Retirement

I saw a picture of the new Michael Jackson / Akon single and I thought, how dumb, it looks like gmail, but then I had nowhere to say that.

What began as a temporary crutch used in an isolating country, an isolating town, the terrible isolating suburb of the isolating town, had become a wheelchair, if we can consider that an extreme kind of crutch, so I decided to quiet down for a little while.

Being quiet means experiencing the urge to speak, but deciding not to. This seems like a far weirder experience than merely silence, because being quiet means ritual examination of your reasons for keeping shut and the styles of the compulsion you're experiencing. In the last few days, I've noticed that my compulsions group around a few related tones.

The most obvious one is a compulsion that, interestingly, I don't normally indulge; explicit or graphic stories and phrases to do with shitting or pissing. When the thought occurs to me to write about or tweet about this or that shitting adventure, I usually say to myself, "No, that wouldn't be a good idea, you already mix a lot of retarded things to compensate for feeling pretentious talking about philosophy or books, but talking about shitting would only express a sort of celebratory disgusting." I thought things like this would recede in the noise of other messages being dealt with, but every time I deal with one of those, I start to develop general theories, building from that experience that I have spent the most time with.

The second compulsion is the narrative self-confession. Related to the first one, these are usually self-effacing moments, trying to pick food off my pants in front of a class of third graders without them noticing, being confused when "Chateau" was translated "성" instead of "Castle".

Third, fourth, etc., these are strains of "news", I suppose, a community conversation, listen to this song, look at this fucking horrible thing I've just found, god, I am so fucking angry about this political issue, let me tell you about it or provoke you into a fight about it, or you've said something cruel or authoritarian and I want to yell at you for saying that.

What occur much more rarely are actual insights into either my condition or my consideration of the world. I don't mean this as a flagellation, oh, I am so devoid, no, I'm more interested in this as craft. Time goes into these sentences and word placements, into long range stylistic trends, into the conversations and relationships that undergird them. At least under this sign, these are traditional craft hours, a work done without any special purpose, perhaps to form a general shape of myself as a slack sail to be taken by an intense thrust.

I think I miss trading music the most. The entire trajectory of a technological period has made music appreciation so autistic that our culture has malformed us to retain the sociality of music: the posturing and signalling, the "I am this kind of musical consumer" tone of contemporary music discussions. But as the social aspect is eaten up, it becomes another "managed" aspect of life, material to be circulated and played with, to hide feints and false bottoms and hide yourself and the mistake of an earlier generation of music listeners: the "opinion". It's got a dialectical shape to it. It's also where bringing pleasure to a person is most clear, and, in rare moments of conflicting aggrandizement, it can even escape this stupid trap and let the old idealist myth of a "social" back in.