Duct Taped Detritus
By Rory Marinich AKA Rinich

I know precisely how close I am to a nervous breakdown.

My thesis advisor just wrote me back regarding my three essays which I think are the shittiest. He said they were uniformly “fantastic”, his choice of adjective.

I am hunting for a calm, adult deliberation which feels completely alien to me. I know how much work I still have to do. It’s intimidating: six more essays, plus probably two revisions each of the nine I’ll need. One revision just to get it structurally right, and one more to make sure it flows. Then I’ll have to rewrite a lot of my core narrative to be sure it’s as tight as I want it to be. That includes the intro chapter, which at this point I’ve written a good ten times. I’ve spent at least thirty hours of my life writing that first chapter, and I’m planning on spending another three or four before I’m ready to call it done. And another thirty hours, possibly more, finishing all the other parts that I don’t feel are finished.

Part of me wants to spend the next thirty hours overcaffeinated and plunging desperately into somewhat being able to call this finished. Another part of me wants to give up and call what I’ve written finished. I’m getting praise for even the parts I dislike. If writing this was about the praise, I could call myself a success right now. But it’s not about the praise. It’s about the piece, and making sure it can be all the things it deserves to be.

“Deserves.” I’ve never been more acutely aware of my writing’s structural integrity than I am now. I’m writing an argument in three parts, each part of which is subdivided into three more parts; each of those subdivisions spins out into a tangent essay, and each tangent essay fits into two groupings of three essays each. Each of the substructures, and the structure as a whole, must flow. It’s not enough to make the points I want to make; it’s crucial to the points that I be able to make them compelling, or else my arguments won’t hold up.

The caffeine-drinking voice in me is the one that worries I won’t be able to write this without inspiration. It’s the worrywart. It tells me not to trust myself, not to trust the integrity of my thoughts. If I don’t write this right now it’ll never come out. I need to do it all at once, and without taking a single break. It’s the voice of youth and insecurity and immaturity and it will ruin me if I follow it for a project of this side. Ruin me.

This year I’ve embarked on a number of personal projects that are each of a scale beyond anything I’ve tackled in my life. Two web sites that have each been a year in the making. This thesis, which’ll end up taking me a little bit more than a year to write. One other project that I started in September, with the assumption that nobody would get to see it till the September after next. That one might come out a little bit sooner than that, if I’m lucky, but I’m in no hurry to get it done.

I’m feeling compelled by the work of architect Christopher Alexander, whose four-book The Nature of Order took him decades to write. The Nature of Order is an examination of how life grows – not biological life but a more abstract definition, one that takes pretty much everything in existence into account. Alexander’s vision of architecture goes beyond buildings, into every aspect of society, art, life. It makes me think that the purpose of the creative mind is to make spaces in which growth is encouraged and made easy.

To that end, I’m determined that the spaces I create must be uniformly the best spaces I can imagine existing. The rate at which I build them should be determined by the limits of myself and my life, not by some arbitrary decider of how frequently I ought to be making things. If my projects take months and years to finish, then so be it, as long as in the end they’re what they ought to be.

Myself and my life. The two things I can’t ignore or sacrifice. From them grows everything I’ll ever do or know or make. Building something at their expense will send everything crashing down. So I won’t.

The child in me is terrified that my life is to be spent, largely, enjoying my life. For every hour I create I’ll spend two or three or four hours walking, relaxing, learning to cook, idling about. Holding Ashley close and kissing the side of her mouth and reminding her again and again how strongly, and in how many ways, she means something to me. The child in me doesn’t want any of that. The child in me wants me to be an ascetic, or a rude ruthless jackass. Something pure and straight, simple and flat.

He is wrong, and I won’t let him deceive me any more than I’d let anybody else deceive me. What I’m working on transcends me and exists beyond me. It can wait. All I need to reach it is to know that it’s there to be reached.

I’m scared and I’m hopeful.

God, I wish you could get the one of those without the other attached. It would make things so much easier, you know?

It feels like everything’s coming to an end, in more ways than one. The end of a leg of school. The end of a long, shambling quest to put a few very basic things into enough words that I could understand them. The end of a recovery period, in a way, where I overcame a lot of childhood neuroses and realized that the world I thought I was seeing wasn’t quite the world that was there. The end of a major work that’s taken me four years to finish.

I’m driven by compulsions and by love. The compulsion is the easier of the two: the drive comes from beyond you and all you have to do is move till you reach it. Love is harder: you find it in yourself, then recognize it’s already there in others, like it’s been waiting for you to look. I’m hopeful because I’ve found love in the world around me. I’m scared because now I can imagine this love disappearing again.

It’s the same old story, one of a hundred billion variations on a basic theme, stitched through the little pieces that make up everything, weaving it all together in patterns we can spot with the naked eye. On every conceivable level we both spring from this and we return to it. Why? No important reason. “Beauty” maybe. “Physical necessity” really. Things are the way they are because past a certain point, they couldn’t be any other way.

I read – I forget where – that pattern art originated in religions that understood their gods to exist beyond the human plane of existence. The essence of God was properly depicted as a beautiful pattern, nothing more. I can get behind that kind of God.

We have a hand in weaving the patterns of the world around us, in creating beauty within the patterns that already exist. It’s a quest for scientists, architects, poets, dancers, lovers, children. We seek so that we might see it for ourselves. We create so that others might see it too.

Success, if it’s to be measured, is in smiles and songs and skyscrapers. Laughter and water. Moments that stay with us for years. Moments that last no longer than moments.

