Friday, April 4, 2014

I tried to watch Boardwalk Empire to see Jeffrey Wright in character, but the violence… I had to turn it off, even as I could see how I could get involved in it.  So, alone, late at night, I turned to YouTube to find what I could about The Pogues and Shane MacGowan.  There was something about how the song Fairytale of New York came to be…  I got out a guitar, had some wine, and chilled out.  See, doctor, I'm been working these four night shifts and basically get the shit beaten out of me on each of them, and I have a few more Saturday nights to deal with before I go back to Sunday, not that I really want Sunday any more…  I'll do Saturday just on pride, even if it will kill my day off.  A cross to bear, what can you do…

But I did have a moment of self understanding, or awareness, whatever you want to call it.  I'm naturally an empathetic person.  I get how people are feeling.  Maybe that's why I can't watch that violence, even if it is imaginary, staged.  It's not real but it can feel real, and so why horrify yourself…  Things are scary enough.

Being an empathetic person, well, that leaves you wanting to be a writer, or maybe you're just not good at other things, like when you have to impose discipline or meet some tedious regulation.  And maybe that's why I feel so wiped out after the work week, too much of other people's agendas, no real support for your own self...  Frenchie doesn't care…

That's the whole culture, I guess.  I don't find people particularly kind in the city, not that I blame them. They're under pressure just as I am.  What am I saying…  I don't know.  But I just find it strange:  you're an empathetic person, and you try to reach out to people, but, it's like they take you as a creep, an oddball.  "What?  You can't get with the competition?  What's wrong with you?"  And that's why I walk around this town like I would imagine Abraham Lincoln walked around, feeling this gloom, feeling the cold anonymity.  I don't want to even go out anymore…  You're not going to find much kindness.  You'll just find people in selfish trances, glorified by their careers and their successes, when it's hard.  And even if you were to try to bring up empathy, people would for the greatest part turn away or just shut down, or even worse, like outright reject you.

For me, there is no other issue.   I mean, everyone talks about issues, issues, political, geopolitical, business, commerce, crime and justice and so forth, but to me that's all a side point.  You know in your heart what the right thing to do is.  You know your own capacity to offer the generic kindness to other reasonable people…

But my life is fucked up because I'm not self-protective enough, or not a good breadwinner, or just lousy at being an in-charge take-care-of-stuff male, try as I might.  Okay, fault me for that; I can understand.  Fault me for being so lazy as to want nothing else other than to be a writer who's writing as he sees fit to write, not even on anything in particular, but admit at least, 'well, but he's a nice guy,' for what it's worth, though it's completely true that nice guys finish last, might not get much done in the world in the way of, I don't know, defeating Al Queda terrorists or regulating banks like that savings and loan run by the guy who just died, Keating, big anti-porn Christian guy, and yet he knowingly bilked how many people out of their retirement savings so he could have lavish boats and vacations and real estate, which is the disgusting side of people that we should take measures against…  A nice guy wouldn't do that, wouldn't blow up people, wouldn't swindle them…

I guess with everyone as self-centered as they must be they don't notice humanity anymore, like they don't want to see anyone who's not that well dressed who can't afford to be so well dressed, like they don't want any part of that loserdom, lest it be infectious.  Yeah, we all know it's a slippery slope.  We all know, in theory, to avoid being depressed, to keep working hard and all that, but not all of us are so lucky, and it seems like the fault of 'those people' is primarily that they aren't aggressive pricks who like to hear themselves hold forth all the time.

I guess you can shrug it all off, and say, well, to be empathetic is to go with God's love, the Love Supreme, believing however foolishly that if you love as God loves you'll find the right path in life, know how to conduct yourself, take care of things, set the right boundaries to protect yourself so that you don't fall into unhealthy things…  And that's I guess why I write, just to keep myself on that path, so I understand myself and who I am and all that natural empathy stuff even though it seems useless to other minds.

I think this is one of the most important thing as an author, that because you are empathetic, you have the right to be writer, as a tool in bigger hands to show that we are all human, that we all suffer pain, and that the largest most important thing to do is simply to be kind.   Qualifying that by admitting that I am a meat eater, I'm sorry, it's just the way it is.

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