Anonymous asked: you're unable to obtain fun in the ways most people do, can't take inspiration from the people you know in person as to how to enjoy yourself in life. The thing you think would be the most enjoyable for you would be social domination, as in high profile 60's and 70's nation-building politics at best, or charismatic cult at worst, but you haven't had been able to wedge your way into a position where you could start building that.
>so your anhedonic life is punctuated by bright spots of enjoyment that are ineffable, impossible to share with most people, impossible to coordinate a healthy friend group around. And you accumulate immense amounts of cultural knowledge because understanding social movements is the closest you can get to your dream of creating, controlling a social movement like that.
Not exactly but close, insult anon, and not even that obnoxious, maybe I should start calling you insIGHt anon?
You’re dead on on three things:
1) I do want to oversee some sort of domain that I can shape to my liking and make good enough that people are like “hey konty, nice work you’ve done here” and want to engage with or imitate it
2) I’m alienated from the people around me and their engagement with the world, and this limits the extent I can draw enjoyment from engaging with the world myself.
3) I want to change the culture to my liking, build, or at least find a new (sub?)culture in line with my own ideals.
But only 1) is really an essential, invariant part of myself. The other two are contingent, linked even. 3) is how 1) plays out under conditions of 2), and things are currently 2).
Because I have been in environments I liked, loved, looked around and said “it me” and built up a tribe to go out and enjoy. And under those conditions I relax and look to carve out a place within it. But outside of that my blood rises and I want to tear things down and replace them.
Looking back I had a decent childhood in a not-worst environment that was maybe even ideal to be a previous-generation parent in, but it wasn’t my ideal and I resented it and wanted it shattered. Then I went off to college and the first year was a bit alienating but then I found Risley and everything was good.
And college is a time-bound experience so 1) didn’t really come into play and I accepted I’d have to leave it behind (unlike some mates who stayed in Ithaca, or went to grad school, to chase that dragon).
LA I never really found that but for a while it felt like I was always on the verge and I kept holding out just a bit longer – the whole Hotel California thing – but eventually I got worn too raw and left.
Portland though, when I came, it was the dream. It was like my ideal as filtered through my childhood and made practical and somehow better, where everyone I met was a potential friend or lover and there was a wide variety of little scenes every one of which was like if some small aspect of my history or personality or taste became a whole thing, that I could choose among to join or visit at will.
And under those conditions I could see myself fulfilling 1) by being one of those eccentric pillar of the community Portland burghers. Like, off the top of my head a viable path would be like:
Develop interests into an expertise in 80s-90s home furnishings. Have a stall in the antique mall you visit twice a week. Get called to appraise an estate or consult with a set dresser. Get called more often. Meet a guy into retro computers, agree to split the cost of buying old Tandys and Amigas, he takes the salvageable electronics to rehab, I keep the shells to polish up as period-themed decorative pieces. Offer to weed the neighbors’ front lawns so the whole block looks nice. As the retro home wave catches up to that period, open a small shop on a street still kinda gritty but where the doors open onto sidewalks not parking lots. Hire 20-somethings to work the desk. Make a point of not reblogging when other local business owners try to spread the videocap of some thief like wildfire, cause they have a place in the ecosystem too. When I don’t have anything to restore, Frankenstein together old IKEA pieces into sculptures, show them off at art faires. Start a blog about it. See people post them on Pinterest. See someone in Tennessee start doing it, too. Take a few 26-year-old lovers, maybe decide one’s right to settle and have a kid with. The whole time play pinball, put together 1 or 2 tournaments a year myself. Keep writing here, maybe publish an essay collection or two. Go to a funk show one friend puts on. Go to a scavenger hunt where all the all the items have to be found off strippers’ tattoos. The retro wave passes, which I planned for, and sell down my stock and wind up the business. Through the set decorators I had some impact on how people remember the age of my childhood. Maybe one of the former staff has a millennial-era stall in an antique mall. Die.
And I would’ve been just fine with that. But why don’t I, as you say ACT and make it happen now? Well if you read me closely enough to extract all that insight you know a lot of my recent anguish is that Portlandia, the place where that was all possible, is dead, or dying.
Like, the antique malls can’t pay enough rent to hold their leases without charging stallholders too much to break even. Breaking even plus a bit of consulting doesn’t pay enough to live on so the retro computer guy just doesn’t exist. To make rent the shop would be in a strip mall on looks-like-Florida 180th Street. The people with money and taste for that would never pass by, anyway that class now lives in condos not houses and decorates from catalogs anyway. Not the “where young people go to retire” crew that gives up the chance of ever getting rich for a wonderful background culture, they’re the people who came to Portland because cost-of-living-adjusted salaries for Registered Nurses and people with Masters in Non-Profit Development are up to 12% higher than comparable markets like Raleigh-Durham. The local foot traffic would be immigrants from countries where the 90s looked nothing like that, and gambling addicts zipping down the sidewalkless road shoulder on disability scooters. Single-story two-bedrooms in the neighborhood still cost $350k. The 20-something shop clerks live 15 minutes further out. Everyone still trying the bohemian lifestyle is dispersed to different perimeters of the city so there’s no critical mass to start an art faire, or a funk show. The pinball scene’s already a lot more sedate softboy than the rowdy “drinking club with a pinball problem” shit-talk slap-ass dollar games when I showed up, but now there are guys (guys!) on Facebook complaining about all the toxic masculinity.