Neither fear nor hope are any more real than we make them out to be, but if reality is what we make together, then so are hope and fear. I’d like it to be made of love and hope, rather than of the fear and compulsion which often follow it in its wake. It will be made of both, but I’m holding onto the hope and letting the fear pass by.

Trillions upon trillions of photons pass through the Earth in a fraction of a second, and our world is made of the ones which we happen to catch.

This might sound extremely arrogant or slow, but bear with me. I think I might be quicker than a lot of (most?) people. I often get frustrated and blame people who don’t figure things out as quickly as I do; I’d just assumed it was because they didn’t get that “10 ways to solve problems” worksheet in 3rd grade like I did. But I’m sort of realizing – way later than I should – that I’m just quick. Not any less prone to error or anything, just… quick. And that – again, this comes about fifteen years late – I don’t have a lot of sympathy for less-quick people, and also, I assume it’s their fault when I figure out things faster than they do. That’s wrong and I’d like to stop it.

I am at the point of practically shitting out essays. I’ve written three in the last three days, none shorter than 13 pages. I’ve still got six to go, and I hope to be done by the middle of next week so I can start revising ASAP.

In case you’re interested: writing at this pace feels very unpleasant. I’ve learned that it doesn’t actually affect the quality of the output (I can write either wonderfully or crappily regardless of whether I’m feeling crappy or wonderful), but as I finish each, I’m left with the weird feeling that I’m running out of words to use. Yet I’m also totally caught up in the rush of writing all this. A part of me wants to stay up all night and write two more. I won’t, though, only because I have this fear of hitting a point where language stops making sense and I’ll output 8000 words of nonstop gibberish.

The Weird Fuckin Thing About Art

For me the weird fuckin thing about art is that of all its traits which we laud and hold dear, it all has only one thing in common, which is that somebody at some point decided to make it and then they worked hard on it until it was done. We don’t revere this process, but we revere the art it creates. We celebrate it for what it symbolizes and what themes it gets at and what deeper meanings it unveils for us; we champion it like our knowing of it puts us on the right side of some cosmic cause; we fight over it like the people who made it really give a shit about our taking up arms against all those who might shrug and say, Eh, not my thing; but what we don’t do is go, Hey, that’s cool! I want to do that cool thing too! And then we go do that cool thing and it takes however long it takes for that cool thing to be done.

Every artist ever is defined by a few key traits. First, they thought about things; second, they worked on some things. What those things are doesn’t really matter. I mean, it matters to them, and it matters to the people who like their art, but there’s nothing individually important about what comes out, though the people who cling to it act like there’s something truly significant about the things that stand up about it. But nobody looks at art and says, Wow, that’s neat, that dude must’ve worked really hard on that. Good for you, dude! I liked the end result.

We like to mystify things we don’t understand; but we mystify the things, not the people. I mean, all art comes from people, and art is so diverse because people’ve got goddamn depth, all people, even if it’s not the sort of depth you might be looking for on a given day, but still we see the interesting art and assume that like there’s something interesting about art that isn’t also interesting about people.

I love people. And I love all art. Not all people, not all art, but it’s not all here for me, is it? What I have a harder time standing are people who turn art into something sacred, especially when the art they worship isn’t especially much writing home to. And I also can’t stand people who are fundamentally lazy about themselves. I don’t mean lazy people; I am a lazy people; I have moved a total of like twenty feet all day. But people who just can’t be fucking bothered to think about themselves, or to act how they want to act, because at some point they bought into the myth that life is simple and shallow and boring and now all they’re doing is looking for ways to escape it and find something better. And all the ways they find to escape it come from people whose lives are about working on these things which help them escape. But some people never seem to make the connection between the escapes and the people who made them, and they keep going on about those escapes like you’re not living if you’re not constantly trying to get out of your own life.

There comes a point where every non-asinine artist goes You know what? Fuck art. Fuck saying things. Fuck meaning. I wanna do this shit because I fucking like doing this shit, fuck off with your greater purpose. And then they do that shit and people see it and they think that, like, whatever that shit says, there’s something profound to it. But there’s not. It’s just people doing things. People doing things is way more impressive than it sounds. It’s maybe the most impressive thing, on some level. But we weirdly fuckin focus on the thing and never on the gorgeous mundanity that led to that thing in the first place. Magic is more boring than we think it is. I think that’s what makes it magic.

Friends

Maybe you could say it started with the nose-picking. I remember being bullied on the bus because it was funny to kids that I put my finger up my nose. I mean, it was, but I wasn’t picking my nose for laughs. It just felt good to get dry boogers out of my nose. So I hated being laughed at. Hated it.

Or you could go back earlier, to when I was I don’t know how young, and I found a piece of red glass somewhere, declared it a ruby, and tried to sell it to neighbors for like $500. I always loved money, or maybe I just loved big numbers. I used to scan the Guinness Book of Records for big numbers and speak them into a tape recorder. Maybe I didn’t like money or numbers: I just liked the look of stacks of dollar bills next to each other. At once orderly and chaotic. Crisp yet yielding. I always liked weird things. Garfield, too. Weird things and Garfield.

By fifth or sixth grade, certainly sixth, I thought of myself as a reject from society. Sixth grade was the year I wrote a girl a note telling her I thought she was pretty, but I was too scared to put it in her locker myself so I gave it to this prick of a kid named Alan. Alan read it himself before delivery; I will never forgive him. Then word spread that I’d done something stupid. I heard about what I’d done from a hundred thousand people. By the time the girl came by to tell me she’d like to be friends, I’d rehearsed a response of heaping scorn so that she’d know how unhurt I was by her rejection. She’d know that I could never like her because I was better than her. I emerged elite and alone.

