- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XIII
By Doctor Gonzo
27 August 2000
Minneapolis -- "Sam Keaveny is fucking dead."
Words uttered while traveling along country road 134, near the Fingerhut Warehouse. Words incredible to hear, words that I hoped I would never hear uttered aloud with any serious. However, those words came out of the mouth of my friend Ross as we went down that road. It was an early morning in June, perhaps early Friday morning. To think back and put a precise date is somewhat difficult, because the emotions were too intense and they mess with memory. But I can still see those words and the look on Ross's face when he said them, a look hard to describe.
It was true, and it was devastating. Although I didn't know it at the time, when my pager went off around 8 PM on the night of June 6, 2000, my life was about to take a turn in a direction I could not have expected in a million years. Because I was working, it was some time before I was able to return the pages, when they became more frequent, more urgent, and from a multitude of people. Then the phone call, the shock, the numbness. Too early at the age of 22.
I am reminded of Julius Caesar as I write this: I come not to praise Sam, but to bury him. Not that he needed the latter, nor was there ever a time when he got too much of the former. In fact, dozens of phrases from novels run through my head, all of them related to the subject of death; none seem to fit. When a very close friend dies, nothing you have felt or read in the past can fully capture the new emotions. Nothing prepares you for the pain every day afterward, for the knowledge that you will never see him again. Sometimes it all seems unreal. Perhaps it is. Metaphysics, however, is lacking for a moment like this.
Sam was not an angel. Sam's epitaph will not be written in the history books. He did not find a cure for any diseases, did not lead a country, did not invent a better mousetrap. Based on what some of the people said at his wake and funeral, you almost thought that he did do all these things. I understand that people need to paint a picture for themselves that allows them to deal with death, but to canonize him so quickly is confusing. It's as if only his faults died when his heart mysteriously stopped. But that's not true. Everything else died as well.
I was glad to hear some of the stories I heard at the services, but it was unfulfilling. Almost everybody focused only on his strengths. According to most people, he had life and the world figured out. They talked about his excellent scholarship, his leadership abilities, his extroverted self. It was clear to me, a person who had known him almost ten years, that some of these people didn't know him at all. Yes, some of them were acquainted with him. Some saw him a couple hours a week in class, or worked with him at a camping store. A few knew him through their own children, a testament to how tightly knit our community is. Nobody can say that the outpouring of grief in our community was false; there were hundreds, if not thousands of people standing in line to see him. Far more than I will draw, probably. Everybody who was there was grieving. But not everybody was grieving the same man.
Sam did not get the nickname "Waffle" for having everything figured out. He was responsible for statues of saints disappearing for juggernauts from our school. He broke nine of the Ten Commandments at some point in his life. It is hard to argue that he had a good impact on people in all of his adventures. The bottom line is that he was human, and his faults are at least as important as all of his positive attributes. The stories that make us laugh or groan deserve just as much time as those stories which demonstrate his sterling character.
The square world may miss his knowledge, his work ethic, his leadership. But what I am going to miss are his faults, because that is what friendship is all about. Who wants to hang around somebody that is already perfect, somebody that has no room to grow? To do that would be no different than hanging around an inanimate statue. Sam had potential, and I hung around because I wanted to see where he was going. It might not always be wholesome, it might not always be smart, but it was worth it. That's what our needling was about. It's not much fun to fool around with somebody who had it all figured out. There would be no change, nothing to look forward to.
Those people who thought Sam was the most upstanding member of the community since Abraham Lincoln saw one part of him, the part he projected in order to make it in this world. But his close friends saw a different part of him, one that was hidden away from casual acquaintances. That was the real Sam. He wasn't a textbook example of how to be standing on God's shoulders. He was somebody trying to find the right path and getting sidetracked from time to time. And I wanted to be there on that path with him; that's why I was his friend.
Not many people look for that kind of aggressive humanity. It is obvious especially in the ritual of the funeral. I find few things right with the Catholic Church, but the beliefs of the priest as expounded during the funeral were especially onerous. "Sam died because God wanted Sam to be with Him in Heaven." To me, that makes God sound like a selfish prick, which He probably isn't. But believing that does give people comfort, especially the same people who only saw the good side of Sam and thus thought he was a shoe-in for the Kingdom of God.
Somebody who knew Sam better, however, probably can't buy this nonsense. Not because we are judging his life and his worthiness to go to Heaven, but because Sam didn't really believe in that, and neither do we. If there is any reason for his death beyond the fact that his heart just stopped during a routine medical procedure, it is probably that he found a place with lower rent. Or he could have died just to get a kick out of the pageantry that came out of it. Any rational metaphysics would not include some omnipotent being deciding out of the blue on June 6th that it would be nice to kill somebody. But in a world where people wish to believe that something exists to explain arbitrary acts, that theory might be comforting.
Sam's death floored me. Many things that we talked about will not happen. We will not create a cinema café in St. Cloud, we will not visit a great walled city full of the best and the brightest of our day. I will not go and see him teaching English at a high school in Okinawa. We will not walk among flower gardens talking about our crazy friends, and Loso's Midway Pub will seem strange if I am not searching for him when I go there. There is a lot that I was planning on doing, and now nothing.
However, I don't know if his death had any large impact on the way I live my life. It would be expected of me to say that his death was a wake-up call for me, that now I realize how precious life is. But that's not the way I feel. I think about life every day, and at the same time I know that such questions are pointless anyway. It is human to die and to lose, so I wonder when people say that a death makes them think more about their own life. Why weren't they thinking of their life before? And if they weren't thinking about it before, what will stop them from reverting to that state? A death, like every other event in this world, simply reminds us that we are human. Only that point need be taken away.
