Generally, blissfully, I avoid Europe, New York, the art world, etc., but I am obsessed with Avocado Ibuprofen, the Instagram of a Finnish artist named Jaakko Pallasvuo who makes novella-like comics about creative anxieties and arts institutions. He is truly the social critic of our time. The comics, by sifting through layers of cynical silt and build-up, locate the soul of the esoteric artist’s psyche, and especially how it experiences (sorry to not be more creative here, but) late-capitalist existentialism. He translates the uneasiness that permeates any niche group trying to do creative work in this era of diminishing returns, when selling out no longer offers you many favors, and digital self-expression feels dead-ended, or, even worse—circular.
This one about a failed writer (“early-mid-career”—devastating burn), making a life out of hanging around, the endlessness of having drinks, the impatient toe-tap of looking for some talented miracle to recognize and nurture, therefore giving you, the witness, a justification for your existence, made me suspicious. Back in December, at an event, I read part of my essay about the same idea, of the anguished cultural seeker desperate to witness their next great purpose. It was grounded in my subjects of choice—music, going outside, and romance—and I was the failed writer, dying for something to happen. Essentially: “waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets…” (I presume many of you would like to believe, particularly in outsider or subversive circles, that you’re exempt from the basicness of a Springsteen lyric describing your whole lives, but trust me—none of us are safe.)
The character in this comic, and my essay, was me at the end of last year, and for years before that, too. Something happened (I guess that’s ironic) where I’m not that person anymore, with that kind of angsty critical/creative clawing that could be dismissed, cynically, as parasitic. Instead I’ve been spinning my wheels elsewhere, driving myself towards the American dream of changing my mind, even if it feels wasteful for some reason I can’t yet describe. I’m not saying changing your mind is inherently liberating or correct. It’s just what I’ve been up to.
The witnessing and the restlessness, though, that doesn’t go away. I think those parts are permanent. Not all people are out there types, and I feel like I have to explain myself, so I say, “not to self-mythologize, but apparently my first words were go places; my second were, we home.” It’s that the more I see of things, the less anxious I become; I get to rest. In looking at more of the country, for example, I certainly don’t become optimistic about it, but somehow, I feel at ease. Increased awareness is the only thing that relaxes me. Maybe there’s some subconscious angst around the idea of creative discovery becoming fully algorithmic, and the reassuringly static possibilities of discovery in the physical world grounds some of that.
“Sometimes, you have to go look for your life.”
But probably not. I’ve always been this way, and I don’t think this is a reactive state. I keep wondering when the jig will be up, sussing out if it’s just a youth thing. Well, it turns out that I’m not in my youth anymore, and while it’s possible this frantic culture-vulture version of me has died, other parts have just become more concentrated. I sent this…whatever this is…to my two best friends, like, “me on the inside,” and they didn’t even laugh, they just both said, “yep.”
Usually, my restlessness is a routine alone-time thing. So for once in the spring, it felt novel that I was instead restless to meet someone halfway this time. It made me feel like being this way has a point, maybe.
As we sat on a porch between LA and Arizona, living out our first morning, I described to him this unfortunate recurring theme in my life: somehow, I attract people who really test me, almost like there’s some scent on me that makes people try to take advantage. From family to strangers, it's been a weird trend, because I’m pretty un-manipulable. It’s hard to pull one on me, but maybe people like a challenge or something. This never seems to happen when I'm vulnerable, as you’d predict, but instead once I’ve landed on some relaxed and restful ledge. What’s that about? I theorized aloud that my baby face/strong spine combination is like pheromones that attract the takers of the world. Then I noticed he wasn’t listening, and I decided not to repeat myself. I used to need to be heard all of the time, but now trying kinda wears me out.
Lucinda Williams was playing in his town soon and I told him he should listen to albums two through five to get to know me. The title “Happy Woman Blues” is tattoo-worthy, and I feel like Maria was always the album’s cameo on the necklace, the picture in the locket.
Some folks will try to take your heart away
And just when you think you've really got it made
You wake up and find madness in the morning
But damn the pain and damn those restless days
Damn the pain and damn those restless days
In regards to restlessness, escape has never been the point. It has just always seemed obvious to me that I have to go places first; that we home came second for a reason.
