FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Originally, I wasn’t going to turn to things I’ve written for these flashbacks. Rather, I was going to be culling through the archives for various things other people had written and in which I made an appearance. But I used a word in the previous post — ennui — which reminded me of something.

What follows was written and posted online in March of 2002. Since that’s the period several months before I launched my defunct “experiment in amateur journalism and hobbyist reporting” it seems somehow fitting, in the wake of that experiment, to revisit what I was during the bookend time at the other end.

A few prefatory notes.

First, I have left the hyperlinks intact, although some of them no longer lead to where they once did, and some of them no longer lead anywhere at all.

Second, the title of the item in question (used here as well) is the title of a song by the late lamented Portland band New Bad Things, which had broken up before I ever heard of them. One of the former members of that band was a regular at the cafe I used to own here, but ironically enough she’s the only one I’ve never actually seen play with the band at any of their post-breakup shows.

Finally, the piece originally was posted to a site I once owned called What Planet Is This?, which when it began was where I had stashed my writing-through-the-event after 9/11. By the time I posted the piece below, it no longer was dedicated to that purpose.

Some years ago, I came across the following definition of the word “slack” in a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary at a library in upstate new York:

In critical path analysis, the amount of time by which a particular event may be delayed without delaying the achievement of the overall objective.

For a long while, I had it printed in solid black letters from a felt-tip pen on an orange three-by-five index card, a material reminder of this perfectly wholesome definition. It became my explanation for why I accepted my demarcation as a slacker.

A rather important question, however, is left unanswered: Just what is the “overall objective” anyway?

I’ve become bored with most things lately, although there’s evidence to suggest that it’s some sort of cyclical affliction. It being Spring now certainly doesn’t help. Time of rut.

And of milestones. For five years, I’ve lived in one city — the longest stretch since before my aborted college years. A milestone I celebrated — if deliberately, only unconsciously so — by moving out of a shared house into a place where all that’s good or bad rests squarely with me and me alone.

No, I’m not bored because I’m by myself in this apartment. In fact, I’m often not in this apartment at all, but rather hovering at Stumptown or babysitting for a friend who recently moved back to Portland.

Burnout is a conceivable explanation. The spin of the world has just become so damnably tiring and tiresome over the past several years. And as things have become ever more schizophrenic — and as people seem to become ever more insular and willfully ignorant — I find that my ability to adequately express any opinions on it all (other than the opinions of others thanks to the wonders of weblogs and hyperlinks) is reduced to almost nothing.

Projects are littered about the feet of my past selves. The first grassroots online response to Internet censorship. Living in New York City. Living in San Francisco. A failed cybercafe. A series of websites, all good ideas, most thrown by the waysides because I just can’t keep up.

I’m not disengaged or wandering because of 9/11 (the original reason for this domain, by the way) — those events, and all of those which have come since, especially the domestic political ones, just heightened my sense that no one really matters except on the scale of the micro, the personal.

I can relate — as dodgy and scattershot as even this can be sometimes — person to person. But the macro, the national, the global — these levels are like a dream. And a very very bad one, at that. One from which I can’t awaken.

So this boredom thing. I’m even bored with the Web, although not in the same vapid ways as the been-there-done-that crowd who recently cropped up in a nonsensical newspaper article. It’s not even that I’m bored with what the Web is per se, but rather that I just don’t seem to care very much right now about the place it has in my life.

Maybe I’m just restless. Or maybe I’m becoming convinced that there is simply nothing new to say.

It doesn’t help that I recently finished reading a piece by Thomas de Zengotita in the new issue of Harper’s:

Which is not to say you aren’t moved. On the contrary, you are moved, often deeply, very frequently — never more so, perhaps, than when you saw the footage of the towers coming down on 9/11. But you are so used to being moved by footage, by stories, by representations of all kinds — that’s the point. It’s not your fault that you are so used to being moved, you just are.

