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Tunneling down into the revenue vortex, which is not only exceedingly boring but also kind of melancholy-inducing.
Minds have refractory periods just like muscles. Thus I can’t really crank out endless torrents of words without pausing to look at the Met Gala gowns (hideous), engage in endless debates on the last Mad Men episodes (insipid), and check up on the doings of random individuals over the past 40 years with whom I may or may not have had sex a very, very long time ago.
These activities make me feel very insignificant.
Of course, I am insignificant, but most of the time, while I’m not exactly okay with it, it’s just another one of those value-neutral facts.
Except when I’m doing scut work. Then I feel very sorry for myself.
Why aren’t I in hideous haute couture designed by the same designer who did the Emperor’s new clothes, parading my new silicon butt cheeks in front of the Metropolitan Museum?
Why don’t I have an HBO series? (Mine wouldn’t be about the advertising world of the 1950s; it would be about a manic pixie dream girl in the early days of the Internet.)
Why didn’t all those people with whom I may or may not have had sex 40 years ago jump off a cliff or something?
But really, why don’t I have a rich uncle or something that I don’t know about, and why doesn’t that rich uncle die and leave me all his money?
I keep thinking about the Life of Vincent Van Gogh as some sort of illustrative Zen parable. Did he sell a single painting while he was alive? Maybe one or two. He was just a miserable human being, a sweet soul racked by all sorts of psychic pain. A kind of Quasimodo. A kind of Christ. Would it have been any kind of compensation at all for him to know that in the hereafter, the world would commoditize those strange, twisted visions inked from pigments he ground up his very brain cells to create?
Is it better to be happy while you’re alive or to make waves after you’re dead?
Not just a rhetorical question because, of course, I don’t believe in death. Or, at least, not in death as something more than a caesura.
I believe in reincarnation. In my own life, there has been spillover from time to time between past and present lives, when I was very young, at least, to the extent that I wondered, Where the hell am I? What’s going on?
But never to the extent where I read about some dead person and though, Yup, that used to be me. And look – I did okay for myself after I croaked.
And that’s the kind of thing that would make all the tedium worthwhile.
See how gallant I am? Notice me, notice me, notice me-e-e-e-e-e-e...
Minds have refractory periods just like muscles. Thus I can’t really crank out endless torrents of words without pausing to look at the Met Gala gowns (hideous), engage in endless debates on the last Mad Men episodes (insipid), and check up on the doings of random individuals over the past 40 years with whom I may or may not have had sex a very, very long time ago.
These activities make me feel very insignificant.
Of course, I am insignificant, but most of the time, while I’m not exactly okay with it, it’s just another one of those value-neutral facts.
Except when I’m doing scut work. Then I feel very sorry for myself.
Why aren’t I in hideous haute couture designed by the same designer who did the Emperor’s new clothes, parading my new silicon butt cheeks in front of the Metropolitan Museum?
Why don’t I have an HBO series? (Mine wouldn’t be about the advertising world of the 1950s; it would be about a manic pixie dream girl in the early days of the Internet.)
Why didn’t all those people with whom I may or may not have had sex 40 years ago jump off a cliff or something?
But really, why don’t I have a rich uncle or something that I don’t know about, and why doesn’t that rich uncle die and leave me all his money?
I keep thinking about the Life of Vincent Van Gogh as some sort of illustrative Zen parable. Did he sell a single painting while he was alive? Maybe one or two. He was just a miserable human being, a sweet soul racked by all sorts of psychic pain. A kind of Quasimodo. A kind of Christ. Would it have been any kind of compensation at all for him to know that in the hereafter, the world would commoditize those strange, twisted visions inked from pigments he ground up his very brain cells to create?
Is it better to be happy while you’re alive or to make waves after you’re dead?
Not just a rhetorical question because, of course, I don’t believe in death. Or, at least, not in death as something more than a caesura.
I believe in reincarnation. In my own life, there has been spillover from time to time between past and present lives, when I was very young, at least, to the extent that I wondered, Where the hell am I? What’s going on?
But never to the extent where I read about some dead person and though, Yup, that used to be me. And look – I did okay for myself after I croaked.
And that’s the kind of thing that would make all the tedium worthwhile.
See how gallant I am? Notice me, notice me, notice me-e-e-e-e-e-e...
