Embarrassing Myself on Twitter is Not Enough

My father emailed my brother and I to tell us he witnessed a “great dogfight” between two birds: “It was a draw. Good outcome.” He probably meant that killing isn’t good. I want to say that he can’t mean that violence isn’t good, because he obviously enjoyed the fight, but then I would be saying witnessing something outside of your control and enjoying it is the same as thinking it’s good.

If he witnessed a fight between two people, I wouldn’t hesitate to agree with his conclusion that nobody dying was a good outcome, but because nature is talked about as a domain in which there are no ethics, his judgement feels out of place. His story of seeing the birds fight is in the form of a nature documentary: he’s titilated by the violence between animals, feeling, in a container, the supposed reality beneath the manners of human society.

On the other hand, my gut reaction was to think of all relations as dogfights, so that a draw would be an impasse: the persistance of an antagonism. His email, for example, has produced a draw among my thoughts. The story was so succinct and simple that the idea of a draw seemed to me to have no limit of context. It bloated and bloated, like beached marine life, or a beloved face.

During the last straightforwardly romantic relationship I was in, I visited a friend in a city for a week, which was at that time the longest we had ever been apart. In a used bookstore there, the owner and employees were griping about how many people come in to browse and then buy the books they want for better prices on Amazon. The threat of being the loser of a competition attuned them bitterly to tiny betrayals, to the texture of their loss. Feeling from their conversation that if I didn’t buy something I was a bad person, I bought new edition of The Art of War, with one of those return-to-modernism cover designs. We were in the habit of emailing each other passages, even though doing so mostly made obvious our mutual unintelligibility, and I sent this:

Ground where mere survival

Requires

A desperate struggle

Where without

A desperate struggle

We perish

That is

Death ground.

When there is no way out,

You are on

Death terrain.

On death ground,

We demonstrate

The desperateness

Of the situation.

On death ground,

Fight.

“Are you planning to go to war?” was the reply. I’ve probably never been more passive-aggressive in my life. I had heard that this book was beloved by business types, who liked to imagine themselves embattled every day. I found myself reading it as methodology for the internal fight to stay in the relationship, or as advice on extricating myself from the relationship, the latter of which I struggled to convince myself I didn’t want. It’s easy now that it’s long over to see it as fated to end, but at the time I had anything but clarity on which way it ought to go. It was as though the desire to leave came from another person who grew on me, mollusc-like, and if I acknowledged that person enough to have us surgically separated, I wasn’t sure which one would turn out to be me. I was constantly half in panic, blushing and nauseous, and I felt that this cold, white-space-heavy translation of Sun Tzu might be able to calm me. Even though the fight was between staying or leaving, a draw at that time would have meant staying without any resolution of conflict.

For a revolutionary, a draw would be a defeat. We’re always living in a draw which must end. If it’s a bad end, this is called apocalyptic thinking, which has become, in the crowdsourced mass cognitive behavioural therapy that is twitter, one of the thought-distortions that must be avoided if we’re to collectively understand ourselves exactly as we are. From a painstakingly accurate description of the present historical moment, can anything move? I’m afraid of description becoming prescription, a change that makes change impossible. Apparently I’m so afraid of CBT becoming prescription that I’ve barely read anything about it, and thus know almost nothing about it, yet (of course) have an opinion: The management of distortions–or in apocalyptic terms, the clearing away of all distortions–that appears to be its therapeutic aim, seems to me to be judging what is and isn’t distorted based on what is productive, what makes the patient a productive member of society. And the sad truth is I want absolute truth!

I watched a video of an octopus reaching over with its tentacle and tapping a shrimp on the side of its body that faced away from the octopus, so that the shrimp fled into the octopus’s grasp, and, eventually, mouth. Somewhere, I can’t figure out where, I read the word “tentacle” as a metaphor for a concept reaching into your mind and not letting go even after the tentacle has, which now sounds like a very Hegelian and very hentai image of consciousness. That night I dreamt I worked in an octopus processing plant. We the octopus processors were discussing how to market octopus meat, and someone suggested that octopuses are cute, and described an ad with a cute octopus in profile, so that what drew you in was its cartoonishly exaggerated eye. I thought an ad like that wouldn’t work, because with it immediately comes the thought of our work of slaughtering and filleting the cute animal. (But wait, I think now, that thought would only make the animal cuter.) After work we went to the beach, where an octopus was running around playing tricks on us. I was having fun, but not everyone was so thrilled. One of the more serious and security-minded among us took from the octopus all the tools it had stolen from us. He said it was dangerous.

