Unbelievable

I’m browsing Netflix and I hover over Unbelievable. I’m about to click it. I’m thinking that if I press this button I enter a category of people. If I don’t I’m in the other category. This moment is sorting me. And I wonder if Netflix knows whether or not I will press it. I don’t even know if I will. Not really. I surprise myself all the time. Realistically: Netflix doesn’t care. Obviously: Netflix is probably not conscious so Netflix can’t care in the usual sense. Yet also, Netflix doesn’t predict what you will watch. Yet other, if Netflix were conscious it would be more of a creepy binoculeer than a hand-holding friendo. Well, more of a reverse binoculeer. A reeluconib. It yearns only to give you the options you are most likely to engage with. It just wants to spend time with you. For you to spend time at it. Pay attention to me. Prove to me that you’d rather be here with me than anywhere else.

But no, I didn’t come here to entertain the supposed perspective of an entertainment distribution entity. That line of thought is just a distancing tool that helps me get a larger view, using nonsensical empathy to dissociate from myself and enter reflection mode. Crosshatch through the mirror if you will.

I liked Unbelievable. But fair warning, this is a story about rape. It’s a short series based on a real story of rape, false rape allegations, false rape allegation allegations, the many, many pitfalls in our society’s support systems, and how women deal with it all. The main focus is on the fictional and easily believable, based on a real person, similar to other real people, representation of a person, foster child, closemouthed outsider outcast named Marie Adler and what happens with her.

There are many worthwhile moments in this show and that’s why I think it’s worth watching. That’s really what I look for in stories these days. My heart measures a story in moments and if there are enough of them then my heart tells me “I got my moments-worth” and then my brain makes a note of that and using a very mighty and slimy rubber stamp bureaucratizes it as [WORTH]. It can also have bad moments, or even more bad than good. It can even be mostly bad moments—for serious. I think this is a good criteria, more so than measuring a thing’s worth by how many flaws it has and then doing a kind of Platonic subtraction, distance from perfect. That subtraction method creates a weird grouping of art. It scoops up the best but it also includes a whole yammering of milquetoast people-pleasing “go wide” art. The example I like is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with more flaws than merits, and yet the flaws inform the overall texture and shape the experience and give the heart a reason for being, the journey worth taking, the show worth stamping, the hand worth wiping against the internal pants, the mind worth wondering why this [WORTH] stamp would be ever slimy, then slime starts smiling, the sentence crying, reader shaking head, looking down, sighing–

We are thrust into the shoes of a very unfortunate person. Marie Adler. I don’t want to be specific at all about what happens with her, but more generally she is the strongest entry point into this story and the most sympathetic character by far. Watching her is an exercise in frustration. In many scenes she is on the verge of speaking or acting, or not speaking, or not acting, and it never satisfies. Which is brilliant. A wise woman once told me that the most engaging moments of a story are when the audience most wants the story to go differently but understands that it can’t. That’s why I’ve never been a good writer. I don’t have that willpower to drive the story in a direction I don’t want it to go. I like it when things line up. Marie Adler’s story is misaligned every which way, which means sliding off in a direction you don’t want it to go, in both large ways and tiny moment-to-moment ways. She is misaligned with life. That is a very powerful central character. No matter how normal or lucky you may be, you’ll find yourself either shouting at her or the world or both because she’s you and the world is you and nothing is right with that combination.

I very much wanted to the show to take more risks than it did. With content of this type I always wish stories to make more controversial decisions, and challenge the audience a little more. Yet that’s unrealistic because I know I’m more on the outside than most, a content junkie. For many people more challenging would be unacceptable and for content such as this it would be a bridge too far. This is a story about a struggle against reality. The hard work of the story is in getting us to not run away. For most of us there is an acceptable balance to the world and when that balance is disrupted we are thrown into a decision mangling process. To actually be in that situation is unthinkable and completely disorienting. To wrap a brain around that situation is to deny denial. In that sense as a show it can’t be too real because that would drive away most of the audience. So although it didn’t cater to me specifically, I have to recognize the wisdom, the decency, in the level of nuance and shock and ambiguity that Unbelievable settled on.

Because I think about the people who were like me and clicked on it. And the larger group of those who didn’t. Like most stories centered around rape Unbelievable has a very defined mission. There is entertainment that exists purely to satisfy. Most of comedy and most of action falls in that category. Easy listening. Then there is entertainment that expects something of you. This definitely falls into the latter, especially when viewed as one piece of a larger body of literature seeking to educate us about rape and sexual violence in general. That larger body operates best when there is an appropriate access point for each individual to enter. Perhaps I clicked on this show and it affected me because I was in that appropriate spot. I may not have clicked on a slightly different show or access point. And for other people this one might be too far or not far enough. I do think it is a worthy addition to that existing body of work.

Most of the moments I dislike about the show are the usual ones, when things are too pat or too pert and work out too easily or flow too softly or walk away too quickly. You know the type. Things line up just right and I say wait, wait, wait. Is this a story or is this professionally marketed, overproduced, microwaveable wishful thinking? As I mentioned before, it has to be somewhat stylized in order to cushion the impact. Also, the logician in me knows that when a story has a mission all arguments are constructed via inequalities.

