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- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XXIII (Requiem for a Bar)
By Doctor Gonzo
13 November 2009
Minneapolis — A new restaurant has recently opened on the corner of Hennepin and 2nd Street NE in Minneapolis. According to the owners, quoted in numerous reviews in the local media, it is an Asian place with an "East meets Northeast" vibe. It is located in a trendy neighborhood in an historical building that was vacant for several months in 2009, and undoubtedly the Northeast Minneapolis Business Association is happy to see something occupy a very visible corner location on one of the main thoroughfares in tangled web of streets that come together near Central, Hennepin, and University. A few of the reviews mentioned that Ginger Hop opened up "in the old Times Bar" location, but little more was said about the previous tenant, or its 10 years at that location. True, reviews of new restaurants rarely, if ever, dwell upon the carcasses of all those establishments that had tried, and failed, to make it before, but the closing of this bar was a bit more personal. Since I have found no other epitaph to the Times and Jitters, the establishment that had to die in the creative destruction of capitalism for Ginger Hop to now exist, it falls upon myself to inscribe it, along with how it fit into my life for a brief moment.
Let down and hanging around...
Jitters (and the Times Bar upstairs) was a good bar, and it's hard to find a good bar. It's much harder to even define what a good bar is when your pool of bar experiences is quite shallow relative to your average twenty-something, and that describes me pretty well. I drank very little when I was in college: nothing before I was 21, and only rarely thereafter. Much of the alcohol I did drink was imbibed at home, not at a bar: considering that your typical broke college student has little disposable income to spend on luxuries like ambiance and wait staff, most students, myself included, opt for cheap booze from plastic bottles at home, where there is never a cover. As a result, the sum total of my bar experience in college consists of a restaurant on the Greek island of Santorini and a few trips to Stub & Herb's, and not much else.
This left me at quite a disadvantage when I did splurge in college, or when had finally graduated and found a real job, as I was completely befuddled at the panoply of drinks available at most brass rail establishments. When I was at a bar, I usually ended up ordering whatever my companions had ordered before me, since I didn't know any other options. This led to such disasters as ordering a Jack Daniels and Coke, Sex On The Beach, and, god forbid, things involving "Pucker". My scholarly research gave me a repertoire containing exactly two other drinks, although a Fuzzy Navel or a Screwdriver weren't terribly impressive choices either. Nor would I order such old-school drinks as a Manhattan or a Gin and Tonic. Beer was out of the question. The only beer I tasted growing up was cans of Budweiser, and thus I sadly and naively thought all beer would be that bad.
Why was I so averse to alcohol? The explanation for why I didn't want a drink could fill a volume in an of itself, but the short version was that I had only seen firsthand the negative effects of alcohol, not the positive. Moreover, getting the dangers of drugs and alcohol drummed into me by Catholic schools certainly did not help. Since my high school group of friends was extremely tame, I wasn't around alcohol in social situations. When I got to college, I was pretty introverted for my first couple years, and college being what it is, once again the negative effects of alcohol predominated my experiences. All in all, I couldn't see much to be gained by getting involved in the college alcohol experience. To top it all off, the cheap vodka and beer I did drink was unsurprisingly awful.
Since I didn't drink, I didn't spend my time thinking about it or what I was missing. After I graduated from college and found a job, I lived in St. Paul in a very residential neighborhood. There weren't any good bars to go to even if I wanted to do so, and thus the veil of my ignorance had no reason to be pierced. The status quo remained firmly entrenched, until around 2002, when my brother switched jobs from the excitement that is Olive Garden to a new bar. This bar wasn't in my neighborhood; it was in Northeast Minneapolis, just across the river from downtown, a location I was pretty unfamiliar with aside from knowing that it was where my grandfather's church was located. He asked to stop by and check it out while he was working, and sometime during a random week (a Tuesday or Wednesday, I think) I did.
Exiting the freeway at 4th street and driving a few blocks northwest, I parked on the street. Jitters was down some stairs in a place formerly occupied by a coffee shop (hence the name). It certainly looked like a basement coffee house: a darker atmosphere, split by a wall into two main rooms, with the bar in one and a stage-like area with tables in front in the other. Seating was booths, both straight and curved, with several tables scattered away from the walls where they would fit. There were two couches sitting near the bar, looking like a living room invitation to sit down and chill out. The bar itself was a curved, graceful L, with room for maybe seven or eight people around most of its length; ten if everybody got nice and cozy. Little, if any natural light, unfinished ceiling, exposed beams and plumbing. Martini signs on the wall (it being a martini bar), rows of underlit liquor bottles at the ready, and few people early on a midweek night. I wasn't immediately sold on it, as the product wasn't something I was interested in. But it was nice enough, and it was one of the first, if not the first, place I had a Guinness, and as I was to learn in the future, this was a "Good Thing".
Over the next couple of years, I'd drop by very occasionally, usually during the week. It definitely wasn't a hopping place at 7:00 on a mid-week night, and during those visits I did little more than have a single beer and chat with my brother for a bit; he wasn't terribly busy that early in the night either. On the weekends, though, it was naturally busier, although not to the point of sheer craziness. Those nights typically had just the right-sized crowd, in fact: not so crowded that it was wall-to-wall humanity, but enough people to give it a lively atmosphere. Not only was the size good, so where the components: it was a fairly low-key, young professional crowd for the most part, which I happened to be. Not a bunch of drinking-to-get-wasted college students, or a bunch of people shopping the meat market for a hookup, just a mix of people who were in search of a fun place to chill with a few friends and enjoy the entertainment, along with some older regulars and some newcomers willing to give the place a try. The musical entertainment during the weekend was also quite good: Erin Schwab or the John Starkey band were the two that were playing when I was usually there, although there were a lot more that I can't remember.
