The Schwartz

I took a pretty formidable cocktail of drugs tonight, and its amounted to me feeling pretty stellar at the moment. The results of this will drive the rest of this post.

Admittedly, I'm fairly strange. In taking all of this, I can't really think of anything I'd rather have done than come home and write and be by myself, and I guess that speaks to my intensely personal nature. Its not that I don't enjoy the company of those I did it with, because I think Brian is a pretty spectacular friend to have, but I just have this weird weight at the depth of my character, a sort of bizarre manifestation of self who has so much to say and wants so badly to say it, but for whatever reason never has felt particularly well-expressed in action. Its very frustrating. There are things I wrap myself up in, and in many aspects overwhelm myself with, but in a moment of tranquility like this I feel approachable and at ease with myself, which is something I strive so hard to find in a nearly breakneck ambition but can't seem to get all that close to that often.

Maybe its just that I want to express these things to something perceivably public so that I can feel that I'm confident in facing the world and at best hope that I can dismiss any concerns people have with the way I choose to live my life and "roll" so to speak. My mind has always been a prickly pear, and the things I take interest in, am naturally inclined towards and have set myself after have been difficult for me to explain always, but I've never been without a guiding principle or conception of what it could all become. I understand society, I understand people. I can look at a conception of human relation or another's personal conflict or even emotional insight and understand it almost immediately (something I find best exampled best by my affinity with literature and art), but I have trouble reconciling these same simple problems within myself and still don't feel like my expression in comprehension comes that close to explaining just how well these things resonate within me. I've been trying in this blog to show the parallels that connect the everyday things I experience and how I tie them to what I've read or thought or believe, but it all still needs work. I dunno, its not that I want to sound exceedingly deep or give the impression that I think I'm better than everyone because of what I am, because I really don't. I'd honestly hate to conceive of myself as some sort of "writer" or intellectual giant, but there's also the dissatisfaction and valuelessness that comes with the ambiguity of not labeling myself as such. Mostly, I think I want to avoid feeling as though I do the things I do just to have them seen as some sort of social parlor trick or facet of my personality, because I don't and I care about them on a much more personal level than that. I also don't want to sound too angsty or tortured in my approach to this, because I don't think that's the level I experience these things at. I mean, I don't have a girlfriend and I feel mostly unapproachable and overwhelmed or overwhelming in most social situations, so the situation has created a strange limbo within me.

I'd hate to come off as someone who just wants to brag about what he's known and how weird a niche of knowledge he's found for himself, because its nothing like that. At the most basic, I feel as though I love the art and perspective I've taught myself, and again the choices behind this weren't in the interest of constructing myself into some certain social pillar, but instead because these are things that fascinate me and ultimately the realm of literary art and art in general is one where I want to contribute to the conversation, move it forward and reflect my mark upon. Is it too arrogant to say that I feel in these things that I have something valuable to say beyond just reciting them?

I have fun in connecting these things, in taking the disparity of weird shit I've read and watched and experienced and drawing them together, wrapping them into a creation that in part pays credence to where I've taken them from but ultimately (hopefully) is a conception and expression which I can safely say is mine. In terms of output, my ambitions as an author have been lethargic and mostly destructive, and maybe the idea I had of turning myself into something like that will never pan out, but I just haven't found the way I want to allow myself to be like that yet. Somewhere on the landscape of my mind, I haven't been able to reconcile whether I've never read anything I'd want to sound like or can't understand where I want to draw from most. I know the two aren't exactly compatible, but those are the two polar views I typically find myself confronted with. I like Pynchonian surreality and playfulness, but at the end of the day his novels feel too maddening and chaotic and unrelatable. He's post structure and absolute, but his novels mostly reflect that too well and don't ever feel terribly relatable or welcoming. I think Delillo's work is wonderful and much more breathable, and I adore his conversational writing ability as much as I adore Pynchon's wordplay, but his novels lack a certain magic of the world I see and love in authors like McCarthy, Faulkner, Greene, and in weirder yet probably more appropriate ways Rushdie and Garcia-Marquez. I love how those authors can take a setting and make it feel like something that mattered and has a relatable resonance (if only, in certain instances, because of nostalgia, but that still counts), McCarthy with his conception of the American Southwest and Faulkner in his sickening yet romanticized realization of the South. These authors have a way of using a setting to establish an easy, accesible and formidable value at the core of their works, and I like how it contributes to whats essential about their novels. Another instance I find is Proust, Genet and other more introspective authors (Doestoyevsky probably goes among them as well) who for whatever reason I can only think of as European.

As it stands, I'm probably most inclined to write in introspection, but its something I really hate about anything I try to come up with. Assumedly because of how personal I find myself, these sort of authors really strike a chord within me, as I really enjoy the plurality and mental exploration of characters who seem decidedly relegated or entirely vapid and social but are ultimately used as devices to express things that are more humanistic and connect disparities between conceptions. I'd like to say more about this and would've preferred to use a more colorful selection of authors to mention, but I'm sure this seems like more of a namedropping than anything, and I don't know how to avoid having it sound like that.

So what of my productivity? Am I really supposed to rest on the laurels of this idea that I haven't found an accurate means of expression or balance? I mean, what else can I say? This way of expressing things seems to be the only shoe that fits, so that's how it'll come out. I know my decisions may seem chaotic and oftentimes even erratic, but they're all in league with a larger picture that I'm trying to get at. What I'm trying to say is that while it all makes sense in my head sometimes, I think my hands are just having a hard time catching up. There are moments and values and tones which I'd like to let loose, but they just haven't been all that easy to catch. Whether these things will ever congeal into something that works is anyone's guess. At times I hope they will, but at others I think I could walk away into an entirely different means of expression that would be more up-front and nonliterary. All I can really say is that all my life I've been having this conversation with myself in my head, and at this point I'm not sure the person I've imagined myself talking to actually exists (not in a crazy way, idiots) or whether I'm trying to draw them out. All this amounts to is me being fairly antisocial and withdrawn even though I've got some decent social skills and people seems to dig on the vibe I'm setting. In essence, I'm weird.