12/4/14

The world is so... what's the word I'm looking for. So IMMEDIATE. Why is it all so fast. We want to talk about karma. We want to talk about aging. We want to talk about fate, luck, nature, time. We want to talk about it like these things are out of our hands. Our Hands = Individually. Our Hands = Human species-wise. The only people who refer to their circumstances as luck are people who have good fortune.

Is it that they don’t have better shit to do or is it that there is no better shit to do. Is it radical to have leisure time, to go to private parties in private hotel lobbies. This is your television you’re on me. Is it radical to possess yourself. Is it radical to have leisure.

It is sort of reassuring. I so often feel like a sell-out because I work a job and I only write or make stuff or whatever when I feel like I really want to or can. But I feel like maybe it’s kind of selling out to be talking about how you are radical when what you are is not radical—you’re doing you and that’s fine but that’s not radical. You’re shopping. Radical means style.

Following the gaze. Are we looking towards each other or are we looking to see if other people are looking at us. Here’s an example: I’m struggling with anxiety and depression and even using those terms to describe myself. It’s a freaky and embarrassing thing to do, and to talk about, even for someone like me who feels little compunction about talking about themselves. What makes it feel less freaky and embarrassing, what is a comfort for me is having some additional context, some more information. What I am feeling, as Pema Chödrön says on her Oprah episode, is what everybody feels, what everybody has always felt, since the beginning of time, and will always feel. To some extent or another.



I’ve been struggling to read Cvetkovitch’s Depression: A Public Feeling for a very long time now. I’ve lately reaffirmed my efforts to work through it, though, and one of the things she talks about is the multiple ways of seeing what depression is or could be. Different models think of it solely as an issue of brain chemicals but it could also be a totally rational and logical response to fucked up situations and to the capitalist white supremacist patriarchy in which we live. There are forces in our world that make some people very rich and very comfortable and the way those forces work is my telling others of us that we are worthless and useless. And these forces make themselves known in a multitude of ways, including public racist violent crime, committed by the so-called police. The system, as many have noted, is not broken, unfortunately, it's doing exactly what it was designed to do.

So are your feelings, which we all feel, of insecurity, of desire for more (power, security, control, etc.) are your feelings letting you know that you’re in good company, with the rest of humanity? Or are they letting you know that they are real and that you need to tell the rest of the world about them? What’s going on right now. Are you talking about the national media around these public lynchings in 2014 in U.S. cities or are you taking pictures of yourself by the pool in Miami at art basel even though you’re not actually an artist, you’re just paid by a gallery to go to parties (which is what artists do but it’s not the only thing artists do). I’m not into the thing of who gets to be an artist and who doesn’t get to be an artist—we’re all artists if we wanna be. It’s just the question of who gets to be busy? Who gets to be too busy to care about this. Who gets to be too busy to show up. Lots of us.

But then who gets to be too busy as to say you’re into feminism but you’re not into protesting lynchings. If you’re into social change but you’re not into protesting lynchings. It’s like, maybe you’re not actually into change. If you think about it. Partying in Miami is not radical.

I guess what I’m saying is you don’t get to be about it if you’re not about it, and you don’t have to be about it. It doesn’t have to be your thing. Just drop the whole idea of being radical from your brand. It’s not radical to be a celebrity. It’s not radical to be rich. It’s not radical to be lazy. The flaneur is no longer a radical gesture. It is no longer possible in New York City to live that bohmenian lifestyle and it hasn’t been for a very long time. Yes, you could eke out a living giving shows shows shows three nights a week and it would be rough and you might love it but you couldn’t really do it forever as everyone knows. This is a context of literally no future and everyone on some level knows that.

I’m glad that the younger gays are pointing out the hypocrisy here, and that the older gays (I’m writing about social media right now, sorry) are pointing out the hypocrisy here. I feel a little hypocritical because I didn’t go to the marches last night but I also feel okay about that because I’m sick, and I’ve been sick all week whatever. I’m trying to go tonight.

I feel like this is an opportunity to make some connections. I've been really struggling lately, with feeling like I'm a big fraud, like I'm not a person, like no one is a person. Okay. I'm not wrong about this.

I have to see this as an opportunity to have compassion. So many people aren't weighing in on this they way they did for, say, the FaceBook "real name" policy, or marriage equality or whatever. The idea that this is bigger, separate, different or in any way less personal is a misapprehension. Unfortunately, we're not all about it. We're not all on the same page. And that's ok because I think deep down, we more or less get there eventually. But part of getting there is acknowledging that for a lot of people right now, people we love and people who we want to keep in our families and in our communities, for a lot of us, it's not hitting home. For a lot of us, we're still really excited about seeing Miley perform for free at a private event. After all, if it's your job. After all, if it's your assignment, right? We're not all about it. Some of us do in fact want to feel like we're out for change, but the change is a changing of the guard. We don't all have to have the same values. Consensus was always a pipe dream and ever will be. Let me meet you where you are.

Tell me about your party. Let me hear about what you're feeling and what you're thinking about when you fit it. I'd like you to hear something too, from some other people, who couldn't make the party this week.