A Blue Pill and Alcohol

It was early, but not too early when he lifted his head. Perhaps it was out of boredom with the ground beneath his feet. Dirt and gravel for three and one half mile, changing only briefly as you cross the bridge. Or perhaps something about the view onto the city had caught his eye.

Portland was just beginning to yawn and stir from sleep; the clouds were still thin enough to suggest that there was sun near by, rising somewhere to the east. His heart was pounding and the sweat was running into his eyes. The city has a real skyline to it, and it did, particularly at that moment. He had seen many cities with distinct skylines, but he had returned to this one. He pondered these thoughts as he rounded a corner, heading for the bridge where the ground would finally change, if only for a moment.

He could feel his limbs freeing themselves of the blue pill and alcohol from the night before. He powered on. Before focusing on the last mile, he noted the lack of cars on the streets and thought it was a good thing. Then one more thought crossed his mind as he looked across the bay:

I don't want to get used to this city without you.

Love in a time of Swine Flu

I sat in the bus station, waiting. A bus was on its way to take me on yet another journey into the unknown. Away from a comfortable place that I have become intimate with; a place with long winters and even longer summer days. Its the place that was my home for seven years, but that I never recognized as home. It is far away from the fast streets of Paris and the Bavarian Alps of my childhood. It is not a European place, nor a Serbian city on the Danube. As I sat waiting for the bus I thought of Bukowski:

when you think about how often
it all goes wrong
You begin to look at the walls
And stay inside
Because the streets are the
Same old movie.

Behind me Wolf Blitzer was discussing the Swine Flu crisis. People are calling for a closing of the border with Mexico. My throat felt tight. My heart rate, slightly elevated. I must be getting sick. They tell us not to get paranoid, not to buy into the fear, that it will be ok. But the news is built on sensationalism and it needs us to be afraid or we will stop listening. I felt dirty, like my hands were caked in layers of infectious grunge. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if my eyes would also now get diseased. Bukowski made his way back into my mind:

It is no wonder that
A wise man will
Climb a 10,000 foot mountain
And sit there waiting
And living off berry bush leaves

I wanted to be in the mountains. I had seen the ocean again for the first time in almost a year and I had missed it. I had also missed her. As the bus pulled up and we all made our way into the confined space they warned us to avoid, I thought about leaving. I thought about being a European in America, an American in Europe. I thought about how much I miss Munich and Paris. But most of all, I thought about her and coming back. Ten days more and Bukowski will be right.

Mountains are hard to climb.
The walls are your friends.
Learn your walls.

On Happiness

Foreword:
I thought to change the title of this entry to "David has a broken heart" because the questions in this entry are in part, provoked by this state of affairs. But ultimately the idea to write this entry came from an email exchange and a subsequent conversation with Momcilo, and thus I cannot take all the credit. I also want to add that I am becoming more and more convinced of the maxim "act locally". The evolution of my political person following 7 months in a large Multi-National is moving away from seeking global solutions (international diplomacy, etc.) and towards finding solutions in and from the communities where the issues originate.

What is happiness then? Like 'freedom', I fear it is one of those terms thrown around easily, and without clear definition. Where does it come from? Is it simply a good balance of chemicals in your brain? Or more philosophical, like a profound understanding of who you are and your place in the world?

I ask these questions because of a recent email exchange with a few different friends, but also because I sense that, myself included, there is a general unhappiness in the world, and thus we are all chasing this idea. But if we have trouble defining it, then what the hell are we chasing?

I could start by answering that part first: What are we chasing? Nothing, I would answer, because I think we are running away from unhappiness, more than we are chasing happiness. It's why so many are on some kind of Medication (legal and illegal). I believe that there are some legitimate uses for some of the medication used to get people out of depression, but it has become a bona fide industry for passifying the masses (as has the illegal drug 'industry'). We cannot chase something we struggle to define, as to do so would be to waste a lot of energy running in a thousand directions. In fact, as I think about it, that is exactly what the experience of running away from something, in this case unhappiness, is like. We simply scatter, not knowing where our refuge is, like a heard of wild beast.