I’ve heard this particular apocalypse called octopia, in which octopuses inerhit the earth. Octopia is what happens if the you are not the one you thought you were, once separated from your asexual reproduction, or if, having worked through all your cognitive distortions, you discover you don’t recognize yourself at all. It’s not this paragraph.

On Instagram I saw an ad for I don’t know what that showed a woman in coveralls covering a mirror sliding door with an adhesive sheet of chalkboard. “Smooth out the bubbles from the top down,” advised the ad, and it looked like she was installing an opaque, black screen protector on a phone the size of herself. I found myself wondering what a person like the one in the ad would write or draw on the chalkboard. I once knew a family who had a chalkboard in their kitchen, and it was full of each member of the family’s promises to the family, binding them to their optimisms. There were elements of life plans as well as weekly chore schedules. As a member of a family who never trained any of our dogs, I felt like Elizabeth Jennings looking at paintings.

I no longer know this family because of my family, but I never really wanted to know them. A falling out in a work relationship that was more than a work relationship (like every work relationship) has been redacted, so that this isn’t something I should be talking about, except that nobody who would care will ever read this. Through this game of chicken between straight men, there appeared to be two sides, and on the other side was this family.

Before all this, I housesat for them once, and with them gone, the curiosity I had about their lives mostly evaporated. But going from visiting a place to living in a place only means going from eavesdropping on to overhearing objects. The spines of her books staring at me as I lay in their bed, I found myself helplessly speculating about the life of the house’s matriarch. I quote my speculation here, as if I haven’t written it concurrently:

A punk with a lot of younger friends, she enchants her family life with her Midwestern engineer husband by being involved in the radicalism of twentysomethings. She uses her and her husband’s money to fund nonprofits and direct actions, and the activists like to hang around the aura of newslessness of the bourgeois family, like moths. She in turn goes to rallies and meetings, where she’s embroiled in controversy, which is what the restful, abyssally perfect forms of her husband’s MIT education lack.

Her two children are a kind of reproduction of mother and father–she highly socialized, witty, star of high school theater, and applying to drama schools, he quiet, serious, and an aspiring writer. These aspirations are taken very seriously, put up on the chalkboard. On the chalkboard, they’ve had Passions and Paths since adolescence. One time we all took a hike in the snow on a foggy day, and the son got far enough ahead of us that we couldn’t see him anymore. His mother said with an wistful, annoyed laugh that “he’s always been a child of the fog.”

In other words, I couldn’t (read can’t) imagine her life without thinking of her husband as the opposite of a mirror, because that’s what my devotion to my childhood friend, who smoothly went from aeronautical dreams passed down from his North Dakotan grandfather to studying engineering at MIT, felt like.

In Arrival, it becomes apparent that Amy Adams’ character has been more or less writing on a whiteboard to her not-yet-conceived daughter this whole time, not to the aliens in the fog behind the screen of the cleanest movie theater of all time, but a pre-pre-fetus who appears as intrusive visions a.k.a. memories that feel like a loss or a post-apocalypse, but turn out to be the bright future of humanity. After all, she wrote “HUMAN” on the whiteboard, like the first item on her wish list to Santa.

I think I never want to intend a thought again, like a drug addict, but on the other hand I’ve become addicted to writing about (or over) my self-regard. Posting what feel like heinous acts of self-presentation brings a cycle of shame, during which I consider all the ugly implications of what I’ve written, and imagine, unbidden, the thoughts of the three or four people who might read it. It’s clear that embarrassment is addictive, and it’s unclear whether embarrassments are additive. Do I yell at myself about things I’ve written on the internet instead of yelling at myself about things I’ve said in person, or do I just yell at myself more?

Last month I tried to write an essay for a magazine, which was embarrassing. The essay repeated itself and meandered, at once anxious to tie everything to a thesis, like academic writing, and full of nonsequitors. The essay was supposed to be about how a particular director liked to sidestep the embarrassments of his youth by very subtly making fun of them. Writing scripts that hewed close to his life, his authorial voice, my argument went, became the way he wanted to be regarded by someone else.

Obviously I was projecting, but then again what I thought the director was trying to do–to sneakily become graceful–was exactly what I haven’t been doing. I decided that the director had come to the conclusion you can’t convince anyone, you can only make them laugh.

