videophage.com

I am only writing to stave off the impending depressive episode that I can feel building up in my body. This is gonna be all off the top. I feel too overwhelmed by choice in this city. I’m too obsessive for this. Just yesterday, hanging out with my new NYU friend for the first time, she takes me to a market and I can’t decide what cookies to buy. Most of the options were too expensive and I knew whatever I chose it wasn’t gonna be very good and I didn’t need to be buying them in the first place, so I made myself pick up a cheap, day-old black-and-white cookie after much pacing and deliberation and complaining. My next essay that I’ve been researching and outlining is gonna take so much time and energy and I don’t think it’s gonna turn out that good. It’s not a novel idea it turns out, so I’m not sure how best to go through with it. The laptop I have is a real piece of shit and it’s a hassle to get it to do the simple things I want it to do. I miss my computer back home. How pathetic is it that my happiness is tied to a machine? I guess it’s not that pathetic to be like everyone else. The only Übermensch is that man you will never see or hear from, living away from everyone according to his own beliefs, on his own terms. If the Nietzschean ideal can be surmised as the warrior-poet, I see not many better contenders than Ted Kaczynski. I feel like every man at his core is a libertarian: deep down, we all want to be homesteaders. An entire class of people that cannot stomach being told what to do. And I see videos of these guys going out into the wilderness with next to no survival skills and an iPhone, where they’ll learn how to live off the land and build a house and gather food, like a real man. Yet, they have to post. It’s a compulsion. I genuinely believe it’s just our evolution. The Call of the Wild is overwritten by the Cry for Attention. I try to reject—more like, moderate—all this technology that wastes time and kills attention spans, while, on the other hand, I exalt it in the abstract as maybe still possessing some liberatory potential. The Accelerationist Manifesto professes this doctrine as well: that is, technology can be repurposed under a new economic organization: it can liberate us! the Keynesian future isn’t dead, it just got delayed! However, not even a machine is born with a completely blank slate. There’s too much us in them. As a species, we have always been searching out care. It’s our nature to seek it. I suppose seeking always ends in destroying. I won’t shit on these guys for wanting to get some likes by uploading their lives. I’m not a primitivist, and from what little I know, I honestly think it seems like an ineffectual political philosophy, but aesthetically it just makes sense to me. There is a beauty there, an appreciation that emanates from my bones— something I can neither question nor adequately describe. I wouldn’t want to. Jameson is wrong. There is no waning of affect. On the contrary, there is an overproduction (and thus, a manufactured overconsumption of this surplus affect). Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of Shaviro lately. I was introduced to him in college and I agree that no one’s doing it like him when it comes to writing on film—although I find myself legitimately and equally excited by the stuff he’s written on any other subject. I have finished a handful of books and essays in just the past week or so, which feels great (with many of these PDFs just picked up on random urge and finished in just a few sittings or less), but then it all gets too overwhelming again. I can’t read everything and I certainly won’t understand a good chunk of what I do read, I can’t possibly comment on all of it. This next big essay idea keeps finding new sources for itself, and like the last one, will take months to fix together. I need to focus on other things to stay sane, but then it’s just there weighing on my mind, so how can I do anything else? So, I don’t do anything. It feels like a black hole honestly. Maybe that’s just writing in general. The obsessive-compulsive cannot be broken, it seems. It’s so frustrating to be someone so easily discouraged and afraid of criticism and rejection, but then after putting forth the minimum amount of effort to convince myself “well I tried, didn’t I?,” knowing full well that I’m not gonna get anywhere, I can’t learn to just give up. I can’t throw a punch, but I can take one. I like to call myself a “not-angry person,” but it was only yesterday I actually realized how angry I still am. My anger is not outward, but I don’t feel it’s inward either. Freud believed melancholia to be a manifestation of anger toward oneself. I genuinely don’t know if I’m angry at myself. I certainly don’t express it outwardly. There are no vocal outbursts, no smashed keyboards, no hatchets through doors, no slamming fists. I don’t think anyone will ever see or hear that again. But, there is that venom. If not inward, then interior. Whenever I see something so mundane that it really should not even be given a second thought or garner any more than a nanosecond’s reaction, I try to mediate between myself and the anger, but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. That’s because it’s not a feeling: it only becomes an emotion when you try to rationalize the affect. I eventually forget, and then I’m angry again at the next thing. You can pull a man out of anger, but you cannot pull the anger out of a man. It’s the only emotion we’re taught is acceptable, says bell hooks. It feels like I have to undo all the damage of purposefully making myself as invisible as possible over the last decade. I don’t get to be mad that no one wants to pay attention to me. I don’t want it, but I do. I won’t pretend to be above the want for validation. I’m not better than that. I’m not above scrolling on my phone for far too long or wishing for the perfect partner to help alleviate my problems. My Bluetooth headphones broke for good right before I moved here, then the iPhone adapter for these awful old CD player earphones broke, and then yesterday, the speakers on my phone stopped making sound altogether, which isn’t even the first time that’s happened. I walked to Target to go buy Swiffer pads and headphones. I didn’t care what kind they were. I was going in there and getting whatever: no looking for a better deal online, no standing there reading the back of every box; I just bought the standard Apple EarPods with a new adapter and left. Cleaning the floor and listening to music. I knew that would pick me up. I always kinda thought the music-as-therapy/music-makes-you-feel-less-alone crowd were annoying, but I did feel it working. I still kinda feel like shit again. Now, I’m trapped with these headphones. I can’t hear anything without them. After two days of training for my new job, I decided to stop showing up. I hated it there. I hated those people. The second day wasn’t just giving it a second chance, but an exercise in figuring out what it was that was rubbing me the wrong way about this place. I can only describe its “culture” as bro-ish. It felt like going in to work at a frat house. It was even funnier when I learned that this shitty Scandinavian company for all its emphasis on “chill vibes” was sued not too long ago for misogynistic hiring practices. It all made sense. I didn’t want to feel like the weird kid who got caught sneaking into a Sigma Chi party and was now being publicly humiliated in front of everyone for thinking he could have ever gotten away with pretending to be one of them. The majority of that training felt more like hazing than any sort of learning. I am a quitter. I’m proud of it. I don’t care. I don’t care enough to describe it in anymore detail, but it made me smile to think of their reaction when I wasn’t there the next day. Of course, they don’t actually care. It’s whatever, I got paid for the online courses and the two days I showed up. I want to find something better. The backbone of my pseudo-justification for moving here was to get closer to a thriving artistic and filmic culture. No, it’s because three years ago I was the angriest and unhappiest l’d ever been and wanted to leave everything behind. I really thought that was possible. I said that I was going to move to New York City. I had to! Even after clawing myself out of that hole, I still felt compelled to go through with this promise. I forget that me now is not the same as me then, or maybe I forget the opposite. I really don’t know. On the one hand, I made it here, which is insane; yet, I’ve already put up my hand to throw in the towel. I’ve barely tried to find a job that won’t make me want to kill myself. Wasn’t that the whole point, to find something that relates to my passions? Whatever, I got paid to learn how to make coffee and juice for a few days. I’ll see your $150 and raise you a pair of new earbuds. It was only a matter of time before I had no other recourse but to admit that I too get lonely and in need of comfort.