Between eighth and ninth grades, I lost the only friends I had left. First there was the eighth-grade band that I wanted to join. Of course I could join, because I had a good singing voice and I had SO MANY IDEAS. I was a vital asset to any band that would have me. I was rejected from the band via a scrolling banner on a public GeoCities page, which I assumed every kid in school read. “You’re not in our hand Rory!!!! That is because none of us like you!!” Something like that.

A feeling of outsiderdom blossomed into a raging paranoia. If my friends couldn’t reject me politely and to my face, I couldn’t trust anybody. And if I couldn’t trust anybody, then I was all alone. And if I was all alone, then I was going to be trampled over and forgotten, by all the friendships that wouldn’t have me as a part of them.

I started writing when I was 11, because people liked my writing and that meant they would talk to me. Four years later I took a drama class and realized I was witty. Wit plus a series of encounters with a dickish friend-of-a-friend taught me that the best way to cope in high school was to speak up when you felt like being mean. I wasn’t so good at telling people when I liked them. I was great at saying I hated them.

Nobody liked the things that I liked. Nobody felt the same things that I felt. Either it was because I was smarter than them, or because I was inhuman; I wasn’t certain which. Other people who told me they were smart must be wrong, because they had friends and I didn’t; my loneliness was proof of my superiority. And people enjoyed me when I was mean, so clearly I was right to be mean to everyone. Maybe they even liked being told what made them inferior. Maybe that’s the best way to grow.

I became an excellent critic. I could notice flaws in things that were barely even there. Eventually I also noticed the things that made things good; but I only ever used that to defend my own likes, nobody else’s. If you liked something I didn’t, you were wrong and stupid; if you didn’t like something I did, you were wrong and stupid also. I was searching for something big, something too big for any of you to ever notice or even comprehend; my cruelty stemmed from disappointment, at the world’s perpetual failure.

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There’s something to be said for knowing how to critique things, for knowing how to appreciate difficult art, for knowing how to create. I don’t regret the skills I learned. I regret the path which took me to them.

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The night of my senior prom, I stayed home and wrote about why I hated senior prom. I wrote about how much I wished it could be a celebration of maturity, of adulthood, of growing up together with a hundred friends. Instead, I said, it was an indictment of our youth, our school, our culture at large. It was a reminder that we hadn’t grown up. That after thirteen years together we hadn’t changed like we should have.

Graduation week I felt a few desperate pangs. Something enormous was coming to an end, suddenly, abruptly, and if I didn’t act soon, the chance would be lost forever. Act how? Chance for what? I don’t think I knew. I remember the post-graduation party, spending a night in a building I’d never seen before with the people I’d known nearly all my life. Having a good time. Thinking, maybe I missed most of it, but boy, there was something here, wasn’t there? Wasn’t there?

That summer I saw a lot of people I’d barely spent time with in school. It was fantastic. It was the first summertime that I felt young and free and part of something. It ended too soon.

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When you feel like you’re the only person in the world who thinks and acts like you do, but you’re not enough of an introvert to lock away the rest of the world entirely, then the only way for you to cope is to develop a whole new person to be. Study people and the way they behave. Manufacture responses. Calculate your every word and gesture. Slip your presence into a conversation so that you occupy exactly the niche you want to occupy.

Your friends become the people you wished would like you, rather than the people you actually like. You envy them and you know, even if they don’t, that you will never be them. When you slip up and reveal a part of yourself and they respond derisively, you either turn on a small piece of yourself and stomp on it till it dies, or you turn on the derider and you take them down. You hurt them as viciously as you know how to so that they know you didn’t mind what they said, not one bit, not at all. You’re a loner, see, you’re an alienated genius. They’ll pay for disappointing you, but that’s all they ever were, that’s all you ever saw them as.

Disappointments.

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There are still some people who, when I text them, I have to delete my text from my phone immediately. That way I don’t have to think about how hurt I am when they don’t reply. Their failure to respond tells me that I have failed to make them my friends, hard as I’ve tried to become somebody they’d like to be friends with.

I still pick my nose, but I’m less blatant about it.

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I’ve got a deep love for Facebook, though I haven’t used it in nearly a year. I love the arrogance of its conceited CEO; I love how they change things and piss off their users on a bi-yearly basis; I love how they want to use technology to bring people together in a way they’ve never been before.

I didn’t grow up with Facebook; it showed up when I was halfway through high school, and changed things nearly instantly. My activity log shows over a thousand wall posts a year, the first two years. I talked to people I’d never talk to otherwise. People talked to me the same way. Friendships started and ended on Facebook. And it was all logged, unbeknownst to the average user until Timeline exposed their entire life. It’s an amazing social history that never could have existed before. It’s changing the way people interact. Is anything more exciting than that?

Yet while it enables conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen, Facebook can be frustratingly superficial. I don’t think it’s intentionally so, but the downside of convenience is devaluation. When talk is easy, the harder sort of talking gets skipped over. When friends are logged, it’s easy to take them for granted, all piled up in rows for your easy poking and unfriending. When certain things about people – likes, favorite quotations, photographs – are the easiest things to see about them, you start thinking of people in those terms, because they’ve chosen to expose themselves in those ways. You start to think that this is the way to express yourself – calculated appearances, selective statements addressed to the feed.

