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Title
In 2017 I resolved to quit Facebook. It was a good decision which has been reaffirmed constantly by the slivers of abusively bad discourse I see linked from time to time. I also deleted my presence there (insofar as one may, apparently You Can Never Delete Your Facebook).
Twitter followed soon after, and I deleted all my tweets too. I realized it felt good to do that.
I’m still here on rare occasion (like now) and my archives of failed shitposts and broadly uninteresting reblogs endure. But I’ve thought about deleting all that too. I’ve thought about a massive purge of my online self. And it leads me to my 2018 resolution (I think).
Before we go on, no, I don’t think I’m going to delete my whole everything.
But, I realize that the major weight lifted from me by deleting Facebook and Twitter wasn’t only the noise from everyone else. I realize that I have not been 100% happy with my online voice, and deleting Facebook and Twitter (and not being here often) has allowed me to escape that dissatisfaction.
(That is not to say that I’m mute in life. Instead, I throw myself into the voice of compulsion, of work, of family life. A transactional voice audible just to those in the room with me. I don’t write songs about me anymore, just about Hank’s stuffed animals.)
I realize that more and more these days, every concept I have to write or present myself online is stymied by insecurity and second-guessing. Every song I write is heckled down by a small man in my head who says “you assssshoooole play something original”. I have a hundred first lines of great blog posts that just don’t feel authentic. Even this post is getting a treacherously high level of side-eye from my super-ego, but I’m going to push it out through my imperfect content extruder.
My 2018 resolution is to find my voice again. I’d like to blog, to write, to make music, to express myself. But I want that expression to really reflect who I am, bereft of influence, unencumbered by a need to adhere to identities of my past, alarmingly clear and concise (currently: failing at that), and acceptable to my future self and posterity. Part of that is figuring out—once again—who I am. And then once I do that, I can express myself online again and feel confident in it and proud. Thats my resolution.
But I probably won’t go back on Facebook.
here’s my song
motivational words
be the Uber of yourself
mood
blo g
America
The more that time plows on, the more I see this world pushing beyond the extremes and limits we thought were fixed. It’s a combination of the world becoming more extreme, and my perception becoming more keen. I’ve been tremendously blessed with good fortune and great opportunity, and I consider myself to be a very successful person relative to the rest of the billions of people in this world.
When I woke up on November 9th, it was the first time in my life where I truly did feel set back. Both for myself, and on behalf of many friends and their groups who, while privileged in certain ways, are still greatly vulnerable to the malice and whim of powerful, shitty men in corrupt systems. Some people, who were already set back, chose to propel this risk at their own peril, whether aware or not. They’ve spent their lives putting a dollar in and getting nothing back. Now they’ve gone all in, putting fifty dollars down, hoping they’ll get back fifty-one. And they’ve wagered our livelihoods as well.
I’ve walked to the train these past few days in a daze, wondering what I can do. Anger and frustration swell and subside, but at the end I come up empty. Do I march? Organize? Complain? Am I wrong now? Was I mistaken to believe that this man embodies dangerous authoritarian, fascist, and globally destabilizing tendencies? That this charlatan, this unfettered liability, was someone we objectively should not have wanted? Work distracts me. I go back and forth between Twitter and Facebook only to find more anger and frustration at an addicting complacency machine that numbs us to the world, like digital Percocet. We’re strung out, and we hate our pushers but we need them every time we unlock our phones or open a new browser tab. We claw at our scabs, unable to get sober and become aware of the drugs that intoxicate and manipulate us.
We’ve been at peace for a long time. The wars we have are fought and suffered by real Americans, those aren’t American wars, they’re military adventurism that we can abide while continuing to drink Starbucks. Even though we lose real brothers and sisters in those wars, on a national level, they’re not real enough to break out of a neat, 30 minute slot on network news. Now, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, I feel that this destabilization could bring violence and turmoil into our states, onto our highways, and into our backyards. It could break out of the 30 minute nightly news, it could tear down the entire concept of a television where you would watch news, safe in your home, in a town or city that has guaranteed you stability.
I’m doing my best to neutralize my anger. It’s going to take a lot of processing. But the part I can’t deal with is every morning at 5:45AM. A polite cry goes off from the next room over. It’s my four-month-old son telling me he’s awake and wants to play. I pick him up, change his diaper, and bring him to our room. He sits on my lap and I play him music on my phone. He listens intently, staring back and forth between me and the phone. I sing along to him, old songs about youth and hope and wonder, Simon and Garfunkel. Crosby, Stills, and Nash. But when I sing, a lump in my throat comes floating up, and I can’t get the words out. And I realize that this emotion, this sadness, this worry, is more important than the anger. It is more real. I get angry but I don’t cry when my football team loses on Sunday. This sadness is different. I truly worry that my son must now grow up in a world that is vastly less kind, that is vastly less safe, and that is vastly less viable than a world we missed creating by less than a margin of error.
He’s going to wake me up in 6 hours, and he’ll smile the largest toothless smile you could fathom when he sees me. And all I’ll think of in that moment is that perilous, tenuous new world that balances on the head of a pin. That world has been real for many people before now, but it became much realer for all of us this week. And when I look at my beautiful boy, a pang of despair prods at my knees, and I feel hopeless to quell the rising tide of malice that is flooding more of that world every day.
The best I can do is to try to be strong when I sing to him. To breathe deeply and try to stay in tune:
“I’ve come to look for America.”
im someones dad and that owns 😎
bijan