I’ll use the movie Parasite as an example. If you haven’t seen it, go see it. I really mean that. Don’t read the rest of this paragraph. Anyway: In the first act this poor family hits on a series of ridiculous windfalls. These are played for comedic effect but basically everything is going as well as it can, even better as it can. It’s a can that’s too perfect to exist. Everything is gliding for them. However, all it takes is one particularly bad night for this the can to be completely crushed. Now, how you rate the events of that night on a scale from likely to impossible will affect whether you are convinced of one of the story’s claims: that the vast difference in wealth is insurmountable (or unjust). Even a family working together as a single unit, though they may be talented and ingenious and ruthless, though they may ride on luck as if it were a personal pony, in the end neither merit nor good fortune could insulate them from the much larger circumstances at play. And perhaps luck of the moment is nothing compared to firmly established wealth (perhaps itself an accumulation of luck?) And this is an argument via experience. You can follow it with your brain but it is experienced through your heart, and its effectiveness depends primarily on how much you accept and internalize the reality of the fiction. Even if characters are as wild and extreme as cartoons, the comparisons can remain completely valid and applicable to each of our more quiet lives.

Unbelievable does stray to certain extremes. However, it’s easy to recognize that these extremes are simply the bounded edges of its inequality arguments. The crime may be pushed to an unsettling degree, but that only means a milder crime would be swept under the rug all the more quickly. The investigation might be coming together too easily, but even then the horrors are not neatly undone. The pursuant detectives are women, but if there weren’t it may never have gotten this far (and so on and so on). In this way we see these “unrealistic” points remain just as convincing if they were tuned down. And there’s no need to break out your magnifying glass and protractor. I’m just saying that if you did, it would still hold up. And we can’t deny that if we believe in the message heartily enough then we mustn’t allow any bone-headed ones in the audience to escape a good clubbing.

I would say the first episode is the most ambitious and the most essential. The remaining are less ambitious but very competently carry out the first episode’s promises. If the first one really roughs you up, the remaining do help to take the edge off. You might be thinking that this isn’t the show you need to see. You could definitely be right. Let me just say that it’s an experience that has the potential to not just be cathartic and therapeutic but critically preventative. The people who really need to see it might be in the group that doesn’t click on it. But maybe if everyone watches it…

In The Tank

My favorite bit of lingo from competitive Magic is the idea of being [deep] in the tank. Actually, I think it may have come from poker but I don’t feel like spending the ten or thousand seconds it would take me to Google it. Anyways, it basically means thinking for a long time.

Examples?

It seems like he doesn’t know what to do. He’s been in the tank for at least five minutes.

Is this girl playing slow or does she just spend a lot of time in the tank.

Well, they’re pretty deep in the tank. When they come up for air we’ll see how it shakes out.

I like this word tank because it’s been bulking up recently. It’s a word where if you saw it on the street you’d presume it might be hitting the gym three times a week.

To tank in the context of competitive sports or games can also mean to throw, as in to lose intentionally or to perform poorly enough that you might as well have intended to. Then in some cooperative games tanking means to fulfill a protective or distracting role, to take hits for one’s team. Then of course in the 5D chess of politics there’s the think tank. You already know what that one means. To me it also conjures the image of a Panzer or a T-34 with shark teeth painted on the sides and a giant elephantine brain bulging out of the top and retractable AT-Walker legs (from Star Wars), a perfected killing machine hellbent on firing its main cannon upon the nearest animal shelter. But that’s just me.

Tank.

It’s definitely a set of letters that has grown in use over the past century. It’s a real go-getter, and probably spends a decent amount of time networking. Calm down, tank. You already had your big break. Don’t you make me mention tank man.

But yeah, I like the specific use of “being in the tank” because the meaning of this is a bit blurry, a bit out of focus. There’s a bit of reverb to the meaning if you reverberate my meaning.

The straightforward lineage is undoubtedly think tank. Like most gaming lingo it’s shorthand hyperbole. The player is in their military think tank, and all the generals and presidents and king’s men are getting together to decide on the most prudent course of action. In this sense it’s also a mocking jab because while an actual think tank is a meeting of great minds, when a player is in the tank they are consulting no one aside from themselves (so why is it taking so long). Yet to me this is a more accurate portrayal of how the mind actually functions. We often think of the self as a unified whole but this is a misleading belief. It’s healthier to think of one’s mind as a think tank.

There’s also the fish tank. People don’t mean it this way but I think it’s a meaning that floats about on some level of their mind. The reason being: you don’t usually go in the tank unless you’re in a bad spot or a tough position. So it isn’t just that you decided on a whim to go into the tank. You needed to go into the tank because this is a critical moment. So in that sense your worth as a player is now being examined. You are on display like a clownfish at the aquarium. Again, it’s mocking because the fish actually has no chance of escaping the fish tank. You know, just like how your brain has no chance of escaping your pitiful existence.

Then there’s the oxygen tank, which is an offshoot. People definitely don’t mean it this way but it sort of fits. It’s like the oxygen tank is raiding the think tank’s wardrobe. (What, I can’t even borrow a tank top?) When you’re in the tank you’ve got your scuba suit on, your flippers, your goggles that suck on your face, and you’re diving. You’re diving as deep as you can, looking for something, anything that’s worth resurfacing with. But the time is a-tickin’. The longer you stay underwater, the less oxygen you have remaining. And your breathing is getting uncomfortably loud. Eventually there comes a moment when you’ve gone a little too deep into the tank and well, at that point you’re just dead in the water. Your friends and family can find you on the scoreboard with a cute little goose egg next to your name.