So of course I loved Facebook: it was a reflection of the way I saw people already. I could generalized and dismiss people without saying a word to them. I could make my cruelty public for everybody to see and acknowledge. Facebook’s a great place for social showmanship, and I’d developed some sweet moves that I wanted people to see.

But then – weirdly, unexpectedly – I became happy.

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Part of it was my growing up a little bit, though I’m loathe to give myself much credit here. Much of it was the amazing friends I made, the ones I could be a little more honest around, the ones who actually made me feel ashamed for my bad behavior. Some of it, more than I wish, came from meeting people who acted like me and realizing I hated them. Realizing I hated the status game, the games of having good taste, the obsession with appearances and behavior and “winning” with people by saying the right things to them. Realizing that despite my love for surfaces, I needed something beneath them, and I passionately hated the ones that cared only about surface.

I struggled between the two hates for a while – hating the people who were what I was not, and hating the people who were what I had become. I still struggle. It’s hard not to resent people who never learned how to put on a good show, people whose love for a thing is less obsessive than yours is, people who are somehow less elegant or thoughtful or refined in their approach to something which demands little elegance or thought or refinement. My instinct is still to judge, to critique, even when it achieves nothing but insecurity and petty thoughts.

Slowly I’m changing. Slowly. I’m still hunting for the bigger thing, but the destination’s changed. It’s not about awe or greatness; it’s about freedom, comfort, looseness, joy. I’m looking for that which opens people up.

Then, last night, a stupid and simple thought hit me: I don’t have to be crafty about liking things. People like me and I like people. The things I like are great because I like them, and it doesn’t matter if the rest of the world agrees with me or not. The things I don’t like I can freely let go, rather than clinging to them and struggling to incorporate them somehow into myself. I don’t need to be all things to all people. I can just be the things that I’d like.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the happiest smile I’ve ever seen. Nothing in the way of the world and that smile. It was a smile that was enjoying itself and not thinking a whit about whether it oughtn’t be. The kind of smile so easy it’s hard.

We complicate things, and we complicate ourselves. It’s so much easier to be simple, if we let ourselves. And it’s easier to be easy than most of us know. Probably even easier than that.

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I’ve avoided Facebook because I hated how much I used it. It’s a broken system, it really is. I can imagine it being so much better. Just like that eighth grade band: I’ve got ideas. But Facebook isn’t primarily about ideas or philosophy or significance. It’s about friends.

I miss people on Facebook, and those people don’t seem like they’re going anywhere. So I decided to go back. Find the people I missed and tell them how much I missed them. But before that, I wanted to wipe out the past, get rid of all of my public ties to the ugliness and the unhappiness. So early this morning I woke up and started systematically deleting the thousands of posts on my Facebook wall, bit by bit, working backwards through years of memories.

I can’t say I expected to feel anything about the deletions. But there’s something about going backwards through six years of your life that’s powerfully disconcerting. You see friends go and come and go again. You see them turn younger. Depressions vanish. Gentle confidence becomes youthful anxiety. You see every fun conversation you ever joined in. You see every ugly thing you ever said.

I see a lot of conversations with people I never really liked, people I pretended to like because I wanted them to give me… something. I don’t always know what. Sometimes I know exactly what. Sometimes I don’t even remember the person, yet there they are: years of long, vivid conversations which you only barely paid attention to. Years of being somebody else in public.

Sometimes there are people who only ever talked to you twice, but you were there when they talked. They said something that meant something. Or maybe they didn’t, but they meant something to you, they were the real thing you weren’t sure you wanted. And you remember them, and you wonder why you didn’t remember them then. Why you thought it was a good idea to cut them away in the first place.

Before he died, the controversial writer Christopher Hitchens wrote, “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.” Looking back on the years, neatly and utterly documented online, you see a part of history. You see the moments you missed, the mistakes you made. The friends you lost and might never regain. But you also see the friends you kept, the friends you still have. The friends who make you happy, and the friends who are happy you’re there.

What surprised me the most, looking back on my high school years, wasn’t realizing what an idiot I’d been, or how horrible a person I was. I’d known that even then. No: the surprising thing was the realization that I didn’t miss some things. That I’d never been outside at all, even as I’d tried my damnedest to be an outsider. That I had been a part of this life the whole time.

self longform text meditation friends friendship facebook high school

Revision of Whitman: So I contradict myself. Fuck off.

I find myself annoyed by the presumption of professors who insist that I not only write papers but also hand them in for grading. That the paper exists, and that I am its author, ought to be enough to satisfy and amaze them.

thoughts text papers school grading writing

Things

I guess you could say I care more about things, in the abstract, than I care about people. That’s not to say I don’t care about my loved ones, the friends and family who make my life meaningful; I’d give up all the things of the world to have more time with them. And I try not to be callous, though callousness is my inclination; I attempt not to inflict pain or suffering through my actions, though I often fail. But I find myself caring less about people and more about the things people create; my interest in suffering extends as far as it’s caused by man-made systems and beliefs.

Yesterday I attended the dress rehearsal of a Beethoven/Brahms concert at Rutgers in Camden. It brought me to tears. There’s something richer and more fulfilling about live classical music than there is to maybe anything else I know. I wish there was a popular form of entertainment that could bring about such deep satisfaction; the balance between what’s profound and what’s popularly accessible fascinates me. Partly this is because I feel that I am neither particularly interested in what’s profound or what’s popular; I consider myself fairly mundane in my motivations. I don’t hold ambitions for celebrity or for profound realization. I’m interested in each, but I am much too easily happy with life to care much for either direction.

