Saalon Muyo

I have three real posts in progress, and too much to do to focus on them, so in the meantime, listen to some really fantastic Josh Ritter music.

I was in the back seat of a car, racing down a long, flat road toward Boulder. Brennen was driving, his sister was in the front passenger seat. This song was playing.

If I survive to see Halloween, someone pat me on the back, ok? A deadly gauntlet lies ahead. That little emotional breakdown in June is going to look like picnic time in comparison. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Let’s talk about the good thing first, yeah? The thing that’s all happy and vacation-y, that if it wasn’t taking place during the month of Apocalypse would be excellent. Next Thursday I go to Disney World for five days. It’s the Food and Wine Festival at Epcot. A long weekend of stuffing my face and drinking myself silly is great, sure, but it’s five days when I won’t be doing all the things that I already don’t have time for.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited. I need a vacation. Just the timing, is all.

Because the real Horseman of the Apocalypse is that I’m replacing this bad boy with a whole new website. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to be utterly, totally and completely rewriting the Cultural Trust’s website from scratch. In a month. In one month. By myself. With a vacation shoved into the middle of it. I’ve done a great job of pretending it isn’t coming, but now it’s here – like, it’s here today - and it’s time to start hacking. God help me.

Throw in that zombie 5k run the weekend after I get back from Disney (the one I didn’t bother to train for yesterday because I was too much of a mopey-face to want to do anything) plus the idiotic idea that I could host a Halloween party the weekend after that and the whole mess starts to look…unmanageable.

I’ve also got a short story I was supposed to have finished for a friend at the end of last month, and I had this fantasy where I start real work on my next novel (so I’d have more than one thing for which to get rejection letters, you see), but who the heck knows what’s going to happen there.  If I make it through the month without totally losing it, I’ll consider it a win.  Well, no. If I make it through the month, don’t get fired, don’t break down, survive the flights to and from Disney, don’t fracture an ankle at the Zombie 5k, and get my house cleaned for that stupid party I’m hosting, THEN I’ll consider it a win.

Easy, right?

It’s one of those days.  I’ve blamed a lot of things for them, through the years. Coffee, the season, an upcoming and stressful event, or some altercation, real or perceived.  It’s easy to find a reason if you think about it hard enough.  A reason for the jittery hands and the intermittent nausea, for the irritability and difficulty concentrating, for the general sense that things – maybe everything – are going wrong without reason.

I don’t have it bad, whatever it is. Anxiety? Depression? Cyclothemia? I’ve never spoken to a psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist – not ever – so I’m honestly unsure. It might be nothing at all. Just the regular workings and mood swings of a normal human brain.  It’s tough to know what normal is, since we really only get our own mind to look at.  You just know, sometimes, that things are not working as they should and you don’t have a lever to pull or button to push to make things stabilize.  Whatever it is, it comes and it goes, but never with such force that I’m unable to ride it out.

It’s one of those days, today. It didn’t start that way, and I don’t know when it started going wrong, but I know it’s here. It’s not just the jittery, slightly nauseous feeling. It’s the little nagging tug in my mind, pulling me to look at every conversation I’ve had to find the subtext, the real meaning of what was going on.  The subtext is always the same: It’s falling apart. The job, my friends, my writing. Anything. Everything.  It’s the feeling of friendships slipping away, of realizing that things were never going as well as I thought. It always starts so subtly, with something so plausible, that it feels natural to pick at it and try to work out why.  Then it just spills over the sides and makes everything it touches feel just the tiniest bit off.

And it’s tiny. It is. I don’t stop working. I don’t lose my appetite or sleep for twelve hours. I stay functional. It just sucks to function, and it sucks subtly enough that it’s not clear something is wrong until it’s spiraled just a bit too far for the anxiety to be justified.

It’s worse when something good happens. It slips in, underneath the really good emotions – the triumph, the warmth, the joy – and eats away at them until the happiness becomes anxiety, and anxiety becomes that sick feeling of not just failure, but false success.  I’ve come to expect it on those days, now, and it’s easier to let the wave crest and break over me when I know it’s coming.

Like I said. It’s small. It’s manageable. But as I’ve come to recognize that there are emotions that are not under my control, it’s made me think more about what would happen if it stopped being manageable. That happens, I know. The mess in our brains is not a static thing. It changes as we age. It shifts because of circumstance an environment. It’s as fluid as the parts of our personality over which we can exercise a modicum of control.  I have friends who’ve struggled – both under professional care and on their own – with thoughts and feelings they can’t control, but it’s taken me a long time to really understand how terrible it can be not to know if you’re going to be ok tomorrow.