You know, sometimes it is smart to be suspicious, but if you’re smart, there’s no need to be suspicious all of the time. I like to test my intuition situationally. I’m not always right in the end, but there’s a difference between recklessness and restlessness, between thrill-seeking and the regular kind. I like how both of these songs talk about angels, but none of us are talking about blind faith.
The lessons I was taught before I was old enough to start living, or at least the ones I remember, were all about boundaries and self-reliance, administered in an empowerment tone. I think, in this regard, a lot of well-meaning American liberalism is about threat- and harm-insulation, at any cost. In affluent contexts in which day-to-day danger is likely an abstraction, a thing happening to somebody else, this curdles into an unwittingly conservative aversion to risk that manifests in personal relationships. It breeds an antagonistic sense of caution; because when you care, there’s always risk, and to exempt yourself from the cost of it, you just outsource the dirty work of it all. You become a government of a person, protecting your border.
In a moment of upset it struck me that a lot of people (mostly men, sure, but all kinds) will go their whole lives without being caretakers. When that isn't a baked-in responsibility of your destiny—if you are exempt from the expectations of, say, aging parents, broke or broken family, babies, or any other needy type, including yourself—I think those muscles that keep your shoulders back and your head on straight can atrophy. Your neck loses slack and automatically fixes your gaze at the navel. So much navel-gazing and you lose sight of the stakes in front of you.
What are the stakes? A lot of us want to let others transform us, but reject anyone who isn’t fully formed. A lot of us fear something will be taken away, if we choose to risk giving ourselves up in an attempt at knowing another, especially if it doesn’t lead to the desired result. A lot of us look at potential partners like employees in terms of what they’ll offer to the equation—even, or perhaps especially, if you consider yourself evolved in a certain political mindframe. And, a lot of us who consider ourselves evolved in a certain political mindframe do really want a way to be ethical consumers. So a lot of us operate like ethical consumers in our relationships. At the same time, a lot of us believe that death is inherently unethical. I think all of this is related somehow.
There’s always meaning at play in the agricultural world, because it is a real world, in which most anxious liberal theories get tested in the high-stakes realms of ecology, economics, and community survival. Jordan Michaelman wrote a great piece on death in small-scale, regenerative meat production that everyone should read (I’m very live-and-let-live about this, but if you have qualms about meat consumption, I really recommend you hang in for, or skip ahead to, the section where he reflects on his vegan year in context). So, as he reported on the slaughter of these beloved, retired dairy cows, the rancher said:
“Once they go down, the whole thing shifts,” she says. “Most people never think a moment in their life about productive death. Death is either a disaster or a murder, but never something deliberate. Intentional death, meaningful death, we almost can’t fathom it, even though we consume it every day.”
After witnessing the harvest, he wrote,
There are no easy answers. It is an itchy, uncomfortable set of realities, one that can drive you mad if you let it, creeping up again and again with the ding of every dinner bell. We say ethical consumption is a fallacy, but we are drawn to attempt it, over and over. Such efforts may just require embracing discomfort from time to time in our too-short lives. We may not have a choice when we inevitably come across it on our social media feeds. It means we don’t get to look away.
In the piece, he describes the philosophy of “one bad minute”: shorthand for a way of raising cattle in which they’ve lived the best life possible (as opposed to suffering on factory farms), and it’s only in their death when they experience the first and only one bad minute of their lives (that is, if they are harvested on-site—one bad day acknowledges the more common practice off-site slaughter). Even though I have some familiarity with this world, that concept was new to me. I don’t think everyone needs to go watch a cow die to care about the meat. But death is the cost of life, and to avoid witnessing these stakes in any capacity outsources the care, cuts you away from purpose, on some level.
You have to encounter novel situations in order to discover nuance, I think. Not from doing the same things over and over again, or from letting the same kinds of people treat you the same kinds of ways. If you need to glimpse your whole life, want it to flash before your eyes so that it suddenly all makes sense to you, don’t you think that something, perhaps part of you, has to die?