I’m tanking a lot of nonsense these days aren’t I.

Whale Sketch

Fail today. I’m going to fail today. My only real expectation for myself is to mash some keyboard buttons and convert some dead air into lost static. And somehow I will fail at this. People would love to be in my position. There is no one in the world deserving of this, the time that I have to doodle and dandy away. For some reason I’m the one. I’m the one who gets to stare into the white space and see my blank mind reflected back at me. Pick a direction. Pick literally any direction to be better than this.

Some things sound like whales. What’s that now. Some things sound like whales. Is that what you decided to go with. How is that what you decided to go with. Name one thing other than a whale that sounds like a whale. That wasn’t intended to sound like a whale. That would sound like a whale to anyone but you. I will let you remember one nice moment from your life if you can even imagine for me, right now, what a whale actually sounds like. Not the one in Finding Nemo. Not the one from that Loveless track. Not the one you thought you heard that one time you fell out of the boat off the coast of Australia and the people you were with didn’t realize it for a few minutes. Or maybe it was just a few seconds. Everything and even time seem bigger when you’re a small child. Whales seem extra big. They seem big enough to make sounds in places they definitely aren’t and could never be, such as that one time you fell out of the boat and imagined for a second that you might get swallowed by a friendly whale. Not a hungry shark. Not an indifferent whale. No, a friendly whale. For some reason you thought it would be a happy, friendly whale who wanted to help you out, but because of its size and relative brain mass, accidentally digests you. A blameless whale. A bumbling whale. Ah to be a whale, crooning around in the depths, tickling oneself on the underbelly of a lazy typhoon. Oh, the life of a silly whale, gathering great masses of seaweed into frondy green hearts, to nudge them towards one’s schoolyard crush. Ah, the schoolyard romance of a whale, sinking into the sea like two nuzzling barges, cargo lost like so many colored pencils and barely used erasers. The clouds titter with a hand in front of their mouths. The sun takes off its sunglasses and gives a splendiforous wink, signaling the waves to rise up and sing their eerie harmonies. Look at their little lips, which flit about like miniature versions of themselves. Oh, those synchronized waves, dancing in their rows like so many pageant youths, cheeks the taut blue of a whale’s first tattoo. What innocent tattoos whales get, all anchors and Spam cans and coconut trees. You could imagine any one of them to be found bursting from Popeye’s bicep just before he bazzonks this week’s evil octopus. I have to laugh at those darkly dressed octopuses, each fitted out with either a monocle, or a mustache, or a particularly nefarious umbrella. It’s hilarious the way their arms go full noodle as they cackle mid-episode, every episode, but actually this scene always frightens the whales. They tend to hold their breath even tighter at that point. Then at the end they emit that most classic of whale-sounds together, and exchange glances a bit sheepishly. It’s embarrassing to be frightened in front of another but maybe if it’s you, it’s kind of thrilling. Well I’m off to floss my teeth with the ocean again. I’ll listen for you.

Horse Girl

If there was one movie I was looking forward to seeing it was Horse Girl.

I was excited to see it because I heard it was about lucid dreaming. I am always down for any representation of the dream realm. Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the center of the movie. Still, I couldn’t look away. I really liked it.

Netflix itself is an amazing dream, because they go full bore into so many little nooks and crannies. Everyone has their own nooks. Horse Girl is in one of mine.

I don’t know anything about horses except that they are very difficult to draw. Thankfully, this movie has very little to do with horses. Horse Girl, as a title, is not representative of the movie. That’s okay. Sometimes titles are very representative (THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP) or underline some central idea (INCEPTION), but they don’t have to be. Titles can also be just a hint, or a small mystery, a handle to jiggle while you take a trip through another person’s mind.

In this case that was Sarah’s mind.

I have to say, this movie really impressed me. Yet I shouldn’t recommend it because it is a very difficult watch. I can see most people being variously bored, nonplussed, unimpressed, or incredulous. Some of the scenes can feel very slow, and some of the tricks are reused a lot, presumably to drive certain ideas into your mind again and again, and it’s like they’re making the same point over and over, a point we already understand. At that point it doesn’t do any good to continue to belabor it. It’s like they’re, how do you say, well I forgot the phrase.

Yet especially in the slow parts, I believed in the reality of the movie. It felt like real life at times. The acting was quite honest. I believed that these were real people. And that’s a really important impression for a movie like this. It wouldn’t work without that.

Because a movie like this is about an alternative to reality. Most people might describe it as mental illness or being plain nuts. In that sense it can feel quite horrifying at times. There’s that sense that something is coming, and perhaps you sense it or you don’t, or the people around you sense it. An alternative experience.

