The twilight of the bully—and the bullied
The most devastating stage of bullying is not the bullying itself, but its end. First because of its anticlimax. Bullying dissolves rather than detonates, without a final battle or a catharsis for either party. Second, and worse still, because it occurs to the bullied that they have just ended the most intense and intimate relationship of their lives. They will go into every new stage of life and personal encounter facing familiar toils with added drudgery and give-and-take, but absent of any sense of completion or of being needed as their tormenter needed them. And no kindness or affection will ever equal the appreciation felt in the bully’s torment. The bullied will scale the highest mountain in search of wrongs for which they can demand forgiveness and find nothing.
Dangeresque
The symptoms of the danger-lover: gregarious by nature, boundless with cunning that can often be confused with ambition; thinks rapidly but not deeply, logically but not soundly; increase of motivation when set against a purely negative force; discriminating to the point of caginess, if one thrill burns out, whatever honors or rewards it reaps, the danger-lover will abandon it without a thought; will consent to assist the weak up to a point; cynical, impulsive, and careless; indifferent to rather than fearless of risk. The danger-lover falls metrically short of heroism, and is left at the mercy of public taste. In one direction, the danger-lover is an antihero; in another, a coward.
Boredom’s oasis
There are two types of boredom. One is isolated—or individual—boredom; the other is systemic—or mass—boredom. You understand isolated boredom as you experience it more directly. Typically it is seen as solitary, characterized by a restlessness without aim—a rule of the self by idle hands. Yet isolated boredom conveyed in the right way has its glamor. A bored person in public can look like a subversive oasis in a desert of joviality. The presence of the bored person indicates the promise that there is always somewhere better to be.
Systemic boredom is more of a pestilence than a feeling, spread by a sense of mutual distaste and malaise. Here the aimlessness, idleness, and solitude are features rather than bugs. It is a total retreat from all acceptable activity, a world not of two idle hands but many, all with nowhere better to be. It is the nightmare of we, numberless and directionless. The fount of all the worst ideas.
Walking prologue
The competitive culture gives a distorted view of “coming in first.” Triumphal firsts are far and away outnumbered by crude, flawed, or unfinished firsts. A firstborn will spend the entirety of her cognitive existence quietly observing her siblings—assessing their most apparent merits and subtracting them against the her own defects for which their existence was meant to compensate. For a firstborn is either a walking prologue, which no one reads, or a walking rough draft, which must be revised.
Flame retardant
The market for giving righteous offense—“speaking your truth”—is better viewed as a market for prejudicial validation—“echoing their ‘truth’.” A media environment driven by metrics provided by presumed readers cannot afford to be anything less. Each venue and individual poster must be mindful of their clout constituencies, providing content that burns without being flammable.
A bloody rivalry
True crime and horror have a key incompatibility that can only lead to confrontation. It boils down to a difference of view. True crime is always looking down from a pedestal over the pieces it wants to put together at its own whim. (Incidentally, pornography looks the same way.) While horror is always looking up from an abyss to see its own components swirling about it with their own agenda, and marveling at their dexterity. True crime’s illusion of mastery cannot withstand horror’s certainty of dominance.
An abbreviated obituary
Even as, or exactly because, we have become more permissive in the level of extremes we can reach, a sanitizing or desensitizing effect takes hold of our senses. We seem incapable or unwilling to feel inwardly, in the depths of our most cavernous bowels, any kind of repulsion an artist wants to inspire in us. Society puts its gag reflex on life support, knits while it wastes away, then agrees to pull the plug.
The arc of expectations
You approach the expectations you have of others like an accountant: making a debit of each disappointment in your double-entry book. You approach the expectations you have of yourself like a dramatist: scripting the arc of your heroic quest. But rather than call on the debt, you increase the interest of your indignation. And rather than finish your script, you prolong the climax of your defeat.
Castles of filth
A shitlord must live up to their name. Therefore, the perfect shitpost is comparable to a castle of the most refined craftsmanship and using the most putrid construction materials: a gothic castle of filth. This castle has staying power; it is lived in or it is nothing. And it will be some time before the resident notices the framework of bones, tendons, and ligaments giving the dung its fine shape and resilience. But when they seek you to ask from what source these bones were extracted, you will have gone. A shitlord does not take shelter in their own castle. They go onward and upward to a place beyond the scope and conception of those they correct: an eternal birthday party at a celestial roller rink, where they are at once the celebrant, the guest, the clown, and the cake.
Criticism dismembered
Essaying is nothing if not a verbal distillation of a thought process, and at times even a full personality. It is a declaration that something needs to be said and that a certain person would be most effective in saying it. Reviewing is at once an intensification and a restriction of the essayistic function. Knowledge and taste clash with authority in order to persuade readers of the relative value of a consumer product within X-amount of words. It risks devolving into formula.
