Asphyxiated by Commerce
In the name of not taking things seriously or not being taken seriously or not taking myself too seriously:
I am increasingly excited to attend a brilliant friend’s wedding, in an environment I have never visited: the South. It is not the genteel south or the dirty south but like the rustbelt south (maybe?) which I find brilliant-friend-appropriate. I was in Atlanta in the eighth grade. I watched a boy in one of my host-student’s classes beshit himself at the top of Stone Mountain. Things did not get easier for him that afternoon.
“The Answer is: because. I don’t know if your elementary school teachers frowned upon the use of “because” as an autonomous answer . . . (I’ve never harbored any active resentment towards that interdiction.) But since it’s a fundamentally impertinent answer (as teachers well know), it occasionally comes to mind automatically, knee-jerky. ”
Standing desk woes: I mean, yes, you are standing and getting things done. If you have two screens and you go back and forth between them, there is a vague sense that you have a lot of things afoot and you need to scroll from one screen to the other to get it all done in time. But you spend a lot of time standing. That this is the realization of the idea does not change how the realized idea works in actuality.
This points to a basic flaw in my navigating-through-life approach: rarely can I predict with any accuracy how I will actually respond to a given situation, once it comes about. Like living alone, for instance. Or like failing to take down the tree on January 2, 2020, as I had intended, and now feeling like taking down the tree is the most difficult, most labor-intensive thing that could be done. Who knew that 5 days could transform a mundane task into something requiring Herculean efforts? Satisficing reigns in terms of what actual experience is like compared to what it seemed like it might be like, at the time, in the not-too-distant past, when I was contemplating it. Satisficing is a clear unimpeachable win for a poor predictor of future self responses, like me.
A client, ambivalent about taking a step that is by rights necessary and that will either be taken now, with some effect, or else taken in six months, with dullened effect, says: I’m not sure we want things to get messy. The response: We are in the business of Getting Messy. It is that which we do.
That was in a civil matter where only money and livelihoods and reputations and life-lived-as-we-know-it are at stake. Criminal matters can go even further down that road. Each sub-culture of a given profession has the equivalent of gallows humor. This profession is one where there may actually be gas-chambers (no longer gallows) at the end of the road, and certainly decades spent in a prison cell. It is hard to know how to lighten that mood – to take in stride that this eventually ends up in a no-good, very-bad place. Prison itself is filled with hilarious people. Also unmitigated misery. That too.
I am anti-cat art. Somewhere, a meowing cat takes a break to lap milk from a bowl. I am sure that it is, in the moment, mildly endearing. But no need to make art out of it. Of late the things I make art out of start with blue painter tape that carves up a small canvas into different sections, very amateurish renderings of a figure with his or her mouth open in a scream (sometimes with arms up in a V), and clumsy renderings of Buddhist heads like one print I saw in a DT Suzuki book I bought at the eponymous DT Suzuki museum. (It was very white and angular.) onto the canvas I tend to brush horizontally, with a sponge type brush, splatted paint from an art kit that the giver of the repulsive gift left at the house. I fail at achieving abject maximalism. Sometimes I fail at tearing the blue painter’s tape off in one piece.
Asphyxiated by commerce is as good a description of the second-half of the second decade of the 21st century as I’ve yet come across, or coined, I forget which.