43/52 - Pain and Perspective

"Whoever declares that the capitalist mode of production, the “iron laws” of present-day bourgeois society, are inviolable, and yet at the same time would like to abolish their unpleasant but necessary consequences, has no other resource but to deliver moral sermons to the capitalists, moral sermons whose emotional effects immediately evaporate under the influence of private interests and, if necessary, of competition." - Friedich Engels

Dear Internauts, 

I've been reading John Green's new book, Turtles All the Way Down, recently, and, while I could quote some brilliance from almost every page, I'll need a few more reads till the best bits settle in. Combine that with the gorgeous film Loving Vincent, which I saw the other day, and my mind is swirling all the more with such a tremendous tide of these inspired thoughts. 

One from Green's book which stands out at the moment is something about how sickness is so often talked about only in the past tense, or rather as something to soon be in the past tense. Pain and illness is that which we're getting over or getting past or on our way out of. However it is, he says it better than I can, but I'm too exhausted at the moment to try and seek out the exact quote. 

And there's another one, of course—how we have so many words for everything but pain resists an accurate description. One of its many victims is language. 

And it's not like I don't know what it's like to try and help out a friend who's suffering. It's not like I don't understand how difficult it can be to try and help out someone you love when they're done and out. It's not like I can really blame the folks who've skipped out and ghosted on me for wanting out. My options for answering any "how are you" continue to be either lie or tell some depressing, barely accurate half-truth. 

Anyways, I've been having a lot of trouble focusing lately. 

Still, I've been thinking a lot about the quote at the top and how it applies to so much I find unsettling. I can dissect that which bugs me the most in society, preach reform and a moral drive within the confines of modern times. Ultimately, though, some things can't be fixed. 

My own inner struggle may hinder my ability to create, as—despite what we've been told—mental illness is more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to art, and yet I'm not blind or unaffected by the astounding injustice in the wider world outside my own mind. Well I strive to find some inner balance and write about a need for empathy and communal cooperation, I can't help but recognize that we can't simply talk the world into a better way. No blog or song will save us all. My personal critiques of politics, religion, or the media are merely the puppy scratches at the door of a bigger conversation. 

The truth is that as long as we live and converse as if systematic injustice is inevitable and unchangeable, all of our squabbles about trying to find a better way of coping within those systems will continue to bounce back against us in vain. While a shift in perspective is necessary, for real change to occur, it isn't enough to look at the world differently. The object itself must be disassembled. 

It's not enough that we try and be more commercially just within an unjust economic structure. It's not enough that we try and be more interpersonally just within an unjust social structure. It's not enough that we try and be more compromising within a corrupt political system. It's not enough that we agree that things are bad for any chance of good to occur. 

Tear the roots out. 

There need be no compromise of love and justice while seeking revolutionary change. In fact, a revolution without love and justice isn't very revolutionary after all, is it? 

If upon hearing of some scandal or abuse, I simply say, oh that's too bad, yet I refuse to look inside and question my presuppositions, then I only allow for the continued existence of an environment conducive to similar wrongdoing. If I complain and jeer at some monstrous act or words from a public figure but refuse to consider the larger context by which they were allowed to come into power, the soil in which they were grown, then I might as well have not spoken at all. 

If all I can say is that at least I'm not like those other folks in my demographic to make myself feel better, than I might as well be cheering on the worst of my kind. 

For now, I don't really know how to be better, only that it's not enough.

Thanks for reading, 

Odist

42/52 - Root Canal for the Brain

Dear Internauts,

I kinda miss having a therapist.

I'll admit I've often used this weekly blogging thing as a platform for pseudo-therapy. While there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, it is too much of a one way conversation, a bit like prayer in that sense. Or at least what my prayer life was once like.

No offense.

Oh, I cherish our time together, sure, even if this is the closest current equivalent I have to homework in my quasi-adult existential squall. Thus today's late posting is more reflective of my last semester of school than it is like the homework of most of my academic life. Please take solace in that you are not anything at all like algebra 2 homework.

Also, please take note that my mood and manner are maybe a bit marred by my mouth's most recent malady (but more on that in a minute).

I've had many therapists in my life. All in and after my feint toward higher education. Some talked far too much, leaning more toward life lecturer than listener. One wouldn't talk at all, even after I'd made every attempt to elicit a reaction beyond the nodding and indiscernible expressions. But all for the better, I suppose. Some when they start talking get a tad too mystical for my liking.

What you need is someone who doesn't force you to talk about what they think the issue really is while still being able to help you deal with what the issue really is.

Also, unlike every single therapist I tried to get in touch with on my insurance plan during the first half of this year, it helps if they don't have a waiting list of three to six months for the first appointment. I wonder if, after that first appointment, my place on the waiting list for our next meeting is decided by how well it went. Would it be an audition?