It's been a while since all of this happened. The temporal distance has increased, but it is hard to say if that makes any difference. Death is something very hard to deal with; perhaps that is why so many people put the dead on a pedestal, or turn to explanations that come from religion. That is why there are thousands of novels and stories that deal with the subject. But in the end, death is something that can be dealt with personally as a brief reminder of our human condition, nothing more. We are all on the road by ourselves in the end.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XII
By Doctor Gonzo
31 May 2000
Minneapolis — Too much time on my hands. Normally, school would still be in session now, and I would not be able to waste my time on this atavistic endeavor. I would be in the final stretch, finishing papers and reading what should have been read weeks ago. Yes, it is true that very little actual studying would be taking place, but at least I would give that illusion. I would certainly not have any time to fuck with this computer, trying to figure out how to work the damn thing without a mouse. I have spent half an hour on that futile mission, and all I have succeeded in doing is crashing programs. Microsoft apparently doesn't care to indulge those of us who, sometimes out of necessity, don't have a rodent handy.
It will be replaced tomorrow, for I have very little to do otherwise. There are two reasons that I am not fucking around with the College Experience right now. The first is that the change to semesters has resulted in a schedule that ends a month earlier, in the middle of May. But the more important reason is that I am done with that trip once and for all. No more puttering around with other undergrads, trying to get the good grades that may or may not lead to success in the future. I don't even have to pretend any more. And while post-graduate work may be in my future (and how am I to know?), it will not be for a while. I'm out of Sing Sing for the time being.
I have none of the extra bonuses added on to my piece of paper. No ass-kissing distinction for graduating with a 4.0, no cum laudes of any sort. Perhaps I graduated with honors or something like that, but I certainly don't keep track. I started my college career fully of dewy-eyed idealism, but during the last two years I resigned myself to the reality that it was all jumping through hoops anyway, so I may as well elect not to set those hoops on fire and make it harder on myself. Some people may say that they are in college for the educational aspects when all they want is an insurance policy against poverty; I am the other way around. I admit it.
So now, on this warm May night, I do nothing but listen to Led Zeppelin. I feel that I do not have to explain this, for I have done so quite adequately in the past. It works well for tonight, one of the first nights that actually smells of summer. The sodium vapour lights mix with the occasional headlights on the street below. An odour of day-old rain mixed with flowers past their prime fills the air. It is the perfect night for sitting on a rock on the shores of the Mississippi, or playing on a swing set until midnight. Talking, staring at the sky looking for Elvis, thinking, or just sailing higher and higher, trying to get a gut-level feeling of what it is like to be an eagle.
But for now I am stuck inside, listening to the Rain Song. It will do for now, until I can find a place where the above-mentioned activities can take place . . . but I do not wish to travel down that path at this time. Gradumatating from college leads to other kinds of introspection, the most important being why the hell was this so easy?
Sure, I may have graduated with a 3.75 GPA, but if you took out the two Fs I got due to insane professors (and my refusal to withdraw from those courses) I could have easily graduated with some high honor. This is everybody's goal, of course. Am I included? That is hard to say; I see grades as secondary to the whole process, or at least I think that way when I am in an idealistic mood. When I am not in such a mood, I just see grades as a means for incompetent instructors to give the illusion that they are teaching. The only time really cared about my grades was this past semester, and only so far as passing was concerned. I didn't want to stay here any more time than was necessary, and so I was relieved when I got my grades and saw that they were all above Cs.
The reason I see grades as secondary is because I learned long ago that they do not reflect effort. No reflection at all. I will come right out and say that I didn't try at all to get As in my class. I did not study, I did not worry, I never broke a sweat. And furthermore, I feel no guilt i this. I know that people have to work hard to get good grades, just as I "know" that there are 6,000 languages spoken in the world. Both facts have about the same impact on me. I do feel some disgust at this fact, but then again, what can I do?
Every consecutive year, in my eyes, I dropped the bar a little more. With every passing semester, I did less and less, but that was never reflected in any objective measure. In some classes I was tempted to aggressively go far below my standards just to see what would happen. I never did, because I can't really go that low; it's no more my personality than drinking eight Budweisers and drag-racing up and down the freeway would be. I have to do what I consider the minimum, but as far as the University is concerned my minimum is their maximum.
Remember the Laffer curve? People sure liked to talk about it when Regeanomics was all the rage. It says that at some point, if you increase tax rates, you will get less money because people will consciously depress their salaries in order to pay less taxes. It was the reasoning behind those tax cuts, and of course it was pure bullshit. It may well exist, but not for tax rates around 30%. Those idiot Republicans . . . but that's not the point, as fun as it is to bash right-wing morons. This curve does exist; film is a good example. Normally, as light increases on photographic film silver density also increases, in a nice linear fashion. However, if you seriously overexpose film, you eventually reach a point on the response curve where the reverse is true. It's called solarization (the true kind, not the Man Ray version that is really called the Sabattier effect). It's the Laffer curve for film development
What the hell does this have to do with anything? Well, it appears that this effect occurs with effort. More effort on my part is not leading to any increase in anything. There is no response. Complacency is the result, a complacency that is not welcome. It's a bit like being a deranged President who is running for re-election, say in the year 1972. When you can blow thirty points off your lead and still win, you tend to ignore more wholesome activities and spend your time showing contempt for the system. When you put a lot of effort into something and it makes no noticeable impact, are you going to put your effort into it? Or are you going to launder money through Mexico? History has shown which one is more apt to happen.