Late in 2003, I moved from St. Paul to Minneapolis, and as a result of the convenience of living in Uptown, started going there a bit more. Driving up 35W, over the bridge that had less than five years of life remaining, and exiting to drive up 4th Street NE became more common. The bar itself was also in its ascendancy: in 2003 it was voted as the best place to meet straight single women by the alt-weekly City Pages. Fortunately, that didn't quite result in hordes of hormonally-driven, lecherous, single men descending upon the bar, at least as far as I could tell. I still wasn't visiting as regularly as a weekly basis, but enough to know most of the staff. It was a pretty good place to be when I felt the need to go out. And there, I could finally start undoing all of the bad knowledge I had acquired in the past, and learn that beer could taste good and be drunk for its own sake. Not only did I drink Guinness, but also found my other favorite Blue Moon. I also starting sampling the martinis there, and while an espresso martini would never lead to anything good, a dirty vodka martini was superb, especially when it wasn't make out of Phillips vodka. Slowly, I began to understand that alcohol wasn't the single-faced evil that I had irrationally believed for so long.
Then, in 2005, my life changed significantly. My then-wife left me, which expectedly threw my life into a good bit of disarray. I suddenly found myself entirely alone for the first time in years. At the same time, and partially as a result, I felt a level of sociability that had been missing in my life before. Thus, with much free time, and no attachments, I went out and about much more. Minneapolis has no shortage of bars, and I went to a few on a regular basis that were decent, like the Independent in Uptown (conveniently located just blocks from where I lived), or Brit's Pub downtown, but Jitters was one that I went to most frequently because it was the best. I didn't go there to drink away my sorrows, or to find somebody new, but just to be around interesting people. As pithy as it sounds, Jitters became my "Cheers" in a way: the regular watering hole I became a small part of, when a feeling of belonging mattered just a bit more because of the circumstances.
I'd go there a few times a month usually, sometimes more. I couldn't get enough covers of "Use Me", or Blue Moon and Guinness, and that suited me just fine. I saw a lot of people, some once, some many times. I got to know the people who worked there and tended bar, Jim, Pat, Smalls, Savanah, the rest. I watched the dancers who were Saturday night regulars and heard the latest gossip. I chatted with random people. I got off the sidelines of just reporting and made my own gonzo stories, some funny, some embarrassing, some unremarkable. Through it all, around it all, stood the bar, the stage upon which this all played out, Martini sign on the wall, case full of cigarettes next to the register. Arriving at 8 or 9, watching them set up the stage, grabbing a seat at the bar because it wasn't too busy yet. Sometimes, I'd close it out, and watch the servers count their tips and grab a smoke, once the bar was officially closed and the smoking ban was no longer in practical effect. Or I'd go to Nye's, which could stay open an hour later and was a favorite of the staff after they got off of work. Usually, though, I'd go home, having had a good time, and not needing any more than that.
You know, you know where you are with...
I've noticed that life is a sometimes-staccato succession of periods when disparate elements come together, hold a shapeless form for a bit like a birds tenuously flocking together, pulled by the most gossamer threads of gravity, and then dissipate. For a while, everything comes together and it just feels right, until time creeps forward and imperceptible changes throw the delicate balance off. There's a very important (to me, anyway) passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, that captures this sentiment perfectly, riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. For me, during that time in my life, Jitters and the Times were at the center of it all. That it wouldn't last was inevitable, but when it did it just felt right.
I can still see the people smoking on the sidewalk outside, the steps downstairs, the walls, the bar, the seats, the candles at the tables. I can hear the music, the clanging of the bottles, the crackle of the ice being refilled. Hundreds of people, thousands of drinks, millions of bits of color, smell, taste, and sound coming together to make a whole much greater, to me at least, than the sum of its parts. A wave that enveloped me, filled me, and quite literally changed me as a person, when I needed changing. And then...
Things started to look different even before I briefly left Minnesota in 2007, with talk of revamping the Jitters space to be something completely different and unfamiliar. Although that plan didn't come to pass, I had a premonition that things were changing in a way that would destroy the synergy that existed, as it inevitably would. When I came back home, I moved to St. Paul, much farther away physically from Jitters and where I lived before, and probably more importantly, outside of the psychic orbit it had been in before that time. As my life changed and I started doing new things, meeting new people, and finding somebody new, I didn't go back there very often. When it suddenly closed earlier this year, I hadn't been there in several months at least.
Despite the lack of recent visits, however, the imprint it made upon me was not insignificant, and it was sad to see it die with a whimper in more ways than one. Obviously, for those who had been employed at the Times and Jitters, the loss of a means of living was huge. The community at large lost an unassuming, decent place to get a drink and relax. And for a few people, who were looking for a bit of stability and magic in much the way I once did, the loss of something they would never experience is a poetic kind of tragedy.
The reviews I have seen of Ginger Hop have been decidedly mixed, but those reviews were only for the food. On a personal level, it will never be able to measure up to what preceded it.
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- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XXII
By Doctor Gonzo
22 November 2006
Minneapolis — Push. Push. Push.That message greets me every morning, after I walk up the granite stairs of the S.O.B. and pull on the brass handle, covered in an ancient patina, of the front door. Push, the revolving door says, so I push and I go through and as I do so, I give it an extra shove as if I were on a game show and pushing for a chance to make it to the Showcase Showdown. The same thing every morning, because that's what my narrative tells me to do. It sets down some broad rules about supporting myself and being professional and not tearing through the halls screaming. It doesn't have all the answers, though, such as whether I am pushing against that door, and whether it is pushing back on me.
That age-old Zen question, of which is the subject and which is the object, is perhaps it is a bit trite. However, it remains a very valid question. Life has been pushing back on me of late, or perhaps I should say that it has been pushing back on me more; life always pushes back whether you realize it or not, a consequence of Newton's laws applied to existence rather than physical objects. Sometimes, it pushes back on you in odd ways, and sometimes it gives way easily and almost invites you in, pulling instead of pushing. When you are pushing against too many objects that give fierce resistance, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate exactly why you are pushing where you are pushing, and whether it would be a good idea to start pushing somewhere else. Especially when you have noticed in the past that pushing elsewhere not only wasn't dangerous, it was a lot easier.
With the lights out, it's less dangerous...
