they will come one evening
with a dump truck
back it up to your house
and pour out the money
take it
take the dirty money
spend it wrong
spend it madly, wrongly
on matches for bridges
on ladders not for your own feet but for the next and the next ones
let them give you the only thing they have
as you win their game then pocket the dice and run
ask for more
spend it all
buy pitchforks
(Jan 2022)
What is a ‘fixer’?
The term has immoral connotations, referring one who dodges, bends, rewrites the rules, gives unfair advantage to a certain outcome. Lawyers, generally. Mafia, frequently. People with the tools and ambition to bend reality to the shape they desire.
It’s a fun word, though. Flexible and ironic. To fix means to do many things. To repair or remedy, to put in place, to arrange, to neuter an animal. It’s a threat (“I’ll fix you!”) and a humble request (“can you fix this?”) It’s everything I like about language.
To fix is to set in place with a sense of permanence that time betrays.
To fix is to render an animal sterile. Fix a genetic line in place, remove from stock.
In the very best orgasms, time and space stop, and start again. That is the stuff in you that once was a supernova, that once was a star, remembering how it felt to be nothing at all. Why is pleasure not sacred?
How can we be expected to fix ourselves when they won’t even let us repair our own phones?
Fix this, fix that.
Fix it to the wall.
Burn the wall.
These are uncharted times. The schism between narrative and lived experience is more apparent than it has ever been. That seems like something we need to fix.
I lost a dear friend this year. He was widely agreed to be one of the most frustrating individuals to ever walk the earth. There was no hiding from him. Your foibles, your feints, your fake news: absolutely fair game, and he brought everyone who cared for him to the point of hair-tearing hysteria at least once.
I learned the lyrics of the Gatchaman theme song for that son of a bitch. In phonetic Japanese.
He was also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and voraciously devoted to his goals. I think about him a lot, as I did while he still orbited in an embodied form. He was deeply aware of mortality, of the fleetingness of life, and the need to use your time passionately.
What I feel, in grieving him, is that there truly is no meaning in existence beyond what we ourselves provide. Some may want his death to be a ‘message’ from ‘God’ to value your life, but he was passionately secular, and would have fought you with every ounce of his prodigious logic to prove that his morals derived from anything beyond the human need for belonging and connection.
We cannot satisfy this need through cruelty and restriction. We all belong to the human family. We all belong to the earth. Our walls are false. Created by human minds. If there is a divine, it does not pick and choose which of Creation is most glorious. How bold of us to assume. How unhelpful, when the dented little spaceship we call home is closer than ever to being pushed out of the narrow span of livability.
Adam would have known what I mean. He hated that essentialist bullshit. Worked up until the end of his life to make our world more fair.
What else is there to be done?
I’ve tried to blog many times over the years. Aside from my life-long inability to keep any kind of regular diary for more than a few months, blogging about oneself seems incalculably trite. And damnation but I hate a long-worded ramble about people’s family values on my way to their rhubarb pie recipe. Being no great fount of wisdom about any particular thing, I have never felt I had much to write about.
And then I read this piece by Cory Doctorow.
Doctorow is already a bit of a legend, and this goes a very long way towards explaining how and why. It is also the most instrumental, calculating, analytical, yet least mercenary (Doctorow’s emphasis) description of the value of blogs I have ever read. It has altered my worldview considerably, and I say that as a person who actively alters their worldview on the regular. I do enjoy it when an outside force does it for me.
For you TL:DR types, what makes this different from all other advice I’ve read about blogs? It’s the fact that Doctorow’s primary audience is himself. Most advice says to use the blog to make yourself likeable, create a human persona so you can “connect” with your “target audience.” Whatever you do, don’t write about writing, they say, even though my favourite authors blog about writing all the time. Even though we’re meant to “take the reader on our creative journey.” Write instead about your “passion” or some hobby or your pets… then mention to fans of this aspect of yourself that you happen to write books…
This feels like trying to suck up to rich classmates by talking about horses, then asking if they’ll buy your lemonade. Dude, I’m busy. My passion is writing more books. I don’t want to make small talk. If I’m taking the time to write blog posts, it’s gonna have to be about bigger stuff, and it’s going to have to serve me more directly.
“(T)he thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.”
Doctorow welcomes the public to observe, comment, suggest, reframe and so on, but he blogs first of all to keep a record of his own thinking. Yes, a book or a private e-journal does the same thing, but the internal coding of blog design makes them taggable and searchable. All his ideas, given at least the semblance of coherence, cross referenced, and available all the time, everywhere. I wept, just a little. So much of my time goes to what can only be termed data management that the thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.
The Commonplace Book as Doctorow describes it is present in mainstream thought most obviously as the Bullet Journal. Many bulleters do indeed publish, as five minutes with the hashtag will reveal.
But I don’t know what I’ll do. Utterly inconclusive I admit, but I have a well-practiced habit of promising more than I can deliver, and so I now make far fewer promises. Is this my Commonplace Book? Comments clearly welcome.
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