I think that happiness is a pretty natural state for living things. Happiness leads to uncaring, or maybe it’s the other way around; if you think that life in all its forms, both beautiful and terrible, is magnificent, then it’s harder to care about specifically what that life is doing. I’m certain that my own deluded cheeriness is what makes me good at what I do, as much as or more so than my moments of obsessive brooding. I find it easier to see the patterns in things when I’m a detached observer rather than a participant.

So I’m not interested in people – their joys and their sorrows are passing moments in a greater symphony full of each – but I am interested in what people can leave behind. Because if we can introduce greater and more elegant creations to the world, creations intended for ourselves, then we can fix whichever systems are broken and bring more and more people to this state of bliss which frees them to create and to play in turn.

Some people spend their lives devoted to great causes. I doubt I could ever devote myself to anything of the sort. These people may change the world, but then they are gone and the rest of us see the improved world and it feels self-evident that things should have been this way to begin with. That some are willing to spend their lives improving things for others impresses and humbles me, but I couldn’t do it. I care too much about the specific abstractions I leave behind, the thoughts and discoveries and realizations that might make people see things differently. Not any one thing in particular. Just things.

I tell myself that this is the greater cause, because from elegant things can come a thousand movements. Possibly I’m fooling myself. Possibly there’s something bad about my inability to feel empathy for people I’ve never met, or even for people I’ve met but still don’t especially care about. I make an effort, as I said, not to make things worse for those people, but I don’t feel a particular incentive to make things better for them either, even when they’re in particularly putrid places.

I offer this not as an excuse, but as an explanation. What interests me about life is how it comes to be, not how it subsequently is. I care about creation. I’m interested in changing the things that have already been made, but that’s a fleeting interest compared to my consuming passion: fifty bows move and a vibration shakes the room. Something is where something was not. Lives are fleeting, but life endures. The individual instances interest me less than the things which reinforce the whole.

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Variations on the theme of Bruce

(This is the hardest thing I’ve written in maybe years. It was not birthed easily.)

There’s something in Bruce Springsteen’s music that’s significant enough for me to spend some time understanding, I think. I don’t know the last time discussing somebody risked my flying into a hot wet rage; I’m prone to hatred and scorn and thoughts of violence as much as (I assume) anybody else is, but when I start thinking about Bruce my thoughts aren’t of violence, they’re of something more terminal, something like: Maybe if our species’ survival includes Bruce, it’s not worth fighting for. The actual thought is wordless but that’s one relatively decent translation.

That’s a highly irrational impulse; I’m not sure where it comes from, and that worries me, hence this. It comes from someplace very deep, someplace I still haven’t mined all the words out of, and I don’t like thinking I still have those deep wordless places in me. I’d prefer to be as shallowly profound as possible. So as I find these worrisome responses, I’d like to deal with them on my own, in a place where the only harm will maybe be a long, boring treatise on imaginary neuroses.

I feel that my response comes from the weirdly clashing aspects of Bruce that seem, to me, ultratense; I’m not sure, in other words, whether I think Bruce Springsteen is incredible or despicable. It’s like the tension you create when you skip stones on a lake: you push your fingers so closely together that the stone slips off, spinning madly, bouncing off whatever surface it encounters. There are enough contradictions in Springsteen that I get this sort of dizzy.

II

Likely as not my improbable anger towards him comes from my love of remaining in relative control of myself and my environment. I could never play RTS games on anything but the easiest levels, because for me the joy of playing a game comes from creating impenetrable stability; sometimes, when I’m feeling low, I’ll play a video game and spend three or four hours slowly grinding a virtual opponent to dust by creating a scenario in which it’s completely impossible for me to suffer even the minutest of losses. There is absolutely zero challenge to this; what I think I enjoy is this process of gracefully creating this stability.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that this process is central not only to how I play but to how I read and write and think. I love reading and rereading books, essays, blog posts, etc. until I have a firm grasp of exactly what a piece’s virtues and flaws are. When I write, regardless of whether it’s a story or poem or essay, I’m either going through a process of grappling with something unstable until it seems to come to a rest, or else I’m producing in a state of utter whimsy and confidence. The whimsical pieces can end on unsettling notes and involve jarring elements, because their joy comes from their meaninglessness; the “stabilizing” work (what a shitty goddamn term) always ends on a note of contentment, and if it is not content, then it is not done.

I feel dissatisfied with my writing because it always seems to move towards being corny and saccharine; I feel that the writing which hits me the deepest is that which unsettles me, whereas my writing moves towards settlement. I could be charitable and say that my writing might have meaning because it exposes various levels of chaos and unsettlement within a seemingly simple situation, and that the ending is more a reassurance that order is possible than it is a cheap packaging-up of a difficult situation, but I genuinely feel that my writing is repeatedly too shallow to convey anything of real meaning. Though I’d be hard-pressed to explain just what this “real meaning” is.

My typical self-assessment is much more uncharitable: I see myself as somebody who only starts games that he knows in advance he can win, who deliberately says inflammatory and stupid and hurtful things to people just to provoke them into debates which they have no hope of winning. I am antisocial and misanthropic and have a hard time dealing with environments where I’m not in some way a central part; I can lead conversations very well but I can’t follow them. No, that’s not true; I can follow conversations in which it seems that the person talking seems to care that I understand, and if I don’t seem to matter in a situation then I have to take pains to disrupt it and turn it into a me-vs-world battle where I have been given a meaningful role – that of the antagonist.