It seems that the system is no longer rewarding effort, and not just at a University. The NASDAQ didn't rocket up 87% in a year because all tech companies were doing that well. Instead of rewarding sound business plans and punishing companies that were nothing more than fluff with a web site, investors threw money everywhere. It could only last so long before the bubble burst, and burst it did. It's not even the first time that it has happened; the Asian financial crisis was basically the same thing. People threw money in that direction willy nilly, and when some bankers took a look around and decided that there was something wrong with office space costing more in Kuala Lumpur than in London, all that speculative money vanished. People didn't reward quality investments over there, they invested money without looking. Companies would get money rammed up their asses regardless of their health. In that situation, is it any wonder that people choose non-effort?
Effort seems to be a scarce quality. It was probably the only thing holding this society together, given the fact that most people are not terribly bright. In a society that rewarded effort, people had a great incentive to not stray from the path. Now, everybody's balloons are rising faster than some people can handle, and the result is a general lack of effort. Stock crashes may sober people up a bit, but they will not have much of an impact on things like workplace discipline. Many people, seeing the record low unemployment, believe that they no longer have to show any effort in their jobs. After all, with everybody so short-staffed, how can they be fired? Effort is not being rewarded; anybody can walk into a place a get hired on the spot. The incentive is gone, quality suffers, and people erroneously equate job security and goofing off.
These problems have always existed. There have always been snake-oil salesmen; there have always been that group of people who thinks that it is okay to go to work so twisted on Quaaludes that they can hardly speak. A lot of people do a lot of stupid things, things I and other sane people would never consider doing. These groups of people have existed for thousands of years, and many a lifetime has been spent trying to come up with some sort of solution. So far, it has not been done, and I doubt it can. I certainly can't do it; if I had the ability to keep people from acting like idiots I could solve all of the world's problems. If I could keep people from screwing around at work, if I could stop people from dating guys they met on the Internet, I could swiftly end all wars, keep disease from spreading, and get people out of poverty. But I can't.
Then what do we do? Some people look at the idiotic adventures and decide they want to have some fun too. Some people advocate drowning the fools in the ocean, or at least herding them up and sending them to Bavaria. Others just want to be left alone, as far from the idiots as possible. A few think that these people got the short end of the brain-stick because of social structures, multi-national corporations, or ridiculous conceptions of nationalism, and if you would only take them out of the repressive structure they would magically start doing The Right Thing. The elites throughout history have usually had one of these approaches (and I call myself an elite, if for no other reason than I feel like it). Wars have been started because of these ideas, but nothing ever gets done. There are frats that are full of people who think it is awesome to screw every girl in their partner sorority in a single weekend, just as there were marauding gangs of Vikings that raped and pillaged. At least in defense of the Vikings, they spread language, conquered the oceans and discovered new territories. The brothers in Pi Kappa Alpha just do terminal experiments on construction equipment.
What do we do with these people? I got used to taking the pragmatic approach, but is that right? Now more and more I feel like insulating myself, and no longer do I put any faith in the argument that people shoot others, steal things, and do smack because of the inherent nature of a capitalist society. No matter where or when you live you are going to have these people. The thing that makes it worse is when you give you incentive to play by the rules; when you no longer reward effort, it's over. When you give a kid an A because he tries really hard but still fails, the kid who gets an A because her work is spectacular will no longer feel like differentiating herself from the mediocre. When you pay a person eight dollars an hour to make personal phone calls and hit on passers-by, the other person who does his job perfectly but only receives the same eight bucks is no longer going to care. When one can be so ignorant as to not know what language is spoken in Great Britain but still pull down a six figure salary, those who pride themselves in taking an active interest in the world think not of using their knowledge to help people less fortunate, but instead think of wiping certain cities full of shallow people off the map.
I'm not bitter that I wasn't rewarded for putting in more effort in my college career. I am instead bothered that I could get away with lowering my standards, for this does not bode well for our civilization. We are already on the verge of a new Dark Ages, but there is still time to pull back from the brink. If not, then I will find some deserted lake to build a playground on so that I can swing in the moonlight at midnight and talk with my friends, enjoying the night air, away from the small-time trials and tribulations of people who can't try and won't care. It won't be the moral thing to do, the right thing to do, but perhaps it will save my sanity. Selah.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way XI (Denken Sie an den Weg)
By Doctor Gonzo
7 March 2000
Minneapolis — It's the first week of March, but outside it feels like the first week of May. It is humid, the skies are threatening storms, and the temperature is near 70. Chalk it up to global warming or a pact with the devil; it doesn't matter. I am listening to Led Zeppelin, the great Presence album, and combined with the weather, it is summer for all I can tell. Nights like these, alone, usually don't bring much happiness. What they usually bring is much thinking about why I am here instead of enjoying the weather on Grand Cayman, or the equivalent decadent spot. At the very least, I wonder if I am moving at all.
Weather and music have always been a powerful combination, and I believe I have written about it before. In fact, I see that I have written about Presence before, to boot. No matter. If it still holds true today, that means it is significant. It is some thread that holds things together, a thread that I am not always able to keep in mind. But the tonight's rare permutation of atmosphere and mentality seems to allow me to think about this further.
Every year I look back and laugh about what I was doing before. At any given moment, I believe that I have pretty much figured out how things work in this world. At any given time, I have just conquered what I think to be the last problem, the single missing piece that has kept me from happiness forever. Of course, I also look back at the previous times that I thought I had finally found the key, in my ignorance, and laugh about how much I still had to learn. But now . . . ? It's a constantly moving frame, like the words yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday I was a silly goddamn fool. Today I have understood my past mistakes and I am ready to do only right. And tomorrow? Well, at some bars there is a sign that says "Free Beer Tomorrow." Unfortunately for the wino, tomorrow never comes.
