Slash Catharsis

I've always been much more of a producer than a consumer.  In music, I preferred to create or play my own far more than I enjoyed listening.  The same is true for poetry as well, and in the past couple of years has been true of board games, too: I prefer to craft my own.  It's not that I believe my own work to be better than anyone else's; rather, I'm usually very skeptical about my own work.  But the process of creating--the work and satisfaction of turning something over and over in my head, perfecting the unfinished corners, tucking in the inefficiencies...ah.  That gets me.  I like that.
 

The same is less true of non-poetic writing, especially fiction.  I do love to turn a phrase, but writing is so much work.  I'd rather read someone else's hard-fought 250 pages than wrench my own way through the task of pulling a story down to earth.  That said, I enjoy the cheap words of expository writing (like this).  It affords me the pleasure of creating, without the work of slaving my creativity to a longer, oppressively structured narrative.  I'm not moving the story along, here.  This is the story.

What's curious to me is that my life has been, to this point, neatly divided between the poetic, musical, creative side (The Artist), the analytic, scholastic, working side (The Professional), and the personable, religious, social side (The Relative).  Years ago, I broke these three into Poetry, History, and the Sea; I still think that concept offers some useful parallels.  That much isn't too curious, though; lots of people have different aspects of their personality, different expressions of themselves.

The curious part, to me, is that all three are, for me, more or less mutually repulsive.  The Artist is a dark soul, overly emotive; the others think him an idiot hippie, or embarrassingly uncensored.  Meanwhile, The Artist thinks the Professional is a horribly self-important, soulless drone, and The Relative is a simpering people-pleaser.  The Professional and The Relative meet at parties from time to time, but never talk; we have nothing in common, except to describe the other in our own respective circles.

And, appropriately, the three have (almost entirely) different circles of relationships.  The Professional has friends at work who do not bleed into other realms; The Relative has family, a wife and kid, friends at church--all of whom are, also, carefully constrained to their own arenas.  The Artist used to have several bands, and at one point had a small following in the writing world, but has since lost both, whether to geography or silence; he's a wandering, lonely soul these days.

It struck me today how uncomfortable I am with any of the three pools of Myself overlapping.  I suppose I should have no legitimate objection to my work colleagues reading my poetry--but all the same, the very thought makes me uncomfortable and I would go out of my way to avoid it.  The same is true for family at work, or the reverse.  I'm fascinated by the thought that writers in the past may have had the same duplicitous existence, hiding their writing selves from their professional or family selves, and when we gaze back at an author through his or her own written words, we then emerge with a very discolored view.

At the same time, I diagnose my own behavior here as considerably unhealthy.  Creativity as catharsis for my other two Selves is normal enough, I suppose, but I rather think I should be more integrated overall.  I get the impression that many other people are more integrated--but, to admit my own snide arrogance, I confess that I credit others' well-balanced personhoods to their own shallow lack of creativity.  It's not hard to be well integrated when your three parts consist of TV Self, Work Self, and Sleeping Self.

Enough.  I'm sure you get the point, whoever you are.  This is a dark and only partial catharsis, here, and mostly unrecognizable as myself.  Don't be deceived.

Psalmist

I read Psalms from time to time.

As a child, the enemies I drew parallel to David's foes were bullies: other kids, meaner & more violent than myself, who punished me for being gentle.

Now the enemies, oft as not, live within: bitter roots and dark veins in my heart that need more punishing than I mete.

And I wonder, with these new interpretations, which the Psalmist meant.  Or does it matter?  Save us from our enemies: the hallway bully, and the dark-eyed heart.

Either way, I echo to myself.  That scrawny kid needed me, the gruff and iron-eyed adult, to protect his fragile energy.  And now I need the heart that scrappy kid possessed, narrowing his eyes into thin slits--

There are two of them; the usual tormenters.  One behind, one in front.  The one behind is to demonstrate some new technique he'd learned in martial arts.  The one in front, an audience.  I, the demonstration.  Technique du jour: a submission move.  "Just bow down," he says, "tap out."  He repeats: "Just bow and I'll let you go."  I won't; I won't; I tell him so and plant both feet.  Never having stood up to him before, I feel that thrill of freedom mixed with pain that follows change.  And, of course, in this case, just normal pain, too, the kind you get when elbows try to leave their place.  "Just bow down.  Jesus, what's wrong with you.  Just do it."

I never did.

And now I wonder, far removed from that warm-forged time: where is that stone-spined, clear-eyed youth?  What room have I kept him in?




January 2015

A Bureacratic Memory

"Come join us!" Four of them: two younger women, two older men, one a supervisor. They are all quite in their cups; I too, but less. I join them in the hallway late at night, according to a slurred invitation. Work friends on a business trip.

We are making for the pool, for what purpose I have not divined. It is closed for the night; the men try to force the door. I laugh. Trying to be helpful I take a knife from a nearby room service tray; the knife is bent, lock picked.

Down some steps ("Careful it doesn't lock us in," I say, and place a waste bin in the doorway) to the dim-lit outdoor pool we all collide in laughter. I am thinking childish things: throwing lawn chairs in the pool, pulling sodden pranks.

