I’ve had such a hard time concentrating all day. And there are a number of things going on in my head contributing that, but one of them is a kind of artistic restlessness, some of my oldest conflicts around doing what I’m supposed to versus doing what I feel I’m really best at, most interested in, or which feel like more valuable uses of my limited time on earth than simply maintaining myself. I see that picture of Prince and Wendy of The Revolution, and I feel a cosmic, insatiable despair of jealousy — I wanted a life that looked like that, but I was so repressed and controlled for so long that I didn’t even know what I wanted. It’s terrible, and so common.

And yet I can’t despair. Both because my sense of obligation has grown, but also because I think I physically can’t. This is the weirdest effect of being on antidepressants (which, again, I am SO glad to be taking) plus also probably being completely unable to reckon with a full, numbing, impossible year of doing nothing but sit inside, worry, and seek stationary occupation… but I feel the desire to, like, kind of lose my cool… and I just can’t. There’s something between me and the feeling. It’s manifesting depressively, in just not finding anything interesting or appealing except for the most mind-numbing escapist forms of play, but not as full-on sadness or whatever else.

My problem is, as it has always been, feeling in my heart that I have never fully lived as myself. Whoever that might have been.

And I kept thinking of Otto Rank’s book Art and Artist, maybe I’d read more of that, how long had it been? Restlessly, I unpacked lots of my books, found it, unpacked more, and then finally decided to read a bit. According to the bookmark — which at the time I was using a piece of parchment that I also took notes on, tri-folding and jotting down thoughts — I was last reading this in January 2015. You put down a book and pick it up six years later. I was talking with Celeste at the Heirloom brunch bar about The Familiar, rain, the goddess, and art. It was such a beautiful stretch of time, in its own way, going most weekends to sit for a morning, have a nice breakfast and coffee, catch up a bit with a fascinating friend, and read. Now we aren’t friends, for no reason but going separate ways; I stopped eating there as often anyway, the vibe changed gradually, and now it’s an impossible thing to even consider going to sit at a bustling restaurant for an hour. One of the fundamental pleasures of my simple, constrained life, inaccessible for over a year. One of many. It feels wrong to complain, so many have it worse, we’ve all gone through it, but my fuck, it’s just been stupid and it’s only getting harder to reckon with as time goes on.

So anyway here’s Otto Rank, I’m at the final chapter, I’d set it aside for no reason but distraction, and the chapter is called “The Artist’s Fight with Art.” I skim the preceding few pages, and here’s someone who really wrote very clearly and helpfully about what it’s like to be driven to make art, what happens when you don’t or can’t, what happens when you do, and how to think about your relationship to your art and the world. Almost no one I know can think of themselves as an artist; not without the intermediaries of irony and commerce. I don’t anymore, though I used to.

And yet nobody’s heard of Rank. I hadn’t, before I came across this book on a whim, and was surprisingly moved and, I think, helped by it. I don’t think I’d be as healthy as I am today (in some ways) without having read and reflected on Art and Artist.

But right now, tonight, all I can think is what a shame it is that our existence has to be so hard; that some of us have to struggle mightily simply to coexist with ourselves; and that collectively we have, I think, found a great deal of wisdom about how to go about that terrible task, and yet hardly any of it is widely available, let alone taught to us when we need it most. All the growth of my adult life has been fought for, against myself, my family, and my culture, inch by reluctant inch. I’ve worked so much harder than I should have had to, just to be okay with myself. I’m mostly okay with myself these days!

But some days, like today, I feel like I’m going to burst just from… a profound lack of satisfaction/meaning/pleasure/purpose. (if the red hot chili peppers were existentialists.) If I can’t perform my job tasks for a few hours, my sense of myself and my progress crumples. The world will move on without me, leaving me again. I won’t let that happen! But not because of anything other than grim refusal and medicinal buoyancy.