Honestly, I don’t want to overplay this. It’s not something I even like to bring up.  There are worse problems than fighting through feeling like an irredeemable screw-up and  failure. There’s not being able to fight through it at all.  But I’ve come to realize this is not going away, and I don’t know what to do but to say so in public. To say that there are days when I am not who I would like to be, and that I could – I think – be better at seeing them coming and riding them out. And to admit, in writing, that I’m a little bit afraid that a day might come when managing it is not quite enough.

Hey! We’re back with Movie Education posts! Let the bands play and the cheerleaders do whatever cheerleaders do (What? They cheer? That’s all?) because I’m going to awe and astonish you with classic and beloved films I waited until I was over 30 to see.

King Kong (1933)

Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong is one of the few times I’ve let myself see a remake before the original. By and large, I feel like whoever got there first deserves to get to my brain first, too. But Peter Jackson is a special case, and I made an exception.  I’ve finally looped back to the original and was surprised what a complete and fun film it was. I expected to have to make a lot of excuses for how dated it would be, but I stopped paying attention to when this was made long before I got to the impressive stop motion effects. This movie is what it is – a tragic adventure about a big ape – but for what it is, it’s pretty fantastic.

Fright Night

Once I was obligated to see the remake for David Tennant, I decided not to do what I’d done with King Kong and make every effort to see the original. Especially since I wasn’t so much interested in the remake as I was going to hang out with ladies drooling over Tennant. Here’s the thing with the original Fright Night: It’s ok. It’s got some truly awful performances, and some bizarre special effects choices. It’s also got a really compelling character for Roddy McDowell as Peter Vincent (a character that, in the remake, was so shallow even Tennant couldn’t do much more than make a few funny jokes) and a fun, apple-chomping villain played Chris Sarandon. It’s one of those movies I’d have liked a lot more as a teen, but isn’t the kind of trash heap you could only like at that age.

Nashville

I’m embarrassed to admit that this is the first Movie Education pick that I bombed out on a third of the way through. I love Altman, and I was pretty pumped up to finally see Nashville, but after an hour I still didn’t care about a single thing going on and couldn’t bear to drag through another 2 hours of it. Some day I’ll try again. I’m sure it was me, and not the movie, and I probably just picked the wrong time to give it a chance. I’m a little disappointed in myself.

The Wild Bunch

This movie once sat on my shelf for a year before I gave up and returned it to Netflix.  This time, I didn’t let it sit longer than few days. How did I wait this long to see this movie? It opens with an incredible action montage – not a montage like that Team America song, more like the one they make you watch in film class from Battleship Potemkin - before settling you into the doomed final mission of a group of  outlaws who’ve seen their glory days fade into memory.  The old west is no more, and the law is closing in on William Holden’s gang.  They’re forced into stealing guns for an unstable generalissimo, and step by step are backed into a corner by a world in which they no longer fit. Every performance is great, and if you like the kind of rough westerns Sergio Leone produced, Peckinpah’s classic will rub you just right.

The Graduate

Boy, this one influenced pretty much every director on the planet, didn’t it? Especially Wes Anderson. I bet his screen saver just plays The Graduate on infinite loop, even when he’s asleep.  It’s interesting, because The Graduate is a really good but not really awesome film. It’s funny and well constructed, but it’s also so much a piece of its time that it doesn’t get much father than that.  It’s not that the transition from college into adulthood isn’t still just as unsettling as it is for Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin. It just doesn’t feel like this, not exactly. You can tell it was made in the 1960′s because it’s obsessed with awkward zoom shots and the use of really long lenses pointed at people running toward the camera. I find the visual experimentation of late 60′s and early 70′s American film interesting, but I don’t always like it. The Graduate is well shot, though, and you’ll notice moment after moment from the dozens of films that’ve aped it since it came out.  It’s absolutely worth seeing, but it’s also one of those films that – as time passes – becomes more important than it is great.

Want to hear a great song? Back in the heady days of AudioGalaxy – probably the best music service for finding new stuff that you could hope for – I ran into a song by The Blood Group, called “Odin”.  Now you should listen to it, because it’s genius on toast.

I know I’m biased. When you meet your wife and two of your best friends in the same place, the nostalgia can get pretty thick. Even if that place only ever existed on a server in New York City.