Old habits die hard, however. Whenever I accidentally stumble upon the worn footsteps of my past, I follow them with such ease and certainty that it often frightens me. This I saw earlier today, when I was driving around to kill time and enjoy the weather. Driving down streets where I used to live or where I used to frequent, I automatically headed for those spots. So automatically, I had to stop myself and say, "What am I doing? Nobody lives there anymore. Nobody knows who I am, or wishes to see me." I saw this even stronger this past summer, when I visited my former place of education. I had been there for two weeks of my life, three years ago. But when I went back, it was as if I had never left. It was so damn spooky, I thought I was losing my mind.
How many times had I done that before? I can see a picture clear in my head as if I were doing it now: it is around eight o'clock in the evening. It was summer, and the light in the sky was rapidly fading, but there was still some blue left. My car Gonzo, before it was Gonzo, is sailing down some street, the street lights reflecting off the paint and turning it an indescribable color. I'm heading somewhere, to a friend's house, to a park, or nowhere in particular. I see people on the streets, cruising up and down the road on their crotch rockets and in their low riders, screaming and acting like the teenagers they are. I see tired families out for walks, or huddled in some minivan heading to Dairy Queen after the soccer game. I see trees blowing in the wind, an airport beacon, the river flowing by. I see the campus. I see myself on a motorcyle going to Dairy Queen and talking with my coworkers whom I had happened to run into. I see myself. I see others. I see connections.
But they are static. What do I tell those people, if I could go back, if I had the chance? Don't waste their fucking lives? Go crazy once in a while? For God's sake, why are you spending $400.000 on a house? Would it do any good for me to say something? The rare times when I did, the rare times when I was talking to some people under a sky full of fireworks or sitting on a rock in the Mississippi, did it do any good? Fate has put me in weird positions before, but how can I know that I am doing the right thing? I can't. It always seems like the right thing today, but when today becomes yesterday it will become extremely wrong. I have seen no signs that the path I have chosen is correct, other than my own mistaken beliefs at the time I choose.
Times like these, when I am fairly comfortable and happy with what I am doing, are the times when I have the most questions. When I am having serious problems due to my own idiocy, I usually have no questions about what I am doing, which makes sense; gotta keep my head above water and my ass outta jail. Moreover, rarely do I have a problem figuring out how I fucked up after the fact. I can be very certain about my mistakes and how I shouldn't repeat them, and so far that has worked rather well. Happiness, however, leads to questions. No longer are they of the type "Do I deserve this?" They are not even of the type "How the hell did this happen?" They are of a very strange type, as if I am asking myself if it is happiness that I am really seeking. That question probably doesn't make sense to most people, but I am troubled with it nonetheless.
My beliefs in the past few years have really focused on the value of those who have gone crazy and changed the world in a big way. People who didn't seek happiness, but sought some weird devil that was nobody's but their own. Some succeeded, but what exactly is success? Changing the world at the price of your own mind? Or is pulling back from the brink the real success? It didn't matter to me which one it was, I was determined to follow that path. However, I wasn't really ready to give up comfort and happiness. I thought I could chart a path between the two. With one foot firmly on the rail of insanity, and the other foot firmly on the rail of happiness, I would move forward wherever I may go.
At first, this worked pretty well. Rather, it didn't need to work at all, because art was long and happiness was very far off. I could follow the crazy path, for what it was worth, because I didn't have much in the other world. Not many people, not many connections. I was isolated and it worked well for me. The craziness was not very severe yet. Now, however, it seems that the rails are not going in the same direction; it seems that one is going left while the other goes right. I am torn between the two, wondering if it would be best to simply pull my feet off and run myself.
It is not so easy to continue to drive oneself mad. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and vacations tend to destroy whatever work you have accomplished. However, doing the opposite is absolutely out of the question. Whenever I think about giving in and selling my soul to our society's value system, I shudder. There is no way I could become so shallow, so thoughtless. But where is the right path? Without any allies, where am I to go?
I have spent many days and many more nights asking my friends these questions, in one way or another, and not getting any answers. Of course they don't know them, they aren't God. Instead of answers, I wish to find some insights. So far, I have found none. The people I thought who tilted towards giving in have done so, and the rest have simply become more confused and turned around. It has been how I have called it for the most part, which isn't helpful. Knowing who won't do what doesn't help. I need to look elsewhere.
Where do I look? Right now I have the image in my head of myself sitting outside at a restaurant on Cape Cod. I see myself looking around, looking in the little shops, watching people, writing, simply absorbing the atmosphere. I see that, but I don't know why I see that. Why is that image haunting me, what answers does it hold? If I think a bit more, I have another image in my head, the image of some random in the same place, on vacation, there to enjoy the sights and send postcards to friends. He and his family sure isn't worrying about any questions. They don't care about anything but taking pictures and spending money, and when they return it will be back to normal. They were not driven there by any search, but by the travel guide. Which picture is better? Which one should I try to emulate: the one that already drives me crazy, or the mindless vacation?
I see myself in my car at six in the morning, trying to clear off enough of the windshield so that I can see where I am driving. It's foggy as hell and I can hardly figure out where I am, a bonus when I am driving in a place I have never visited before. I am driving somebody to work because I happen to be up at the same time. Millions of other people are on the roads doing the exact same thing . . . but no! That's not it at all! There's so much more, the scene I painted is only a façade, the reality goes so much deeper but I cannot get into it for fear of hurting myself. What's the difference between myself and everybody else? Should there be a difference? I don't think that lives are such drama; instead, I wonder what people do with their days. From time to time, I glimpse something out of the ordinary in a person's life, but it is nothing more than a glimpse. I can see my personal troubles in that car, but I can't see them in any of the other cars I see.