Everybody has a narrative. It's not your goals or ambitions, it's not a to-do list, it's not what you want to accomplish. It's how you frame your experiences, like the spectacles through which you view your life and categorize it. It's your "meta", the "thing about a thing", the container that holds everything else in it. We all have to create a narrative, because there is an almost infinite amount of sensory data out there, and our brains would quickly be overwhelmed unless we neatly filed things away in pre-labeled cubbyholes. What people say, what they do, the color of the lawn, the smell of perfume, the sounds of Pink Floyd...they are just part of the information we constantly receive. We grab onto maybe 1% of that information; the rest never gets past our filters. Some filters we have no control over, but some we create for ourselves in order to help make sense of new situations and new experiences.
Since these filters literally determine what you perceive and what you ignore, so it is impossible to underestimate how important they are in determining how you live your life. Everything you learn from an early age are transmuted into bricks that build up these edifices: learning to differentiate right from wrong, proper standards of conduct, how your parents and your family treat each other, how people act at the store, how people act in church, how you act towards your friends. Most of the time this isn't done consciously, since much of your narrative is created before you are aware of even the concept of its existence. You just accept what you are nudged towards, unconsciously creating a structure that will be used to interpret future experiences. Eventually, you might realize that you do have this set of preconceived notions that colors everything you see and do, but by then it is pretty hard to change it. A lot of the time, you don't even see that you have it at all and you will harshly criticize anybody for insinuating that there is more than one way to view things; these people are called "religious believers."
Narratives are powerful things. Wars are started because one group of people, sharing one narrative, decide that they hate another group of people sharing another narrative, because their narrative says so. A narrative determines whether you see a setback as a temporary dip in an otherwise upward trajectory or more evidence that your life is horrible and is only going to get worse. It plays a big part in determining your happiness and your success, simply because it goes a long way in defining what those entities are. Similarly, it heavily influences how well you are going to work with other people and their narratives. Only hermits have the luxury of not needing to worry about how others classify and interact with themselves. Those of us who live in civilization generally find it easier to deal with people who have narratives that aren't drastically different from our own. When there are huge differences, what you get is the answer to that old Knowledge Bowl question that starts like this: "A student from America lives in Japan for a year..." Culture shock!
Powerful things. Consciousness-shaping things. George Orwell posited that if you can change the meta, change people's narratives through the use of language, eventually it will be impossible to have thoughts that go against the ruling ideology. Like just about all meta, without it nothing else exists. Changing it a little can lead to drastic changes down the line. Which begs the question:
What happens when you discover that the narrative you have created is wrong?
It's fun to lose and to pretend...
Some people out there may already see a "gotcha" that prevents the question from being answered, and I see it too: whether a meta can be wrong depends a great deal on how you define "wrong". It's hard to define a narrative as being inherently wrong, but it is obvious to see that some narratives do a better job of describing reality and providing the right framework for dealing with reality. A narrative in which everybody is out to steal your Lucky Charms and the only way you can defend yourself is to shoot them preemptively is not a terribly good narrative to have around other people. Nor is a narrative where you will be "greeted as liberators" and have flowers tossed at your feet. Sometimes, the cubbyholes that we jam our experiences into don't fit right, or warp things, or break them entirely. Depending on where things fall, it may not make a huge impact in how you live you life; on the other hand, it may matter a great deal that you are smashing and mutilating things as you perceive them. Or the cubbyholes may not exist at all, so we drop valuable pieces of information on the floor and lose them forever.
I was pushing and pushing, and things wouldn't fit or I would lose them entirely. At first, I thought that perhaps the problem was with how I was acting within the confines of my narrative. If I tweaked a few things, followed the right lists, then everything would get back to where it was before. It was only after a fairly long period of incremental failure that I began to question my underlying assumptions, to understand that maybe the problem wasn't in the details, but with how I was seeing things. No matter what tool you use, no matter how delicately you hold it, no matter what angle you choose, you are not going to be able to pound a round peg into a square hole. Realizing that the problem begins with the assumption that a round peg belongs in a square hole is the beginning of the solution.
It's hard to know when I began questioning my narrative, because it's a bit like knowing when you first acknowledged the universe: it's everywhere around you. It's the water that the fish are oblivious to because it's their whole being. Sure, from time to time I would notice that some things that should have gone one way because my narrative said so went another way, but I didn't spend a whole lot of time paying attention to them because, of course, my narrative told me not to. It's not easy to bootstrap a way outside of things to see it from a different point of view. But eventually at some point along the line, something must have happened to open a crack to what lay beyond, and it began to spread.
I had to quickly admit to myself that it was certainly possible that my narrative left me ill-equipped for living happily and successfully, as that had happened before (although, of course, I didn't fully grasp it at the time). One example that is simple and easy to understand is how for a great deal of time, my narrative focused exclusively on academics. For me, life simply equated to school, and school for me was insanely easy. It didn't require much effort to do the "right thing" in class, and with every accolade I received I was building up a conforming narrative that was encouraged by my parents and teachers. Unfortunately, there were a couple of fatal flaws with this narrative, despite the best intentions of everybody concerned: clearly, academics was not the sum total of life unless I was planning on never leaving academia and embarking on the 50-year PhD program, which is something that does not work well with the post-industrial capitalist American society we are living in. Second, by narrowly defining the important thing to be academics and noticing that it was easy, I thought that everything else would be easy too, and any obstacles would easily succumb to the same rote, logical, scientific-method steamroller that worked well in school. A mathematical algorithm would provide the same right answer constantly whenever it was used, so a similar algorithm, implemented without variation and without fail, would fix any other problems I might have elsewhere.
Yeah, right. This may have worked for a while, but eventually the realities of dealing with other people changed in such a way as to make this a less than useful narrative in achieving my goals. Of course, when this happened, I didn't question the narrative, I questioned everybody else. When I failed with my meta at the same time others were having more success using different narratives, I didn't see the shortcomings of mine. My system was right; again, theirs was the wrong one. Mine was "more true" or "more pure", a belief I held sometimes as fervently as any religious fanatic. Simply knocking down the structures that have been built up over years and decades and even generations isn't an attractive option. So I kept up with it, sometimes being happier, sometimes not, occasionally making changes at the periphery and eventually finding myself in uneasy compromises where my narrative was hit and miss. It was more of a matter of luck than anything intentional, and as a result was temporary.