So that’s what I’m finding myself alienated from, why I’m in a mood to tear it down or strike out for the frontier.
To return from my fantasia and counter-fantasia to your actual text, I dunno that “social domination” is its own right is it so much as it is the ability to craft and maintain the desired culture. Like, that plus 60s-70s nation building plus culty is like… the postcolonial African and Arab regimes? Gilded palaces, Paris boutiques, harems snatched off the street? And I see no appeal in that (well, maybe Gaddafi, he was a true d’Annunzian). The court life seems tedious and alienating (remember how Abdullah of Jordan is called “King Playstation” and I had that weird experience playing Rocket League with Arab nobles against servants who let them win) and they couldn’t or didn’t cultivate any public culture worth the name.
And I’m not sure I care about the social-movement history stuff I do because of this unfulfillment, the interest in American cultural history goes back to childhood (but, uh, so does the desire to make my own culture, so maybe). “Thinks he’s always the smartest guy in the room, who could do a lot better running things so deserves to, draws on his self-guided reading of history” is def. a recognizable frustrated petty elite male type, but it usually latches onto like, Ancient Rome, or Civil War military history.
(Someone the other day, was it you?, sent an ask about how longing for the golden age of my youth just makes me another garden-variety reactionary, and I wasn’t too insulted by that [well, maybe “garden-variety”], more by the assumption I didn’t have enough self-awareness to notice already myself. Like I notice that my complaint above is basically “the independent petty proprietor is being squeezed out of the economy and culture!” CLASSIC reactionary.)
A connection you could’ve leaned on harder is that my alienation from others (sense of superiority to, tbh) is WHY I can’t build or wield a social movement. Like I said about the depressing realization that being a cult leader is about dealing with broken people’s issues and vulnerabilities all the time.
I do look back and realize my dad’s youth prepared him better - living in mixed neighborhoods full of kids, sports team captain in a parochial school that was a vertical cross-class slice of the population by religion, working a road crew in the summers, joining a fraternity with (black) staff cook and housecleaners, becoming an Airborne officer and being handed a bunch of enlisted men to train and order around. Whereas after elementary school I realize I was very segregated by merit parental income – not just “who lived where the good schools were” (I lived there because my dad grew up there – and then worked with the district and county and land developers to make them “nice”, I guess) but within schools classes “tracked” by, well, class, a sports culture that was strong but retrospectively for kids who would need college scholarships and for kids that… wouldn’t. Growing up the only kid my age in the development of identical houses (not really that fancy, early cul-de-sac loop shared exterior wall “townhouses”, in the region where Toll Brothers later pioneered the “McMansion”), driving past 4 or 5 neighborhoods to visit the houses of the fellow competitive-admission college-bound kids I knew from like, AP classes and World Affairs Club and the Gay-Straight Alliance.
Going to a dojo with lower/middle-middle kids-of-immigrants (and -CalTech-rocket-scientists) maybe helped a bit, or living with some HS dropout food service Portland locals a few years, but I don’t really have the habitus of command, you know? I was raised into the egalitarian deference and let’s-debate-it-out-we-all-want-the-same-things-anyway folkways for the new elite to relate to each other on the assumption our rule would be maintained by broader structures we weren’t taught to uphold and were more likely taught to want torn down when acknowledged at all.
But after it all, if Portland wasn’t the answer what was? Like I have cousins who followed my dad’s path, Cornell undergrad to law school but they’re not professionals, in the sense of autonomy and a stable of clients and cooperation with other local elites to grease the wheels, they’re high-skill employees doing contract review for mergers in merged-themselves national law firms in cheaper-than-NYC machine politics Philly. And the new class of local elites commute down to those same jobs and their local influence comes down to electing people from the right party (Dems!) and telling them to do the right things (Equity! Density! Intersectionality!) that the right podcasts say.
And what if I stayed longer, schmoozed more, worked harder to become a TV screenwriter? I might be a “cultural creative” sure, but even with the writing skill I’ve honed today, with the best connections, with full foreknowledge, I couldn’t have stopped ::gestures around at the culture:: this
I dunno, I think maybe I was prepared to be an excellent member of Generation X. I’ll probably inherit a two-comma sum at some point, end-of-life expenses and proletarian revolution permitting, I’m thinking of the old ways and buggering off to the sticks to build a new community through sheer willpower (here, as usual, meaning “inherited structural advantages”), cause what else is there?