Time is not running out, but it is passing relentlessly. Things don't change much, however. I see myself sitting on the mall of some foreign university, I see myself getting fresh ice cream on a summer night, I see myself rallying the troops to assault the pub. I do these things, and I continue to do them, because I enjoy them. But is that all that there is? Jesus Christ, shouldn't we be saving the world or something? Are we allowed to waste our time on such silly activities when we have higher goals to achieve?
It is nights like this that make me say no. I long to be enjoying the weather, playing tennis, sitting in a park, waiting for storms, serenading the street. Instead of driving myself mad in order to take control of the media, pushing myself to the limit to figure out what message I should be spreading, I simply want to be throwing a frisbee around. And I think back at all of those times I have missed, because I was too crazy to take advantage of them. Too involved in school, to busy, to goddamn stubborn to try and take advantage of beautiful freedom. I regret one thing one day, I turn around and regret the opposite the next day.
I have always been a volatile mix of opposites, but it seems that the mix is getting out of whack. It wasn't as important before for some reason. Now it is. I am happy and stuck. I am on patrol in Hué, singing Mickey Mouse tunes. I am bending the rules of this computer-generated world we call reality. I am racing through Indianapolis, trying not to get hit by lightning. I am with somebody I care about and enjoying it. I am running for President. I am all over the place, knowing full well that the only place that has the answers to my questions is the place I am in. But that doesn't stop me, it doesn't stop San Diego, it doesn't stop Beibei, it doesn't stop Santorini, Chicago, Boston, Washington, Austin, Kenosha, or Hanover.
I am trying to answer a question by finding another question. It is simply not working, and it never did. All the times in the past when I tried it stand out like glowing diamonds among a fog of those unimportant events. They are all connected, but the connections are starting to wear thin as everybody is getting bored with the same old game. It is hard to say exactly how that game has changed, but I can see it. It will change again next year as well. The end of the world didn't come as I perhaps thought it would, and things continue to go to hell in a handbasket unabated. The Rapture would have been a fitting, logical end to what has been happening in the world of late, but it didn't happen. Where this new slide will take us is anybody's guess.
Yesterday was foolish, but I still connect with it and feel I am missing something. Today I am happy and feel secure in how I live my life, but I wonder whether this has to do with fucking anything at all. Tomorrow is that weird time when I go to a job interview, get money, do all that shit, maybe go crazy, who knows. That will always be the ultimate goal, as it always has been. Always ambitious, reaching for new things. Maybe I'm content now, maybe I'm not, but I will be content sometime. Running around like some goddamn methedrine bat. The frame changes, the day advances, and I am back where I started.
Tonight is almost over, and in a couple of days it will snow and be winter again. This night will be as distant a memory as any other spring night. There will no longer be this weird combination of events to make me think like this, and I will probably wonder what was going on. I will have other things to worry about then. I already do. This rant will be temporarily forgotten, to be resurrected some other day when the wind is warm and Achilles is making his last stand.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way X (Думайте о пути)
The tenth of a never-ending series
1 December 1999
Savage City — There wasn't much traffic at midnight on Thanksgiving. I was just slowly drifting down Division street, looking at what the pigs had done to my hometown since my last visit. Nothing too imaginative, just the typical collection of plastic "progress" that is forever creeping otward from the core, in search of new virgin territory to conquer. I was behind a car with a couple of teenage girls in it, people who were, in all likelihood, locked into the shallow values I was avoiding. Could there actually be people cruising Division on Thanksgiving? It seemed to be a small possibility, but to some people there is nothing better than that drag strip; at the very least, it beats spending time with a family. My wonder disappeared when they did the U-turn at 33rd Ave, the only place for cruisers to turn around and start heading back towards downtown - the promised land. And just for an instant when their car was turning, I saw the driver and our eyes met.
There wasn't a whole lot to see there, and I probably looked the same way to her. She could have seen in myself what I saw in her: the searching, the aimlessness, the boredom. But her boredom is inherent in the game she is playing. Can there be much excitement in doing circles in a backwards hick town? My boredom was on a different level, and I didn't feel the city at all. I was just passing through, like I was a ghost. In many ways, I was, for the person who grew up in Savage City passed on, or at least has been frozen to be revived a different day.
I had half a mind to follow this car and see what these people were up to. Though I am totally ignorant about the etiquette and procedure of cruising up and down a main drag, and thus I wouldn't have much idea how to flag these people over, for a bit it didn't make a difference. There had to be some kernel of truth that these people had. Perhaps they knew something that I didn't know that forced them to drive around late at night with nothing better to do. I don't think I would immediately convert myself and join their sorry cult, but at the very least I would have some insight into what has created that empty look in her eyes. And I am a sucker for that kind of look with possible intelligence behind it, which has gotten me into trouble in the past.
But I ignored those feelings and instead went home. The fatigue was too great, and I had work to do the next day. Being back in Savage City for the obligatory Thanksgiving dinner was bad enough. By most measures, the dinner was better than any in recent memory. No yelling, nobody started crying, no fighting. It was as Norman Rockwell as my fractured family is capable of producing, which was exactly the reason it bothered me. I have never known that kind of family in my experience. Some may say that is my loss, but such statements are totally outside of my logic. My loss or not, I can only deal with what is. Not with what should be, or as a teacher said on The Simpsons tonight, "Sounds like somebody's got a case of the ‘s'posed to’s." Of What Is and What Should Never Be, which one comes first?
