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May 26, 2007
i'm just loving the world into a crisis of change
Sorry for the non-posting, but your droog and humble narrator has been a bit distracted the last month or so. The list of stuff that's gotten in the way of the bloggery is long, but the main culprit has been a fairly mundane and workaday time-crunch, some pals having employed me since the start of April to think about the Internet for them. As a result, '07 has been crap when it comes to the posting, and those of you who are still around to read this update-cum-apologia really do walk super-saintly in the light of the god/patron saints/loa/whatever of personal publishing. I mean, I have literally stopped telling people I have a blog, such is the wasterlandery of EBOG'07: January I was recovering from Kenya, February I was tending to a sick nana, March I was recovering from tending to a sick nana, and April and May I was out earning the Yankee dollar, bringing us up to the present, five months with a grand total of 10 posts tops. Crap, I tell you!
More cryptically, I will also confess that since about New Years I've been in the throes of one of those periodic, every 7-years or so psychic spasms, a kind of transformative life-seizure that threatens to reset about everything before it wanes, leaving me with little in the way of spare cycles to devote to, say, Alberto Gonzales or Imus or the new LCD Soundsystem record. It's a shame, because so much is happening about which I think I have a cent or two to throw in, but thems be the proverbial blogger-breaks. Fortunately, the world is so chock-full of smart, entirely google-able people who are constantly saying things I would have said, just as well and better. Everyday I read the blogs and feel outraged and depressed, sure, but also old-fashioned inspired at how many fine people there are out in the world putting words and ideas and pictures and things together. My only regret is that all of you don't live in Downtown LA, thereby allowing us to have a pint together, develop crushes on one another, run around and plot world domination, or, barring that, utopia. My template for the way I feel about my blog-roll and daily blog reading habits is Fort Greene, Brooklyn in the 1990s, a time and place when everyone I ever wanted to know lived a few blocks away from me and did the same work I did, when we all belonged to the same dial-up BBS (!), i.e., Omar Wasow and Peta Hoyes' New York Online. Aging "golden age" cranks are a bore, I know, but I really do have to say that I have seen the rise-and-fall of our era's last/best promised land, and its lingering hold on my thoughts and inclinations is precisely why each and every one of you seems so familiar to me. It really and truly is like we all got high together once in someone's park-facing apartment; it's completely amazing.
Since we're all buds here, I feel like I have to warn you, though, that posting will likely continue to be similarly thin heading through August, this because on top of everything else I've been accepted to, er, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy, held annually in Seattle, Washington, USA. So I might be out of the loop a bit. I head to Seattle in couple of weeks and won't be "back" (whatever that means. I'm barely here now) until 8/3 or so, and I've been warned that the pace of writing (a story a week for six weeks) has made it difficult for bloggers and journalers to get their entry-a-day in. We'll see.
I went to a graduation (not mine) a few weeks ago that was complicated and bitter for a bunch of reasons best explicated elsewhere, but in the midst of what was a classic downward spiral I was literally shocked out of myself by a speaker on stage exhorting the exiting class to "love the world into a crisis of change." (Does anyone know where that line is from?) What a strange and random and dangerous thing to hear while brooding your way into a comfortable and easy funk! Because, first off, there are underlying ways in which loving the world runs counter to the grain of my temperament, brain-chemistry, outlook and so on. I mean, the world sucks most days, it seems fucked and populated by vast numbers of annoyances and mediocrities, so the thought bubble over my head at any given moment tends to be something along the lines of "what a moron you are!" or "jesus fucking christ can you stop making bullshit sounds with you mouth!" or "my only (other) regret is that there is no actual hell for you to go to!" To love such a world calls for a fundamental re-orientation, and to love it into a crisis of change requires (as I understand the idea, at least) not just a passive encounter with the world's notional lovable-ness, but the active, constant introduction of newsness and goodness into said word, a commitment to making true and useful and decent things for other people in hopes that your honorable work of addition might engender something similarly new, who the fuck knows what but it better be better than this shit.
So, if you ever find yourself wondering exactly what I'm up to at any given moment and the blog is no help just tell yourself: oh, right! Gary is supposed to be out loving the world into a crisis of change! I have no idea what that actually means but lack of info seems to me to be the valuable part. It's like that scene in The Matrix when Trinity tells Neo he's been down that street before, he knows exactly where it leads. That movie is bullshit on a bunch levels, but it's right that you might as well be dead the day you get sure nothing will ever change.
Posted by ebogjonson in brain maintenance, ebog housekeeping, on May 26, 2007 10:57 AM
Comments
"Because, first off, there are underlying ways in which loving the world runs counter to the grain of my temperament, brain-chemistry, outlook and so on. I mean, the world sucks most days, it seems fucked and populated by vast numbers of annoyances and mediocrities"
Yeah. A friend and mentor of mine once wrote what i think might be one of the best encapsulations of this sense of being a resident alien, looking out from some sort of self constructed vantage point of judgment just to deal with the crap of it all... I'll try to find a good version of it and get it posted one of these days.
Anyhow, the line of truth as i remember it, is that "morris was building a hard little god inside of him" and most days, i can feel just such a weight.
so it would have to be for a crisis of change that i could even begin to truly love the world...but i also suspect that the same is true about my capacity to love myself.
good luck...and thanks for writing this.
Posted by: sly civilian at May 28, 2007 7:24 AM
Talk about a line that breaks you out of a funk. One of YOUR lines did it for me: "you might as well be dead the day you get sure nothing will ever change." I am in a highly pessimistic space these days. I've even been feeling smugly "right" since, of course, I've been taking in info according to my framework of belief. But since I ain't dead, I guess I better start believing something will change...
Also, I, too, was living in Ft. Greene in the 90's (although I didn't meet you until around '03 when neither one of us lived there anymore). Everyone I wanted to know or ever wanted to know, was living in my neighborhood! Even when I went out downtown, the coolest people I would meet -- I'd find out they lived in my neighborhood. While reading your post, I realized that Those Days are the standard/expectation I keep having for my now. Which means I'm living in the past; a past I can't go back to. Again, another wake up call.
So thanks. Two times.
Posted by: Anonymous at May 28, 2007 9:22 AM
Happy you're doing that workshop ... sounds like a very good place to be.
And yeah, I really miss those NYO days -- I had SUCH a crush on you.
:) D
Posted by: sensashun at June 4, 2007 5:46 PM
oh LAWD
;)
Posted by: ebog/gary at June 5, 2007 2:06 PM
Interesting turn of phrase. "crisis" and "love" particularly not going together for me, traditionally. hmmm.
congrats on the workshop!! exciting. have a great time!
Posted by: belledame222 at June 12, 2007 11:55 AM
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