I spend all this time these days having a head full of words, going over what I’m going to write when I get to my keyboard, and literally ten seconds later, when I arrive at the keyboard, my mind goes blank, as though the computer is actually interrupting my thoughts rather than facilitating them.

Perhaps I need a typewriter.

—

For so very long—decades, in fact—my ideal life, or at least my ideal “snapshot” of life, has been woven implicitly into my every thought patterns, imprinted unassumingly on my soul.

It looks something like this:

I have a small, comfortable, historic home somewhere in very center of a dense, frenetic international city (for the last decade, the image has been of the upper-west side of Manhattan).

I have a timeshare or a weekend home somewhere on a nearby cost, within driving distance, where there are beaches and little bars and restaurants.

I have two kids, maybe a boy and a girl, and we spend days taking mass transit to gaze at museum exhibits and to explore the little wonders of metropolitan society—ethnic neighborhoods, eclectica in parks and nook-cranny monuments, tourist attractions and forgotten bookshops.

I am a professor at a local urban university, steeped in conference and classroom culture, socializing with my students in liminal spaces in a way that is only possible in urban space, where you can meet for hours without ever having “met” at any place in particular, so that there’s nothing unprofessional or too intimate about it, yet conversations can be stimulating and engaging.

I have continued to write professionally, only more successfully, drawing inspiration from the metropolitan milieux around me.

I have a happy wife, maybe also a professional, maybe not, who knows the city at least as well as I do and with whom I talk shop (hers and mine) often.

Life is fast, noisy, and sophisticated, like a cross between traffic and a poetry slam, most weekdays. On weekends, it dissolves into a set of fleeting impressions, of seagulls and waves, of large windows and deep sofas and classic novels and relaxation before we emerge back into the metafactory of urban life once again to start the week.

It goes on like this until we are retired and eccentric and give up our downtown home for something in the suburbs, but not too far away so that we can still go to the opera, to the universities, to the museums, and so that the meat of the global intellectual scene is never far away.

It is a life of committed, energetic centrality rather than of passive periphery.

—

It is clear that this picture, increasingly faded, is giving way and must give way to something else. Life is a thing of reimagining; you can’t cling to your foundations like a tenuous structure in a hurricane and expect to survive intact, much less with joy.

The old ideal life is just not on the cards these days.

But I am unsure of how to replace it, or of what to replace it with, so accustomed am I to the direction that it imparts—a direction that for decades now has driven me into ever larger cities and ever more urban contexts, into more and more eccentric and intellectual university settings, and ultimately, to where I am today.

What do I want now? What should I want now?

I don’t have any perspective just at the moment, and I can’t seem to get it. There appears to be no vantage point from which to get a clear or even a transient account or observation of myself or my life; I am too in the thick of what is happening to know what is happening, too “in the moment” to take account of the moment—a state of affairs that I used to ruthlessly make fun of in others.

It’s not that I’m unsure about how to proceed; I already know the direction in which things are pointing. But I’ve no idea how to go about going in that direction, in what way I should do what I do, toward what ultimate, abstract end other than the end in-itself.

—

If I’m not who I have been, who should I be?

Who do I want to be?

What will make us happy, and how can it be achieved?

—

More to the point, what do you do when you don’t have answers to these questions, and there appears to be no obvious way to get them?

—

One thing that I have realized after some reflection: “normal” is not me. I cannot be, nor have I ever been, happy or even merely satisfied with what other people want. I am not like other people.

I will likely never be like other people, curse it or no (and I have, through the years, done more than my fair share of both).

for twenty-three (23) hours. My eyes and stomach went to bed long ago.

Now I know how med students feel.

Off to bed.

whether implicitly or explicitly, is an important thing to do so that you have something to live up to. It’s a kind of a goal that you set, but you give the public and others the power to enforce it so that you can’t wuss out on yourself.

Basically right now I need to think bigger in every way. Part of what’s bothering me these days stems from me thinking small, having goals that are the size of just today or tomorrow or next week, rather than still wanting to take over the world.

In order to take over the world, you have to want to do it.

Nobody who dreamed of having an adequate day, day after day, for their entire life ever climbed Everest or revolutionized the world of science. Achievement comes from cockiness and grandiose thinking, whether anyone wants to admit it or not.

Not only do the modest often not succeed; even when they do succeed, they usually don’t manage to succeed at anything particularly worthwhile—just at one or two modest things.

I’m absolutely, desperately bored with small thinking right now. I want my challenges and delusions back; they always drove me to heights others thought unfair.

is when flowers usually bloom, often in strange and unexpected ways.

Really hate it. That’s all.

Downward spiral.

Fuck.

—

“You can’t win. But there are alternatives to fighting.”

— Obi Wan Kenobi

—

Time marches on.

Life marches on.

Nonsense.

Stuff and nonsense and shite, same as it ever was.

—

Every few months like clockwork, I decide that I’m going to become “one of them” and make piles and piles of money and become desperately famous, or at least super cool and chill and likeable. There are about a dozen ways to do it, and most people can think of them in about four seconds if they give it a try.

But I can’t. I can’t do any of the things. I’m too normatively compromised, too enculturated and culturebound. I can’t be a hooker or a whore, a pornographer or a middleman, a legal con artist or a huckster. I can’t. I try, but I can’t. I decide, but I don’t.

IN the end, I always decide I’d rather die poor and unfamous, unpaid and uninteresting. And there’s the rub… you see the capitalist elite going out there and dining on the meat of children, living the life of rape and honey, and you know that you could be there but for your own hangups.

Sometimes, I berate myself for them.

Sometimes, the ideology almost grabs me and I almost believe for a moment that in fact there really is a “right” and a “wrong” and that they are “right” and that I am simply “wrong” (as they have always told me, all these many years, often with disdain) and I wonder about myself.

But in the end I always return to what I am; I can’t help it. No, I won’t do those things, because I don’t like the consequences, I don’t like what they cause, I don’t like the implications that they create for those that come after me.

So all I can do is wish for a million just and due reckonings in silence, knowing that they will never come and that I am condemned to be and will forever be venerated as one of the silent masses that are forever, even amongst the most elite of us, exploited, forgotten, punished, the bearers of unimaginable loss.

Narcissism? Accuse me of what you want.

Your accusation of me is your accusation of yourself.

Goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

And all those of you that I’ve left behind, or that have left me behind (it’s never quite possible to tell, and the battle over the ontological status is the very same political battle at issue here), I hope you get everything in life that you want.

Every last goddamn thing.

—

To have a self is to be unemployed.

To be unemployed is to have no self.

To have a self is to be a pauper.

To be a pauper is to have no self.

To fail to embrace capitalist ideology is to fail to exist.

To fail to exist is to fail to embrace capitalist ideology.

Systemic systemic systemic systemic joy, Oh!

—

May modernity eat its children hungrily, one by one.

May postmodernity regurgitate them once again, partially digested and holy.

everything will catch up with me and I will fall like Icarus from the sky, never to rise again.

those who are willing to pursue financial or career security while putting emotional security at risk are seen as wise, well-adjusted, and mature. Those who are willing to pursue emotional security while putting financial or career security at risk are seen as immature, overdependent, and incompetent.

This is pure capitalist ideology. Property is real and essential; personhood is ephemeral and exchangeable. You can identify a would-be capitalist by the fact that they are willing to live an emotionally empty, meaningless husk of a life in order to continue to work crap-average jobs that advance a crap-average career.