Part of the problem in defining it, as I see things, is that there is no collective experience called 'happiness', nor should there be (please see The Invasion or Equilibrium for good explanations why). It is, I believe, a highly individual experience, even when part / all of the source (or the percieved source) of happiness is another individual. They will never be experiencing exactly the same as you. The level of diversity in people is simply to great for one single thing to be the definition, thus our objective, of happiness.

There is also danger in relying to much on external factors to define happiness. I can write this particular sentence, these particular thoughts, from personal (recent) experience. When happiness is not internal, there is great danger of losing that which makes you happy, because it is totally uncontrolable (this goes for people as much as it goes for pills). What happens then, when you lose the source? When you can no longer drink from the pool? Then you experience a terrifying sense of emptyness, which can drive a person to some extreme measures to fill the sudden void. But what if you have an internal sense of happiness? Not "I am happy because..." but rather, "I am happiness".

Don't get me wrong, losing something that made you feel good, that you enjoyed, will always be tough and will always be a negative experience, but if you are not defining yourself and your happiness by it, then it will be easily managable and overcome. Of course, we should not all become Narcissus, spending our lives staring into the pool, but we need to rely on ourselves and our knowledge of ourselves in becomeing happiness, more than we do now. We need to balance this relationship better.

We should also take a moment to acknowledge the insane standards we set for ourselves in trying to achieve happiness. Every day we watch movies and TV shows, we read magazines and book, and we listen to songs about happiness. In these media we are given ideas of how our lives should or could look, but don't. The characters in these situations and everything about them, is carefully designed to attract us. The problem is that they are not necessarily grounded in reality and the lifestyle they advertise is virtually unattainable. Thus, when we fail to achieve what we see everyday as desirable, it causes us stress, and makes us unhappy. But we don't need to feel this way, because really it is just someone's idea of happiness and since we'll never experience it, fuck it.

We should rather take stock of what we have, what we have achieved and how unimportant these imposed standards are. We don't have to be important in the public perception to be happy. Happiness is not linked to anything but feeling comfortable with yourself, which is primarily an internal experience. We do things of significance everyday.

This is, as everything in life, a work in progress. As I get to this point in the writing, I see I can go no further and answer the other questions I asked myself. I cannot because I don't know, or maybe I am not in the right frame-of-mind to do so. But I think it is important that I have at least posed the questions. I have given myself a little direction, I have released further internal tensions, and balanced myself a little.

Afterword:

"Maybe the important thing you are doing with your life is taking care of the cat. At least, from the cats perspective, one might come to that conclusion...

But seriously, I understand the need to do something 'important' with ones life. It is part of the reason I left Maine (both times actually). Certain experiences in the last 6 months have suggested to me that everything is important, well, lets say everything is significant. So, being single, a waitress and the proprietor of a cat, are as significant as taking over a small country (and in many ways much less stressful for everyone involved...)...

I find it extremely hard to get rid of the feeling that I am not doing anything important, that I won't amount to anything. I blame social pressure and hyper capitalism. We need to have constant progress and upward mobility in our lives, because that is what supports the continued growth of the economic system. So, the system subtly ingrains it into our identity. We are always reading about really important people, but never about Peter Petrovic the farmer. Why is his life less significant? It's not, it just doesn't fit the front cover of consumer culture developing in all corners of the globe."

On Language

He sat down to write. What else was he going to do? Wanting to deceive them, or perhaps himself, of the true narrative, he wrote as if constructing a short story. This was to be a short story about a man in search of truth, in search of meaning in a world that often felt more alien than familiar. The search takes place under the brutal weight of jealousy and is colored by fear. 