Between every therapist, social worker, doctor, nurse, intern, old friend, family member, or whoever else I've wound up relaying my mental issues to, the tale has gotten a bit stale in the telling. Along some stories which can grow in splendor at every recounting, tales of illness tend to flatten out, broken down by necessity into their barest facets. There's an effort to appear the opposite of embellishing, to circumvent any attempt by the listener to diminish my pain through disbelief or comparison. Combine that with the need to share a list of symptoms in the same breath as prescriptions for the hundredth or so form, and one might start to think depression is just a cerebral tooth ache.

In a way, trauma is similar to a root canal, and not just in how one tends to exacerbate the other. Consider— a stranger in a position of authority put me in a vulnerable state and cut away at my nerves with a loud, metal tool.  It recalled both issues from my childhood as well as interrelated circumstances from adolescence and the insecurities of self-care as a young adult. If I'd been more prepared to deal with it, the situation would likely not have occurred at all, and yet there remains an inescapable feeling of helplessness and inevitability. (I do believe, if half-heartedly, that some inevitability is at least in part, escapable.)

Of the many differences, of course, one pertinent is that the dentist cut away the nerves from within the infected tooth, so now the intense nerve pain which had existed is eradicated. (Why do we even have nerves in our teeth, anyway?)

Maybe, this is then a better metaphor for how traumatic it is to deal with trauma after the fact? Every trauma builds upon itself. To construct, or at least to fix, we must first destroy.

You can't build on a busted foundation. And boy is the drilling like a jack-hammer!

I've currently got some temporary cement in there with the plan for something more permanent in early November. My jaw still gets sore, so I have to keep up with the pain meds. My teeth feel uneven, despite the sanding and shaping they did to try and find a balance. But then I tend to grind them anyway. Nervous habit.

Fitting, I suppose, that one of my first experiences as a 27 year old is to deal with something that's built up over so many of those years.

We can do everything right. Brush, floss, rinse with whatever brand they're hocking at the time. The tech's gotten better, as has the environment and the medicine, I guess. Still, something can get in there and infect and no matter how hard you try and deal with it on your own, a professional may be needed. Of course, that professional may be a jerk (like so many can be) or they may be kind as sunshine. Still, sometimes they've gotta go in there and dig at all the nerves and the pain and dirt and uncertainty. At the end of the day, it's your mouth.

Sometimes we can't live with the pain. Sometimes even the best fix can't make things even up quite right ever again.

But if I eat a lot of junk food and never brush, the trauma of a little chip in my tooth could turn into a root canal situation all too soon. As far as metaphors go, that's a pretty poor one to say that our brains need regular cleaning too. As with all metaphors, it falls apart upon close inspection.

Still, sorry for the preachiness. Just know I hope you can find a way scrub out some of the junk from your neural pathways. At very least, please know I'm not gonna judge you for taking whatever sort of ibuprofen you need for that sore jaw you can't help but grind.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

41/52 - Another Year and Some (Non)sense

"Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, 'Is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?' Then a voice comes to me and says, 'We hate to tell you this but life is a thousand-word essay.'" - Charles Schulz

Dear Internauts,

Another year riding around the sun, and I feel much the same as I did last time.

I've decided to spend the rest of the month working on finishing a timeline for the events of my graphic novel, Ghosts of Domus. Instead of putting out one completed (written, drawn, colored, and lettered) chapter at a time, I aim to make sure the story is a more complete whole first. This way, I can spend NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. November) writing the script out for the entire story. If you're curious, I use the comic book script format of the free software Celtx for my scripts. I picked it up for a screenwriting class back in college and find that it's fairly simple to use and intuitive (even if my own typing can sometimes be a bit quick jumping from section to section).

Here's a picture of a wolf pup I drew after finding an old black marker in my backpack:

I recently saw Blade Runner 2049 and Marshall, both of which I'd highly recommend.

My mom's parents, in moving out of their house in NJ, gave me an old banjo. I don't know much about the instrument, so I picked up a book about it from the library. It's interesting at least, but the physical state of the instrument itself is something I want to get checked out by someone more knowledgeable before I go too hard with it. The tuning of the strings is very tight in the way that feels like if I mess with it too much something is gonna snap. Who knows when last it was played. Still, it's kinda fascinating as some aspects (the open G tuning for instance) seem so straightforward, while so many other aspects of a Banjo are so idiosyncratic (like the high g string at the top, tuned from about halfway along the neck). Maybe if I can figure some of this out you'll get to hear some super simple beginner banjo parts on future tracks.

Been having some tooth trouble. My experiences with dentists as a kid were abominable. Seemed like no matter what I did, it was always wrong. Between that and some rude dentists whose method of joking around was making fun of me, the already anxiety-producing idea of a strange, masked figure with sharp, spinning instruments of torture digging around my mouth is not something I look forward to. I've been trying to avoid it for a long time, and not just because without dental insurance it was cost prohibitive.

