Admittedly, we got nothing.

I would say this is a little something to stop the bleeding, but writing this feels heavier than anything I've written in months.

Rest assured readers, that Tom, Cate and I are well aware that there hasn't been posted anything here for a week. For some of us, it has been a rough week or so, I can only speak for myself having exclaimed, "lover, my muse has left us" and "muse, my lover has left us" at different times, so our ability to write about responsibility (or anything else) has been impaired.

But. To continue the theme of responsibility, to pick up that broken flag, I write. I held a crying woman (twice) in my arms, and was held by a different one attempting to explain that I really didn't know if I was doing "Okay" or not. I can watch as my friends, for one reason or another, tear themselves away from the group and school, counting and crossing off the emotional pillars I have come to count on fall away.

(I'm writing this listening to Thrice's MySpace page, or specifically, Come All You Weary and Broken Lungs. It's very Christian, but hell. It's Thrice. Give the songs a shot. Broken Lungs makes me wish I had a guitar and could sing "are we fools and cowards all" half as well as Mr. Kensrue.)

My responsibilities, to those women I have held is to hope and ease their burdens, for a moment, by telling another human being. I have no answers to their problems. I hold no solutions, and can find or imagine none in my mind. I could offer advice, in one case, "consolidate what you've got, then use that to figure out what you want". In the other, of which I dare not speak, my two responsibilities (show up and don't ask important questions) seemed easier to do in retrospect.

I held one of my friends as he asked why a promise made was broken, between portraits of young artists. He knew why. It had to be vocalized. Just to know someone is there. Something, somehow. He asked if anyone would care. I outlined how, where and when it'd hurt me in the deepest detail I could offer.

I cannot take the pain away. I cannot wipe the tears from the young woman's face in the airport terminal, and it would take hours before it appeared she truly brightened up. I told the young man to press on, not to give up hope. I cannot wrap my arms so wide as to stop the cascading waves of culture and fear from those I hold.

I can't. I can only offer my shoulders and arms. I'm sick and tired of seeing how brave we can be. I've watched it eat up my friends. I'm watching it eat up me. But so long as there is still a banner, tattered, broken and dropped, it's my responsibility to pick it up.

My back is strong, my shoulders are wide, and we must press on, through the sadness, through the despair to whatever's greeting us on the other side of tonight. Let's talk on the way.

Theme Week: Responsibility

Having responsibility come next in line of topics after hedonism week made me smile when I first heard about it, too. By now, it's pretty clear that we're not keeping up a post a weekday, for reasons alternately comprehensible and incomprehensible to me.

 

To keep this from getting hopelessly abstract: Let me elucidate the theme into my life right now. I will deconstruct my tenuous responsibilities during a week that I have off of school.

To my classes: To do the readings and work that I have neglected to do during the semester that I have gotten away with not doing.

To my friends from that same institution: To say what's up every so often, and hope things go well. Basically, keep lines of communication open in case something important happens, so I can be available in case of an emergency to offer support or something similar.

To my friends from home: Do try to keep in touch and possibly set something up for meetings, but they're all back in college as well. Fantastic.

To my family whom I love dearly: Spend quality time with them. Talk about important things on my mind, whether it is about my psychological profile or the current election cycle. Say the right sentences that will make my parents proud of me. Word those sentences carefully with the pauses before the Big Ideas, use the right words to show I'm learning more, expanding my vocabulary and otherwise learning and growing up. Keep my schedule open. Write something every so often.

Keep my schedule open enough, and keep it in the back of my mind that I can get a brutal phone call at any time for the next couple of months from reality that says "Drop everything. You're coming with me for a week."

To this very website: to write something for Friday today.

To myself: Find a way to be happy for an extended period of time that does not involve dating a girl. Also, to have fun and relax above all before Sunday. Laugh a lot. Get some distance. See Crime In Stereo. Actually enjoy myself. Smile and mean it when I say I had fun over break.

My responsibilities are pretty easy and pretty clear. Less so is when they come into conflict. Speaking to someone with the power to prescribe me mind-altering medication is when the responsibilities of having fun and relaxing (No, really, I'll take you around for a day, and by the end of it, you'll understand that relaxing and having fun are a responsibility, and not something that just comes easily. Were it not for my deep, abiding love of ska music, I would be the polar opposite of Big D and the Kids Table video for Noise Complaint, though that could also be expanded to say, their two other videos for their disc, Strictly Rude, which, coincidentally, you should buy. But I digress.) come into conflict with enjoying myself.