Hatchet jobs are seen as a way to break out of formula, to speak wholly and unabashedly for one’s own self. And yet just as one has read every defense of hatchet jobs, one, too, has read every hatchet job. Acidic elegance stitches well into other acidic elegances creating the same black velvet butcher’s apron. It is more mood piece than persuasion. The hatchet job reviewer is always the cloaked assassin, but for whom precise aim is secondary to the glimmer of the blade.
Hardcore statecraft
Without hardcore, it’s hard for me to imagine punk lasting for as long as it has. Hardcore is an entirely bottom-up enterprise, implemented by virtue of its being needed. Some people want a certain sound, a certain social experience, a certain way of thinking that the wider culture cannot comprehend and declines to accommodate. In that event, those who want what is otherwise refused need to devise it themselves. Hardcore, and by extension punk, is an ongoing process of creation and correction. Black Flag and Bad Brains built the world and forged the language; Minutemen and Negative Approach articulated the philosophy; Dischord and Sub Pop made every punk a citizen. Punk thrives less because it is rebellious than because it is right, central rather than peripheral. It is less about a lifestyle than it is about living, to the best of your ability, what you believe is absolute.
The process of sucking (my own private ice age)
Only when I become dissatisfied with the world that was given to me do I finally strike out a path for myself. This is more of a contingency measure, however, until I could latch onto someone or something that could express my inner convictions more forcefully than I could or who could make sense of, if not bring order to, the noise constantly frazzling me. Once found, sycophancy and pliancy very quickly became my love languages. Some might call that blind obedience; I prefer self-abnegation: lesser power ceding to a greater one. With the right persuasive thrust, it is easy to accept all the bad things as singularly bad and which should be stopped at all costs but without assessing for myself the contours of the badness in question. I accept it by avoiding anything that contradicts preexisting sentiments. I desist in wit and intelligence for my own sake or addressing my own needs or tastes. Think of it as being frozen without the added annoyance of being cold. It is approximately what sucking feels like.
No shelter
Who murdered the roadside motel? The ranch-style hub, with its neon sign blinking names with “manor” or “court” in it, its clashing colors, its paneled walls, and its leafy, opalescent swimming pools, was as lastingly iconic of our ascent to modernity and national self-confidence as the sights travelers saw in between their stays there. A society as dependent on its highways as ours is ever knowing, even respectful, of its romantic lore; a time of smoother infrastructure, all-night diners and service stations, the epic landscape with offbeat attractions, and the postcards amassed along the way memorializing all of these things. As the provider of shelter, the independent motel was also the keeper of the national promise.
But romance deteriorates, promises are not always kept, and icons have a way of becoming omens. Seeing them on the road today, where motels of this kind still stand, they stick out like unhealed sores. When abandoned they are depressing, when still in operation they are unnerving. They are places of exhausted options on the one hand, hidden shames on the other. Being in one of its rooms, the spiritual debasement is palpable, as is the awareness of what is left behind with every stay. And no one escapes without leaving an impression on that secret history. In an age of corporate plenty, what resort leads people there?
The decay of the roadside motel has something of the chicken-or-egg to it. Was its decline signaled by the road itself? Of the freedom and individual determination it engendered? Did they become life-sized disposal units in which travelers appeased their inhibitions or changed their stories? Or was it the imagination? When Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates removed the picture in his office and stared secretly into Janet Leigh’s room as she undressed? If the latter contributed at all, that would have given the motel a haltingly short peak from 1945 to 1960. It never really stood a chance. But its roots don’t matter so much as the perception itself endures. The motel is both dead and undead.
The discourse cycle
Intellectual A says something everyone knows like “water is wet” but adds some stylistic flourishes like “late capitalism” to garner 748 “likes.” Intellectual B, feeling resentment for not having thought of it first, replies to her adding that “Actually, water isn’t wet. It’s in a liminal space between solidity and vapor.” She sends it to select editors to disperse to readers who will ignore it. A third, secret intellectual knows that this cycle will go on forever if she does not intervene. She masters the sciences: psychology to assess the weaknesses and habits of A and B; technology to determine the easiest tools to wield; anatomy in order to find the most efficient method of dismembering and dissolving dead tissue; geography to store the dead tissue where it is least likely to be discovered; and finally self-help to stifle the thrill of a never-ending hunt.