That too passed, and as things stopped working, I became frustrated because tweaking things didn't work. The algorithms didn't work. In fact, it was increasingly obvious that I was just trying to do the wrong things altogether. I was baking a cake when what I really needed to do was paint a wall, and no matter how well I made that cake, the wall wasn't getting painted and everybody was getting mad. Eventually, after several efforts at baking a better cake, I began to realize that it was fruitless. The cake wasn't faulty. My assumption that a cake was necessary was. In fact, taking a look around my life made me realize that although I had a lot of pretty good cakes here and there, I had a lot of unpainted walls and unfinished poetry and unwritten programs. I could continue to bake cakes and hope that under some circumstances they might do the trick, or I could try to figure out what I really needed to do, which would require taking a pretty hard look at how I got to thinking about cakes in the first place. It would be a difficult task, and it would be an unpleasant one. But it's the one I chose because the alternative was no longer tenable.
I found it hard, it's hard to find...
At first, I was pretty angry. On the surface, I was angry at people for not wanting cakes. I was mad that people would not want what I was offering them. But of course I knew this was folly, and that people are not under any obligation to value what I happen to value just because I value it. Sure, my narrative said that certain things were more valuable than others and hence any "good" person would also value these same things (be they character traits like honesty or arbitrary moral rules of any sort), but when I removed the tautologies of my narrative, it all fell apart like a house of cards collapsing in upon itself. I couldn't be angry at people for not sharing my narrative, because being angry isn't going to change their minds or make them value my meta more. If I wanted to stop pushing against immovable objects and encounter a bit less resistance to my happiness and success, I would have to stop berating others for their inferior narratives and instead figure out what was working for them that could apply to my own reality.
When you look for new narratives, you have to be prepared to throw out your old beliefs and turn them about entirely, often times without understanding the mechanism behind it. A somewhat illustrative if irreverent example is the teetotaler who wants a more successful job being faced with the study that shows that men who drink after work earn 10 to 14 percent more than the abstainer. There isn't an obvious correlation here, which I think can make it even harder to change the narrative: it's like being brought up to jump up and down on one leg facing a certain direction, and then learning that people who turn 20 degrees to the north are more successful in their jobs. "What?" you say to yourself, and dismiss everything as ridiculousness.
Take honesty, for example. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that absolute honesty was the unswervingly best policy, and that anybody who did not measure up to this standard was inferior. I prided myself in being honest even when, especially when, it made no sense and other people would choose something else. That particular point of view, however, did not lead to the success that I was hoping for. In fact, in many situations not telling the truth turned out to be the better option for everybody involved. Ditto for "faking it" and pretending character traits that I did not happen to feel at the time. Rampant dishonesty and fakery continued to be counterproductive to long-term success, which I was expecting, but I was somewhat surprised to find some of these other things. It turns out that often the best cake is inferior to a crappily-painted wall when a painted wall is what people really want.
What I really discovered though, overarching all of the other discoveries, was that this wasn't easy, nor was it supposed to be. Despite the changes I had made on the margins over the years to make my life slightly easier, the inherent easiness that I had expected of everything had not disappeared since I created it long ago. In fact, many of the other portions of my narrative were based upon finding the easiest or simplest rule and implementing it: being always truthful instead of trying to determine what another person wanted to hear, or my somewhat-distantly discarded alcoholic prohibition. In those cases, it was far easier to stick to absolutes than to put the time into determining whether something was beneficial or hazardous in that particular situation. Time and again, I had realized that in order to squeeze things into the cubbyhole that said I could do anything easily when "anything" was a lot smaller pond than it used to be, I was taking the easy way out. When it comes to a geometric proof, simplicity may equal elegance, but not always when it comes to a job or a relationship. I insisted on hewing to easy, however, and that doesn't work.
Also, I had to admit that a lot of it was based on fear. Fear kept me from finding out what people really wanted, because there was always the chance that I would fail. Some early but consistent failures at things that weren't easy heavily influenced my narrative to the degree that I envisioned shapeless, though ominous, consequences should I fail again. I paid lip service to "fear itself being the only thing to fear", but I didn't grok it. That would require making changes to my narrative. It was only after I had failed so miserably and so spectacularly, and lived to tell the tale, that I realized that there was very little I actually had to be afraid of. In fact, that might have been the trigger for all of this, the Phoenix rising from its own ashes. It would be poetic if so much had not been destroyed in the process.
We're not just making promises, that we know we'll never keep...
Of course, I am only at the beginning of reevaluating my narrative and trying to figure out what works best to bring happiness to myself and others. But understanding that it is possible for a narrative to be wrong is an important first step, because unless you can see the walls around you and realize that their mere existence is not proof of their rightness, you can't change anything about them. It's not an easy process, but perhaps changing that part of my narrative is the most important thing I will have to do. I simply hope I have the ability and the vision to do it correctly.
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- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XXI
By Doctor Gonzo
21 August 2006
Savage City — The drive to Savage City took no more time than normal, all things considered. True, traffic has picked up to ridiculous levels in the past few years, to the point where even when traveling on a Saturday afternoon, there is stop-and-go traffic as everybody tries to get to their cabins up north, or maybe just to their homes in the ever-expanding exurbia that is filling in between the Twin Cities and my destination to the northwest. Although I cursed it, there wasn't much I could do to avoid it. It didn't last long, though, and I was soon speedily on my way.
When I arrived, I stopped by Val's for a bite to eat. My trips are becoming less and less frequent, so when I do make it up in the vicinity of that ancient, tiny hamburger shack, I almost always indulge. It's the only time I eat deep-fried, unhealthy fare, simply because it is so good. One of the few redeeming facets of Savage City, in fact, as the rest of town is filled in with the detritus of suburbia. I have often remarked to people that it is now impossible to tell whether you are driving down Division Street or any of the main drags of Maple Grove, Chanhassen, Woodbury, or any of the characterless outer-ring suburbs of the Twin Cities. Something is always lost as time goes by.