These kind of things, I trust you understand, require you to go over the worst portions of your life for the purpose of (among others) getting prescribed medicine for your head (leading me to the inevitable "Am I not good enough as is?", which is quickly pushed out by "Yes, you are, and you should know better than to ask. You're admitting you need help."), without also mentioning the good moments in between them. It is a bitter, bitter responsibility to drag out the words to recall the feelings of pain, betrayal and even more memories I don't deign to shred my throat expanding on here, and continue. 

Repeating hurt just seems to lodge it deeper in me, but to explain just how, where and how I bleed and from which arteries and how profusely, so I can help an authority decide whether my depression is deep and abiding enough to warrant medicine to alter my behavior patterns does not make my life much happier.

I am responsible enough to concede I need help, responsible enough to walk in the door, responsible enough to sit down and go through all this again, and it leaves me with no small amount of chagrin that I might not be responsible enough to enjoy myself.

Lest you think my world is all doom and gloom, there are also good things, little projects in my mind and disseminated in the world that make me smile, that I get updated on every so often, which in fact, are some of my other responsibilities, which I hope to be able to speak about soon. 

It's a hell of a break.

Responsibility, and the Dark Side of Being Fancy

The expérience grande continues, gentle readers, as we struggle to turn things in by certain due dates. I will be your host for the day, and I would like to know what you think about certain issues. Extra fancy issues.

We here at Elevennames are, to a (wo)man, relatively fancy. We have individual pursuits (that we mock each other for in private) that we demand to be of high caliber. We enjoy expensive sandwiches. I enjoy fokesy indie freak-folk, and would jump for joy if I heard that Jose Gonzales would do a cover of, say, Massive Attack. Ha ha, excuses to link, how I love thee (also, bonus points for having some of the most needlessly "I am showing off to the internet" analysis I've ever read in the comments). We are each pithy little autodidacts in our respective areas of fondness, holding well-studied and extremely personal degrees in junk we enjoy. And there's nothing wrong with this, because, as we discussed during that week of debauchery we call Hedonism Week (which was oddly prescient of this whole Elliot Spitzer thing, no?) it is OKAY TO LIKE TO DO THINGS THAT ARE FUN.

But there is a big, angry bird lurking on the other side of this coin. A big angry bird that wants to show off to you, and never! Stop! Talking! About! Itself! Vide ghoulish semi-wit Sebastian Horsely. His youtubes are unpopular! He has written a book! He has visited many whores! He has a sort of costume! He wrote a book named after a T. Rex album! He is very fond of himself, and wishes you would be, too. I am not sure of other people's interpretations, but I find the man grating. Like two grates, grating against each other, while another grate watches, from the shadows. Smoking.

Very grating indeed.

Too often, I feel, we fall in love with the exterior of something, the big famous bits that make us ignore flaws. People love Voltaire when he's zinging the government, less so when he's zinging them. Atlantic Ocean hater Oscar Wilde is great when he's young and speaking endlessly of himself, but less so after his stint in prison (though he did get that awesome teardrop tattoo and join the Bloods) and he started caring about others. Self reflection is not, strictly speaking, what is lusted after, unless we can control what we reflect - we seek not a mirror of truth, but one that contorts our own Dorian Grayish visage into something that we can tolerate. Indulgence is well and good, but it's a razor's width away from delusion.

Which brings us back to Horsley. And his badly-written adulators (as opposed to me, who I guess am a badly written detractor). Listening to the man talk is like one of those anti-drug commercials starring Peter O'Toole's boring younger twin.

This is not a tyrade against dandies, nor against dandyism as a whole. I fancy myself one (more of a raconteur, really, but that's beside the point), so it distresses me to think that what I think of Horsley, other people think of me. Which is terrible! I mean, I can understand when some people dislike me for a good reason (such as saying that they are hungry ghosts, or dead!), and for that I apologize. To be so consciously unconsciously offensive, though, is mystifying.

Ultimately, I suppose it's merely self-image that I am concerned with, an ouroborosian cycle of trying to divorce myself from my own negative qualities. I do not want to become so self-interested, however, that the only thing I can talk about is myself - I am not universe, no world replete with hidden wonders. To assume that I am, in my opinion, is to become the most dreadful kind of boor, the conversationalist who can only speak of their own novelty. Unalloyed with seriousness, compassion, intelligence, or responsibility, self indulgence and general frippery are merely the pastimes of those faeculum-class of human beings that seek political office. Hedonism requires responsibility in order to make it worthwhile - otherwise it's merely flash and glitz with nothing beside, a fading firework, gone before it's even night.

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.