Godheval

This year’s democratic primaries have been quite stimulating, quite surprising, and also quite confusing. Back in May of last year, I emphatically suggested that people should not vote for Barack Obama. My reasons had nothing to do with his merits, but with my fears of what would happen if he got the nod, such as his assassination, or the loss of moderate voters to the Republicans due to his ethnicity.

Today I tentatively recant on my declaration. While I still have fears for Mr. Obama, he is actually the candidate that I support, for reasons not the least of which are endorsement by Dennis Kucinich, who had been my favorite previously but has since dropped out of the race. As he says in all of his rhetoric and lofty speeches (which in spite of my distaste for them I realize are somehow necessary in American politics), Obama really is the candidate who represents “change” and “new direction”.

That the primaries have been so close, and with Obama’s stunning Saturday sweep of Washington, Louisiana, and Nebraska, it got me thinking about whether an African-American president is more conceivable than I previously thought. Maybe what I said about this country “not being ready” back in May is more a reflection of my own isolated cynicism rather than the actual sentiments of people nationwide. Much to his credit, Obama has attempted to steer the public discourse away from his ethnicity, getting people to focus more on his merits as a candidate as they should

Sometimes I feel a certain anxiety, as though the people around me – just general people, not friends or acquaintances – that people don’t trust me. And maybe they don’t for a plethora of superficial reasons, false preconceptions, or their own fears and insecurities. But what I’m wondering is if the ability to trust others is based upon a person’s estimates of their own integrity. What I mean is that, if a person considers themselves somewhat morally “flexible”, capable of doing unscrupulous things, do they then project that capacity onto others? If you feel that you are not trustworthy yourself, then do you assume the same about others?

Or is it the inverse? That because you are paranoid, insecure, or at least just cautious about the actions or intentions of others, that you assume that feel the same way about you? I am – quite obviously – a cynic, and so perhaps because I don’t trust or anticipate people to have unsavory qualities, I feel like those sentiments are reflected right back at me. Whichever way it goes, I think this kind of thing is at the heart of the barriers to communication and interaction that are so powerful in this city. Certainly there are plenty of people that are genuinely untrustworthy, genuinely immoral, genuinely fucked up – but one would hope that it’s not the majority, or even a large number. Yet it seems as though most people in this city are fearful of mostly everyone else, any macho posturing notwithstanding. What’s strange is that while this area suffers under a lot of crime, it is not unique in that respect, and yet this paranoia-cynicism-insecurity complex is very much a regional (even local) phenomenon. Such bad energy in this place.

It seems to me that writing really is a thankless profession, unless you’re someone like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, selling millions of books translated into multiple languages. Who gets the most recognition for a blockbuster movie? The actors, the directors – hell, even the cinematographers. How many people remember who wrote the script – you know, that little minor thing that was only the essence of the whole damned film? I’d say not many, unless the director and writer happened to be the same person.

Authors, again with the exception of a few big names, are almost never celebrities. Even many of the most famous writers of high literature and poetry and other stuff heralded in Western culture are not really famous. Beyond the people who study them directly, or amongst the generally well-educated, these people are obscure. People may know their names, but may not be able to name a single piece written by them. But is this a reflection of the anti-intellectualism and rampant ignorance prevalent throughout American society, or of some inherent distance between the writer and his audience?

But I’m not writing any of this because I want to be famous. I’d just as soon write under a pseudonym. Oh, wait, I do – and I have gone through great lengths at times to conceal my true identity, although by now it would take the bare minimum of research to discover it. The point is that I don’t care about personal recognition, but I do care about recognition of my work, which I guess you could say is an emanation of me – an extended phenotype, if you will. Whatever you want to call it, I feel that for all the writing I do, for all the purportedly great ideas I have, for all that I feel that I have to contribute to the world – there is hardly anyone around to appreciate it.

I mean, seriously, who reads this bullshit, anyway? Who are the 420 people who visited my site last month? I’d really like to know. Some are undoubtedly friends who I have linked to articles. Some are me, accessing my own site from different computers. Some are people who randomly stumbled upon one of my videos on YouTube. But for all of those 420 people, how many of them provided me with any real substantial feedback? None – perhaps with the exception of one friend, who I sometimes have conversations with as I write the stuff.

Writing is a thankless profession. Why couldn’t I have been born a musician? And no, fuckers, don’t you dare email me NOW. This is not a cry for attention.

Lately I’ve been feeling more out of touch with people than usual, and usually I feel quite detached. I’ve been having this sense that I just “don’t get” people, that I don’t understand their motives or their vision in many situations, don’t share their interests or their dreams, and that I generally have some sort of rogue ideology that flies in the face of their sensibilities. None of this is intentional, for the most part, except for those cases where I intend to challenge the status quo or shake things up by getting people to think about things differently.

I was watching a friend’s video and I couldn’t help but think the whole time: What is the point of this?. I didn’t get it. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to. And it is exactly these kinds of things that I don’t get in general. Is it because I am often mulling over teleological concerns that I must find a point or a purpose in even small things, while other people do things just for their own sakes, with no purpose in mind at all? I sometimes consider going out, only to hesitate as I think: “And do what?”, a question that invariably leads me to going nowhere as I remember that this city apparently does not cater to my particular interests. Although I’ve gotten better at this, and have learned to enjoy going out and wandering the city for no reason at all – often to find things to do on a whim – I feel I am no closer to bridging the gap between myself and the vast majority of the population.

Sometimes it dawns on me that I may just be the only sane person in the entire world. But of course, just as I think that, the inverse occurs to me as well – that such a thought may mark me as the crazy one. This seeming paradox is represented in my mind by the taichi symbol used to express the relationship between yin and yang – you know the one.

On each side there’s an absolute color, black or white, but embedded in each area is a small dot of the opposite color. So on one side you’ve got me – let’s say the black dot in the white area – being the only sane person. But the complement to that, on the other side – the white dot in the black area – is me being the insane one in a sane world. Which is reality? Perhaps both, perhaps neither. And maybe, much like yin and yang, the opposites are not in conflict, but complementary, and the border between sanity and insanity is not so stark, but rather fluid and transitional.