III

I feel, truth be told, like a very shitty friend very frequently; I feel, very frequently, that I might be able to tell most of my friends truthfully that I don’t “need” them. I have, in the past, told friends this, and felt a vicious satisfaction in ripping myself away from them. But I hate feeling that way, and I regret every single friend I’ve ripped myself from. I’m inclined to blame the friends here for making me feel this way, like it’s their fault that I don’t value their thoughts, or that they don’t prioritize me in every single goddamn fucking exchange. Yet that’s not fair to them, and also I’m nervous that I unintentionally make other people feel unwelcome or that I don’t matter.

I truly believe that I’m not so narcissistic that I have to matter in some unique way; it’s that I feel if I don’t matter then I must not be expressing my movements clearly enough. I must not be letting other people dance with me. Surely if I were letting them into my heart they’d be moved and they would move me, right? Regardless of how silly or small the movements might be? So maybe it’s my fault if I feel out of place or unsettled. Maybe it’s both our faults, in which case it’s my responsibility not to blame you and to try and make things work regardless. Or to try and help you work with me. I don’t know.

I fear that perhaps I’m obsessive-compulsive, and this tendency I have is towards needlessly needing order. Or I’m attention deficit, and am simply incapable of paying people attention. Or I’m a sociopath who doesn’t have it in him to empathize with other people. I have a terror that there’s something deeply wrong with me, some little seed that stops me from ever being a good person, and that this seed will destroy every one of my hopes, every person I could ever want to love.

Or maybe the sickness is that I need everybody to love me as much as I love them. Even if maybe I don’t feel like I do love them. Maybe there’s something wrong with always wanting to matter.

IV

All this is to say that, while I have this need to find order and stability, both in my life and in my social interactions, Bruce’s weird contradictions manage to utterly destroy my ability to keep my footing in any conversation that mentions him. I’m not certain what I think about him, so I can’t express my feelings toward him with any effectiveness, and the result is that when I try to mention what I think about him I feel unerringly that my voiced opinions are in the wrong. I lose arguments over him because I contradict myself in trying to explain what I think about him. And I can’t stand to lose an argument. I don’t play these discussions to see whether I can win them; I play them to show the other person why they’ve already lost.

Contradictions. Which are they? Bruce is a carefully manufactured image of a musician yet he is “authentic”. He writes cheesy music yet it is sincere, even poignant. His music is among the best-marketed on the planet, yet it is “true”. It is either terribly-written or wonderfully well-written; I don’t know which. It is either exceedingly primitive or it is over-produced.

He’s either exactly the kind of artist I want to be or he’s exactly the kind I want to avoid being. I’m missing some things here. Let me try and articulate this better.

It’s difficult because Bruce is a storyteller, and storytellers are exempt from any exact sincerity. If his songs don’t feel like they’re coming from a real, complex person, then that’s okay, as long as the characters he create are themselves compelling. If his lyrics don’t convey any subtlety, but there’s a subtlety in the story’s motion, then there’s still subtlety, just not on the surface. And Bruce’s songs absolutely have a cheesiness on their surface: they’re over-romantic, caricaturized, both in their lyrics and in their sound. I have a hard time believing that music any less emotionally dumbed-down would have met the success that Bruce had.

There’s the rub: while there are admirable traits in Bruce’s music, they’re masked by a surface-level simplicity (bordering on outright stupidity) which is what actually brought him to a wider audience. It’s made more complex because Bruce is clearly very talented at manufacturing this surface stupidity; he’s got chops as a pop songwriter and as a folk songwriter alike.

V

I’ve been listening to two back-to-back Bruce albums as I write this. The first, Nebraska, is stripped-down and bare; Bruce recorded the songs on his own, waiting for his band to come together and play them, then realized there was something to the bareness and released the album as-was. The second, Born in the USA, is the most 80s-cheesy of all the music I’ve heard from him, yet he embraces the cheesiness and makes it a part of the overall thing. The pop-production is entwined with the message and reflects it; it shows a winking self-awareness that older Bruce lacked.

What’s interesting is that here’s a guy with the chops to release a bare folk album and make it interesting, but who’s also got the marketing savvy to know that something like this will sell. I don’t accuse Bruce of manufacturing a stripped-down authenticity – I have no reason to doubt its genuinity – but certainly it’s not an accident that Nebraska was a big seller. It markets itself, and Bruce knew it would market itself.

Born in the USA seems to embrace both sides of Bruce – the legitimate folk American singer, and the pop producer who aims to please. It argues (to me anyway) that a pop song can contain bitter, hard truths without losing any of itself. And that, moreover, perhaps a pop song might relieve some of the bitterness for the bitter, while exposing the pop audience to the bitterness, even perhaps changing them. It seems to make some sense of Bruce, of how this man could write folk songs with enough of a pop sheen to repulse me, or pop songs with enough of a folk backing to transcend pop.

And there’s no arguing that his music hasn’t touched millions, many of them to the point where they develop a fierce, passionate love for the guy and his music. I’m from New Jersey; many of these fierce lovers of Bruce are my friends.

VI

But this fierceness bothers me too. I’ve been rambling so let me at least put this shortly: I’m not sure if being a pop icon is such a good thing.