With a splash the supervisor has leaped in nude and yells for a girl to follow. I see his limp penis and feel awkward, and chilly. Without interest I notice one girl is now naked too. Her breasts are very small and it baffles my slipping wits. She looks uncomfortable, glances my direction and asks with nervous laughter, "What about him?" I shrug, demure, and promise not to look.

A modicum of decor stumbles soggily through my head; "You're drunk!" I cheerily declare to all, and raise my whiskey-glass in well-veiled protest. Splash, the naked girl is in the water too. No-one seems happy. I think it is cold: a good night for jackets.

The second girl eyes me as I am about to slip away; the second man laughs and confidingly asks me, "What's in this for me?"

"I'm leaving," I announce to no-one, with no malice. At the bottom of the stairs the second girl asks, "May I come with you?" as if I were getting in a taxi; I give her a ticket for the ride. She is putting her blouse back on.

The naked couple are in the pool, I think failing to have sex. The second man is caught between two worlds.

Sauntering then down well-lit halls, with a worried drunkard trailing, I call the front desk from my cell-phone to complain of loud kids in the pool and please send security. I take a sip out of my glass and notice my companion looks relieved.

We go our separate ways; next morning everyone is most apologetic and hungover. "I couldn't find my key," says the second girl, "so I slept in someone else's room." The supervisor says a number of contrite things; the naked girl had a long fight with her fiancee, of which I heard a lot. Years later, both men remain in their positions; the second girl no longer works here; the naked girl married her fiancee and they had a child.

When I see the supervisor sometimes in the hall I whisper jokes to friends but always smile to him and say hello.

4.10

<jibberjabber>

<text:"

I started working on an alternate work schedule, 10 hours a day 4 days a week.  This gives me a day off to watch Charlie.  Gina works three days a week: we have a friend watch Charlie two days a week, and I take the third.

Mundane stuff.  But it's a fascinating change of pace for me.  This is the first day I have off, and I'm nearly going nuts.  So far, I've cleaned the kitchen, basement, living room, vacuumed, taken Charlie grocery shopping and out on a walk, given him a bath--and it's a quarter past 2.  He's sleeping now and I'm about to work on the box images for one of my games.

Also interesting, for me, is that each working day, I'm one of the first to arrive at work and almost always the last to leave.  As it should be, of course--I'm working 10 hours with an additional mandatory unpaid lunch half-hour, and with a few minutes on either side, that's almost 11 hours at work each day.  With the shorter days, I usually get there just as the sun is coming up (but a little before), and leave after it's gone back down.  Perhaps one reason today is so energetic for me is that I feel like it's been dark since Sunday evening, and suddenly I'm surrounded by daylight.

Every evening at work, as I'm leaving for the darkened parking lot, I feel a strange camaraderie with those few people lingering in that building.  There's something strange and exciting for me about being in office buildings after dark--some sense of being backstage, if you will.  It's idiotic, of course (grown men don't think these things, I've been told), but there it is.  I like it.

">

</jibberjabber>

Speech

The other day, I was lurking in a comment stream online about workplace attire.  Women were complaining about being judged for what they wear; men were complaining about being told what to wear.  Turns out, I don't have much of an opinion on this: when in Rome, I disinterestedly dress like a Roman.  Whatever.  I neither judge nor care.  I have a mild dislike for wearing ties.

But what struck me about the conversation is that unpopular opinions, if not expressed in a sufficiently tentative manner, were immediately shouted down by the crowd.  For example, one women expressed disgust at how all women, regardless of what they wear, are judged at work--either too trampy, or too frumpy, or too materialistic, or unfashionable, etc.  Another person (unfortunately, a man) countered that he thought there should be some standards at work.  This commenter then met with an absolute barrage of opposition: people called him unenlightened, or expressed outrage, or just passive-aggressively responded, "you can't possibly understand."  I'm not really interested in the content of the argument here: what fascinated me was that people were attacking one another, expressing emotional outrage, and taking offense--just for having expressed differing opinions.

Is this free speech?  Because this didn't seem like freedom of speech to me; it seemed like socially-controlled speech.  In my example, the "standards" commenter was backed into a corner and essentially forced to shut up or apologize (he just went silent, of course).  And as I watched the situation unfold, I recalled the numerous times I've typed something out in a public forum, but deleted it without posting because I knew it would be an unpopular opinion.

I suppose it's still free speech, in the sense that it's not illegal.  And yet there are constraints on what we're socially allowed to say--real constraints--that don't make sense to me.  For example, my wife avoids posting anything online about our parenting choices based solely on the rationale that we know some of our friends would disagree with our choices, and just the conversation itself might harm those relationships.  You can scoff and say they aren't true friends, or you could lecture us about just "being ourselves," but we really don't need bullet-point advice from a self-help pamphlet.  Reality is complex and this is a nuanced decision, not cowardice; such decisions are frequently part of maintaining good friendships.  If you have any friends who aren't exactly like you, you know what I mean.

But obviously, this irks me.  What is it in our culture that forces us to hide those opinions and choices from our friends?  Have we become such a petty, small-minded culture that good friends really would be separated over differing opinions?

I suppose social groups in every culture and time period have enforced some level of constraint on speech.  It feels like there are tighter constraints today than there were in years past, but how can we tell the difference?

Or am I just sensing these constraints because they fall on the other side of my own opinions?  Is this really a cultural trend, or do I just have dreadfully unpopular views?