So it’s not surprising that you have learned to move on so readily to the next, sometimes moving, moment. It’s sink or surf. Spiritual numbness guarantees that your relations with the moving will pass. And the stuffed screen accommodates you with moving surfaces that assume you are numb enough to accommodate them. And so on, back and forth. The dialectic of postmodern life.

There I go again. Turning to someone else’s words. Someone else’s thoughts. So why not offer one more tidbit from de Zengotita:

The prospect of finitude helps to account for the turn to sensation, as if intensity of presentation could make up for repetition. Of course, sensation is also a response to sheer clutter on the screen, a way to grab the most possible attention in the least amount of time. But that clutter also accounts for why everything’s already been done, and so it cycles on relentlessly — fill the pages, fill the time slots, fill the channels, the websites, the roadsides, the building facades, the fronts and backs of shirts and caps, everything, everything must be saying something, every minute. But what? What’s left to say? It doesn’t matter. Cut to the response.

I once wrote, in a meandering dream-like un-story set without specification in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (an un-story about “the philosophy of interference and the persistence of vision”):

Is it the clutter that makes this place feel as if it is haunted? Or does it merely seem to draw out the interference of the people themselves, focus it almost into a coherence that can be felt like a presence?

He scrawls in his notebook a line he heard somewhere: “Maybe I need romance to keep me warm, maybe I just need an electric fan heater.” The abandoned cigarette goes out in the ashtray. He lights another from a fresh pack and places it beside the first. There is a psychotic jazz playing on the tapedeck, but some sort of radio traffic keeps intruding, like someone nearby has something to say that is more important, or maybe what’s important is that someone hears it.

I’m not certain that I any longer understand just what this was trying to say.

All of which seems somehow synchronous with having just seen Waking Life again — not so coincidentally, perhaps, by the same filmmaker behind the movie Slacker. Ambling in a seemingly aimless manner through the bobs and waves of a landscape of other people’s words, other people’s explanations for just what it is we’re doing here. Wherever this “here” is, exactly.

There is a scene in the former, in which four young men walk through city streets, poetry slamming existentialist soundbites. They come across an old man, long beard, holding on tight at the top of a telephone pole or lamppost. Asked by the four if he needs help, he rebuffs their offer, prompting one of the men to mumble, “Stupid bastard.” But another of them counters that he’s no worse than they are. He’s all action and no theory. They’re all theory and no action.

And anyway, isn’t this all supposed to have something to do with “rootless cosmopolitanism”? A phrase I originally heard from Hakim Bey:

Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, “rootless cosmopolitanism”). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the “Oasis” issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term “psychic nomadism” here rather than “urban nomadism,” “nomadology,” “driftwork,” etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming- into-being of the TAZ. “The death of God,” in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspectived post- ideological worldview able to move “rootlessly” from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism–able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

Figure that one out for yourselves. Somehow, it’s always seemed intimately intertwined with the defense of my existence as culled from the OED. Further confusing the matter is that the term was (is?) apparently anti-Semitic:

The notion of “cosmopolitanism” was used as a characterisation of all that was causing the ills and the misfortunes of their great nation and eroding its distinctives. A similar terminology was to be used in the Stalinist era against the Jews, expressed as “rootless cosmopolitanism”. To this end all political progressiveness, foreign investors, western Europeans and Freemasons were perceived as a cancer eroding the soul of the nation in the service of the Jews.

Although I suppose that considering my rather dissenting stance in the face of the Asses of Evil skulking about the bunkers of Washington D.C., some might indeed perceive me as part of whatever un-American collusion is eroding the soul of the nation.

Which leaves us where, exactly? Right here, where be began. With all of the un-nerving sense of boredom and having nothing to say. The response to which has been to (at least for now) all but abandon my regular weblog in favor of this stuttering attempt at using even more space to explore all that noisesome nothingness. To write through the void, in long form.

It doesn’t have to make sense yet. It just has to be here, for some still as-yet-undetermined (or is it indeterminate?) rationale.

On we go.