Alan Turing’s paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” seems peculiarly disinterested in convincing its reader. Its argumentation is all in the negative, listing every argument he can conceive against the validity of the method he proposes for answering the question “can machines think?”, a question he introduces and then throws out. He insists that the test he proposes to answer it–in which a machine attempts to convince a human “interrogator” via text messages that it’s a woman, and that a human woman, also texting the interrogator, is not–does not answer that question, but another one. He proceeds to take up this “imitation game” as his stated rhetorical mode: “These last two paragraphs do not claim to be convincing arguments. They should rather be described as ‘recitations tending to produce belief.’”

In the middle of this more performative than argumentative essay, he considers the problem that telepathy poses to the validity of the imitation game, which requires that the three participants be in separate rooms, and decides that the solution is quotation marks: “The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a ‘telepathy-proof room’ would satisfy all requirements.” This seems like the game’s most serious hang-up. Where to find a room that doesn’t speak? Or a thing that doesn’t think?

Every morning and every night I cleaned up the dog’s piss. At 17, he’d lost the ability to hold his bladder long enough to get outside. This had been going on for long enough that I wondered if he was trying to get to the dog door any more, or if where he always peed, on the floor in the room closest to the dog door, had become his new habit. I’m not sure exactly what I mean by “habit,” in that case. In theory, the normative force of habits comes entirely from their repetition; if it’s a habit, it’s not something you should do, it’s something you do. But we’re always trying to co-opt our habits into being socially productive, so that the force of habit does the moral work for us, or as Perfume Genius puts it, “how long must we live right before we don’t even have to try?” I pretended that my habit was to clean up his urine and feces every morning and every night, but often it was only one or the other in a day. I would often wait for the puddles to dry up, so that it could be sprayed with something in a bottle and wiped up with fewer paper towels. As they dried, the puddles grew crystals, like yellow ponds freezing over. This happened every day, but each time I saw a new puddle of pee, I felt personally offended, as if he had broken a promise to me.

I don’t remember being a bed wetter, but I know someone who does. His brother didn’t wet the bed at the time, and, feeling alone, he was in the perfect condition for a support group to emerge. He found out that many of his friends at school also wet their beds, and felt, for lack of a better word, relieved. At which point his parents put a plastic sheet on his bed.

Dreams that let me know that I have to pee really bury the lede, and always come with someone observing. In one dream, the relation I can only call my brother in law followed me into the bathroom of a hotel, where he sat down to wait for me for me to pee. I woke up, the message having been received by virtue of the impossibility of peeing in the dream. The feeling of needing to had been intensified by being unable to because watched. A bed wetter must somehow internalize the observer judging them for not having control over their bladder during sleep, when nobody has control over anything.

The origin of the phrase “taking the piss” is, I read, in reference to morning erections that come on when sleeping with a full bladder. Erections apparently being divisible into real ones made of desire, and fake ones made of piss, taking the piss out of someone’s erection is like taking the wind out of an argument. However far the phrase has departed from the original referent, to take the piss out of something is to soften fatuous speech. Language that is excessive, threatening to burst but annoyingly bloodless, is piss. To be pissy is to be unreasonably irritable, and, like laying in bed and convincing myself I don’t really have to pee, the anger seems aggravatingly avoidable. Confessing is like pissing: it’s a relief, and then it stinks. A sense that the confession came from an imposter of myself follows confessing, and if I could just confess again, I would release my heart and bleed on the confessor, not just whiz.

This could be called confession hangover, and it can also go the other way, of never wanting to confess again. Drinking makes you pee a lot, making “getting pissed” an extremely intuitive idiom, and when you wake up you’re tired of peeing. Hungover, you’re all out of fucks, which, if you have an outsize sense of politeness, can feel like a relief. Having taken all the piss out of yourself, there is only blood left.

Limerance is a very urinal phenomenon. I recall being on its receiving end, and being asked questions that were at once too personal, and, like the nearly orange urine of dehydration, thick with the asker’s own products. I found myself avoiding talking to my limerant, because I was afraid of seeing in her speech a doppelganger of myself, yeasty and fermented by her imagination.

But to take my strained, fidgeting from foot to foot bodily metaphor further, piss is necessary, the result of substances passing into the blood. I’d like to think of myself as a creature without the need to void, but that would mean never taking anything in, never being subject to anything. Unbearable conversations that I spend an exasperating amount of time privately taking the piss out of are unbearable to the degree that I perceive their sociocultural determination. One would like to think there’s a yellow river that one occasionally has to ford, and in which some unfit people drown, as in a game of Oregon Trail, but we’re all wading, splashing each other with our footfalls. The perception of the internet as an extraneous element in our lives that we need to “detox” from, is down to the desire to be autonomous, to be purely agents in the social field, to get it all out of our system.