Eating at a park by the river, I was amazed at how absolutely deserted it was. Nobody on the playground, nobody on the swings, not a single soul in all the acres of grass and trees save myself. On a beautiful Saturday, such a park in Minneapolis would be filled to capacity with sunbathers, cruisers, transients, and just about anybody who was trying to be seen. But I had only the company of the bees and flies that were buzzing around. Just another reminder that the experiences I had grown up with were quite different from the experiences that I had come to see as normal in the past few years, ever since I left my hometown more-or-less on a permanent basis some ten years earlier.
Ten years was the theme of the day. I was a bit nervous as I left and approached my first destination, a nervousness that others would confide that they too shared. For I was not in Savage City on a business trip, nor was I even up there for political reasons as I had been not a week before. I was there to attend my 10-year high school reunion, seeing people that in some cases I had not seen in a decade. I didn't expect it to go badly, but the anxiety was there. Social anxiety was a fact of life when I was growing up and attending Cathedral High School. Sure, my general anxiety has greatly diminished in the intervening years. But as is usually the case, the old triggers brought it back, and I gulped it down as best I could as I approached the tent set up in Riverside Park.
Greetings. Hellos. Faces, some that had not changed much in ten years, some that were barely recognizable. Friendliness as the rule, not the exception. Genuine interest in the lives of others, both on my part and on the part of those that talked to me. I soon found that I had little to be anxious about, and I spoke with people easily. Some I had not seen in ages, some I had not seen in a month, but the talk flowed effortlessly regardless. There was familiarity there, even though spouses and significant others and children ran around (not forgetting, of course, the dogs that people brought).
I felt confident and not terribly self-conscious, feelings that may have been new for me around some of these people. I tried not to dwell too much on the sad thoughts, that I was not there with my love, the person I was planning on attending with, and turned away from the bittersweet-ness to happiness. If CHS wanted to do a bit of advertising on behalf of their academic bona fides, the class of 1996 would provide great material. Lots of success, lots of college graduates and advanced degrees sought and obtained. A number of people doing yeoman's work as teachers, perhaps taking to heart the mantra of academics that our own teachers had tried so hard to drill into us. I enjoyed hearing what people were up to, sometimes in spite of myself. At present, my own career is firmly entrenched in politics, one of those verboten subjects to talk about with strangers, but even that caused few problems.
Beer snobbery aside, the afternoon picnic portion was soon over. I checked into the mystery motel that would consist of my accommodations for the night, and went back downtown to grab a quick bite at an old haunt that was older than myself, and then to the evening portion of the festivities. Drinks at the Red Carpet, known by me mainly for the quality of its drunken fights at bar closing, as Red Carpet patrons would assault customers of the Press Bar for no good reason. Again, I didn't expect trouble, but at the same time I didn't know what to expect exactly. But as they say, In Vino Veritas, so it would definitely be interesting.
I was there because I was bored, and I was there because life doesn't happen to you when you are holed up in your apartment. But mainly, I was there because it was hot, and I stupidly insisted on cooking dinner in my apartment without air conditioning. So it was 90 degrees in my abode, and cool air seemed pretty attractive. It could have been any bar in Uptown, and it was, in fact, just about every bar. I sat there, not terribly interested in the schlampen around me, just cooling off for the most part. But that didn't stop people from coming around me, and I couldn't help but hear their conversations.
"You are the love of my life."
That one got a smile.
"I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
I had to stifle a laugh. It would do me no good, I reckoned, to burst out when two random drunk people were talking shit right next to me. Even if I did find it to be hilarious.
Yes, I used to be a romantic, and this kind of didn't necessarily used to amuse me so. But allow me to be a bit jaded; I have recently heard too much to allow me to grasp my idealism too firmly. Where once I would have thought this talk to be noble, now I just find it to be a bit doss. Is that the right way to view life? Maybe, maybe not. But for now, that's how it is.
No, it didn't go down exactly like that at the Red Carpet. The laughter was true, not at the expense of others (for the most part, anyway). I was not jaded, not bitter, not down. More people showed up at the bar than at the picnic, which wasn't unexpected, so that meant even more catching up and talking to people. Plied with drink, perhaps it was a bit more fulfilling than earlier. As the night wore on, another phrase entered my mind, this one too not exactly in English: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more things change, the more things really did stay the same.
To be truthful, a lot of things had changed. The pettiness and the cliques were thankfully gone, washed away by time and maturity. It was a lot easier to be open, also probably due to maturity and experience, the fact that one third of our lives had passed outside the confines of the school that we had spent two or four or six years at. I certainly am quite different from the person that walked away in a cap and gown one night at the end of May; I would like to think that I have changed for the better, and I think I have. As did everybody, or at least everybody that I feel safe enough to comment on. It was a bit refreshing.
But the familiarity was still there in many ways. Despite the passage of time, some memories are so deeply embedded in our psyches that mere passage of time could not erode them. Reversions to old roles and power differentials, fragments of old relationships that used to exist. Some, as the night wore on and the truth serum worked its magic, became readily apparent. You can never go home, and that's true, but from time to time you can get a glimpse of how things use to be if the stars are aligned correctly.
No matter how much time passes and how much things have changed, it is only human nature to hold onto a little bit of familiarity. Constant chaos is not conducive to success and prosperity. Holding onto something that feels comfortable, even if it isn't necessarily better, can be a hard habit to break. I saw it that night, and I didn't mind it. I saw it for what it was, and that made it easy for me to appreciate it.
"Everybody gets everything he wants." I think I've said that before. That line is at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, and to borrow another phrase from the film, when I heard that line it hit me like a diamond bullet between the eyes. Because it is true. Completely true. Everybody does get everything that they want.
I've proven it to myself so many times it has become boring. I get what I ask for. However, sometimes the universe has a peculiar sense of humor in delivering up what I want; or, more accurately, since the universe is but a figment of the imagination, the universe's sense of humor is that of the perceiver. And I have a unique sense of humor, I guess. So it doesn't always come out right, like getting wishes from a warped genie.
