Mono-no-aware, late December
Shortly after Thanksgiving, I came down with a case of the Taking Everything Too Seriously. It is easy to forget that we are protean bags of carbon meat strung up on breakable calcium assemblages, riding on a consolidated speck of dust in a big black expanding container of cavernous nothingness. And remembering not to forget that helps, especially when coupled with healthy dose of mind-clutch (Glass Irony & God, Leaves of Grass, Human-All-Too-Human vis-à-vis Negotiations, Lethem, Kushner) and earworms (Lamar H.U.M.B.L.E., enter the 36 chambers, Beethoven’s Ninth, Aja). Also remembering that we are here, so mine as well play a little. Whether we are put here or placed here or just end up here, there is nowhere else. More or less.
So I got a haircut with a different style – a “buzz-cut,” as was the middle school parlance – bought some clothes and shoes and art I want but don’t need, and tried, just now, in this second successive night/morning of post-holiday insomnia, to discern whether this pattern of self-seriousness had anything to do with the spirit of evasiveness (having no truck with the idea that the Redeemer is born, or that the man in the sled is bringing all us good ones presents) that seems, well, presently pervasive. And it seems likely.
Still, it’s not just the reason for the season that factors into it. There are other exterior conditional forces that might help explain why play remains elusive. For example, we are in that time of mid-winter graying when all the plows kick up the slush and dirt and gather it on the side of the narrowing streets in flotsam piles and similar et cetera gathers in the storm drains. Chicago in winter was the grayest; for whatever reason, whenever I used to visit Minneapolis it seemed the dirtiest, which can’t be the case, but memory serves, apparently. Here in the Biggest City in the 605, the mid-winter grays are worst when cloud cover keeps the sun at bay and the light of morning just kind of seeps in, so that the early-morning DT sufferers, slowly shuffling amidst what passes for urban landscape, are apparitions on the wet black bough and hundreds of headlights pick them out in stop-motion pointillism.
I’m not saying I’m depressed – sleep-deprived, yes, but par for the course – I’m just saying that taking in the word-historical events in this milieu while also being encouraged to take stock of the decade, is too much. So I am striving, in true 2nd-generation-American Midwest fashion, to dig sideways out of this climactic hole into a different hole where the scaffolding might be more easily reached.
I had the interesting experience of a 102 degree fever on Christmas Eve, and the shimmering perception that resulted was not altogether unpleasant. Also made my first contribution to what passes for a festschrift in this Philistine 605, and that was both an honor and a reminder that I am of the age and station in life where being asked to make such a contribution is a thing.
Recapturing play was a little easier after I put together the 60-piece wooden play Veterinarian set, which made Ikea furniture assembly look like putting a straw through a lid, and the invariable squeals of delight and surprising selective euphoria (who knew that a 2-oz container of Play-Dough would take the top prize?) vastly reduced my self-obsessive streak. All to the good, as it is said.
Incidentally but not unrelatedly, it took nearly four decades for me what is being served by the message that being good means you get stuff and being bad means you don’t.
Limn.
Winter-Gray
:
This might apply indirectly or subliminally
Windmill proximity: sleep disturbance, headache, tinnitus, ear pressure, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, visual blurring, tachycardia, irritability, problems with concentration and memory, and panic episodes associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering when awake or asleep
Beyond the aforementioned mind-clutch, December has been manic work and little time carved out for consumption, but consumption waits for no man, and of late includes:
READ:
The Map and the Territory, Houllebecq
Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA, Fox Owens, Laura (Whitney Monograph)
Wyndham Lewis on Art (doorstopper, smells of musty Hyde Park used bookstore)
Schjeldahl on dying
READING:
Book of Delights, Gay (1/3 of the way)
Where the Sidewalk Ends (we read whatever picture makes us stop flipping)
The Cut, Pelecanos
Vernon Subutex 1, Despentes
Negotiations
Essays, Critical and Clinical
Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, Steyerl