Earlier that night, on the roof of what passes for a skyscraper in Savage City, I meditated upon this predicament. Being on the roof of a tall building is good for many things, and though the Medical Arts Building is no Moos Tower, it was good enough. The streets even reminded me somewhat of Stadium Village near the U of M, with its angled streets and little stores. In this environment, trying to stand in the lee whenever possible, I thought. The situation never seems to change. My interest waxing and waning with politics. My interest waxing and waning with school. My interest waxing and waning with women. The peaks and valleys seem to coincide at odd times, pretty consistently. It's an endless loop.
This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that I have reached the end of my learning curve in this place. It is possible to be in a rut and still learn things, but for me it is no more. My job is at a dead-end, my studies are at a dead-end, my social contacts here are in a downward spiral (perpetrated by the dawning realization that the people here are not those that I wish to emulate). Progress is slowing down at the same time that things are speeding up chronologically. We are blasting towards the next year, four weeks to go now. The speed with which I am zooming would be great if there were some goal I was after, but that is not so.
There seems to be a general malaise around. I am not the only one who is at a loss, running down my engines because I have nowhere to go. Unfortunately, this can lead to fairly destructive behaviour, especially from the very people who normally choose to reject such immaturity. Perhaps it is a sign of frustration, the frustration that comes when a person sees that his or her "better" morality isn't necessarily followed by increased happiness. Perhaps it is the quest to recapture lost youth. I have learned to avoid people caught in these traps, and I know that there is nothing I can do to help these people; many times, all I do is make it worse. I haven't been totally oblivious to the lessons presented to me, but one thing remains that will never disappear, no matter how many times I experience this. It is the puzzled expression that appears on my face whenever I hear the latest escapade in stupidity.
This is the attitude I had going into the holiday. I had to get away from most people, and that is how I found myself on top of the Medical Arts building. After having played Scattergories and hearing the amusing teenage male mentality such a game can elicit, it seemed like a very good spot. From up there Sam and I could look down at my car (I never realized how good it looks from the air) and at the cops with impunity. Off to the north was the rotating beacon atop the hospital's helipad, and off to the southeast was the same beacon at the Savage City airport. There was a warm glow in front of that beacon; the Savage City Reformatory, where the best and the brightest go to relax from a society full of conflicting messages they are unable to process.
Sam had just come back from Georgia, protesting the School of the Americas. I am fairly ignorant about this subject and I will freely admit it; I know that it is a bad school that teaches people to be terrorists, or something like that. But that is all I know. It is a popular target for protests, and though I would have to compare the rates of atrocities committed by graduates of that school to the atrocities committed by, say, alumni of the University of Minnesota before I felt comfortable protesting, fundamentally I would agree. I don't agree with the WTO protests, but that topic threatens too much to go off on some teddible, teddible tangent, so I will leave it alone for now.
It is a hard time for leftist fun and protests. Some of the problems arise from such stupid demonstrations as those in Seattle. Everywhere liberals with their hearts in the wrong places (which roughly translates to nowhere near their heads) are fucking up civil disobedience, by doing things such as going on a hunger strike to get a better professor to demanding that no black people be fired, despite gross incompetence. Good, wholesome protests are few and far between. There are no problems nowadays with the clear-cut demarcations of right and wrong that existed in the past. Hell, it was easy to see that it was wrong when police turned fire hoses and dogs on people because of the colour of their skin. I wouldn't have to see much of that before I would be on a bus to Selma. However, people nowadays are turning stupid cases into the moral equivalents of those a generation ago. This leads to such stupidity as saying the Vice-President in charge of athletics and student development during the worst scandal in the history of the University of Minnesota was fired not because he allowed it to happen, but because he was black. That's a good way to piss everybody off with illogic, but it's not helping make the world a better place.
On the other side, then, you have Nazi posters suddenly appearing on campus at the U. Now, Nazi groups and the KKK are no strangers to Savage City, but I used to think that a larger, more liberal, less Wallaceite campus such as the one I attend in Minneapolis was free of such things. Sure, there are crazy racists and White Power freaks in the student population, but the atmosphere is slightly less conducive to expressing those views here. But nevertheless, posters stating that race mixing is a crime spontaneously appeared, and the National Socialist Movement was responsible.
In this day and age, then, protesting is problematic. The enemies are still there, of course, but they no longer take their direct orders from Mayor Daley and wear easily identifiable uniforms. They go to church and go to work with the ideas and mentalities that were drummed into them from childhood, and though they don't overtly act with hate, they are affected subconsciously. Protesting won't solve this problem. I said as much to Sam, knowing that protesting in this day and age is getting to be increasingly absurd. He countered by saying that such a time is perfect for protesting, becuase things are at their least visible and publicity is necessary. To do any different would simply be, well, fair-weather social consciousness. Which is true in many ways, but there are still problems with this approach.
The conversation drifted away from protesting to general philosophies. It was at this point Sam made a very interesting proposal. In the spirit of Objectivism and Libertarianism versus more paternalistic forms of society, why don't we simply separate the two? Those who are gung-ho about living in a place where only the fit survive and everything is full of intentionality can live in their Galt's Gulch with their contemporaries, while those who simply wish to get along with the emotions and dreams in a world that is not dog-eat-dog can have their own system. The Objectivists will not be bothered by a bunch of stupid "looters" in their midst, and those who choose to live in a society that is roughly like it is now will not have to hear about how altruism and emotions not based on logic are inherently weak. Sounds like a win-win situation to me.
The problem that I face, however, is trying to figure out which side of the divide I would fall on. I have drifted back and forth over the year, becoming less compassionate in the fact of increased absurdity (which is what I am feeling now) and becoming less cut-throat in times of relative happiness. I seem to be in the middle of those poles. I have become increasingly moderate in my old age, to be sure, and this is just another example. A possible solution would be to create some third society for us fence-sitters to be in, but that would lead to increased fragmentation until I found myself in a society and a minority of one. Great. That is the definition of insanity.
