Sure Is, Sure Does

“You tell me. You’re the journalist.”

The saga of simplification versus me has a victor. And it’s not me. Through some external prodding and generous soul-searching I’ve decided this is not the hill I ought to be dying on. And, until I find an alternative, it would be petty and counter-productive to let this opportunity for “boot camp” be tugged away.

Maybe it was the relative ease of yesterday’s output, or the creeping resurgence of insecurity via Turbo Tax, but I no longer felt comfortable rallying around a personal grievance that was more blow-to-ego than anything I had real business being upset about.

My kingdom for an editor who won’t mangle and misrepresent!

My finest linens for a say in the final product!

My...

The inability to find an appropriate outlet is discouraging. Maybe the idea that “well, these people just don’t get it” is ruinously flawed and it would be better to tighten the screws and conform to the arbitrary standards that “simplify” the “convoluted language/phrasing” which apparently hamper the corporate blogosphere’s workflow.

It’s great that said ‘sphere has, like any other bastion of bastardization, taken a form of expression, shorn the qualities that make it expressive and slid it, on a digestible bed of enthusiasm, into the gaping eyes of marketing professionals everywhere.

I’ll cede a couple of points:

1) em-dashes are totally inoffensive to denote an especially-aside aside mid-sentence.

2) em-dashes are totally non-heinous in the interest of tacking on an aside or qualifier at sentence end.

Otherwise, em-dashes should stay the eff out of non-creative writing. 

Note: I would love to be convinced otherwise.

Quickly: Wow! World really conspires doesn’t it? Just when you think you’re about to sit down and write a $40 guide to recognizing sexual assault for USC’s school of social work, you get headlonged by the Senate grinding the gears of World War Trump into motion, high schoolers being allegedly “sodomized” in hazing rituals and Roger Stone’s Mad Men Halloween party visage softened and clarified in a Netflix hi-def screen grab.

I added a blog to my newly minted “professional” SquareSpace. I set out to fill it with thoughtful, “professional” posts that would showcase my renewed interest and refined writing acumen. Of course, I wrote about five posts, one of which was recycled from Thought Catalog by way of Medium. Two pieces stayed in drafts. They didn’t make the cut because of their rambling, quasi-psychotic or otherwise unfitness for “professional” writing showcasement. 

Yesterday, I copied the writing I found worth saving and removed the blog from my “professional portfolio.” Later in the evening I deactivated Twitter, started a new Twitter account for the newsfeed aspect and probably would’ve carried the social media pseudo-purge further were it not for the sneaking suspicion that one job I’d been doing pro-bono utilizes Facebook and is supposed to pay in a slightly altered form in the near future.

Then I considered starting a new, entirely disconnected blog. The aim was to distance my “professional” self from my personal platform. This smacked of personal brandsmanship so I abandoned the idea and turned to this existing territory.

So...

As I’d written in one scrapped blog post on SquareSpace, I don’t have much time for “content” or “marketing.” Unfortunately, those words are emblazoned over the most obvious threshold between the world of unsatisfying low-rent freelance work and even more unsatisfying rent-overwhelming in-office corporate work. 

But, as I was slow to remember yesterday, that’s a binary. And nothing appeals to me less than binaries! Besides condescension -- all forms -- but whatever, who cares, that’s only tangentially related to the matter at hand.

The Matter At Hand

The matter at hand is reclaiming (read: claiming) agency over the direction of my life, working or otherwise.

At various moments of “breakthrough” I’ve outlined an ideal living situation involving disparate creative pursuits, almost utter autonomy, and peripatetic-friendly work, though only in an optionality-rich sense, not out of necessity...naturally.

“I’ll have a column in The Stranger,” I said, “With a weekly show on KEXP and the nearly-earned status of an about-town luminary!” That particular vision was articulated on a bright, warm summer afternoon. I was up from LA and feeling the pull of a homecoming. After finding myself swept aside by the forces of ambition at play in said urban desert, I painted Seattle as a small pond, ready to welcome back a proverbial fish; not-so-big, but not-so-small (in my mind).

Over a year later and arrogance a-shambles, I’m trying to map out a new path paved with humility!

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If the world demands arbitrary credentials, I have to find a way to meet them, and not with a dynamic combination of eye-roll, scoff and carry on. For personally advantageous reasons, I’ve long considered writing a meritocracy. Evidence to the contrary was literally everywhere but still my notion persisted. After all, I had been told I was good at this...someone with more sway would eventually notice...and what a relief that would be!