The kids in the hall
Liminality attracts the comfort-seeker. It is a place to retire when the responsibilities that attend excellence become too overbearing, assuming excellence is attained at all. In liminal space, the comfort-seeker may self-aggrandize free of obligation or pressure to perform and find suitable love, whether it is love for Central Jersey, Jimmy Carter, or being 27 forever. But liminality is also a territory viciously fought over. Generation X claims considerable space as the liminal generation against “Xennials,” who stake so much of it onto their collective psyche that they may be also called “liminnials.” Like Titans and Olympians, they fight over their rightful place to languish in a corridor, and to own their legacy of being all shift and no paradigm. If this is all Greek to you, you have more important matters to deal with.
Against the smirking regime
A cultural hysteria had swept the early half of the 1990s that made smiling for its own sake a mark of discredit. To smile without qualification, without heeding to the solemnity of the moment, was not in fashion. It was an era of the smirk, the sly arch, or nothing at all. To go against the prevailing attitude was to incur a hex of frivolity and all the ostracism that entailed. People predisposed by nature to the sardonic were never more empowered; anyone who was not was relegated to practicing the subtlest of lip-curls before a mirror, amidst air filled with the aroma of lavender- or cinnamon-scented candles and the sounds of “Linger” or “The River Rise” warbling on a cassette player.
Text from a blocked number
Something that will likely have annoyed anyone who came into my orbit in the 1990s was my apparent lack of childlike wonder. While I can understand how one could deduce this lack, I think the deduction was an error. We tend to see childlike wonder as being upward and sunny, because we are more often to encounter children who take that trajectory. But it is not the only trajectory. Some children wonder among the shadows. Some children are gifted with a sense of horror. It is not for me to say by whose judgment this gift is bestowed. This we may never know for sure. I can only say that it is a rather distinct and highly sensitive way of seeing the same surroundings that any other children see.
An artisanal fog
In times of greater prosperity and lower stakes, decadent affectations like angst, diffidence, apathy, skepticism, and even indifference could exist harmoniously with the prevailing joie de vivre. Ambivalence is like a kinder, more guilt-ridden indifference, for the ambivalent knows at heart what is being wasted. Yet in times of thrift and tension, when you must ultimately finalize who you are and what you stand for, ambivalence is a paramount offense. It is a detachment laced with cruelty. It is a bespoke confusion, a fog carefully spread around every object and pathway where what will save you is no clearer than what will harm you. And ambivalence, within this mindset, would seem to be making an unconscious choice: complicity over solidarity, frivolity over commitment.
Lunar fever
In his mind, the average American likens himself to Neil Armstrong. He goes out spiritually wearing Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, set before a series of moons, like a row of gargantuan grey bowling balls, awaiting his bootprints and the conqueror’s flag. He carries a part of the moon with him, as does every other American, believing that conquering multiples of metaphorical moons is about equal to Armstrong conquering the real one. The moon is ever concrete and material in the national imagination, very much unlike the atom bomb, which no American thinks is real (though it is more so) let alone claims (though it claims them).
The procrastinator’s coda
There’s a type of person who prefers to show up late for parties. And by “late,” of course, I mean the following afternoon when it is certifiable that all but the most unwell guests have left, and all the Solo cups, pizza boxes, roaches, cigarette butts, and sex toys (where applicable) are still strewn about like a bomb went off and when the bathrooms are still disgusting. I, who am well-liked and frequently called upon to attend countless parties, never quite understood that temperament, which craves not the thrill of the spectacle but the vulnerable wreckage of its being totally dismantled after the fact. And yet I fear that that very temperament is the one that will most enjoy this post and its predecessor.
When a writer ventures on a project that is less reader-inclusive than is acceptable, they will frame it as having been conceived in the midst of a momentous crisis that had to be confronted with their God-given skillset, lest certain madness (or at least indigestion) overtake them. I could frame these fragments, mostly but not entirely extracted and revised out of longer pieces, in such a way. There was a crisis, but that crisis has since passed for the most part, and it was not so much momentous as it was embarrassing.
Improvement is the watchword for any self-respecting writer. But sometimes a writer gets the urge to set aside their self-respect and suspend improvement indefinitely for cheap trinkets. I look at a lot of what I wrote from 2015 to 2019-ish and find a writer I would have hated if it was someone else. The long and short of it is that I had gotten the idea into my head that I and what I wrote could matter, a delusion from which a lot of poor judgment cascades. What “mattering” meant was often fluid and mood-dependent; in any case it never worked, and to see such glaring failures is not a little horrifying. Just as bad were the “meditative” pieces in which I lyrically moped from failure to failure leaving a lot of ugly, unclear prose far beneath my own standards in my wake. For like four years I stopped thinking.
Anyway, that sucked and I’d rather not repeat it if I can avoid doing so. So this is for the people who showed up late to the “party” and wanted to take stock of the mess. But the joke is on them! As you can practically eat off of these aphorisms. So I guess this post is for anyone who actually made it this far. Good on you!