My Bachelor's Won't Earn Half the Debt I've Incurred

The title comes from, not surprisingly, a Crime In Stereo song called the Bride. It's about that space between college and post-graduate stuff where you're trying to find work with bills to pay and it rings a lot more with me now that I have that bachelor's degree and am trying to find something that will pay me.

Now, though, this is about more.




Zach once said, half jokingly, that I'm kind of important. I'm not. I write, ask people questions and transcribe the answers elsewhere. Occasionally, I google my name and some of my interviews pop up. First is my Twitter feed. Interesting. Second is pastepunk. (What up, brothers?) Oddly enough five pages deep is the blog of a friend of mine, in her initial post that mentions me. Mostly, I like the vouyerism. What work of mine do other people link to? What do they find important? But I'm not important. I'm not sure how many people read or listen.

I ended up playing Left 4 Dead on my own over the weekend (away from home, since I don't own a next-gen console), and leaving aside that I have memories attached to that game, the game frustrated me, not the least of which being my computer controlled teamates are too goddamned stupid to throw a motherfucking pipe bomb (or motherfucking moltov cocktail) when we're being attacked by the zombie horde, meaning, I, was the sole weilder of anything that could take the zombie horde off of us for a moment and had to wait for what I hoped would be the most judicious moment to use said pipe bomb/ass saving device.

Then, another boomer would show up, vomit on someone, calling another round of zombies and we'd be back at square one, this time, without a pipe bomb.

But, when you're playing Left 4 Dead with people, you need to come up with a plan beforehand. Are you going to run through the level as fast as you can on a mad dash for the endpoint? Are you going to take it slow and stick together? Or, something more detailed in between? Then, you have to get people to agree (and stick with) this plan. People on the internet are notoriously finicky, but even when one has those people in the room, there are several different ideas of how to proceed, most of them put forward by me, one of the worst people at the title playing.

(If at this point, you're guessing this is going to relate, closely, to my own life, pat yourself on the back: You're right.)

I've written, for the last three weeks, about feeling stuck and like there were too many options, well, I've begun to narrow them down and nail down a basic framework for action for the foreseeable future in my life.

It came down to a question: Adventure or grad school? I'm relatively young, I've got a couple years to mess around and what to do with a time in my life without a business suit? My parents are perfectly willing to subsidize my housing until I find something permanent, and for that, I am extremely grateful. If the music I listen to has taught me anything, it has taught me to try for the life less ordinary, the road without all the lighting or clear end point.

I presented a quick sketch of my plan for the next couple years of my life to my father, and a good friend of mine, and they both seemed to be okay with it. This summer would be me learning how to drive, this fall/winter would be an internship, somewhere, all the while, learning Japanese, in the vain hope that I could teach English over there come 2010. In case you're wondering, none of this is nailed down. But it's what I want to do.

The opportunity is here, now, to do something real and interesting. It means giving up on a couple things: It means, likely, saying hello to almost exclusively text based communication with my friends in the States and saying goodbye to even the idea of seeing my friends in real life. Speaking through Twitter, Facebook and IM clients. It means a lot of time spent learning a language that I have never even dealt with, a written language that isn't based on letters, but drawing.

But hell. I owe more than is fashionable to my early development to Ronin Warriors, Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing. (I still have the Dragonball Z tshirt from years ago...) Trigun and Cowboy Bebop broke and rebuilt my mind in high school. I've felt closer to JRPGs than most of the people I've ever met. Yes, I know Japan is crazy town. Or at least Tokyo is. There's a saying I was reminded of that the Japanese have: The nail that sticks up is the first one to be hammered. That's what they think of individuals. That kind of a culture is going to be hard to get used to. But isn't that the point of adventures? New experiences. New ideas.

As I told a friend of mine catching up at last night's Trap Them (if you like truly aggressive music in the vein of Entombed or Napalm Death, click the link and buy their full length, Seizures in Barren Praise. $6 for the digital download.) show, what's the point of listening to the music I do if I don't take a grand, glorious chance for something different and unconventional? Live your heart and never follow, right? Be scared. Get uncomfortable.

I keep telling myself I don't want the Dilbert existence. I'm willing to take a chance if it means that I'm on my own and I'm not being measured by some ridiculous standard that I'm constantly behind on. Fuck a computer program and the only variables being in the program code being what I'm measured against. But there's a nagging feeling and it says otherwise. It says:

James, who are you kidding? You've got little to say, nothing to add to a conversation and you made one of the your largest emotional failings your major in college: You think too much and now, you've got a B.A. in it. Your attempts at journalism are middling and your years spent offering criticism in music, video games and politics (domestic and international) are second rate at best.