Sarah’s experience is what I thought my experience would be. Or, one of the possible ones. For many of my teenage years I was 100% certain that one day I would have a psychotic break and lose touch with reality completely. I would wake up each day feeling sure that next year, or maybe five years from now, or tomorrow, I would either be dead or in an institution. A lot of my time was spent mentally preparing myself for this eventuality. I needed to guard against the terror of not knowing, not understanding, not realizing how each moment was connected to the next, of being unable to suss out for myself which way was up. When the time came, I would need to accept that my time here was done for. It was important to not cling to anything because in my mind that’s what really hurts as a “crazy” person. You try to hold on to something and it’s always the wrong thing. It doesn’t match up with what the universe has planned for you. Of course, it impossible to plan around your own insanity. But I had contingencies in contingencies. If it happens this way, if I still have these mental faculties, if this method of testing reality proves amenable, if I can just remember one of these moments, if I can just believe one person from my life, if I commit to this no matter what, what would I be willing to be wrong about, which delusions could I feel comfortable with being my last thoughts, what’s a belief I would cling to even in the face of death, could I trust someone else to define reality for me, could I live being so tethered, could I last in locked room, could I if, if I could, if I could, if I could. If I could be ready, If I could just be okay with however it has to happen. If I could forgive myself beforehand.

How quickly it could all go, no? I mean we think things continue because that’s what they’ve done for so long. But there is no sacrosanct rulebook that the universe plays by. Tomorrow blue could be red. The sun could just never come up. You could meet a horse and a half tomorrow. You don’t know. You believe, and you have good reason to believe. But that’s all it is.

And if you happen to believe the wrong thing a little too much, or a little too easily, you could suddenly be adrift in a very, very strange place. Maybe to everyone else it looks the same as it always did. But what use is that. You aren’t everyone else. You’re you. You’re the only person you’ll ever be. That’s it. So even if other people know, or see, what use is that really? I’m sure it happens to all of us to some degree. It doesn’t have to be a complete break. There are many degrees of broken. And it can be like a cell phone dropped too frequently, invisible fractures developing, and then the next time is one time too many, and it shatters all over your foot. You’re bleeding, stomping around to the bathroom, getting dizzy, wondering whether you should call someone or whether this is worse than it seems, and then you feel kind of tired but you can’t rest because you should really clean up this mess, and then you drift off on the cold tiles holding a wad of paper towels, and have one last dream about the smell of copper.

What impressed me the most is that we always stay with Sarah. I think a lesser movie would meander a bit further into other people, and give the viewer much more to hold on to. It would give us more assurances. It would also have been very easy for the movie to be moralizing. To have some well-meaning agenda. But this movie isn’t about that. It’s about Sarah and only Sarah. To me, it did a good job of portraying each moment of her experience. There was a definite chain of logic to her reasoning. Her reactions always felt earned. Her relationships with other people were exactly hers. Where there were gaps, and there definitely were gaps, those were the gaps in Sarah. A lesser movie would have filled those in with excess. I think this told her story with as little as possible. Well, with as much Sarah as possible, and with as little of anything else as possible. And that’s all I wanted out of it.

On Terrible Anime

When it comes to narrative, anime is pretty much universally terrible. But this is actually a very good thing.

It isn’t a mistake that anime produced today has greater culture impact than, say, the contemporary novel or any slice of modern art. This is probably too polarizing an assertion to really defend in a single paragraph. I’ll just say that some types of media are produced a great deal faster, get absorbed into the public consciousness a great deal faster, and thus contribute to the “great conversation” a great deal more. They iterate more rapidly. Collaborative works like anime and television also have the advantage of not being beholden to single visionaries. The people involved are more replaceable. At least, that’s my feeling. Vince Gilligan, as great as he is, is more replaceable than Proust. We’d still get some watered down version of Breaking Bad if Gilligan had gotten lost in a New Mexican desert. Can you say New Mexican desert like that? It sounds very questionable.

Anyway. Devoted anime and manga fans, derisively (or affectionately) called “weebs”, are both very voracious and very forgiving consumers, and they almost exclusively consume anime. That’s the stereotype anyhow, and I’ll just assume it’s true-enough: true for some, half-true for others, somewhat-true for all. The voraciousness and the lenience and the insularity all seem tied together with the speed at which these stories are produced. They all reinforce each other. If your audience only consumes anime you only need to meet the bar of quality of other anime. If your audience only consumes anime, they consume a lot of anime, so you need to produce a lot, so it’ll be rushed out, so quality will suffer, so the bar will be low, (so it won’t be re-consumed), so they’ll consume it quickly and be done with it, and so on.

But even if you accept my half-baked analysis, you might at least ask why. Why would anyone only consume anime? If it’s so bad, that is.

Well, there are things that you can find in anime that you simply can’t find anywhere else. There is such a variety of audacious premises that if you are willing to look past deficiencies of execution you will find endless fuel for your imagination. And when it comes to execution itself, anything is permitted. There isn’t such a clear dividing line between safe and experimental. There’s meta-commentary and fourth-wall breaking galore. Visual styles can mesh or clash with material, can change from one second to the next. There are more extreme tonal swings than even Korean cinema. It is a bit shocking, even a bit upsetting what anime is willing to try.

This makes for a lot of bad anime, but more importantly this makes for a lot of anime. I think this can only be good for the form as a whole. I imagine there are a much higher percentage of amateur creators in the audience than in most other audiences. There is a constant exposure to fresh material. And the bad material has a place here as well. For the creative person, exposure to the flawed is equally as important as exposure to the great or perfect, perhaps even doubly so.

And I think this is the direction other forms need to go in, especially writing. But I suppose then that takes me back to my dream of iterative, collaborative writing through some kind of not-yet-in-existence online, shared, shareable, free, self-sorting, discovery-friendly, beginner-friendly, publisher-unfriendly, impossibly awesome writing platform. Awful dream to have. Can’t even make an anime about that one.