Sometimes, I find my mind wandering. It wanders far afield, until a passing thought sets off my alarms and I think, "Hold on here, do I really want that? Is it just habit?" Desiring the wrong thing out of familiarity can be hazardous when you get whatever you want.
Like many people, I didn't find high school to be a terribly idyllic time. The geniality and ease with which I spoke to so many people on the night of the reunion did not exist to much extent whatsoever back in the day. Sometimes, that was due to other people, but for the most part it was all me. It just took me a lot longer to, well, stop caring and simply live my life my way instead of in the way that I thought people would find least bothersome. Many times, it led to not living at all. I don't know where I got this from; I do know that several completely coincidental and blameless events throughout high school reinforced it. It took a while, but like all learning experiences, I think it left me for the better.
That's not to say I didn't have fun, though. On the contrary, I did have my moments. It was hard not to considering my classmates; any way you look at it, our class was pretty singular in its quality. But teens are teens and kids can be cruel. God knows that I was on occasion, and those times I certainly don't look back upon with much fondness or pride. Regrets, I've had a few. So has everyone.
Good or bad, though, there is familiarity to be had. It provides a bit of respite during life, and as long as it didn't form habits or fruitless desires, it is pretty harmless. I thus did not go back to my reunion looking to relive the (non-) glory days of my youth. I went back to enjoy the good and hope that the bad had disappeared, and that's almost exactly what I found. From the looks of things, others were there for the right reasons too.
Two pairs, two different places and different hours, same physical proximity; completely different interactions, though, all due to the different libations are mediating the situation. Strange to think how the roles we fill can change so drastically by tweaking a few circumstances.
The rules of the game were followed as far as I could tell, and despite the drink, nobody's roles were unexpected or coming completely out of left field. The familiarity would take some time to melt away, even after I hitched a ride to my motel, fell asleep for a few hours, then got up in the morning to leave Savage City and return to the place that I had called home for quite some time.
It probably took a little while to disappear because it was happy and comforting. There were a lot of changes; some good, some bad. Through these lenses we see ourselves, measuring our own advancement and success as people. I won't be dwelling in that old familiarity, the life that I have left behind, but I do hope that perhaps it won't be such a long time before I experience it again for a fleeting moment.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XX
By Doctor Gonzo
3 July 2006
Minneapolis — "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"Follow your bliss."
One question, one statement, both intimately intertwined with each other. Few people want to be miserable when they grow up, if that indeed ever occurs, so following your bliss is hopefully an integral part of life. If you aren't following your bliss in what you do on a daily basis, then you probably will not be a very happy person.
Trying to determine how best to follow your bliss and be something good when you grow up...now, that's the real problem. As a wise man once said (almost) hundreds of years ago, if it were easy, then everybody and their brother would already be doing it. Given the state of the world today, it's not a likely bet that the majority of the world is successfully following their bliss. People are too busy following other things, or not following anything at all.
Since it was not easy, I was having a bit of a problem finding it exactly. Although there is still some debate as to whether it is the unexamined or the examined life that is not worth living, the life that has no higher purpose, a life that does not have a goal to be traveling towards, is also not terribly useful. After reaching the point where it could no longer be ignored, when there was nothing else to drown out the voices that questioned me, I realized that I had to figure it out. But what?
Some obvious answers would no longer work. I was on my own, no doubt about it. Only I could figure out what I had to do with my life, and no one else could live it for me. That is not always an easy thing to face; I have the feeling that most people either don't care about these things, or simply let life happen to them and then deal with the consequences later. I didn't like the chances that those options gave me, so I hoped that I would be able to be a bit more proactive. Find it myself before it happened to me, before I was trapped in something that I didn't care for. It was a tall order.
The pieces fell away, leaving nothing at all but indifference, ambivalence. Everybody's potential was reset to zero. There was no longer anybody to envy, anybody to suck up to, anybody to idolize. We were either all in a world of one, or a world of everybody; either way, everybody was equal and there was nothing.
Nothing: the abyss was inside, and that abyss was either the foundation upon which to build a new way of seeing things, or a hole into which any new ideas would instantly fall. But nothingness it was, a nothingness that could not be ignored.
A bit later, I was looking over all of these things. Past writings, past articles, TATW, Daily columns, all of it. Part of the reason was that I was looking for topics and inspiration for the statements and essays I would have to write in order to apply to law school. But inspiration wasn't only for applications. It was also of a personal sort, which made it all the more disappointing the more I read.
It was almost all shite. Pure and simple, I could hardly stand to read most of what I had written before. Most of my newspaper columns were the product of somebody who was too arrogant and too sure of having all of the right answers. Many of the other things I had written were philosophic tomes that had little bearing on the life that I was too glad let slip by; I felt much safer inside the Zen walls I had built around myself, to keep the nastiness of the world out.
Oh, sure, not everything pissed me off; there were a few article and stream-of-consciousness rants that were typically the result of alcohol and dipping my toe into that thing called real life. But by and large, it was not something I felt particularly happy to be looking back upon. I certainly could not turn to any of this for inspiration as to what I should be following in my life. Maybe I could use a lot of it to map the paths that I did not want to follow, but simply avoiding things is no way to reach a goal. Besides, avoiding things was what had caused the problem in the first place.
Why? I didn't realize when I started poking around in the remains of my short life that things may have changed, that I may have changed, so much in such a relatively short span of time. Even more puzzling was the fact that I would reject so completely everything that I had written about, and thus experienced, before. I am not so distant from those times that I have completely changed who I am, or is that wrong? Could that be the case?
I don't know; I don't think so. While many things have changed, as they must when life gives way, I can still see a foundation, the bits and pieces that make up the core. They have been rearranged, though, and the things that I once valued, those things that I was able to value, have changed. Taken as a whole, I think it was a good thing.
I lost my second conscience years and years ago...six years to be exact. The last time we had been in the same place physically, I was talking about being in love and he was talking about being in like. My situation went on to become arguably the largest part of my life from that point on, and his was to sadly go nowhere. When all was said and done, a big part of my life was gone, another big part was just starting, and the innocence of the College Experience was gone in more than one way.