The appeal of any type of life philosophy is the fact that you will never be in a minority of one. Most people will gladly give up the possibilities associated with free thought in order to ensure that they are never without allies. The most moronic religious beliefs exist because there are a lot of people who believe in them, and as long as they believe they don't have to explain to each other why they do. If I attack some rigid thinker, he or she will be be happy knowing that no matter how well I logically cut up their beliefs, there are other people who will totally agree with the philosophy and they will all sit around and talk about how wrong I am. For me, never really being sure of what I believe in because I have no book, no sage to turn to when I doubt. Perhaps this is the reason that I once heard, "You think about how things should be instead of just accepting how they are? That's so cool." It's not hard to get depressed by sentiments like that.
I wish this had a point. That would mean that I do have a direction, that I am not merely being carried along by forces I can't control. But unfortunately that is not the case. I find myself dangerously close to the kind of banality that characterizes average life. Just another middle-class freak who isn't doing anything great. The danger comes from the fact that this way of living is frighteningly easy and can even be happy once in a while. At the very least, it is not cutting me down. But I know damn well that the destruction will happen in the future if I continue. So the question is now or later? I have fought mediocrity without really knowing why. Now I feel that I might be wrong, that "being myself" may mean being average. I used to wonder how people go themselves into strangely fulfilling ruts. But this year taught me that I can do the same thing too! It was only fate that kept me from the easy path before.
I see the end of this year as a wall to break through. After it passes, after I see the fallout from the insanity, I think I will be able to choose the correct path. This may be the next Act of my life. We'll see.- Details
- Written by: Nathan Hunstad
- Category: Think About The Way
Think About The Way IX
By Doctor Gonzo
16 October 1999
Minneapolis — The cold stare was quite blatant. The voice was low and abrupt. I had been feeling superficially cheerful of late, and of course I would stop and say "Hi" to somebody that I ran into in the lobby. When my greeting was returned, however, it had been dragged through the mud of a thousand illicit trysts and the fallout from those visits. It wasn't wholly unexpected, and there was nothing I could do but unconsciously shrug it off. Even smile about it for a while. Why, yes, I could be quite an asshole, from certain points of view. There were many people who would have reason to hate me for my actions, and at least that means I am having an impact. I have said it before: if somebody hates me, that means I am doing something right.
When it happened again a few days later, however, I was not in such a reflective mood. Sure, I was an idiot who sometimes ran amok like a bull in a china shop, but everybody does. I don't want to add any hate to the world whatsoever, but the best I can do is guarantee that I don't live a life full of enmity. I could not be responsible when others became indignant at my actions. Besides, what does hating me prove? After all, those people who have a visceral aversion to me hardly have any contact with me. They no longer consider me a friend, if they ever did. They are not in a position to use their hatred to try and change my behaviour, or seek revenge. They are wasting emotion, bringing people down for no good cause. And the people that do deserve to be chastised, if they exist at all, are ignored.
I hate very few people in this world; actually, I do not hate a single person on this Earth. Those that I do hate, which number in the single digits, are not members of humanity. They do not belong to the Kingdom of Ends, and perhaps they never did. They are creatures who have committed crimes against mankind so disgusting they have given up all rights as humans, as far as I am concerned. Even this hatred is more abstract than anything else. With one exception, I have never even seen, much less had contact with, those that I have such great disdain for. They are out there, many of them, and that is something to live with. Those people who have had much greater impact on me and my life, those people who have destroyed my family, sent me into long depressions, attempted to squash my dreams with mediocrity, those people I do not hate.
People do stupid things like that. It's to be expected. Hopefully, when people make mistakes and fuck up they learn a lesson and live a better life because of it. More often they learn no lesson, but instead sit around and wonder why they are always screwing up. Either that, or they screw up without having any consciousness of the fact that they are fuckups. While these outcomes are not the best possible, one cannot argue with their prevalence, and so it is stupid to think otherwise. When somebody that I know demonstrates an inability to learn from their mistakes, I simply catalog that fact and store it away in memory. They will probably not be believable in the future, even if their words dictate otherwise.
As crazy Mr. Keaveny put it to me, I put the blinders on a year ago and charged unseeing through a plate glass window. What blinded me was the fact that I was listening to people's words instead of paying attention to their actions. As a writer myself, and now a half-assed journalist of sorts, I knew full well the power of words to placate and falsify. I have dripped honey to people using words many times, in many languages, for a long time. I usually like to think that I am at least a cut above most others, for I never knowingly lie and I am frank with my idiocies, but only a fool is so callous as to not say the words that one thinks the audience wants to hear, whatever that audience may be. People have used the same trick on me. They have manipulated their thoughts in order to create some impression in my mind that they desired. Again, it is done by everybody. No use in getting upset over this fact. Why not? It's simple . . .
"The guilty undertaker sighs . . ."
Though it was not Homecoming, the damage seemed to be just as great. In the streets, benches lay overturned, a target for marauding bands of drunk Wisconsinites. Here and there smashed bottles lay in the gutter. At one intersection somebody had gone so far as to rip the traffic light off of a pole. Whole blocks smelled of beer. The only explanation for such a night was that the next day, Saturday, was the day of the Minnesota-Wisconsin football game. And that meant roving bands of idiots prowled along the avenues, in search of alcohol, bare shoulders, and windows to shatter.
For most people who have outgrown a 13-year-old's mentality, this scene is repulsive. It is not much fun seeing people who are so drunk that they pass out in the bathroom of their rum-laced dorm. One would think that a person who has a BAC of .209% would have better things to do that attempt suicide through Busch Light. A string of marriage proposals made when inebriated to a dozen men and women cheapens the sanctity of such a union, intelligent people would say. It is not very hard to work up a fearsome contempt for these people, but it is hard to put that contempt to any use.