Let's not forget, your "friends" in punk music, are using you. Period. If you didn't write for pastepunk, do you honestly think they'd email you or IM you out of the blue? Starbucks is hiring. You know someone who works there. Think about it. Cut your hair, comb it and then see about getting a degree that's remotely useful. Buy some ties and white shirts.

Your parents don't even read your blog. That should speak volumes.


After hearing that for a while, the feeling of safety and a steady paycheck is very, very tempting. A man far wiser than I, Jay Smooth, called it the Little Hater, what I'm going to hopefully not butcher and call the voice of doubt and fear in every creative person's mind. It's very reasonable. It makes sense. It's what any normal person ought to do.

Then I remember six words. These six words aren't the same six simple words that comprise Bedard's hosanna in What Makes Us Strong, though they're related, intimately. (I'll explain how if you're really interested.) Those six words are out of step with the world and suddenly, it rushes back to me.

I've only got one life, one chance and getting in step with the Dilberts isn't going to make me happy. Please, understand. Some things can't be unseen and I can't forget what I know, but I'm not cut out for traditional office work. It's not wholly about satisfying that frustrated, scared teenager that first heard Minor Threat through an Archos Jukebox on the southbound train to school, but the culmination of the knowledge that, no, really, I'm different and if I follow that, it'll take me places.

It's late, and I have to get up tomorrow to actually do something. So, while I still have my eyes open, let me end this with another Crime In Stereo lyric:

Oh, Doctor Palmer, what am I to do? This choice is for life and I can't decide...

An Accumulation of Albatrosses

It has come to my attention that it may be possible to carry this shambling persona, this self-indulgent, measured engagement, or lack thereof, with the world too far--that there may be responsibilities I am not addressing, opportunities that are lost as I lay in a pile of my own filth, gazing at my navel. (Or worse yet, reading online forum threads about videogames.)

These things have always gone in cycles, for me, and perhaps it is time to begin a new one. In short, I have decided, with no small amount of prompting from the world and my friends, that it is probably time to wake up.

There are a million things I have not told you about. Love, second-hand death, the rising tide of madness and a car crash, to name a few. It has been a year and a day since my last post produced exclusively for this blog. I know because my good friends called me on it at the bar. There have been things that I tried to tell to you, and could not bring myself to complete. Eventually, the weight of unwritten words around my neck made it difficult to even look at the website, let alone type anything.

That was a nonsensical, self-indulgent sentence, summarizing a nonsensical, self-indulgent state of affairs that has, I believe, ended.

Tonight, I have missed a movie, driven the back roads, shot pool, been thanked by a bartender and spoken words of truth and import with dear friends. I promised that I would do something, not something specific but something nonetheless, and I intend to keep that promise. I have been letting failures, or at least mismanagements and projects that drag on and on, accumulate and weigh me down, leaving the things I care about to rot in the field. It just won't do.

If you're reading this, thank you for giving our confused little website your time. Thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent nonsense, and my arrogance, and my ambitions. And thank you for putting up with my absences, all too frequent.

It is a much easier thing to read than to write, to think than to speak, and to sleep than to learn. (Which is not to say I have slept well lately, on the whole.) The world around us is ever fascinating, perhaps now more than ever, and it is so much easier for me to watch it go by than to act, even in the tiniest of ways.

But it is only through acting on the world that I can truly understand it, and myself. And perhaps I have some responsibility, both to understand and to act on that understanding.

So.

Hello, internet! It's been a long time. I think I am going to begin to write to you again. James is still here, as is my good friend the Gentlebeast, and Thom, and perhaps others will be drummed up as things begin, again, to roll.

Thank you, as always, for your time. I hope to be stealing more of it soon.

Theme Week: Responsibility

This is an experimental theme week, which is to say it is slightly more experimental than usual. For a single week only, we are going to try to post on a set schedule, each of us falling into place behind the last like the gears on a jewel-encrusted cog.

If, somehow, we find ourselves taking a liking to this alien conceit of scheduling, we may continue it in the future. That is not a promise.

What does it mean to be responsible, and why are a bunch of young internet hooligans like ourselves trying it on for size?

Well, we aren't, really. I mean, our last theme week was Hedonism Week, and it stretched on for a decade, during which we frequently forgot to write anything at all for years at a time.

So maybe this is responsibility week because it's time for a bit of a change. Maybe this is responsibility week because we've tried nearly everything else. And maybe, just maybe, this is responsibility week because we're out of better ideas, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

That is more or less our motto.

But I would hold that we are no more irresponsible than the average citizen of this benighted world. We may take up amusing affectations, don curious clothing and spend far too much time reading, listening to music and thinking, but I find nothing inherently irresponsible in these acts. We are not betraying our country or the world by devoting ourselves to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. One must appreciate beauty in order to create it.