Things aren’t bad. I’m just roiling in suspended animation, trying to bend my brain in a direction it won’t go today; it will comply tomorrow, or the next day, and in the meantime I’ll just hold on and do what I can. It’s just excruciating to have the artistic disposition which is capable of bringing new things into the world repeatedly, all day long every day, and to tie the dog to a tree for too many days in a row. Dog wants to run. Dog wants to wear sequined shirts on stage and feel self-assured. Dog knows it will never be, that the window has passed, in every possible way. Dog attempts to reconcile with self for the ten thousandth day. Dog needs to break the rules some days to feel minor illusion of control. Dog feels the wolf it will never be, in its blood and in its toes. Dog would like to go to a bar and belt songs and let loose. Dog wants a TREAT dog DAMNIT

wow I sure am feeling chaotic and contrary today! feeling very pent up and like I'd rather be running around and yelling than sitting still at the computer, again, doing cognitively-demanding work, unable to to even contemplate going anywhere or doing something more interesting

Says Jorge Luis Borges, "I should say [...] that I want to stop waking up every morning, finding: Well, here I am, I have to go back to Borges.

"There's a word in Spanish... instead of saying 'to wake up,' you say recordarse, that is, to record yourself, to remember yourself... Every morning I get that feeling because I am more or less nonexistent. Then when I wake up, I always feel I'm being let down. Because, well, here I am. Here's the same old stupid game going on. I have to be somebody. I have to be exactly that somebody.

BEEP BORP OH WELL

if only!

it's TVT appreciation day

serving up my favorite music since the year 2001

shout out to cherrybomb from starmen.net, whoever and wherever you are, for sending me two of their tracks through irc and changing my brain forever <3

Excellent essay by Lyta Gold in Current Affairs, about the new incel documentary:

The only trouble with TFW No GF is that it’s a big fucking lie. For one, as Rolling Stone points out, the film was produced by Cody Wilson, a 3D-printed gun manufacturer with ties to white supremacists who “[pled] guilty to injury to a child after having sex with an underage girl, a plea that required him to register as a sex offender.”

I am, however, interested in what we mean when we say that someone has been affected by capitalism and market forces. Wouldn’t it be stranger if incels weren’t alienated by modernity? As Gabert-Doyon puts it in Jacobin: “In part, then, the men in TFW No GF point toward the failures of a market-based logic of individual freedoms and responsibility.” Well yes, but what doesn’t point at that? Noticing that humans react to capitalism and the failures of market-based logic is a bit like saying “trees react to sunlight.” All trees do; it would be bizarre if they didn’t. These particular trees react differently though, and that’s interesting. They grow twisted branches and attempt to block out the sunlight of every other tree in a grasping, jealous rage. The differences, and those reasons, become important.

“The distance from the antifeminist ‘red pill’ [conviction that you have discovered some secret underlying unwoke truth about reality] to the racist ‘red pill’ was not so far,” she writes. “Each, in its own way, represented conspiratorial worldviews, in which the rights of women or minorities were a zero-sum game, promoted by sinister actors to deprive men and whites of their due.” The most common expressions of racism are a doubled fear of brown people taking away 1) white women and 2) white men’s jobs. It’s winner-take-all anxiety, the fear that if you (or the collective you, however imagined) can’t compete you will be replaced; in other words, the logic of the market distilled.

A girlfriend is an acquisition, a demonstration of status. In the pseudoscientific/economic sensibility of inceldom, a girlfriend is proof that one has successfully outcompeted other men. As Tolentino explains, “Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.” Possession of a girlfriend is understood as a solution and an end; loneliness mixed up in the acquisition of objects, in which women are the highest prize. But “a girlfriend” is more than that, too; a woman in your life who loves you and will listen to you is the closest that many men will get to actual social support. As sociologist Jessica Calarco recently said in an interview with Anne Helen Petersen, “other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.”

Incel mass murderers aren’t, as the documentary suggests, an aberration, doofuses who take the joke too seriously. They’re the ultimate expression of the desire to exert power over others, to be famous, to frighten, to be noticed. The incel community may pretend to only ironically revere the mass-murdering Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian as “saints,” but that’s because they’re too cowardly to admit they’re serious.