During a breakup a while ago, I told someone that I didn’t believe in his idea of sacrifice, that he was wrong for giving up so much of himself for someone else’s comfort. Looking back, what I meant was, he hadn’t sacrificed for this relationship’s greater good; he gave himself away as a scapegoat for not owning up to his needs. He offloaded that job, and resulting resentment, to this other person, who could never complete the task. Almost a year later, my best friend and I were talking about how sacrifice is dismissed as a dirty word in modern relationships, maybe because it's Christianity- and patriarchy-coded, but you do, indeed, have to surrender, at some points, for a vision that's more than the sum of its parts. What we meant was that sacrifice is a confrontation with the true cost of your desires. We were talking about the cost of living.
This spring, my dog had to get emergency spinal cord surgery, because he has this disease where his vertebral discs become brittle and prone to herniation, which compress the spine and cause paralysis. Luckily, his lameness was pretty much reversible, hopefully fully, but the operation was expensive, and his recovery was so intense it changed my life for a while. After the initial shock subsided, I felt the gravity of purpose keep me tethered to him. The debt was a burden but somehow felt like a reward. I was surprised at myself, for not becoming depressed and resentful. I just felt…snugly compressed a bit, and I felt good and not anxious about staying home, for once in my life. The tasks of it all did not feel good. They were actually pretty painful. Still, for some reason beyond just “this will be worth it in the end,” it felt worth it, right then, too.
Before this, there was this freak, violent event earlier in my year. Much of it remains a mystery to me, but all I know for sure was that in its wake I witnessed an attempt by people to abandon their caretaking on my doorstep, unwilling to acknowledge the high stakes, dismissing a needy reality, secretly or subconsciously expecting I was the one to fix it. You think it sounds overly dramatic, until you’ve experienced micro versions of this, over and over again, build up into some pointless tragedy that could’ve been prevented if people owned up to their needs and were honest with you and themselves. It oddly reminded me of that guy from before, if only because the pattern was the same. The whole thing brought new wrinkles to my baby face. It’s difficult to realize that you do have what people need, sometimes. It’s even more difficult to protect yourself, and others, without acting like a bureaucrat. But the way in which they’re trying to get it from you, through extraction, not sacrifice—none of you would come out intact.
More recently, I chatted with a couple of different friends who underwent top surgeries. They both mentioned the profundity of de-accelerating to take care and heal something. In their case, themselves. In that framework, it unhooked the often bloody work of caretaking from a feminine-coded form of sacrifice, as a burden, an oppression of freedom, a curse of duty. Rather, it was an assumption of responsibility that brought you closer to who you actually are. One that looks nothing like martyrdom, but is instead a real, clear, honest look at your life.
Lately I’m exhausted by stammering people, fast talkers who make it impossible to get a word in. They’ve always been a struggle for me, as a recovering mumbler, but suddenly I don’t want to keep up. Despite this, I did used to relate to their urgency. Up until pretty recently, my neuroses and compulsions felt like drive, too.
Now, when I’m with my mom, I see that kind of reactivity wind up and manifest in her, and I feel this tense inheritance in my bones. This is the scaffolding of what used to hold me up, what naturally composed me; it now feels calcified and arthritic. I can no longer move through my life in this way without dull pain.
Letting people be has been a big change for a fixer like myself. But I can’t avoid noticing a bunch of men (and, yes, some women) around me architecting their future midlife crises. I think these are people who are finally accepting the encouragement to self-examine, to finally take their feelings seriously, but they don’t have the tools to manage the resulting existentialism. Taking all their feelings as facts, rather than contexts. A soft story foundation shaken to collapse by the discomfort of acquainting themselves with their inconvenient desires, bringing down with them the people that have made a home in their lives. Their escape, away from the risks and compromises of the relationships in front of them and into a blank fantasy of self-completion, looks like a coward’s freedom to me. It’s a restlessness of retreat and regret. It’s hitting the road to get away from yourself. It turns out that an increased awareness of life doesn’t calm all kinds of people. It turns out that you’ve got to have a hunch about where you’re headed, before you start to just go places.
In the midst of a crisis one night, he told me, “it’s easy to be a good man, when you’ve never been tested.” He was well aware that a lot of him was a test for me, because of how strongly I identified with my ethics. I arrived with shrink-wrapped principles that antagonized the inherited conditions of his very different life. Some of mine proved flimsy out of the box and so I had a decision of which to try to reassemble from weak parts, or just throw them away, more cheap plastic to the landfill.