Such relief!

My dream of meritocratic shortcutting is dying two deaths:

1) Writing seems to be considered communication rather than expression. This is a problem when your writing is unavoidably expressive, but not particularly concerned with the finer points of grammar, punctuation or structure, etc. 

I took it as a compliment when a classmate remarked on the similarity between my written and speech patterns. I suppose I shouldn’t have.

2) I’m almost certainly too reliant on the “they just don’t get it” bullshit I’m “expressing” in “1).” I’ve reread my papers from academic life. It was not pretty, baby! And, while I’ve certainly improved, the fact remains: There’s work to be done. Candy can be any enticing medley of design and color but jagged edges will make it impossible to consume. Those jagged edges may have been somewhat smoothed by interested parties (especially lately) but they’re still jutting! The time has probably come to give up my fantasy of never learning the rules before breaking them...realistic though I believe that “fantasy” to be...

“Basic qualifications” have to be met, explained a lightly patronizing rejection email. Guys! Who knew!

To that end, I am suspending my theory of mixed-use serial commas, and committing to the style of whatever benefactors I can scrounge up in the future. I will put my head dutifully down and adhere to the style guides and keyword optimizers! Who cares! It’s all in the game, baby!

OR

Or I can use the refinements that come naturally with practice and stop trying to fit myself into the gaping “content” void of the corporate written word. Will I be happy writing copy for data analytics? No! Will I be happy blogging for middling B2B comers? Likely not! So why on God’s green earth am I applying for those-type-gigs??

Money? True.

The attempt to attain an inarguable sense of place? True.

Health benefits? Yes, that too.

I want stability. At least I’m fairly sure I do. I want to know exactly how much I’m making and when I’ll be paid and with that certainty the ability to put it towards what I want, near and far term...But is it worth the misery and senseless exhaustion I’ve experienced in each and every office job I’ve ever had?

I love the invented life imagined a couple summers ago. I love the idea of working in a bookstore. I don’t want to have to live in a city. I want options. I want enough and I don’t need much. I love the idea of committing to writing as expression, not as a communicating medium of seminar schedules or recruitment packages. I want more from the one skill I’ve even marginally isolated to build on.

“This is disgusting.”

Broken from the spell of wall-to-wall coverage, I shift my head on her lap; the sensation of which whets an onset of numbing inevitability to a sudden, serrated edge. Onscreen, a sickly parade of the newly-anointed marches, more exhausted than triumphant, more relieved than energized, across a spangled stage. Fleshy and wan to a man, woman and child, the victorious confederation huddles together in loose rows, spilling off of the limited platform. They sway awkwardly, as if pressed into raiment that had failed to meet the mannequin’s chic promise.

The patriarch takes his place and holds court. He calls out to unseen family members and an oft-maligned crew of insiders, careerists and ambivalent sycophants. This limp cavalcade of toasts skims a roiling surface, careful to avoid the overfalls and violent, sucking depths that have threatened his self-professed disenfranchisees’ nonspecific demands of reclamation again and again. He emotes in the manner of a man worn down from unforeseen processes, abuse both doled out and absorbed, and a lifetime under the manic machinations of a character without much use for respite, given or received. But now a weight, not always apparent over the preceding months, seems to pacify whatever instinct had guided him to slide the country’s collective fingers across the salted, lime-drenched array of razors that punctuated his campaign’s bloated caricature of restorative hope and nostalgic delusion.

My phone buzzes.

“Motherfucker.”

Without a thought, and not for the first time tonight, I respond simply: “Yeah.”

Buzz follows buzz as various intra-national connective strands of my life weigh in. Both too timid and too bold jokes, the refutation of comedy’s viability at a moment like this, and a generalized sense of disbelief, if not shock, permeate and buoy the discussions. Finding myself inarticulate, I shift attention back from the screen to her focused, increasingly-livid profile. She turns and we exchange raised, nonplussed eyebrows.

Now the screen trumpets back to life with a run through of the Elected’s prior remarks: sometimes revolting, often weightless, they’re always delivered with projectile force. An attempted muting proves unsuccessful. After a few culminating lines from our new national representation’s blustering audio CV, live coverage resumes.