If, of course, you were indeed a lonely person, and you wanted love, you might not spend your whole day online trying to get a reaction out of people by upsetting them and then simultaneously bemoaning how lonely and depressed you are. Moyer’s incels may want to explain their behavior as simple causation—they are alienated by society, therefore mean jokes. But it’s a feedback loop—alienated, therefore mean jokes intended to display superiority and detachment, therefore more alienation from everyone else. Tfw no gf, and it’s partly your own fault, because you’re kind of an asshole.

The fact that incels might want to be perceived as social victims bereft of personal responsibility is really an abdication of agency. [...] we have to be willing to accept some basic realities: namely, that we are alienated but we still have agency; we are responsible for how we treat other people no matter how sad we are; and we are all in this together.

But just because someone is aware of the cruelty and inequity of capitalism doesn’t mean they’re opposed to it. This is one of the dangers of trying to find common ground with incels, and reactionaries in general: yes, they too have identified the problem, but they have their own answer, which is not the same as ours. Reactionaries may agree with us that capitalism is bad—Lavin notes in her book that “a persistent low-grade resentment of capitalism…pervaded the [white supremacist] chats” she was monitoring—but her subjects mostly blamed it on the Jews. The future that reactionaries long for (aka a nostalgic mostly imaginary past where men were men and lesser people knew their place) is not even close to what egalitarian socialists have in mind.

These guys are unhappy, and their loneliness is pitiable. They have few options; this is a bleak and brutal country. But this is a bleak and brutal country for everyone, including the women that incels think they are owed sexual access to, and if they just tried to see those women as human beings like themselves, struggling like themselves, who are not a cure or a prize but just more lost and confused people, they might actually find the happiness they’re looking for. But to do that, they would have to give up their childish dreams of superiority once and for all.

There’s no socialism without solidarity, and TFW No GF shows that incels have solidarity—with guys like themselves, and no one else. They believe they’re owed something, something in particular, something more than other people, something that the universal solidarity of socialism won’t ever be able to give them. But it’s always possible for them to change their minds, and admit responsibility, and decide they’re ready for real solidarity and community instead. Right now they’re standing outside in the snow, looking on bitterly through the window at the light and life inside—but they can enter any time. The door is open. They just have to choose to come in.

Nathan J. Robinson, in Current Affairs:

But it’s very clear that the deregulation of Texas’ energy market, the free market for power that Cruz championed, directly precipitated the price gouging. A Wall Street Journal investigation put blame squarely on the state’s excessive trust in corporate benevolence. The Journal calculated that “deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state’s traditional utilities.”

The CFO of a natural gas company was giddy in reporting to investors how much money the company was making off the tragedy: “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices… Frankly, we were able to sell at super premium prices for a material amount of production.”

To fund that jackpot, the city of Denton is “now looking to borrow up to $300 million to cover fuel expenses from last week,” and on one day alone the “municipal utility racked up a $75 million power bill, more than it spent on electricity for all of its last fiscal year.” So cities are faced with the prospect of taking on debt to pay off power corporations, all because they needed to keep the lights on, while those same corporations will be “spectacular winners.”

(Incidentally, the Journal notes that in the debate over Texas’ deregulation, “leading the charge was Enron, the Houston energy company and champion of free markets that went bankrupt in 2001 amid revelations of widespread fraud.”)

The Journal reports that now, in the aftermath of the storm, companies are “trying to figure out how to pass on the billions of dollars in costs to customers.” The paper quotes an energy economist who says that the crisis is going to be “an incredible transfer of billions of dollars from Texas consumers to generators” with some “spectacular winners and losers,” the biggest loser being “the state of Texas.”

We can see very clearly here how free market myths run up against the reality that regulation is necessary to serve the public interest, and government cannot “stay out” of the economy without it going haywire and hurting people. Now that even Ted Cruz admits this, let us hope a few more people will abandon the laissez-faire mythology that sees markets as miracles and every regulation as a burden. That’s just not how it works, as Texas has found out the hard way.

you're welcome

queen — flick of the wrist

Looks like it's time for me to listen to every single Queen album again! Sheer Heart Attack is... so good!

"Baby, you've been had."