Internet Relay Chat still exists. Like Usenet, it’s not and will never again be what it was, but you don’t have to look very hard to find an IRC chat room.  They’re used mostly for support these days – sometimes the thing they’re supporting is downloading cracked software – but I guess there are still people out there goofing off with people they’d never met like in the old days. I really don’t know. I can’t even bring myself to log on for research, anymore. My memories of those days are too strong.  I don’t want to talk to ghosts.

There was something really free and insane about being in IRC, something that was lost as the internet looked for more managed and controlled ways to get us to socialize.  In IRC, you could drop into a couple chat rooms while juggling a handful of private chats and it all made perfect sense.  Some people were exclusive to one room, but the rest were doing the same thing I did. You’d be talking about Babylon 5 in SciFact’s and rehashing MST3K jokes in the Armageddon Cab Company, and maybe you’d drop into a one-off chat room you just created to force someone to listen to a story idea you now regret telling anyone.  It was social anarchy, controlled only by the barest of administration tools and the threat of group disdain should you make things crappy for everyone else.

Things have changed.  You don’t meet people online like you used to.  Vestiges of the old internet remain, in practice or in spirit, but are scattered into niche communities so small and focused that you only run into them if you’ve got a reason to look.  The really anarchic societies on the net are the Reddits and the Metafilters, but there you’re trading in ideas. It’s not social, at least, not in the way I mean.  Anyway, message boards and Livejournal communities aren’t immediate. The best memories of IRC are of single, wonderful nights where conversations took on lives of their own and I stayed up into the early morning because I couldn’t bear to miss what would happen when I was gone. That’s not something that happens on a message board.

Facebook and its like have pushed us back into boxes where the people we meet are the people we met ten years before, while Instant Messaging programs like Google Chat and Skype keep us locked into one-to-one conversations with people we already like. It’s not that you never meet people, but you don’t meet them the same way. You don’t meet them in a hailstorm of silly, self-generated memes and shared sound clips from movies.  You don’t get that crackle of meeting someone over a drink for the first time and not knowing if you’ll ever talk again.  IRC was like that. It was bar hopping for anti-social teenage nerds, and now it’s gone.

When I talk about the old days to Brennen or Brent or Rachel – all people I met in those wild, old days – we end up circling around to Twitter.  Like IRC, there’s a bit of anarchy in its blood.  It’s not the same: It’s time delayed; you can’t split a conversation off into its own room; if you don’t individually follow every participant in a thread you’re missing the conversation. There are still some weird barriers to meeting people that IRC never had.  It’s close, though. It’s really, really close. I know it’s close because, for the first time since IRC, I’ve made friends – real, serious friendships – on Twitter.

When the economy came crashing down around our heads in 2008, I found my way to a podcast called Planet Money.  Within a few months, other listeners had found each other on Twitter. It started with a shared fear of where everything was headed, but it wasn’t long before it became a lot more for some of us.  Laura Conaway, who was in charge of wrangling the community around Planet Money, called us the Recession Club.  We’ve kept the name, but for those of us who still talk, we’re not a club anymore. We’re just friends.  We’ve met in fleshland; some of us multiple times. We wouldn’t have gotten there on a message board.  There’s something about being able to drop into a conversation and burn an hour with people that writing public emails can never do. Twitter gave us room for anarchy. Friendship needs a little bit of that to grow.

Last night was one of those nights. I don’t know what started it. You never do. At some point, running gags start overlapping and merging and people slip in as they realize there’s an anthill to be kicked. Your wife or roommate or parents or cats – whoever’s sharing meatspace with you – walks past and wonders what the hell you’re laughing at. You try to explain, but it’s impossible. It’s not just unfunny to anyone on the outside. It’s silly and stupid and weird.  You’re either part of the moment or you’re not.

That’s what the old days of IRC were about.  It was as close to most of us boring, suburban types will get to living in a big, bohemian house, drinking vodka out of coffee cups and sharing jokes that stop being funny when you walk out the door in the morning.  I’ll never get those old days back. The world that created them no longer exists. Nor has it gone away forever. Nights like last night, the feeling that when the parties are over you’ll have stumbled out with a new friend or two…I thought those days had passed. You can’t go home again, especially when you’re home is filled with Russian bots and Warez trading squatters, but I guess the road ahead isn’t always as unfamiliar as I feared.

I went into the woods and I came back unharmed. Then I scraped my elbow at the bar. My life in a nutshell/

I guess I have relationships on the brain, since I’m cherry picking a quote from an AV Club article about Vonnegut.  But like almost everything he’s written, it’s hard to say it better than this:

“Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”