The day before yesterday I was interviewing protesters in Pittsburgh, when I suddenly found myself the target of interview myself, by a freelancing journalist. Asked to comment, I found myself spewing forth an incredibly optimistic rant about internet communities becoming involved in real-world politics, and how I felt this was a positive sign of the times. The bemused journalist found herself struggling to keep up, and after a moment or two I found myself feeling foolish as I recited back a few of the more sensical sentences to her.

The urge to run my mouth has apparently not subsided. I'll probably be speaking to you again tomorrow about the protest itself. There are pictures to be shown and tales to be told, and I get to look somewhat dashing, or at least silly, in my Goggles of Truth.

Secret Cartography: Simile, you just Metaphor. OR The Author is Still Feverish Hooray!

Tragedy tonight, gentle readers. A man with serious problems has enacted a most terrible scenario; we extend our sympathies.


Onward.

Hi! I am just recovering from four or so days of bed rest and fever dreams. There was one where I was a pokemon trainer, and more than a few where I was the Aragorn-like savior of the world, gearing up for some conflict that I envisioned only as a conflict between bright orange and a sort of sea blue shade, surging against each other. A vision that I realized shortly after looked more and more like a map. I'm no prophet, and I realized that this was because I was hunched over (like a sick kitten!) during lunch the day before, figuring out a 50 States puzzle from my youth.

So I've at least had cartography on the mind, and if not of the secret kind, then the insane dream-logic kind. And that's just as good! I mean, cartography itself is mostly a function of metaphor, as we base our understanding of the world upon relating two things that are not very similar. The whole idea of Red and Blue states is entirely fictive, a sickening reduction of thousands of human lives into a single simplified concept, but still an effective way of communicating the idea of difference. The strange part with the dream of Blue vs. Orange, then, was that they didn't really relate to anything - they were just some damn colors. But I still sensed conflict, so it's entirely possible they were just a metaphor for their own action. Does that make sense? It doesn't have to! Hooray for being sick!

Similar to dreams, language and thought processes are extensions of metaphor. On this Valentine's day, consider the choruses of people claiming that two people in love are travelers, or, Lockhorn like, one is a Ball and Chain on the other. They also say (Who says this? God, what's going on? Who are you people?) the limit of a man's world is his vocabulary, with obvious reason; as a person learns more ways to express themselves, they see that few things are cut and dry. Their map of the world suddenly grows new colors that they didn't even know existed. For example, they can recognize Schadenfreude in Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears or even whenever anti-war activists vote for John McCain. Previously, these sensations were just kinda funny! There's a whole new high-falutin' world out there of words (many of them German) to express guilty enjoyment. Red and Blue and Orange are allowed to expand in our understanding into Purple and Burnt Sienna and Off-White and Blue Green - there are now a million ways to reduce individuals to blank representations. Again, the symbols that we use to understand things soon become more and more accurate, akin to creating a map so large and accurate that it's a faithful physical reconstruction of that which it depicts.

Speaking of that. It can be argued that maps are artificial impositions, but doesn't the world, after all, only really exist as long as we agree upon it? The foundation of knowledge is the communication of facts, and understanding these facts relies upon metaphor, the application of what we already know to what we don't. Minnesota is not an absolute truth, after all. So it is with the internet philistines - their world is shrunken, and I come off sounding like I'm speaking a justifiably foreign language when I say something like "I thought their representation was unique" instead of "lol" and then nothing for five minutes (presumably because I was rolling around on the floor). Therein lies the dark side of this understanding - the above mentioned Red vs. Blue struggle, where one side opposes it's opposite so completely they cannot tolerate each other due to an inability to even talk to each other, as each side ends up sounding like an alien to the other. Each side of an argument may know objectively what the words Gun and Control mean in relation to each other, but the term together carries so much baggage with it depending upon your red or blue experience that good communication is impossible. The meaningless quibbles of our time (Obama vs. Hilary, Evil White Guy 1 vs. Evil White Guy 2, Creationism vs. Science as a whole... wait, maybe not so pointless, that last one) are more a function of our enthusiasm towards understanding things in simplistic terms - a sort of Go Fight Win Ra Ra Ra for whatever cause is closest to our hearts, setting it up in a simple adversarial opposition with, well, whatever it is not. Who cares that we can't talk, let's fight about it!

Finally, there's no way to approach the issue with right or wrong, true or false, because these, too, are just metaphors. You can't escape an issue by relying upon it (like what I'm doing now!) to provide it's own end, even though you can eventually hope that a representation of Object A slowly becomes so accurate that is almost becomes Object A in itself. So it is with maps - the physicality of places is secondary to the thoughts that we have about them in our understanding, and the only things that can really be mapped out are enthusiasm and fandom and the strange motivation that lies in the logic of dreams and language, because these, ultimately, are the only things that we can hope to give a flying fuck about. Seriously, fuck that hill, let's get into a fight about it.