Even once you acknowledge that folk and pop-rock can coexist without contradicting, the fact remains that the older Bruce material makes me feel slimy and vile. Perhaps there’s an authentic core, perhaps there’s an ultra-competency to the pop front, but with Bruce, at least, something is lost in moving the core to the front.

I’ve been told by many Bruce fans to avoid Born in the USA because it’s corny or synthy or not “authentic enough”. The irony that this album sounds to me like Bruce at his most authentic gets at my central frustration in these Bruce arguments. 

Let me exempt my girlfriend and my mother from the following statement: both are Bruce fans; neither are the sort I’m about to refer to. There are a number of Bruce Springsteen fans who seem to care less about his authenticity and more about his marketably authentic appearance. Who like the sound of his earlier work because it “sounds real” rather than because it’s saying anything real.

These fans also told me to avoid Nebraska, and this is why I listened to those two albums; I figured if the idiots were telling me to stay away, then this would be where I might find something true about the man and his music. I was to avoid Nebraska because it was “boring”: devoid of the pop songwriting sheen that so many fans seem to really care about. And I was to avoid USA because its pop was too obviously pop.

Is there a Bruce album which manages to be so well-written and so heartfelt that its most “authentic” sounds are the ones which make it catchy and driving? I haven’t found it if it’s there, but also I haven’t really looked. I sort of doubt it is, because I sort of doubt Bruce is a competent enough songwriter to manage that. He’s no Dylan; he lacks the lyrical competency to create words which encapsulate much beyond the realm of the cheesy. He’s coming from a true enough place that his cheese is reflecting something important, yet he’s still cheese. When the cheese is stripped away you have Nebraska, which is cutting and chilly and powerful, but which loses its poppiness.

I should mention that if you like both Nebraska and USA, you’re probably not the Bruce fan that inspires my hateful wishes for mankind’s termination, and, moreover, you’ve probably had to deal with my struggling to explain the source of my passionate dislike. This includes my girlfriend and my mother. I’m sorry for putting you through whichever ordeals I’ve put you through.

VII

I’ve listened to I’m on Fire two and a half times. This song is wonderful. Pop poetry.

VIII

Marketing is one of my great loves. It also terrifies me. I’m in the middle of writing something that explains my feelings toward marketing much more carefully, so I want to focus on specifically why marketing of this sort feels dangerous to me:

The process of marketing is to either make something simpler and more accessible, or to provide people with more of an incentive to consume that thing. The former risks ruining the actual appeal of the thing; the latter risks having people confuse the incentive with the thing itself. The study of marketing is, like most good studies, the study of certain parts of humanity; marketing is the study of how people consume, and of what motivates our consumption. I’m convinced it’s an essential study for anybody who wants their work to reach a large audience on any meaningful scale; by learning how to market, you ideally both learn how to reach people and what exploitable weaknesses they have. It can lead to more successful work, but it can also lead to work that gives people a greater self-awareness, and that helps them learn how to be, in some ways, deep.

Bruce makes his music more accessible, and certainly he plays off our weaknesses and lusts; but I accuse his music of encouraging these weaknesses, and of mixing our desires to hear about the truths he’s singing of with our baser, lesser desires. His insight makes me despise him, sometimes: when his songs touch on some powerful emotion and then, without examining it or asking why he’s feeling so strongly, simply embraces that feeling’s strength, then I feel uncomfortably like he’s encouraging shallowness and impulse, even when there’s a deeper undercurrent of meaningful struggle.

It makes me uncomfortable, and it also makes me want to despise him. Because either Bruce Springsteen is too impulsive or dim to understand what’s going on in his music, or else he knows exactly what his music’s encouraging, and he’s exploiting that element for his own sales.

Bob Dylan, whose music I’m not hugely into and whose fans I similarly impulse-despise, rapidly developed a sort of sneering self-hatred for his own success, and I love him for that. He was clearly aware that the very things which made people love his songs were the things which made his songs dangerous or destructive, and this awareness pushed him into strangeness and passion and moments where it feels like Dylan is falling apart. These are the moments of Dylan’s which captivate me.

Bruce never seems to show any self-awareness on any level beyond that of his marketing and production. It’s clear that he’s angling himself towards popular success; it’s not clear, from what I’ve heard, whether he’s disturbed over the danger of that same success. 

It sounds to me like Bruce is using the things which make his music authentic and real to reinforce his pop writing, rather than using pop elements of his music to reach for something more profound. Born in the USA sounds like a triumph of pop, not of anything deeper. It sounds like proof that, perhaps, by reaching for something deeper in themselves, artists might be better able to sell records.

IX

This will sound very vain and shortsighted, but only because it is. I’m wondering if my hatred of Bruce is so difficult to resolve because he seems to embrace what I embrace, which is that authenticity/meaning and pop/craft/entertainment are not mutually exclusive. Yet his music sounds to me like he’s using the deeper things to reach for the shallower things, and I see what I’m doing as the reverse.

That’s not fair to him, and perhaps it’s overly fair to me. I acknowledge this, and I acknowledge also that there’s a deeper insecurity at play in myself.

X

A part of my affection for marketing comes from my awareness that without a good sales pitch, I have basically nothing going for me. I’ve never faced significant hardships; I live a basically charmed life. I have no politically or culturally meaningful things to say about myself; unless I’m coming up with an angle from which to sell myself, I have nothing to sell.

I’m interested in art and technology because they’re fields in which achievements can affect some segment of humanity regardless of where they come from. If a work of art says something powerful, it can reach a person regardless of whether the speaker comes from someplace similar or “relevant”. Some truths are so deep that they unsettle us all, and if we can expose them, we approach a universality that has nothing to do with our past or our life or our origins.

