#7

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Words: Here I am in adolescence with peach-blood I've so often mistaken for tar, with a sore back and a swollen eyelid, feeling introspective even though I normally don’t like doing that in public- it seems sort of gross. Nevertheless, adolescence is always running with the idea that there's some concrete Other, a rock and roll wall to push at with a vague name. But I can't help thinking that there are no Others; there is only us. There’s already been so much written on technology but it’s still worth repeating, I think, that it’s burning up our borders while putting quarter-sized lacunae between us, turning the Self into a small, personal exhibit that we ourselves curate, distorting expectations of both others and ourselves, preaching the allure of the Instant Self, the desire to be simple and digestible and, above all, watchable. Have you prepared a watchable self? Have you assumed the strange, schizophrenic role as both the voyeur and the surveyed? If not, I probably don’t know you (just kidding but not entirely). I feel really sad about this but complexly, this gridlock of borderless, ever-connectedness makes one feel much smaller than one did before, and I keep having this recurring dream where I’m in a room in front of a large group of people, all of them staring silently at me while I bleed profusely. It’s obviously made all the worse by the fact that no one will say anything, and I wake up feeling like the immortal, flexibly gorgeous myths I have been living by are not safe. I keep waiting for someone to tell me, succinctly, what I have to breach, like that part in Barton Fink when Charlie tells Barton, “You don’t listen! You don’t listen!” And the audience is breathing a big sigh of relief because they thought they were the only ones who noticed it. But there’s no crowd watching you bleed, observing you as you wait for their assessment, and it's easy to say but a whole new thing to really know it. I think I read, once, that we get half the amount of attention than what we think we get. And from personal experience, the people who actually are thinking about you are not kindling the thoughts you’d at all expect. DFW wrote in The Pale King that life is what you pay attention to, and I would only expect that most people have more pleasurable things to consider. Although my point isn’t just, you know, that no one is as special as they think they are, or that everyone’s a narcissist, or anything. It’s just that we’re all both overestimating and underestimating the connection gap. It’s not as big as you think because there is no clear border or division; people are not countries and this tender dream of past decades’ revolts is a small, delicate volume, which has also already taken its place in a Hollywood graveyard, so insubstantial and snow-blind false. The gap is not a concrete wall, insurmountable and sporting big, political names, but there is still a small cavern, no bigger than a coin. Over it, we can speak to each other but our elbows don’t touch. The secrets we tell are about poignant things out of airport novels, and we cry together but there is still an unharvested, raw blacktop of mean, awful shit you can’t say. So the intimacy feels safe and sweet but somehow never completely real, and every morning you feel exhausted, people turn to ghosts while you grow paranoid, craving authenticity, asking yourself, why can’t you stop acting and just be? Why are you scorching up your tongue with unsaid secrets and drinking into sleep and building an inch-thick wall around your big, dumb, green-riled heart?

Music: Green Gloves by The National