It is hard to see humanity dragged down to such a level, for I believe that humanity has the potential to be the greatest realization of beauty and excellence possible. Such potential, however, is far from foremost in mind when you see a couple of male examples of the species beating the hell out of each other on the ground. It's tragic, to say the least. But, what can you do?
Not a damn thing. The quickest route to depression is to take offense at every mistake and instance of evil behaviour in people. There is so much of it that the pointlessness of righteous indignation will quickly overwhelm you, forcing you to hide under the blankets on your bed. There is a fine line that some of us walk, the near-impossibility of trying to reconcile all the double-standards and hypocrisies with what we have been taught. I am bumping up against that limit again, and the result is not pretty.
There is one solution. Stick all people in the realm of inanimate objects. This simple answer will make almost all interactions with people tolerable, if not enjoyable. Use as an axiom in your logical framework the notion that people are not responsible for their actions most of the time, and thus it is not worth it to get angry, let alone try and change them. Of course, this attitude may be seen as mildly patronizing ("Besserwessi"as those crazy Germans say), vaguely utilitarian, and downright cynical. But the alternative is to continue to expect people to think before they act, and proposition that is not likely to be realized anytime soon.
That aside, however, this belief is not as cynical as one might expect. Just think about how many times you do not have a choice in actions, that you must do one thing. If you work for a collections agency, you don't have a choice but to send out your goon squads when some person decides to welsh on a large loan. If you are a cashier at a liquor store, you must pull out your shotgun and threaten the idiot tries to pass off a fake, unlaminated Wisconsin DL as his own. Even I don't have much chance for independent thought in my job: when somebody is eating in a library, for example, I have to tell them to knock it off. It's automatic.
It is a widely accepted truism that inanimate objects have no free will. My car does not decide to break down simply to spite me. Electricity does not decide to run through my arm when I grab live wires. Money does not get up and leave my checking account of its own accord. The fact is, cars break down, money gets spent, and electricity will shock you when you grab hot wires. It is utterly pointless to get angry at these events (though some people do). So my car broke down. Who cares? What did I expect?
The same thing holds for most people most of the time. When I see some punk-ass skateboarder on campus, I must tell them to get lost. It is University policy that there is no skateboarding on campus, and it is my job to enforce such policies. It will do them no good to protest, because I can not change the statute. That is not my job; my job is to get them to leave. If they insist on giving me shit for it, that will piss me off, and once again I have no choice but to call the police to get them to comply. When somebody is non-compliant, I call the cops. End of story. Does this stop people from getting pissed, from yelling "Fuck you, toy cop!" as they slink away in anger and disgust? Hell no. These people have not mastered the technique of selective anger. They are generally angry. They are not happy, except when they have a reason to be angry. That way, they can feel slighted, and bitch about how nobody likes them, how that goddamn security monitor is out to get them. Bullshit. I don't care about them one way or another. I have already forgotten about them. They are faceless. As long as I am on duty, I see offenses, not people. I have to.
Are people inanimate objects all the time? I would like to think not. But that is only because religion has made me impervious to existentialist arguments. Those tricky Catholics. I can reject most of their explicit morality as ridiculous and outdated, but I cannot escape that goddamn guilt. I implicitly believe in the inherent wisdom in delayed gratification. Don't act out of weakness now, because you will be rewarded later. When that will be, I don't know (and it is kept pretty hazy). But never question that fact. Dwell at the right hand of the Lord, etc. etc. etc.
So it is basically religious guilt that keeps me from denouncing all humans as automatons. If I could live the existentialist life, just doing whatever seemed right and proper at the time, never believing that I had any choice, I would be happy. Sure, some people would do things to piss me off, but I would get mine because I would return the favour in spades. Running amok, trashing relationships and paying little attention to whether people are better or worse off for my actions. I have to maximize my happiness now, because now is all I have. That's what everybody else is doing. They don't have any choice; they are inanimate objects.
I can't do it. I don't even believe in heaven, but I have this extremely overpowering tendency to think in terms of doing "The Right" thing, whatever it may be. Don't sacrifice some uncertain future payback for temporary enjoyment now. You don't get ahead in life by telling self-righteous old men to go fuck themselves, because though it may feel good now it will come back to haunt you later. And so forth.
Would society be better off if everybody lived for the moment, or if sacrifice and calm planning were the rule? Either one would work, I think. It only becomes a problem when expectations don't match reality. We expect people to think for the future, but they act like goddamn inanimate objects without free will and they choose to live for today. If my car had a free will, it wouldn't break down until it was at a garage and I didn't need to drive for a while, because that would make the most sense from a future reward standpoint (and it did . . . perhaps Gonzo does think). If people thought ahead, would they slash my tires out of jealous rage? I doubt it.
This philosophy is missing one important aspect, however, and that is when to view people as inanimate objects and when not to. Though people may not be able to change a lot of the things they do, hopefully they can change some. When somebody treats me like a pariah, I would hope that there would be a choice, and thus a reversal, on the matter. It can be argued either way, however, depending on how far you want to go in your analysis of a person's actions. It is not a pretty sight, for the most part.
And I have seen. People are more easily read than one tends to believe. You just have to look.
It was small comfort when I learned this afternoon that the hate I saw from that person way up there at the beginning of my story was not imagined by me. It was also no comfort when things unsaid were left in that state. For the time being, hate was not being increased in the world, but only for the time being. And in order to keep my status as a member of the animate class, it may be necessary to do so. You can't shrug off all actions with a trite philosophy.