Knives Out

But the most entertaining movie of 2019 was Knives Out. I say that as someone who once spent afternoons like arcade tokens, gunning to ping pong through the off-ramps and between the whirligigs in Agatha Christie’s brain. She is to the mystery genre as pinball is to plinko.

I revisited some of her stories, and one that stood out to me was Sad Cypress. It has a great opener. The heroine in that story, an Elinor Carlisle, is on trial for murder. All the evidence points to her. There isn’t a single other suspect. To top it off, Elinor believes herself to be guilty. She had motive, opportunity, and used that opportunity to take action against the victim. But the reader knows that she must be innocent. So what gives? It falls to the unreasonably clever Hercule Poirot to fill in the blanks and bring balance to the scales of justice.

Like all the great Christie stories the method of murder is secondary to a more compelling mystery. We stand before an impossible situation and wonder how to make sense of it. Good mystery stories tend to turn entirely on motive. Any discussion of details, the schemes and methods, the coincidences and opportunities, are used mostly to characterize. The how is important, but the why is more so. The why is the doorway into making sense of the whole, so the mini mystery of each character is piecemeal to the main event.

The Poirot stories I remember were all very moralizing as well. Not only would the puzzling elements of method be completely cleared up, any troubling moral elements would also be ironed out. This part is straightforward in a murder mystery. You only need to catch that elusive creature, the vile, clever murderer who knows no conscience.

Then the main character is someone who is virtuous in almost every regard. So for example Elinor is young, beautiful, well-mannered, and rich. She is kind, humble and sharp (although not as sharp as Poirot). She is also reserved, repressed, conflicted, passive, and devoted to the one she loves. The earlier traits in this list are likewise admired in today’s world. The later ones less so. The differences between Elinor and Marta are the differences between the audiences of yesterday and today. Elinor represses her passions, Marta really can’t. Elinor inherits her wealth, Marta has humble beginnings. Elinor knows how to serve lunch, Marta knows how to collect used dishes.

Alright, we’ve paid our Christie dues. (Knives Out spoilers below.)

The real nugget at the center of the Knives Out tootsie pop is the question of wealth. When a man like Harlan deliberates on his will, there’s a problem he’s trying to solve. The problem is that his immense fortune warps reality around it. In our regular lives we ask the question of how to make money. He lives in a world beyond that, the promised land we all wish to sneak into. His question is what to do with that money. Is there anything acceptable that can be done? Time after time, it brings out the worst in people. There’s a reason why money is one of the top motives in murder mysteries. We instantly accept that it’s a worthwhile motive. Money is worth killing for, but that’s only the cartoon version. It’s also worth conniving for. It’s worth being cruel for. It’s worth compromising one’s self-respect, one’s basic decency. If only there were some person of pure heart to help guide us in these trying times.

As a heroine Marta is all too satisfying. Comedies like Knives Out make me worry, because they reach a point where they’re so effective a salve that we feel our real wounds are healed. They extinguish our desire for change by simulating it too well.

At least I take some comfort in knowing that these are comforts which I’m not alone in craving. We do want the petty rich to get their comeuppance. We do want the scheming rich to outplay themselves. We do want the truly rich to be wise, and for these wise rich to dole out their wealth to the kind poor. We do want the cops to be lovable and earnest. We do want the detectives to be clever, or if not clever then oblivious. We do want the kind-hearted to win, and to win because they are kind-hearted. We do so want that. That shared wanting is itself a comfort. If we each separately hold out our hands to be warmed by its soft glow, we have unwittingly begun to warm each other as well, in a huddled ring of solidarity. Or should I say a donut with a piece we all know to be missing.

Moony-Brained

Yet every moon has a sunny side, and this includes a moony-brained boy like me.

One time I was walking on this beach in Australia. There were these lumps in the sand about the size of a hand. Well, the size of my hand at the time – so about the size of a child’s hand. These lumps were clams, or evidence of clams rather. You see this little lump in the sand, and you can just get in there and grab them. Little morsels left by the sea, ready to be cracked open, ready to transmit about two tons of sand onto your tongue. It isn’t a pleasant feeling but there’s something about getting sand in my mouth that always makes me want to laugh. I don’t know – maybe my teeth are ticklish.

I mean, there’s always something funny. Sometimes it’s very small like a grain of sand but it’s there.

Like one time I was eating out of garbage cans and dumpsters because I was homeless and penniless and I didn’t know anyone and I was hungry. And I randomly found this fresh loaf of bread. Like a really good loaf of bread. Not the kind you buy in the aisle, the kind you have to walk over to the part of the store where they pay people to just stand around and be ordered to slice meat as thin as can be. I mean, I know that kind of thing is a holdover from open market butchers but it still seems such an awkward mismatch with the modern grocery store. ANYWAY, I find this bread, this beautiful soft supple concoction of wheat and knowledge and time. I’m starving but I don’t eat it quite yet. In that moment I realize that there is a perfect dance for this moment. And I did that dance. And had a laugh at myself.

There’s a perfect little dance for every moment. Sometimes it’s nothing more than a subtle head wiggle, but it’s always there, waiting to be wiggled. I think that if there were recordings of me when I’ve been alone throughout the many years of my life, people would giggle endlessly at how often I’m doing a very silly improvised dance. I don’t do it when other people are around though for obvious reasons. I’m just way too shy for that. But I’ve always wondered if other people do that too. I find that funny, the idea of everyone secretly jiving when no one is looking, getting their wiggle on.