By now, the next president has exited his stage and, bedraggled but glowing entourage in his wake, winds his way through the adoring throng. A Sikh man reaches out his hand: a shock of brown in the sweating, reddened masses around him. The trademark crimson and white hats bob up and down. Kitsch, sure, but now a simple symbol for the insatiable well of frustration and self-pity that, once given a leak, has ascended to fully-credentialed free flow. Throughout, the glimmering first-lady-to-be never loses her beautifully reptilian smile, and the shiny-faced clutch ebbing around her match that bold, surprised-conqueror’s front. A new, but familiar collection of national imagery has begun to occupy its democratically-elected wall space.

“The crowd,” one reporter points out, “has been drinking.” On cue, the camera cuts to signs flapping and rising over the inebriated. Bold, milky text proclaims support from “Women” and, as had become a familiar epithet at rallies, “the Blacks.” The camera cuts back to an intrepid panel of experts. Desperate justifying and haughty rationalizations persist for a few minutes; buzzwords shoot out in clipped, confident bursts; the world is collapsed and rebuilt to fit the mold of reality. Their disbelief, though initially palpable, settles into a restrained comfort; their jaws, not literally still, seem set, begrudgingly ready to accept this last floodwall’s failing and (not so begrudgingly) prepare for an enriching, if exasperating, deluge of content.

She closes the laptop and, murmuring, suggests that we sleep. The existential upsets and specific dreads implied by the night’s proceedings lingered behind her eyes, and mine. We are left, for the first time in months, without the ability to infer that an inevitable, if hard-won, refutation of the world’s lurch backwards was galloping gamely towards us, hand outstretched to pull us back from the rotting, protestant chasm at our feet. Shaken, we joke that we’re going to wake up soon, that this is in fact the dream.

Do you ever have the experience of seeing with astounding clarity, but, in doing so, realize that there's nothing to see? Apologizes for the hack “pseudo-rhetorical question as opening, and perhaps hackier “apologies to no one in particular, non-existent Dear Reader.” I’m just getting back into this. And I wasn’t especially good before as a cursory reading of my back catalog firmly attests.

Regardless, I need somewhere to work through some frustration. (Frustration? Is that the right word?) To the ‘astounding clarity’ above: the issue is no longer that I feel confused, or particularly muddled or on the wrong path; the issue is that I see past my current situation, past the ill-defined next-thing-coming, past the changes, both minor and drastic, I can (and likely will) make personally, aesthetically and spatially, and find myself looking at a clearing without features. Nothing to un-smudge, nothing to correct, nothing to spruce up and re-purpose; just nothing.

I am, clearly, at a bit of a loss. I comprehend that whatever expectations I infer and feel compelled to live up to aren’t necessarily truly important or worth following through on, that whomever seem to be pressing said on me may not truly be doing so. Maybe the most disturbing thing is that I don’t really think there are expectations. Not big ones anyway. And, if the only ones made explicit are alone in their existence, I’m certainly correct in that thought. “Able to support myself”? That’s frankly not a ringing endorsement of my capacity. What happened to coddling? Where’s my trophy for existence? Let me catch a ride on the everybody-wins generational hyperloop, dammit!

Maybe fulfillment can’t really come from within and the expectation that it ought to is just as fantastical an imagining as the idea that fulfillment comes from specific settings, aesthetics or careers.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUzfmPHAUvw)

So, to be totally honest, this guy was my uber driver; lyft driver: doesn’t matter. Anyways, this cat is good. Like REALLY good. And sure, I’ve been waiting for an excuse to work “cat” into a sentence for years...but, man, this guy is good. And sure, you could say, “of course he’s good, Alex, he’s rapping magnetic to the beat because he’s still tryna make it!!!” And yeah. Of course he is. He has a lot to prove. But like, this guy STICKS. THE. BEAT. 

I don’t like writing about rap anymore. Fuck. I don’t like writing about music anymore. It’s a bloated, distorted, popularized form. The people have their tame impalas and their bullshit. The people have the time to debate the latest beach house vs the latest destroyer. And like, who cares. Not a question. The general “who.” Who is around. Who does care. No denying that. Who loves bands he OR SHE has loved for years. And HE OR SHE especially loves bands who are bland enough to like. It’s super easy to be an UNABASHED & UN-BASHED, mind you, popitmist; whatever that means.,,,,,,,,

Anyways, the point is that Mfourmusik sticks the beat like nobody does these days. He’s the first I’ve heard do it properly since the first (well known) BIG KRIT tape.

The Local Resident EP is the most promising mixtape ive heard in years. LITERAL YEARS, JERRY!!!!!!!

“Fuck That Shit” is the only actual banger I’ve heard since the “WTF R Those” by DJ Paul.