I don't want to donate but if I really have to...
Hello friends, enemies, and indifferent strangers,
I hope you’re all keeping as well as the hellworld permits. I’m writing with a note just for my own sake. Of course, they’re all for my own sake, really, none of this is selfless, but I have many sorts of sakes, unsorted, stuffed in my big sack of sakes, and this sake’s unique. (“Excuse my failing sense of humor.”) Let me cut to the chase before I lose my battle against my impulse to write a long stupid preface: I’m gonna write these two things I agreed to write and you’re gonna help me, whether you want to or not. deep breath
I hereby promise before you, my sordid frenemies and assorted enemacquaintances, that if I don’t write these things then I will donate a hundred bucks to the presidential campaigns, fifty for that racist asshole Trump and fifty for that racist asshole Biden. I hate them both and want neither to win, and I’m also pretty cheap and money’s kinda tight so a hunnerd bucks is an amount I would feel in my wallet nerve. So yeah, either I do the writing or that’s the punishment, with God as my witness. You might think to yourself ‘wow this sounds like the desperate act of a Nate caught in a trap’ and then begin to cackle like the villain you are but you’d be only half right my dear fremesis - this is my daring escape from that trap, so swallow that evil laugh. Of course in the long run we all deserve a better freedom than merely the freedom of choosing a different trap, but for now it’ll do.
I guess I’ll put the long stupid preface second (we do everything in the wrong order here at Open Mode Industries). My employer is being especially enervating right now, budgets and cuts and so on, and while I’m not on the chopping block myself, it’s upsetting and tiring and I’ve been experiencing my feelings on that and the feelings of colleagues who’ve talked with me about it as a worn out sadness. This is a ready to hand feeling in the present hellscape, plus it’s midsemester which is always a low point in both emotions and energy, and all of that has happened to line up with two writing projects I agreed to take on.
Also, these projects are both things where I’m fleshing out what are for me new ideas (so I’m nervous that maybe I’m wrong about some of it and also nervous that I’m going to express these ideas clumsily, which I think is just sort of baked in to having new thoughts) and also ideas that feel a little weird relative to the audience (so I’m nervous the ideas will be rejected, and at a gut level to some and only some extent I feel like this rejection will be deserved), and these projects are both things where I’m involved with institutions that feel above my paygrade (both in the sense that I’m intimidated and in the sense that I’m resentful, those are braided together in ways that are hard to disentangle) which amplifies my worry about rejection and also fosters an impulse to be like “you can’t fire me, I already quit” except not in a cool tough I-don’t-give-a-fuck-way but in a mumbling to myself with wet eyes kind of way. That’s all amped up by the bad context.
I also think this impulse to pack in these pieces of writing is both bad and confused, in that, to be totally frank, it involves a fantasy of me fucking up a thing I care about, that fucking up standing as a response to an untenable situation, as if my employer and the other ennervators are then gonna go ‘oh wow we didn’t realize how much this all was weighing on you, we’re sorry!’ Like there’s a fantasy of creating problems for myself and that resulting in some eventual recognition from on high, which is absurd because the people on high are the sorts who look through people, the types who check your nametag and scan the room over your shoulder with a practiced smile. They don’t extend recognition and I wouldn’t actually want it - not really, not in my best self anyway - even if it were available. So I have to slip out of that self-defeating impulse into a different one.
Emotionally speaking, life’s a game of rock paper scissors, or rather, sadness anger boredom. (Of course I don’t really think those are the only three human feelings. There’s also the other four: tired, scared, sleeping, and the void.) My point is that anger beats sadness, not least because anger is an energy and anger is a commitment. (“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power Do you know that you can use it?”) So I commit to writing these stupid fucking essays of mine and if I chicken out then I’ll give those racist assholes money to help them become king, which I really don’t want to do. And making this commitment is also my way to rise above (that’s the one can’t miss Black Flag song imho) and to build a little fire with this anger, fire spreads, see, so it will feel like I’m writing against all the things and people that I find so depleting, rather than dwelling in that depletion. I feel little silly about needing to do this but I don’t have the time and energy for focusing on feeling silly right now, I’ve already lost several days to this funk I’ve been in - a funk I insist is reasonable given the nested stupid situations - and these deadlines are looming! I choose instead to focus on how stupid the situation is - lots of employers are, like mine, so enervating that they induce a kind of involuntary quiet quitting through employee despondency. This might sound like I’m trying to get mad at my employer in order to motivate myself to do my job, and it’s almost that, except my employer doesn’t really care if I keep writing or not - they’re indifferent subjectively and hostile objectively - so it’s more like I’m getting mad to preserve my motivation to do one of the parts of the work that feels like a calling.
Wrote this while listening the first half of the I Spy discography by the way. The first eleven songs were originally put out as the Revenge of the Little Shits ten inch. I had it on CD and for a while I’d listen to it several times a day. I’ve come back to it a few times, especially “I get mad, I get mad, I get mad.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXgGqYpZzVg&t=354s) I relate to the title and to how the lyrics are about feeling trapped, with a burden of self-consciousness as part of the trap, but it’s also about keeping on keeping on through the energy and commitment of anger. Anger’s a mixed thing at best but one of the times it occurs is in the face of that which is morally outrageous, and moral outrage implies possibility: whatever offends our sense of right and wrong can be eliminated - I don’t mean that as a logical claim or whatever, but as a statement of how things feel. When things don’t seem possible so that we can’t connect the dots for how to get out of a fucked situation, a reminder that the situation is absolutely unacceptable can hurt but also helps prevent tired resignation. ‘YOU be reasonable, I’ll be PISSED OFF’ kinda thing.
I’ve been flippant in some of this but I mean that last bit absolutely seriously and it’s tied to a political position I’m committed to: people have capacities individually and even more so collectively that outstrip what we think we’re capable of. The hellworld and its ideologues make us feel small and weak, hide our capacities from us. Outrage is a way to tap into capacity without having to know what the capacity consists of, and our potentials are both discovered and developed through action. Human history travels its better paths heart first more than head first, so to speak.
One other thing I’ll say then I’m out (got dishes to wash and a cop show to watch). I realize that saying I’m using anger to dodge the sadness and re-enliven myself, I’m aware that I’m being pretty negative. I do take great joy in the intellectual work and the camaraderie of doing that work in community. The thing is, that joy is a reward but not a tool or a motivation. The anger helps me to push aside the sadness and fear, helps me to stop giving up and get back in front of the keyboard, and then being in front of the keyboard I eventually find that great joy. I’d be a lot less satisfied if I gave up on writing, so that packing in these pieces would come at a cost to my own happiness. The thing is that the promise of that future satisfaction isn’t enough to get me back in the chair. The anger is the tougher friend of that tenderer happiness, helping protect it from the ghouls.
So, yeah, I'm gonna write my stupid essays cuz I don't want to donate to any presidential asshole ("another motherfucker in a motorcade!"). The one's due in a week or so, and the other's due in early April. Once the pieces are fully submitted and rejected I'll update you accordingly. Onward and upward, my fradversaries. Keep on trucking.
ps- in my thing about condescension here https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension I talked about being into punk and what it did for me. I think this thing of using anger to push away some of the hellworld's tentacles - not to say I escape from it but just to say that that open up a little room in my head to think despite it - is related to that. Chopping a little hole in the received common sense and available scripts, then, uh, holing up there for a little while, to have a little time having a place - and a self - that feels like it's mine.