If something is tied to negative emotions early on in life, it only becomes more difficult to mentally force one self to deal with them later. Sometimes we think that's not the case because of fears or issues we've overcome, but overcoming them has tied them to a positive step in our mental development. Thus, I can ride escalators like anybody these days, because my negative feelings are counteracted by the positive experience of having done so without issue in the past. However, if there is a continual negative experience, it can be ridiculously hard to justify going back to the source of pain. And then of course, there's traumatic shifts in experience which can take once positive situations or locations and turn them grim and fearful.

Trauma, after all, reshapes brain physiology.

I've heard it said that birth must be one of the most traumatic experiences of life. Makes me wonder what my brain was like before I was born. Probably not too interesting, though. If nothing else, the troubled brain is far more fascinating. Not that I believe in tabula rasa or whatever.

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight. (yes, there are a bazillion things I could say about current events and politics, but honestly I don't think I've anything of worth to add to the conversation. If you haven't yet, I would suggest checking out Amy Siskind's weekly list for a rundown of this mad, mad world's goings on...or at least the local politics version)

Thanks for reading,
Odist

40/52 - What Writing May Come

Dear Internauts,

In preparation for a yard sale my folks were having, I'd been digging through old plastic crates for anything remotely sale-worthy when I ran into the stacks of notebooks from my younger days. Consisting mostly of writing I'd produced between sixth grade to my college years, these were often pages first accrued for the sake of schoolwork and homework, which instead of doing I'd more often set aside for the sake of scribbling whatever rambling thoughts my troubled adolescent mind might conjure. Often in the format of a song, or barring that the line-by-line rhythmic function of a Whitman-esque fraud, I would not simply fill these pages but, upon inking both sides of every sheet, go back and turn them ninety degrees before disgorging another layer of black or blue ink over-top the previous. What I could manage to read sans nausea I found to be the struggle of a young mind to come to terms with the social, religious, and academic pressures of twenty-first century western teenage life. Most of it tedious, repetitive, and beyond banal, I would collapse from cringing were it not for the pathetic and sympathetic sense of loss found in this hyper-emotional half-being floating chaotically in a nonsense world.

What struck me, besides the sheer absurdity of this young fool's quantity of expression—what may be called prolific if any of it were even somewhat nuanced, original, or of interesting quality—was how freely it all flowed. There was no waiting for inspiration to strike. Panic was all the inspiration needed as the weight of this kid's young world wrung out verse like a washcloth in the path of a collapsed dam. Compulsion to create served as such a strong opposing force to the necessity of any other aspect of life that I sometimes found little, boxed-off sections saved for class notes hidden within the larger deluge of literary excrement and the occasional short segment of comic doodling. The largely unintelligible mass of thought splatter existed so blatantly outside the realm of critique, self-edit, or second guessing. It had to exist. I would puff up and likely explode if not for regularly inky bleedings.

The point of this all is the contrast with my current self-doubt when it comes to creativity. While I still experience the occasional sudden deluge of written obsession, I have now built up so many gates and intellectual stop-gaps between the flicker of inspiration and the expression of thought that in contrast to my previous production, it wouldn't be too far off to say I don't create much of anything at all. Any thought of creation is bombarded by doubts, fears, and criticism before it has any time or space to breathe. No tiny bacterium or figment has much begun to spin into itself before it must come up against the enormous challenge of that which is "good enough" or "worthwhile" or "presentable". Any potential poetic endeavor is a potential song and therefore a potential contender for the greatest or more likely the worst song I or anyone has ever written. This could be the hit, the one they all stand and applaud for, the one that I'll hear on the radio one day, the one that'll make all my former friends and lovers stop and wish they'd treated me better as I raise an award over my head and thank my parents for believing in me. Or at very least it might be a nice step in "the right direction" for me as a songwriter.

Whether it be poetry or prose, I'd much rather be writing fiction than whatever something like this blog is. And the truth is that every final draft is more often than not preceded by multiple less-than-final drafts. We must allow ourselves to create horrible first drafts, says every other writing article online.

Anyway, didn't Harrison Ford not start acting till he was in his 30s? Didn't Vincent Van Gogh not start painting till he has 26 or so? How many times was JK Rowling or Oprah rejected before someone saw their real genius? How many horrible, never to be seen first drafts sit silent somewhere in the basement of the greats or even just the mediocre masses of professional creators?

For a similar reason to why I've spent the past few nights unable to sleep while also unable to open my eyes from exhaustion, tossing this way and that and screaming internally for dissatisfaction and the stress-induced ache in my jaw, squeezed shut unintentionally till my spit tastes like blood, I now write this week's blog on Tuesday afternoon. Unable to refrain from looking at views from previous weeks, I shiver from the weight of what if. I want to polish a mirror before it's been made, cut a diamond before it's been mined.