The one situation I consistently spot people doing something similar is waiting at red lights. You sometimes see them singing or dancing with more heart than they had on their wedding day. I used to purposefully slow down at yellow lights (instead of speeding up like a sane person), just to get a chance at seeing this red light talent show. I mean, what other places can you get that kind of thing? Cars have this special magic over people. They feel like they’re in a building or a room somewhere. No one can see them. It doesn’t matter that this thing has windows from every possible angle. People just go ham.

That really is the secret to being happy. You simply need to ignore everything else.

I’d say there are three main avenues to happiness: ignorance, delusion, and depravity. Not knowing something you could know, believing something you have no good reason to believe, or enjoying something you really shouldn’t be enjoying. Those are really your options.

Choosing to be ignorant is a tricky endeavor. You can certainly increase your general odds of being ignorant, but it’s difficult to get specific with it without accidentally stumbling over some knowledge. At that point you’re flirting with delusion at the minimum. And as for depravity, I can’t say I really want to recommend it. That’s a very messy can of worms. So yes! Delusion it is!

Focus in the moment, the now, and forget about as many things as you possibly can. Find that one bright spark that tickles your teeth, and bam, there’s a smile. Of course, the problem with delusion is that if you accidentally remember reality then the whole thing becomes ruined and you have to start all over again. Some people are better at it than others. Call it power of imagination. The great thing about it is that it works everywhere, in any situation. You can be trapped in a box, suffocating, terrified to die, but if you stop a moment and think about it, it can actually be pretty funny. Then you stop pounding on the wood and chuckle ruefully. Or maybe if you find it funny that’s the lack of oxygen getting to you. Hmm. Ignorance, delusion, depravity, and oxygen deprivation. Well, it’s a theory in progress.

We’re mining life for dopamine. I had this thing I could do when I was a kid. Maybe I can still do it but I’m afraid to try because I never understood what it was. I would concentrate for a moment, or something akin to concentrating, and then my brain would feel fuzzy and I would get this rush of feeling good. Like just pure joy. If I tried hard enough it could even leave me in a stupor. People talk about clarity after orgasm, and it was actually sort of similar to that, but milder and without the physical component. I can still do it, and sometimes I’m tempted but I always back off and leave it alone. It spooks me. I’ve always wondered if this was a thing other people could do too. Or maybe it was nothing. Or dopamine. Or a delusion of dopamine.

If there were a person who could be happy whenever they wanted, what would they do? Just like flipping a switch. Probably they would do nothing. If we’re just simple happiness seekers then they’d be set. It’d be like a reptile with a built in radiator. Wait that’s Godzilla. It’s like a Godzilla who sits around breathing on himself. I don’t like how this metaphor turned out.

Alright, I’m calling it. This moon has gone out of orbit.

Do a little dance. Make a little love. Get down tonight. Get down and right. I always do that – I always say “get down and right” when I know that isn’t the lyric. I just find it funny to go down and to the right while saying it. I don’t know. I have the worst sense of humor. I apologize.

Get down, get down, get down, get down…

Cultivating Nowhere

Alright, let’s do this. Depression. Apathy. Party Pooping. Here there be dragons.

I had the habit for many years of leaving half eaten fruit to decay, sometimes in glass jars or in the fridge but often just strewn about. It sounds demented I’m sure, and I suppose it probably was. Last year I saw that movie Taxi Driver and I think I began to understand myself a little better. I mean, listen to this from three years ago:

17.02.09 – abridged

“I have a habit of keeping a decaying thing about my desk. It started with orange peels years ago … A few yellowing grapes, maybe, or a carrot pockmarked with nibbles. A cleanly divided orange bell pepper makes for a nice subject … Perhaps it’s like the opposite of gardening. Call it a complementary denouement to gardening … I am spying on these wasted morsels. I am watching them fade away. To me, this partially eaten apple feels true … Patience truly is the most vicious of the virtues.”

Travis, I think his name was Travis, didn’t do reverse gardening but he had that unhealthy diet. Then in that movie First Reformed the guy lets himself go, lets his body be taken over. And in The Joker you see that thin, twisted body, all skeletal and ghoulish. These are all manifestations of the same disease. Of course, I don’t have it near as bad as those guys. They’ve gone pro. I still take solace in entertainment, philosophy, hobbies. Even when I slept on the street I was always looking up at the sky, contemplating something.

Yet without that where would I be? Well, that’s not what I mean to ask. I wonder about other people I suppose. Through these walls there are other rooms. In other cities, in other decades, so many rooms. And in some of those rooms, are there people like me?

There’s method acting, and then there’s method writing, right? Somewhere along the line I convinced myself that the people I wanted to understand the most were the hopeless ones. The lonely ones, the depressed, the ones who’d gone down a hole in themselves. I had these ambitions to worm my way into that side of things, and dissect it, mash it up, dry it out, crush it down into a powder and create some kind of magical balm that could heal a soul or two. Well, you have to justify your actions somehow. I mean, I don’t know. I think I really did mean it at the time. I really meant to live that pain and then somehow strain it through my brain like a juicing. But of course, at some point I obviously forgot. I mean, even if I had remembered, it’s a terrible plan.