We both grew up casually Catholic and writing stories. He once told me about a short piece of historical fiction he wrote as a teenager, based on the 13th century Children’s Crusade. In his story, swaths of young, poor Catholic boys left home for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where they’d be promised eternal life for their sacrifice. Instead, they were trafficked on their way, cast out of the Church as damnation of their resulting impurity.
Earlier that week, he told me that he had gotten injured again, on the same side of last winter’s broken ribs. The trauma was repetitious. For the rest of the afternoon, in my mind, like stained glass panels in a chapel, light poured through images of the faces of all the widows I know in my life, thinking about the identities violence can impose on a person. Considering, in a new way, who does not get to negotiate the cost of living.
Published in her book Words Are My Matter, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a 2010 essay “What Women Know,”
I’m taking this line out of its context, because I think at the core of the cultishness of femininity lies a problem convenient for manipulation.
All neoliberalism wants is for you to depend on only yourself, because then all of your needs go to market. I feel like people lately are so skeptical of relational growth, instead pushing towards atomized attempts at healing. Men wanting to become sensitive and accidentally glamorizing a half-baked Hermeticism, girls being misguided away from challenge by oversimplified therapy vernacular, much of it resulting in a sort of privatization of self-help. I think many people can now diagnose the common misappropriation of “emotional labor” as a capitalist equation of ROI, but still struggle to dismantle this thinking in their personal lives.
This will be obvious, but much like galleryworld, I’m allergic to techworld. When I landed at SFO the other day, returning from Nashville after a layover in Phoenix, I was bombarded with all the corporate vernacular of B2B-as-lifestyle that San Francisco feels like. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I’m from Seattle and lived in San Francisco for three years, so I feel repulsed by it all though I know there's a lot of truth about the world lodged in that place. It just wears me out to look for it. I texted my best friend that the way likeminded people from the towns in Tennessee we’d just driven through have zero tolerance for, like, the Trumpy hicks and hillbillies and whatever other negative stereotypes there are out there—I feel that way about coastal urban tech culture. Not that they have anything in common, just that it’s what I grew up in opposition to, so I find it more intolerable than is fair, or even wise.
Normally, I remain purposefully ignorant of the fleeting -isms and metaphysical trends of the tech class. Like Anna Weiner’s incredible start-up memoir, Uncanny Valley, though, the writing in Tara Isabella Burton’s piece in The New Atlantis about “postrationalism” in tech circles was compelling enough that it spoke to something bigger than tech. Or, I should say, as big as tech. Even as easy as it is to dunk on people who are just now thinking they’ve hacked finding meaning in life (especially coming from people who have previously diagnosed any kind of searching/seeking impulse as a kind of spiritual “pica”), or to mis-equate them to the trad-Cath turn of some high-chatter but ultimately niche-impact cultural circles, none of us, definitely not artists and especially not farmers, are exempt from living under the whims of technologists.
There’s something between this article and my personal feelings, about—and I’m not an expert with -isms, so bear with me—how technocratic neoliberalism has rationalized us against the messiness of patience. This urge to optimize relationships, in the pursuit of ultimate personal autonomy, has sometimes wrought new-puritan rules coded as boundaries, and shut down some channels for honing intuition. It’s easy to imagine these types of people simply taking these realizations and making, like, another Burning Man about it. But maybe there’s something positive around the people who build our tools for connection realizing there is purpose beyond maximized utility.
The techworld is notorious for, in some corners, harboring social Darwinism. Even outside of it, I think some byproducts of what people mean by “empowerment” end up sounding bootstrappy, as if one can be, say, a dem-socialist/leftist in the sheets, neoliberal in the sheets (don’t even talk to me unless you’ve invested in therapy to fix yourself, type of stuff, even when more than a few of the most enabled people you know have been going for years). I don’t know. There are a lot of wrong ways to navigate interdependence, but I’m weary about not just anyone who tells you there’s a right one, but from who they learned that lesson.
