It’s a beautifully unsettled Friday. Too early for the monsoons, but the earth is unaware of the timetable. It’s trying regardless, laying down thick clouds.
When I woke this morning in the new afternoon, the first thing I thought about was a vacation. Viewed rationally, that’s laughable. I haven’t worked for three weeks, and have taken two road trips in that space. For two months before that, the work week was about six hours long.
That’s almost the equivalent of a whole summer off already.
But only almost.
I had an insight gradually, not particularly fresh, but necessary anyway.
What’s wrong with me, what’s right with me, who I am …
There’s something really important about a single fact.
I am not a shy person classically defined. I am not on the autism spectrum probably. Once upon a time I was a genius, but it seems less so to me now.
What I am is impressionable. Deeply so, often painfully so.
They were interviewing a really young black guy, 20 maybe, about his experiences, with cops.
What impressed me though (using the word in a value-neutral sense) was this.
He gave his name and sketched himself. He was an actor, he said, a director … okay …
A minute into the interview it was clear that he worked at a mall.
I had an immediate reflexive reaction of dismissal, maybe even a little derision, for that set of facts.
But then I thought: I should learn from that. I should just describe myself as a writer, when asked. Not a professor between gigs, or a closet revolutionary, or a fry cook, even if that ends up being my next job.
An actore. A directore. An auteur. An artiste. Fuck your derision and your judgements. Right? Yes. But only almost.
I linger in between, gravely considering advice on how to live my life from a child. And it’s not even advice, just a model, and a fairly raw one.
Nevertheless, I am indented by it.
to press, hold fast, cover, crowd, compress from PIE root *per- to strike
I am struck. Easily.
I make the shortest of drives, to the drugs store.
My attention is caught by the rigs on the road, and what they say about the drivers.
This being the place it is, there are a lot of pickups, and many of them pull trailers for various purposes. The Mexican neighbor is quite defined by his trailer. He’s a landscaping ntrepreneur.
I think about a bad novel I read once, Jerzy Kosinski maybe, where a rich guy ran around the country aimlessly, pulling his horses behind him. Part of the reason the novel was bad was that the horses weren’t important to the character. They were there to be iconic, but they weren’t iconic. They were a prop. Incidental.
I know in some detail what my dream rig looks like.
I don’t have it. Or anything close.
Same for the non-moving house. Same for a lot of what I own, use, am …
This creates an impression. It’s an uneasy one.
I could go on and on, as I often do.
Take any story here, about a stupid Dean or a beloved podcaster.
What you’ll read between the lines is how I’ve been impressed, for good and ill, and most often all out of proportion in either direction.
I love going out to places where nobody can impress me randomly.
I love going far away from anything except the juniper trees and the magpies, who still impress, but gently and soothingly.
I habitually ignore my phones, emails, conversation of any sort, not because I’m shy, but because they make such an impression.
Sometimes even the happiest of impressions overwhelm me.
I try to structure this whelming as much as I can.
I loved doing radio because I was giving tangled impressions rather than taking them. My adventures in the art of the Web are much the same–right down to the present spilling moment. You can comment of course and I always love it when You do. But mostly this is a one-way transmission.
I don’t manage your impressions on me, or anyone else’s whenever I can, because I don’t like you, or what I feel when you’re around, or any of the other unhappy things it might look like.
I’m just impressed far too easily, and the incoming impressions can easily overwhelm me.
It’s a design flaw running all the way through my being.
It colors everything I do and everything I’ve become, and not become.
The reason I’m rushing so hard and fast toward ‘retirement’ is intimately linked with this fact.
All my life I’ve longed to live in a state where the impressions could be controlled and managed … a state where creating impressions was much more a part of my life than being at the mercy of impressions created by others, and often drowning in them.
Being a master of the webs was the best job I ever had (among those that paid a minimally living wage), for this reason.
When being a professor meant presiding over a classroom that was mostly silent for four solid hours, that was a great job too. But when I was expected to speak and interact constantly for even an hour or two, in front of a couple dozen other souls with their eyes upon me, it was often something pretty close to hell, and my struggle with it was obvious.
I wasn’t absent-minded. Quite the opposite. My head was overflowing.
Defensively, I flowed back even harder, pushing the facts out at a frantic pace and in a closely scripted way. Questions I dreaded, mostly. The HTML in my lecture notes expanded explosively. Go here. Check this. These are the people that really know–listen to them. Not me.
I could again be a much better teacher if there were no Chairs around dropping in whenever it pleased them. If I spoke slowly to a camera, controlled the narrative, created the impressions beautifully and mono-directionally. Maybe I will.
But for now the key battles are still defensive.
I need to move all this crap to ground that is mine, in the north.
I need to find some marginal non-deadly way to earn two more years in their system, in the name of the promised land.
And maybe just maybe, while there’s still time for it and before all that grunt work, I will take that vacation for a few days.
To the Cienega, to listen to the wind.