like the best I can do, the small force I can muster, is to ignore the news and try to live life on my own terms. As such, I feel like I may be entering into the “dying breed” phase of life. A cantankerous old man who has been passed by. An oddity. A relic. An anachronism.
Not long ago, I read a story about how grocery stores are redesigning their physical space to better accommodate the store clerks who wheel around carts filling online orders. Grocery stores are becoming less shopper friendly and beginning to look and function more like warehouses. This change, which may be minor, seems emblematic of a larger movement in which we’re actively getting rid of public spaces and further embracing our isolation behind closed doors and handheld screens. With each of these subtle changes (driverless cars, contactless delivery, door cams, AI enabled glasses with facial recognition, AI friends) I feel as though our humanness is disappearing. Our ability to trust (which is the basis of connection) is eroding. I’m tempted to say these things are slipping through our fingers, but a more accurate assessment might be that we’re actively running through the golden field of tall grasses with our arms outstretched willingly embracing these changes. And for those of us who may be less willing to embrace these changes, they’re being forced on us.
This was my monkey mind swinging between bigness and smallness, swinging between wanting to be a visible and meaningful contributor and also wanting to disappear. I feel like I had more things to say, but as so often happens, the writing is slower than the thinking and the forgetting is faster than both.