Interestingly, the next couple of years would be looked upon favorably by one party as an ideal to go back to, while for me, I could only see laziness and apathy. I had achieved much of what most people would aspire to, and God-damn did I phone it in for the longest time. Not always professionally and not always personally, but by and large it was a time when TV and jumps off of the raft and Lake Ann and biking were just about all there was, and that center simply cannot hold for any length of time.
Biking...that's the perfect example. I was biking once again today, along West River Parkway in Minneapolis for the hundredth or thousandth time, and I realized, that holy shit, I had been biking along this route for damn well over nine year. Nine fucking years! Over and over, seeing the same curves, the same scenery, tacking on the same miles to my journal over and over. That one example metastasized into a hundred more. Repeating the same old garbage, doing the same thing over and over, seeking solace in routine. From cheap nasty-tasting instant coffee in the mornings to Earl Grey tea and Hot Tamales in the evenings to the same Grand Round path, the structure changed but the need for it remained the same.
This was broken in many respects by the failure of a good portion of the life that I had achieved; necessity forced me to start taking a look at what I was doing. I couldn't change everything at once, of course, as such tasks are only possible for the most enlightened of us. But by and large, I realized that if I was going to find something worth living for and living at again, I would have to leave the comforts that I had gotten used to behind, and venture out once again.
This is probably the reason I was so disgusted by the written records of my life before. Oh, sure, I played a good game, the college student who was so much better than his peers, the unstained prophet who was seeking the answer to life, the One to which all is reduced. It allowed me to fill with rhetoric those parts of my life I was afraid to fill with me falling on my face and getting back up again. In the end, though, rhetoric won't get you much; it is experience that counts.
The philosophical chains that had sounded so appealing and comforting lost their luster. I saw them for what they were: chains. The unemotional, dispassionate life sounded suspiciously like death. Pretending that I was sitting on a cloud, observing from afar that Great Game that I would only in certain circumstances debase myself to join, no longer seemed to bring me happiness. Not doing was worse than doing, even if doing meant failure.
Instead, I tried to do where I would not do before. It became a question not of What Would Jesus Do, but What Would Sculptor Sam Insult Me Less For Doing? So far, I think that it has worked much better than what I was doing before, even if not all the changes can be appreciated by everybody. It was more real, at least. I touched the world and it did not crumble; more importantly, I did not crumble.
That's probably why I could not relate to what I had written. Instead of delicately dissembling the reality that I so disdained, I was actually doing something. I was fucking up, yes, but sometimes you have to hurt yourself to see if you still feel. As long as the trips don't get too out of control, and I don't think that any have done so yet, then experiencing and learning beat pontificating every day. My past life pretending I was Buddha no longer seemed appealing.
Blonde-curled thin-lipped schlampe with no sense of personal space, angling for attention that comes only perfunctorily...this is expected, not shunned.
No help on what to do when asked to comment on strangers' body parts. Play along, listen to the music, the sun is not yet yellow, but simply chicken.
Sipa-playing stoners standing and sidling outside of yet another modern opium den, buy the ticket and take the ride, they are all the same so why not hop on? Whatever reticence once existed is long gone, a principle that lost all weight and disappeared into the æther, not that it did much good anyway.
Summer smells, the same as in decades past, in the middle of a city or tearing around county roads in the middle of a lightning storm, but now the impermanence cannot be ignored, the mortality that means that there are a finite number of drizzling summer nights ahead.
No, I haven't yet found my bliss. Such big prizes are not found immediately. I do think, though, that I am closer than I have been in a long time. I have lost much along the way; sometimes it feels like I have lost so much that it is not worth fighting for. But I look at the alternatives and they are far worse. I will just keep on, erring on the side of doing as opposed to not. Whatever happens, I think that is the way to go.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XIX
By Doctor Gonzo
18 February 2006
Minneapolis — It was late summer, early afternoon. Although it wasn't raining between Savage City and Minneapolis, off in the distance, covering most of the hollow hemisphere that made up the sky, were dark grey clouds. The sunlight streaming through the clouds and haze made a strange light that served to heighten the contrast of the surroundings. The green fields that I was passing at seventy miles per hour were particularly affected: everywhere around me was a deep, emerald green, sharply set off from the brooding clouds behind them.
What was most evident in this scene was the hyper-reality of everything. The green cornstalks. The blue car. The sticky black pavement, striped, dotted, and dashed with bright, fluorescent white paint. The olives, reds, silvers, and maroons of the passing vans, cars, and trucks. If the material objects themselves weren't literally magnified, their sense of reality was. However, in my mind, there was even more to this reality; or, rather, less.
On that day I was heading back to school, for the start of the semester or maybe just to get my affairs in order beforehand; I no longer remember. However, although my main goal was simply arriving at a physical destination, there was one other thing I was doing. Whether I was terribly conscious of it or not, I was chasing an ideal, an abstraction. I chased it for a while, and as hard as you can chase an abstraction, which in the end isn't hard at all. And what happened to the mist that I was chasing is what always happens: it disappears. For nobody can catch an abstraction. The Forms are forever beyond our reach.
Chasing abstractions is not uncommon, even though it ultimately leads nowhere. Abstractions, since they don't exist in reality, allow you to seek something without having to seek it. There are no concerns about the messiness of reality, the fact that nothing, not a single thing in the universe, is without its flaws. Being unable to accept these flaws, or worse, being unable to seek something in the first place despite its flaws, is the reason why so many people continue to chase ideals that are as gossamer as clouds on a summer day.
Frankly, I can't say that chasing abstractions ever brought me much benefit. It allowed me to insulate myself from reality, to pretend to accomplish something while ensuring that I would never really fail, since failure was already a certainty. Ghosts are pretty insubstantial, and although they may not give you much pain, they certainly don't give you much comfort. The comfort and pain you experience when you seek and find something real are at least proof of your existence, of your humanity.
Abstractions, for all of the attention that philosophers give to them, do not motivate. They do not compel. Had I sought the abstraction of a car instead of finding a real one, I would have had to walk down Highway 10 to Minneapolis, smug in the knowledge that my abstract car would never break down or disappear. Nor ever appear.
