I don’t really fancy being adhered to a camel… I’m going to get drunk.
Those words, relating a story from the making of a film I quite like, which I still think is pretty good — the story, and the film — let them be my epitaph. “I don’t fancy being adhered to a camel; I’m going to get drunk.” They are the alpha and omega of human choice and, I think perhaps, the absolute boundary of what is and is not within our control. Put a Scheffer stroke between the particles to explore the logic: “I don’t fancy being adhered to a camel. | I’m going to get drunk.” Separate them out as the first and then answering part of a statement. “I don’t fancy being adhered to a camel,” and so, “I’m going to get drunk.”
Throw in Omar Sharif’s call-and-response for a third bit, if you want a laugh. “Oh, I’m going to get drunk as well!” Then all the audience is with you.
Is the camel Elon Musk? Is it the entire online experience? Nothing against camels: they are fine creatures. I think we can all agree that, irrespective of such, a plough camel is a poor choice for taking Aqaba. I think I may have told some of you that at the end of last year — which was a hard year — they are all hard years now; I think perhaps 2017 was the last not hard year (for me, personally) and it was certainly nonetheless a hard year for pretty much everybody, globally, in terms of what it did to us and the world — at the end of last year, I did an “Annual General Meeting” for myself. 2021 wasn’t just a hard year; it was a hard year I found hard to shake, a burnout I felt no real vigour to climb out of. It’s not that radical improvement of my circumstances was not possible — I am supremely, egregiously, privileged, and my ability to adjust the issues that are causing me concern is quite substantial, as a result. I could have made some drastic changes and fixed all of the difficulties of that moment. But, the sort of table-flipping I have within my command didn’t feel right — more of a moving-the-problem-somewhere-else, and part of me knew it — so I undertook to untangle the knots.
Miraculously, they did untangle. It didn’t even take that long. I laid everything out — nearly pandemic-wide, but certainly everything contained within the parcel of that particular “bad year” — and did what I do, both as a writer and as a professional. I simplified, simplified, simplified. The premise of untangling leads to the premise of threads, and once you have identified the key threads… well, I won’t say the knots are easy, but at least you can see them. Or you can just cut them. Cutting is a perfectly reasonable solution to knots — even legendary, in some circles — if you can make judicious choices about which problems are worth solving and which are, thus, worth rejecting entirely.
Speaking of cutting, one of the outcomes of the AGM was a 2022 goal that literally reads “cut out the toxic, the low-value, the noise, the doom.” I swear I was not thinking about threads that day and I was certainly not thinking (much) about the doomspiral vacuum online, but. Here we are. A plough camel is a poor choice for taking Aqaba.
Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.
“The Lost Thread“
That’s me called out; I am, in ways I’ve only begun to understand, a chaotic neutral. It’s the neutrality I don’t like — and the chaotic masks that, because I think being an impish little shit disturber somehow puts purpose in what is otherwise my faithful maintenance of the status quo. And I do maintain it, oh lordy, do I ever maintain it. I don’t know that I think radical divisiveness, more “choose a side,” is doing anyone much good at the moment; but then, given what the sides are turning out to be, fuck it, maybe divisiveness is the thing and I’m just a wimp. Maybe we’re all just wimps.
Or, more like: we’re all frogs. In the proverbial boiling pot. We have been, all our lives. We can be forgiven for this. It’s not that we are unwilling to act in the face of change; we’re just
a) so much slower to recognize when change is already behind us (let alone approaching) than we think we are, and
b) yes, changing is hard. It’s uncomfortable and lonely and it takes away the simple medications that make struggling through this moment, or any moment, feel like they are slightly more within our control.
(Except, usual caveat, re: nothing’s in our control.)
Here’s what I like about the online space, or more accurately, what I owe it for the last two years of my life: it made me a better listener. It connected me to smarter people. It outlined actions I could take when I didn’t know where to start. It let me be clever. It let me be wise. It made me part of a community of people whose very existence meant I was not going crazy, not wrong about what was happening, and not going through any of it alone. None of that is nothing. None of that is easy to lose.
All of it feels like something I need to pay at least some honour to, in this moment where all and sundry are convinced it was all a failed experiment, the worst thing that ever happened, the end of civilization, etc., which — no argument here, but — let’s at least be clear on what it also was.
One week
I don’t know what you do when you think you’ve outgrown someone, or something, that you love. I dwell on loss more than I should but one thing I’ve been noticing lately is the way that old losses can still sting while simultaneously holding space for me to understand that I wouldn’t want those things now, even if they presented themselves. Something like that happened with my massive airquotes “filmmaking career” end quotes, which ended (says the guy who’s nose-down on a TV pilot and a spec script and who knows what else) not because the door slammed shut or every single thing I tried to grow never dug down into the soil, but because the way I live my life, the reality I hold contained between my temples, just became a different thing, gradually over time. It used to freak me out, the way I could look back at the thing or the person or the idea that I used to be unreasonably passionate about / connected to / fixated upon, and see that it just… doesn’t matter to me that way any more. It freaked me out because I thought it meant that the passion / connection / fixation itself must have been, at its peak moment, somehow false or illusory. I don’t think that’s it any more. I think those peak moments were true and it’s everything else that changed. It’s taken a long time to get here but, I think it simply is, we are probably twelve different people across the tract of our lives. And I don’t even think there’s a lot of overlap between them, anymore. I think relationships fail and marriages dissolve and careers change and artists cannae hack it anymore because as our souls migrate from person to person — in direct rhythm, perhaps, of the seven-year transubstantiation of our cells — they simply change too forcefully to continue to be considered “the same person.” We move on. We should move on, because it means we actually changed and grew and learned new things and excised harmful habits and improved our ways of thinking and so forth. We become different people. I mean, I know we don’t nominally look at it that way; I know that’s a horribly contrived and self-serving way to look at it, at all. But we might feel better about ourselves, might let the breath out that we’ve been holding for so long, if we allowed just a little of that to enter. I accept that the things that are central to who I am right now won’t be, in 2029. Everything I don’t know how to let go of will slip or deepen, of its own accord. It doesn’t matter which way it goes, all that much. We can afford to be loose with what comes.