(OMG RAMBLING D-)

Edit: Am I encouraging XKCD-ish happy nihilism? You make the call!

Antony and Cleopatra, and the brain.

My dear friends of the internet,

If I may introduce myself, my name is Jack Grey. I'm ever so slightly overeducated, a fishmonger, a drinker of fine teas, and a magician. I'm tattooed and hermaphroditic.

Favourite authors include Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, and Emily Post. (I thought it best that you were forewarned.) I think that trying to choose one's favourite Shakespearean play is a bit like trying to select one's most useful internal organ.

I'm between world travels at the moment. I'm drawn to antiques, to decadent cultures, to historical moments at which savage civilisations met strange natives.

But I suppose it's best to be on with it. I've heard that we're summoning ghosts.

I can, I think, safely state that we modern Americans are quite madly in love with the Victorians. We adore their fading photographs, their marvellously purple phrases, their stockings, the devastatingly straight lines of their suits, their conflicting romantic notions: prudish and prurient, secretive and enduring. We emulate their wallpapers, and, if I may be allowed to speak for all of us, we miss their manners. Desperately.

I would argue that this love affair with an epoch is well timed. Our empire is crumbling. It is no surprise that we'd look longingly to the culture of the fallen empire that we remember best. Perhaps we want to feel ourselves surrounded by their ghosts. We want to believe that we, too, will be remembered fondly by absurdly dressed Japanese teenagers in some glowing future. Or we want to learn to die gracefully. Or we really do just love the wallpaper.

Besides sharing in the collective obsession with the Victorians, I also like taxidermy a great deal. They were fond of the art, in fact.

They, I think, were doing it in conquest. When they were gaining their empire, they were sailing to strange lands, finding beautiful, naked creatures they didn't understand in the least, and animals of which they'd never dreamed, even in the mythologies of the empires that they themselves remembered fondly. The Pre-Raphealites, for example, were quite fond of the wombat, and there is the famous story of the first taxidermic platypus sent back to Britain: the receiver responded that it was a terrible joke and a hideous fake, that, clearly, no such beast could exist.

Taxidermy is enjoying a small revival, if only in my own mind. We, however, are not trying to catalogue dark continents, or to prove our masculinity or our skill with an elephant gun. We're clutching, once more, at ghosts. As our supremacy fades, we're forced to confront the fact that we've taken more than we ought. We've created quite the ecological mess, and, as a few monumentally populous nations in the East begin their own Industrial Revolutions that, we're a bit shocked to discover, we cannot stop, we note that we aren't dying alone.

I don't know about you, but I want an elegantly mounted gazelle head. I want gorgeous stuffed peacocks, taxidermic piranhas, gorilla skulls, and a stuffed crocodile, which I'll display in my study, so that my friends will understand instantly that I'm a magician of great skill. And I want them because, I'm afraid, their living counterparts may not be long for this world. The Victorians stole these creatures away from their native lands in order to prove that they were real. I'm afraid that we may need to begin preserving them for the same reason.

Yours always,

Jack

Of Sailing Ships and Ceiling Wax, of Cabbages and Kings

Blogger informs me that this post is, internally at least, the one hundredth post to exist on this site. This includes any number of drafts that were never posted, sad forgotten creatures unlikely to ever see the light of day or to serve any purpose except to make me feel like we might have accomplished something here.

To wit: in the seven months (really?) and two days (really really?) this website has existed, we have written on it. Not as much as we should have (I am exceptionally guilty) or, perhaps, as well as we might have (there is ever room for improvement), but we have written.

And we will continue to do so as we pass this largely nonexistent milestone. We are living, as the chinese curse goes, in interesting times. In order that we might survive, I think it is best that we practice being interesting people.

I didn't really have a vision when I came up with the idea for this website, beyond perhaps getting my friends and I to write things that we enjoyed and maybe, one day, being able to buy a pitcher of beer at the Penny Bar with strange coins plucked from the aether. I still feel much the same day: we are here to write and have fun, and perhaps even to better ourselves or create some content worth consuming, if we are capable of such.

In any case, not-quite-nonexistent audience: thank you very much for joining us. Next time I update, I'll try to bring some actual content with me. Would you prefer the update about One Piece I promised you a millenia ago, or would you like to hear about how I want a t-shirt declaring my allegiance to Mike Gravel in the 2012 election?

I figure it will be the last election, coming at the very end of the world. We might as well get it right for once.

Alternately, we could elect him the second Emperor of America. Emperor Norton I has gone far too long without a successor.

I suppose I answered my own question there a little. Still, if you're out there, in the dark, with a keyboard and a working internet connection, consider dropping a comment here and telling me what you would like to hear more about: politics or nerdery.