Don't look at me that way,
It was an honest mistake...
I began to prefer the abstract to reality long before that summer day. In reality, for example, people can let you down, people can make you hurt. People also disappear, either by choice or by the grim realities of our own mortality. Abstractness meant never having to deal with the imperfections that made up a person, or with the thought that they may not be around forever. After all, a thought itself can never die as long as there is somebody to hold it in his or her mind.
Abstractions also had the benefit of being able to be taken out of storage, spun around, turned inside out, poked, prodded, and put away again. All this on one's own time, too. Rarely were abstractions surprising. They could give comfort to those who were not as adept at handling extremes, those whose sensory input could get overloaded by unusual data. Not entirely unlike computers in a way, which can only handle certain formats, and do ugly things when something unexpected comes along.
For most of these reasons, I found it easier to think of and deal with abstractions instead of reality. Of course, the flat, non-dimensional existence of these abstractions would get old and very unfulfilling after a while, but it was a long while. In the meantime, there was a certain implied arrogance in dealing with abstractions instead of reality, in dealing with wide swaths of great ideas instead of the unimportant, insignificant details that make up most people's experience. It was only much later that I learned about the importance of these things formerly dismissed as unimportant.
A lot of this arrogance and self-importance came from the very lessons that many people are taught from an early age, that of the noble warrior or martyr who fights and dies for such abstract ideas as "freedom." Of course, the realities of the true motives of these people are lost in the mists of time: these people had far better, far more real and immediate reasons for their actions than simply fighting for abstractions. Nonetheless, this is stripped from our canon, and people are taught in many ways that the abstraction of an ideal is much more important than the reality, leading to situations where a person, or an organization, or even a government claims to support some abstract idea while having no conception of what it means in practice.
It seems to be an axiom that great minds should think great thoughts, and those that self-select as great minds better hop to it, or else the world will enter another Dark Ages. Stupid, yes, but thinking along these lines does allow for some insulation from the rest of the world, especially when it doesn't work out as well as is hoped.
I had no real complaints when I was driving back to Minneapolis that day. I had a roof over my head in school, I was getting a fine education, I had no material wants, no hunger, and I pretty much had the freedom to do what I wanted. Even so, I was isolated, kept in a prison of ideals that did not quite match the world that I was entering, and certainly did not match the world that I had left behind. That world was where I conjured up these ideals in the first place.
Sometimes, I forget I'm still awake.
I fuck up, and say these things out loud...
Part of me wants to go off onto some tangent, like rehashing the life that exists in Savage City. That is unpleasant enough, though, and well-documented elsewhere. Or perhaps sitting in the lotus position and talking about the dharmakaya light, a light that I once saw very strongly emanating from the Dalai Lama and one other person in my life, an abstraction made visible by tricks of light or the iris. But that path leads to nothing more than a dead end.
The path I choose, then, is to delve into when I stopped chasing after abstractions. Eventually, it gets old. The technicolor falsity, more realistic as it may appear than reality itself, is eventually exposed for what it is. Holding up the heavens because one has self-selected as an "idealist" grows tiresome. Sooner or later, most people open the door to reality, finding its expanse to be far healthier than the cramped confines of the mind.
Perhaps it happened later to me than most. That could be due to other things that happened earlier than most. Or it could be due to the people who let me down when I was in need, great or inconsequential. In any case, the pressure of the world beyond was too great, and I decided that it was better to bargain from the strength of existence than with imaginary allies that could not do a thing to help me. Moving away from the one-dimensional existence that is Savage City to greater things has a tendency to do that; had I stayed behind, I may never have had a reason to stop with my abstractions.
It can be hard to give up. Even such things as writing, which I used for solace, can be a prison of abstractions if one allows it. For a long time, I used to write about abstractions and ideals instead of writing about reality. In some ways it may have been beneficial. Writing about mundane reality can lead to situations where you see the trees and not the forest. From time to time, it can be good to take a step back, take a sip, and then go on a stream-of-consciousness rant. Especially if the people on the other side of it are people whose opinions and values you can trust.
Doing it too much, though, can lead to the old "ivory tower" syndrome. There is a time to allow the ghosts to be out at night in full force, and there is a time to join them, instead of sitting around while the sprites dance around you. Perhaps I didn't find the right balance. Perhaps it is still out of balance.
Sometimes, I still think of you.
I just wanted to, just wanted you to know...
It was late at night or early in the morning, depending on your point of view. Having been up working, not sleeping, I chose the former. Spring was turning into summer, and the air was pleasant. There wasn't a whole lot of traffic to worry about between campus and the edge of downtown, which was a comfort. Due to the laws of physics, bikers have to be a bit more careful of automobiles, lest they wind up on the wrong side of the kinetic energy equation.
In my hand I carried a book. It wasn't much, a philosophical tome, of little practical value. However, to me, it had a symbolic value that was far greater than the sum of the words on its pages: abstraction again. For some reason, due to alignment of the planets or other random occurrence, it represented to me an age past, one where I was happier to cling to abstract idealism than to find solace in reality.
Although when I received the book I felt safer dealing with what I wished reality to be than with reality itself, the intervening time had not been kind. Grasping at straws, I found that mere thoughts could not provide any assistance. Abstract people acted in no way like real people. Eventually, it made me angry.
Anger is what I found myself with that night. I walked down the forgotten steps to the river, not far below one of the many bridges that are thrown across the dirty waterway in Minneapolis. This one was brightly lit and provided a very nice background if one was looking for pretty scenery. Other times I would appreciate this more, but not this night.
I sat and thought about where I had been and where I was going, how I got to the place that I now found myself in. I wasn't happy, and the abstract philosophies in that book were part of the reason. The pendulum had swung too far, I was stumbling on the edge, and I needed to ground myself, even for just a little bit.
So I did what any irrational person would do: I sent that book on a one-way journey to New Orleans. The abstractions, the people and ideas behind it, I hoped to escape just enough to come into the sunshine of the world. I can't say for certain whether I was entirely successful, but it was a start.
My old friend,
I swear I never meant for this...