Some people listen to sad music when they’re sad. But that kind of melancholy is like a sweet blueberry compared to the black banana of depression. There are more depressed people today than ever before. People with no will to live, nothing to look forward to, no faith in anything larger, no confidence in themselves, no plans to put off. Just one eternity of a moment after another.

The weird thing about our hard wiring is that we can be so unhappy, so empty, and yet still insist on living. We are just dragged along. Just like dragging a four year old through the market. There’s no bawling about it at that point, just complete dead fish non-participation boycotting of existence.

These people are nowhere. And you can go different places from nowhere. Some people pop back into reality, or have pills that do it for them. There are different routes. I don’t think any of them are very superior to any of the others. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. At this point I’m just forcing myself to add one word after another. I mean, there are times when I’m feeling really gray that I read something and I get some color out of it. Even if the color that I get is more gray on top of the gray I already had, it still helps. I mean, to me, staying in nowhere is okay. It’s acceptable.

But is that acceptance an acceptable idea to spread around? When you hear other people talk about nowhere they’re usually saying that nowhere is bad. You have to get out of nowhere. Here’s how I got out of nowhere. You could try this way, that might work. Let’s just go somewhere, doesn’t matter where. Anywhere but nowhere. Get out, get out at all costs! So my impression is that no, it isn’t really considered acceptable.

They say some people have their wires crossed. It’s hard. It’s just hard to know which people are the truly crossed ones. I mean, what if I think there’s something truly, terribly wrong, something fundamentally off about reality, that existence is just a broken thing. Am I the crazy one? Maybe I am. I can’t know. It can’t be possible that I’m right and the universe is wrong? If there are a billion other people in the room and they all agree that we should try to make this work, then should I disregard whatever it is I’m thinking? Yeah, maybe. Probably. I mean what if I do have crossed wires. What if I am crossed wires. I can’t uncross if I’m the cross because then the uncross is the not me because I’m the crossed one. What am I, supposed to just change into whatever works? That’s pure practicality. I give that a big thumbs down. I yech and I yuck and I yickerydoo. I Bartleby not to.

Here’s what I’d like to see. If I’m this person then here’s what I want. I want to know that it isn’t just me. Right? So knowing that’s what I want, then it seems reasonable to write something like this. Because I used to be someone who could never have admitted, to myself let alone publicly, this kind of thing. Be the person you would’ve needed, right?

But on the other hand, what if by doing that I hold someone back. What if someone is about to leave that room and I’m the one saying hey, hold up, you dropped this giant ball and chain that you were so busy unshackling yourself from! Whew, good thing I caught you. Wow, that fits on there snug like it was made for you. Anyway, I gotta run, so.

See, with other people there’s just too much at stake. Let’s just stick to fruit.

City of Uncut Gems

What I bring to Uncut Gems are my own memories of New York.

It’s a city that never treated me like an Asian person, or even a human person. That sounds strange and off and obviously untrue. It’s difficult to explain what I mean to mean here. I don’t mean to say that New Yorkers aren’t racist. Slurs mate like mayflies in the city. Street side confrontations can easily come to or come from a place of prejudice, but to me issues of race never felt central to New Yorkers. Racism was always a sideshow to a more general individualism. People expected more from you than your race I suppose is what I mean to say. It was a starting point, a way to get the ball rolling, a way to provoke a reaction, a way to force your hand. They expect the stereotypes, they expect your familiarity with the stereotypes, with your presumed culture, but they also expect that you are someone apart from that. In other cities it feels very different. It falls much flatter. In other places, people will write you off and then leave it at that. In NYC it just feels like people are a bit more imaginative. It feels like they are more open to the wide range of possibilities. And this goes back to how New Yorkers take the unusual and the exceptional in stride. Because anyone you meet can be a new kind of exception. Even the most rote jobs will push you up against one unusual story after another. It’s always there waiting. If you want to reach out and learn something, it’s so easy. You are always on the edge of that subway platform, a footstep away from being slammed with someone who is on the hustle, or someone who is on the run, or someone who is on a bender, in a rut, on fleek. Living in New York City was like the closest thing to owning a smartphone before smartphones were ever a thing. It’s that sense of constant, a barrage, just never silent activity, and you’re never alone, not even if you want to be, you simply can’t be alone. You go to sleep and some stranger is there living with you, or your neighbor is shouting, or a car is complaining, or tomorrow feels too desperate to not feel like today. That’s a real city. And when it comes to money, people don’t sort themselves neatly into nice little piles, separate little lanes. A bum and a businessman make eye contact or don’t make eye contact in the same way as any other two. It’s the ideal American city because not only is life close to being meritocratic, every single moment is meritocratic. In any chance moment people are judging you more by what you do now, right now, than anything in your past or your destiny or your wallet. There’s a sense not only of economic mobility but of cultural mobility, political mobility, ethical mobility. You meet someone today and they can have a different job by tomorrow, they could marry into a different culture, be indoctrinated into an entirely different mode of thought. In fact, they are already in one of these transitions, or possibly all of them. The ideal NYC is the true city of my dreams. I think my love of NYC is one of the only real constants in my bric-a-brac life, in my hodge-podge stew of a personality. I loved it as a kid without even understanding why. I loved it as I lived, as I slept in so many other cities, lived out so many lesser dreams. I love it now and I don’t even know the damn place. I lived there very briefly, and I’m sure I misunderstand it completely. But even in that misunderstanding I feel there’s enough truth. My experience of NYC is just one experience, and I get that, but I also think that even if I’m way off there’s still room enough in there, in ‘the city’, for the city I think I know, for my version of the city that I’m gushing about. The real NYC contains mine. I’m not off the mark, I’m drowned in the mark. So yeah, I’ll stick to what I said. It’s a city that never treated me like an Asian person, or even a human person. What matters second most is whatever you want to do. What matters most is whether or not you can get it done. There was a period where I would wake up before dawn to get to a temp job place. It was like out of one of those movies where they pick five guys each morning. This was peak New York City. Now if I had been an extraterrestrial, like genuinely from outer space, that wouldn’t have mattered at all. The guy there looking for hands would only have asked to verify if I could lift fifty pounds. If I had brought it up, that I was from Alpha Centauri his mental note would not be “that guy is an alien”, or even “that guy thinks he’s an alien.” It would be “that guy talks too much.” That’s a real city! Because even if you were from Alpha Centauri it would only define you if you obsessed about it, if you made it your thing. Not everyone has a thing, but some New Yorkers do have a thing. There are the performers that dress up in gold paint. There’s the ones that live exclusively to get drunk with famous people. There’s that person who goes about replacing stolen manhole covers. My examples are terrible so please come up with your own. For every thing you can think of, there’s probably someone whose thing that is. For every thing, there’s someone. That’s a real city. So when Howard says “this is how I win”, it makes sense to me because that’s how it is in a real city. Everyone is playing their own game. Everyone wins a little differently. That win might look strange, might seem scary, but a real New Yorker, a platonic New Yorker, a veteran New Yorker wouldn’t look twice. In a different city it would stand out. In a different city it wouldn’t be believed. But in NYC it’s all just drowned in the mark. A win for Howard is a Howard’s win and a Howard is a Howard is a Howard. Who he is and what he sees in an uncut gem is a possibility that can only exists in his mind, in a New York City kind of mind. So in a sense the story of Howard is one more chapter in the story of New York City. It’s the next chapter, perhaps the ten millionth chapter. It’s definitely one of the better ones.