For me, the universality of art and the universality of marketing is one and the same; my love of stability and certainty is the love of finding deeper truths in things, by which the surfaces can be understood. I just got a comment from a professor on an essay I wrote in which I approached Sigmund Freud and David Lynch and the idea of “uncanniness” in art as basically a problem to be solved; I argued that what’s interesting about things which unnerve us is why we let ourselves be so unnerved, and not the experience of being unnerved. He remarked that my argument, while rigorous, missed the point of studying the uncanny, and that it was shallow of me to think that uncanniness simply was a problem to be solved once and then never again.

I said earlier that my writing always either grapples with instability or else exists entirely in a state of whimsy. Either I’m trying to solve a mystery or else I’m just having fun. I can feign emotional states, but I feel like simulating emotion is dishonest if I don’t make it clear that I’m just playing a game. So I can write nonfiction, particularly media criticism, well: I’m trying to connect a person with a thing or a thought, and my writing is simply the bridge which gets the two engaged. Or I can be compellingly silly. But I feel that I can’t tell emotional, evocative stories, which unfortunately are what I actually want to tell. My attempts either feel too calculated or too out there; I don’t show them to people; I consider them failures. If I’m feeling authentic emotions, then I can express them decently, but my nature is to approach them like I am now, as a self-examination, and to simply work on them until they resolve themselves and fall flat.

XI

Perhaps it’s possible to create serious emotions from the same place I create silliness, but here’s my problem: I don’t feel that I ever have serious emotions. I don’t have any kind of deep emotional well to draw from. My deepest emotions have tended to come from crushes on girls, which, yech. Or embarrassment. Or perhaps uncertainties about the future.

I’m interested in tragedy, romance. I want to write people which engage you and reveal themselves to be vast, complex, more than you first realized; I want them to fail despite being beautiful and lovable; I want there to be deeper things which drag them down and rip them apart. Yet I don’t know how to write these things because I’ve never felt them.

Likewise, I want to somehow be relevant to greater society. I want to write about politics, suffering, injustice. Yet I’ve never experienced these things either, so I feel that when I approach them I’m being a shallow white dude who thinks he understands problems but doesn’t. I’m aware that I don’t know a goddamn thing about the depth of the problems with our society.

I have this worry that all I can ever be is a clown, or a deluded narcissist. That for all my efforts to reach for deep things I’ll never find anything meaningfully deep. That my grasping for stability is proof that I don’t know a goddamn thing about what it means to be unstable, doomed, crushed, ruined.

XII

What I resent about Bruce is that he comes from a place I didn’t, he’s felt the consequences of these deeper issues in ways which I simply haven’t. He understands the working class. He understands romance and tragedy. For all I think he writes his music in a shallow or repulsive way, he’s got something at his core which I haven’t, and which I hopefully never will.

I like playing games that I know I can win. I like being methodical with my life, slowly moving towards stability, then playing fun and whimsical games up top. But perhaps this is what will stop me from ever reaching people the way Bruce does. Perhaps I’ll always sound like a privileged white kid who, even at his best, is incapable of anything more than condescension and delusion.

My entire response to Bruce’s music is suspect. Do I have a legitimate beef with the guy’s music or do I simply resent that I’m not its audience? Are my thoughts about songwriting worth a damn or are they simply excuses for my own failings? Do I not like the way Bruce Springsteen writes music because I see a way to write music better? Or is the very fact that I don’t like his music proof that I’m out of touch with the millions upon millions of people who _do_ like it, and that I will never be capable of reaching so many people no matter what my technique might be?

Maybe I’ll never be connected with larger society like Bruce is. Maybe the way that I think about trying to connect with them shows that I haven’t got a clue of how to actually meaningfully connect. Maybe for all the surface-level stability I try to grasp, there are deeper instabilities with which I’m just not capable of connecting. Maybe at my very best, all I am is a distraction from people who actually have things to say.

The thought terrifies me. Usually I can convince myself that it’s a silly fear, that I’m just as able to speak to people as anybody else, if I choose to. But then I remind myself that if I’m out of touch with the world, that out-of-touchness is precisely what would keep me from realizing that I was in the first place.

I don’t believe there’s a difference between selling yourself and expressing yourself. It’s all just variations within a spectrum. Maybe, too, there’s no difference between saying something meaningful and just yelling LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!, and my very grasping for something that matters is sheerly narcissism.

XIII

Something’s balanced out in my saying all this. Damned if I can say right now just what that is, or if this is even an accurate look at who Bruce Springsteen is or what his music says. But it’s an accurate summary of how I perceive him and why I react to him the way that I do. Hopefully it does a little justice to why I might feel, on wild impulse, that if Bruce is what music ought to be or Bruce’s more fanatic fans are what music ought to create, then perhaps humans just aren’t worth the fight.

That’s clearly not the case. There’s more to music, and to loving it, and to letting it affect your life, than what we get here. That’s not to dismiss the many wonderful things about this music, or the many wonderful people who love it. But hopefully it’s an adequate, if lengthy, justification of why I don’t seek out Bruce’s music, why it doesn’t frequently connect with me, why I instinctively want to mock Springsteen and deny that it touches me at all.

hey little girl is your daddy home
did he go away and leave you all alone
I got a bad desire
I’m on fire

self meditation art bruce springsteen confessional