The fearful potential for even minor greatness does more to hinder its most basic possibility than the first steps of faulty creation ever could.

Fear, pain, dissatisfaction, uncertainty, and weakness are such universal traits that their expression creates some of the most relatable pieces in existence. However, their experience can also lead to the greatest hindrance of creation.

There is no promise that the boxes of notebooks will lead to a Pulitzer or a Grammy. There is no record deal secretly hidden in practicing your scales or signing up for an open mic. Nobody reaches the top of the mountain in one step, but then nobody reaches the top of the mountain without the first step.

It's messy and wild and gross and confusing and real and paranoid and shaking and struggling to breathe. It's writing a blog about not knowing how to write because at least that's writing something, right?

Oh well. It's something.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

39/52 - Overwhelmed by Tragedy?

"It’s as if you’re a sponge that is completely saturated and has never been wrung out. You can only take so much." -Laura Van Dermoot Lipsky

Dear Internauts,

Sometimes it feels all too overwhelming, the world of wounds and worries so blatant. The news of suffering is catastrophic in its abundance of catastrophe. It's so easy to feel guilty for not doing anything to help, but then immediately feel guilty and stuck with no idea how to help. Nothing ever seems to be enough as our awareness of tragic circumstances grows to the point of over-saturation.

I'm exhausted simply in existence—a result of my own issues—but simply trying to stay aware of current events makes me feel trapped beyond escape. The ways in which I see others helping via donations of time, money, blood, or however else seem always just beyond me. Even if I do give, how can I trust any of the "non-profit" organizations whose business practices seem to be in ever-shifting trustworthiness?

At a certain point, it's not even cynicism, but simply gravity. There's a sense of falling without a net, having painted myself into a corner, trapped behind a fire-hot door in a smoking room, while the weight on my back grows heavier and the hole in my stomach expands exponentially. It's a kind of fatalistic defeatism, ever reinforced by the madness of a 24/7 infinite news feed. Even if I can force myself to turn everything off and hide away, I can't forget that the world is melting, the leaders are lying, the businesses are stealing, and the bombers are bombing.

What do I do with the dark sense of certainty that every new bad thing is "the worst" of that type of bad thing we've ever seen? The availability of news stories and the desire for the news media to present captivating post-titles is certainly at play, but it's also a cyclical expansion of this common theme that everything is getting worse.

Now there's every kind of bias at play. Our fear is a survival tactic, and one way to find a minuscule tidbit of relief from emotional pain is to feel our emotions vindicated by the likes and shares of the fear we post and re-post.  What I'm doing right now is simply sharing my pain in the hopes that maybe you can relate, not necessarily with the hope that you will help me feel any better or change my perspective but only that you might give the equivalent of a digital passing nod. Some semi-conscious sense of togetherness can be found in communal terror. From the over-abundance of emergency powers we give to the military and government leadership in the wake of tragedy, to the sense of perverse wonder we find in watching and thumbs-upping "fail" videos.

In truth, this is one of the most peaceful times in history. We have better medicine, longer life spans, and lower infant mortality than ever before. The abundance of accessible information means the growth of more complex and easily attainable education, as well as the creation and dissemination of human personality and empathy through the arts and social media. The theory behind writing your pen pal is now the entire basis for most of human communication.

Still, sometimes it feels wrong to celebrate such positives in light of all the negative. Do I believe that it's only a matter of a greater percentage of good dispelling the bad?

I spent so much time growing up being told that I had to do good because God told me to. Simultaneously, the bad in the world was unavoidable, indefatigable, and unchangeable because of sin, so we might as well just keep our own souls shiny till the after-life and the kingdom come down.
Of course, many of these same people who preached this played the part of many a philosopher and didn't live as such in their day to days.

I like to believe that even the most self-righteous person might have a twinge of goodness in them deep down, at least enough to help out their fellow human being if forced to face that fellow as a fellow.

And there's the rub. Empathy.

It's what every bigot lacks and what every sad soul needs. It's the thing that keeps morality going whether or not you believe there's a divine Big Brother watching over your shoulder, Naughty or Nice list in hand. It's the fast friends children form before we teach them to be racist, sexist, or classist. It's the most necessary quality in the formation of a healthy relationship between anyone and anyone else.

And it's both what keeps us feeling overwhelmed by all the suffering in the world and allows us to keep caring anyway.

I know what it's like to feel trapped by all this madness, and so I can say it's okay not to share in all my sadness.

When we can help, let's. But never because we think we have to or else. Always because we want to help our fellow being in need.

And as always, it's okay not to know what to do.

Thanks for reading,
Odist