First Steps

When it comes to people who write, my impression is they do it everyday. I mean, who the heck knows what goes on in another person’s life. I’m certainly not the type to go ask them (talking to another person!) or believe anything that comes out in an interview (believing what you read, ha!). But my impression, or perhaps my intuition, is that they do some writing everyday, 2000-5000 words at a minimum. This is then added to their stock of unpolished material.

I’ve never been that kind of writer, and writing everyday feels very unnatural to me. I’ve always been the type who will get infected with an idea, let it stew around for a week, or a year, and then like scratching an itch or sneezing a cannonball spew it out through my fingers in a hurry. I suppose you could say I’ve always been a fairly ejaculatory writer. I’ve never put it that way but it does make sense. Okay, I’m an ejaculatory writer. Hi, how are you, I’m ejaculatory.

Even the longer pieces that I’ve written, that are on the order of tens of thousands of words, were still largely written in the moment in a ribald fashion. I’ve done a lot of writing exercises where the goal is to come up with some trick or semantic twist and then use as few words as possible to showcase it. But this is all word play. This isn’t “real” writing.

It isn’t real writing. It isn’t participating in a cultural dialogue, responding to a shared tradition. There’s no weight behind it, right? Well, perhaps.

That could be because I don’t have a very serious mind. I’m not a serious minded person. At my core, I don’t truly believe that anything really matters. I have a very nihilistic core. It’s a state-of-the-art core, very sleek, very lightweight. You could almost float across a pond on a core like this. (Almost, buyers beware.) I mean, I’m a halfway educated person so I can certainly get into the mindset of someone who cares. I can certainly adopt a perspective. But it’s “adopt” as in adopting a highway, not as in adopting an orphan. These are intellectual and political and ethical masks. One tries on a mask, sees how the mask smells from the inside, looks at one’s-masked-self in the mirror whilst practicing Michael Jackson moves, but one does not sleep in the mask. One does not put on the same mask at the same time each day, dance in front of the same mirror, and refine the same moves each day again and again. Not this one!

Somewhere out there Stephen King is cranking out 50,000 words a month and he’s publishing three books a year and he’s downloading his latest firmware update. He is not a hobbyist. He’s a machine. He’s a Dickens. People like that have a long story to tell and they have to gather up words in great big scoops. They have enormous word scoopers. You wouldn’t believe how long-handled these scoopers are. But those cartoonishly long handles are actually a very essential counterweight in the scooping process. (See? What am I even talking about.)

Look, that isn’t even where I want to get to. I’m very aware of where I want to get to. I’m very aware of where I am. What I’m not aware of is how to get from one to the other. Now, say you see a distant mountain and you say, hey, I’d like to get up there. But the only problem is you’re terrible at walking and by the way, you’re a baby. In this scenario you’re a baby. And by that I mean I’m a baby. In this scenario I’m a baby. Okay, I’ll say it. I’m an infantile writer. Well, I suppose a sensible place to begin would be to learn how to walk. Alright, so here I am learning how to walk. I’m taking one furtive step at a time. I’m also crying about it, yes, but this is no problem since babies are great at crying. Crying is well within the skillset of a baby. Don’t argue with me about that.

When it comes to people who walk, my impression is they’ve been doing it a while. But actually some of them haven’t been doing it for very long. They weren’t born that way or anything.