This man in the story wished to see himself as Diomedes, tearing into battle to fight Gods and heros, but truthfully he felt more like a small child, void of the appropriate faculties for dealing with hardship. But this was not what the story is about. It is about language. In the story, the man suddenly felt himself so very far away from all that was of comfort, disconnected from his family and, laboring along with a broken heart, he struggled to reconcile his decisions with his current predicament. But, feeling it was all too autobiographical, he, the writer, decided to write about language instead. Anyway, he was tired of feeling sorry for himself, knowing it only lead down a frightful road. So he wanted to make this more optimistic, even if it betrayed, to some degree, his true thoughts.

He endowed his character with experience in these matters. He, the character, had been living on the street where one goes to feel sorry for ones self. He had been living there only a short while this time, but had spent a few years there in the past. But though this man didn't control his own fate, which was, after all, the job of the writer, he knew he wouldn't be on this street for long. He knew how to manage his internal rust. He knew because he had been there before. On this street. In this place.

But experience alone, the writer thought, was not enough to guarantee survival. If anything, experience without a mechanism to understand that experience was worse than no experience at all. Imagine knowing what was happening to you, yet having no way to deal with it.  The writer could think of nothing worse. Consequently, neither could his character. Sadly, they, the writer and the character, both had the feeling they knew someone like that. So what was it, that would make it different, more bearable this time round, wondered the character? To which the writer replied: language.

Last time he, the character had loved, loved and lost, he was totally inexperienced and didn't have any kind of guidance for dealing with these things. He had taken a few extreme measures to gain attention and to express his deep pain. He cut himself; nothing dangerous, though. Just enough to see a bit of blood, and to get the source of his misery to notice. He also medicated himself on a regular basis.

But that story was a cliche if ever there was one: young man suffers angst and goes on a years long self-pity binge until one day he decides to change things and be his own master. Anyway, a character is never his own master. That is the job of the writer. So instead he, the writer, focused on what was different now. Now he, the character, had language. He had learned, through friends, through his own travels, and through his intellectual mothers and fathers, to construct something out of this pain. He now spoke out about what he was going through, he put pen to paper and read books and watched movies to see how others dealt with it.

Though this made him, the character, a fairly selfish guy, something which he, the writer, despised, it was only a temporary narcissism. But what was it about language, mused the writer, through the character, that made this lost love more tolerable? For one thing, in the immediate, physical context, it meant that he, the character, would be able to formulate words to express his feelings, which acted as a release mechanism. Language was a sort of valve on his internal, emotional pressure cooker. It was a button he could press whenever things got to gloomy and his throat became constricted as a result. 

Moreover, language allowed him to make meaning out of what he was experiencing. He could look back on memories and see where the source of the pain was; see which decisions had gotten him to this point; and he could see the correlation between cause and effect, helping him to see why something had happened. He didn't have to just sit there, cursing the writer for this injustice, as a martyr of his own pain.  He could pick himself up and know why it happened and accept his own responsability. That, according to the writer, should be hailed as progress. Of course, it wasn't an instant remedy for how the character felt, but it was a remedy none-the-less.

Language did one more thing for him, the character. It made him more self-aware than he had ever been in the past. Language connected him to his identity and allowed him to find theories and other narratives, other characters and other writers, who could show him all the possible ways to move out of the neighborhood. Through language he could identify with experience, or perhaps, he could twist his experience to fit a narrative that offered some way forward. Language allowed him to deconstruct himself and then reconstruct himself however he felt it was appropriate. This process allowed him to inhabit this pain as an experience, as he would any other experience.

Language, the writer and the character thought: what a wonderful thing! With that, aware of his own language and ability to control it, the character climbed off the page and slaughtered the writer. What a narcissist!, he thought. Imagine taking up that much space to write about yourself and your pain. Imagine putting me, the character, through such a cliche ridden story, so full of gloom and doom! Bah! There must be more important things to write about.

So he sat down to write. After all, what else was he going to do?