On New Years Eve when I was stuck at home with COVID and a canceled party, resisting taking it as foreshadowing that did end up coming true, I spent the evening texting with someone traveling alone and also in need of company. Trading our resolutions, I told him mine was to stop explaining what love is to men, in the tone of a catty, dismissive, “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” mentality; he said that his resolution was to actually start doing just that. As the words came out of my fingertips, I already felt like I was outgrowing this misunderstanding of what a boundary is, and it immediately felt cringe and crumbly with age. I’ve never actually believed that withholding gets you anywhere, unless you’re in a negotiation. That’s how a lot of people see it, though. I think I’d just been given advice from insecure people for a long time. I don’t think you ever win by taking a stance, or that you can even win at all. All you can really do is lay down next to somebody.
The very famous Maya Angelou quote is, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” But what about when you aren’t around to see, so all they can do is tell you about themselves? What about when you speak a different language? Translation can be a tool of understanding, and it can be a broom of delusion. It felt like to suspend my suspicions, I had to clear out an ideology, and be open-hearted enough to be wrong.
There’s maladapted self-esteem in cruel men, and sometimes in the women who hate them back, too. It’s what happens when one makes an alliance with dominance. The girl-power adage of you deserve to be treated so much better! hits different when coming from the mouths of the women who are also invested in keeping you in a certain place. Maybe it’s not all that nefarious or calculated; they’re just invested in seeing you in only one kind of way, and they’re hesitant to withdraw, lest they lose something. I try to stay graceful because I believe that unfair inheritances of beliefs and patterns create little tragedies of avoidance in all people's lives. But still, no one comes with an auto-redeem setting.
I left for my initial trip to Arizona off the heels of a family reunion on my dad’s side. We were already two hours east of LA and I figured I’d keep going afterwards, to see some new stuff. My dad’s sisters are calm, steady caretaker types from the heart of Kansas, who are always ready to commit to the imminent responsibilities of life, in a way that used to feel old-fashioned and alien to me, but now seems refreshing and desirable. In them, I only ever see duty, never crisis…but I might just not be around them enough. In contrast, my dad is a shame, though over the years, he’s found some better ways to manage this. It might be convenient to talk about unfair inheritances here, but they all shared the same parents.
As the only daughter of an old man, I’ve long dreaded my future responsibilities, particularly towards someone who took calculated measures to escape his own responsibilities to me. I’ll never forget his three sisters carrying his mom down two flights of stairs while he sat and read the business section. It’s just easier to remember the image, than it is to store all the highly technical details of his schemes and consequent failures. Though it’s been true for so many years, it became clear to me on this trip that I was the only one in the room who knew, who even had a sense, about what those were. Perhaps keeping it that way has been my first task of palliative care. I think about “fixing it” but it feels moot. At this stage, I’m more invested in our quality of life.
Maybe I wasn’t born with a restlessness myth; maybe I just like to drive. I’ve changed my mind, that there are certain kinds of people. I just think there are choices and circumstances. Past this novelty of a new idea, I know categorically that I’m wrong, because pathologies are everywhere. But it helped me to think differently this time, out of a desperate attempt to see a man more clearly than suspicion would allow. To witness something different, so I could be at ease.
There wasn’t much this new person could honestly tell me about his past without conjuring memories of suffering, and often cruelty. When I told him one of mine, he told me he wanted to fix it through brute force. But how could he go back and do that? Thinking he was changing the subject by getting off the past, he started to philosophize that modern men’s suffering comes from rejecting the notion, the reality, that taking care of something is what gives a man his purpose. That men would be less anxious, less violent, less pointless if they just knew that about themselves. He knew fatherhood gave him that and he was clamoring and desperate to create it again. He had a feral, smothering obsession about protection.
He knew exactly where he needed to go, and I could see it out there, too. I glimpsed the route he would take and it was harrowing. He got so lost trying to find it, and I’m not as conditioned as him. That route would’ve left me out to die.
At work, he hauled himself up chapparaled mountainsides, sometimes falling down them, just to care for all of those expensive, fortunate cows. Cashing out his life for the sake of their one bad day. He would text me, constantly and anxiously, about the fear hanging over his head that he was always just one more dumb injury away from losing his job.
love,