Social Extinction

Didn’t I touch on this about a month ago?
About how I’m a fierce introvert? How large crowds and egregious social interaction drains the life out of me?

Oh, I did!

Tonight, I am sapped. Drained through and through. I’ve been at this job about 3 weeks and during week one they sprung a Halloween surprise on me. Let’s do a Kill Bill Halloween costume theme!

Normally, I would bow out of such foolishness. I was caught off guard. I had no choice but to say…OK, and furthermore, act enthusiastic about it. I work with all women, so I’m sure they knew it was a difficult task for me. I’m a manly man! (even though my height has become good humor)

This left me with 2 weeks to formulate a Kill Bill costume. I used this website which literally shows you how to make the most obscure costumes, and while Kill Bill is not necessarily obscure (for women), Bill is very much so (for men). With extraordinary help from my mother and brother, I got this train wreck together. I could not have done it alone while simultaneously learning a new job. The more I learn, the busier I get. This is a general maxim across all human society. Adeptness equals responsibility. This if fine. I have no quarrels with this. I love a challenge, and a pure challenge this has been. I’ve had good training, unlike some of the shit I’ve complained about before, but there is always a lot to wrap your head around. Especially when you’re trying to design a Halloween costume at the same fucking time.

For an introvert, this has been an incredibly trying period. I feel that finally, tomorrow, I can settle into a serene period of commitment to tasks at hand, being that the previous two and a half weeks have been spent worrying about shit like this:

Haha, yes, in a fit of delusional anonymity, I have blurred my face, but removed a co-worker’s. Blurred faces can sorta be re-conjured.

The introvert in me breathes a sigh of relief.

But there is a demented part of me that loves this stuff. OK, maybe love is a strong word. But I “enjoy” it in the sense it reaffirms some vague wonderful bullshit I’ve never known in my life. Still, my proudest moment today was not my costume or the fact people might have liked me. It was that I finally dissembled this mammoth spread sheet and reconstructed it into a usable form. It only took 2.5 days. Shit.

I like being alone. I’m not a Halloween person.

A little over 8 years ago, right after the car accident that mangled my life for a day and years, I wrote a short story over the stretch of several recuperative months. I called it “Sorrow of the Future” and it was not very good. I see this now clearly. The problem was its unfamiliar (especially being that I penned it) brevity. The story was overly sparse in relevant narrative. It was minimalism to an ineffective level. The story was like a really pretty female model who has the body of a 12-year-old boy. Bleh. Sorrow of the Future could have been so much more. I was fresh out of a 3-day coma. I wore a cervical collar for several months. My head had taken an inhuman pounding that left blood spilling out my right ear. I could not be blamed for writing such mediocrity, and yet…the story was unique.

After recently finishing my 6,000-word (unrelated) fictional romp, I embarked on retracing and tackling Sorrow of the Future again, 8 years later now that I’d like to think my cerebral healing is more advanced. I’m rewriting the story and trying to inject as much apocalyptic meat into it because it is lifeless in its present incarnation. I say this because the story is about the end of the world, with a touch of surreal darkness. In fact, I wrote it long before I saw a splendid Spanish film, Before The Fall, which had the same tone as my story in that it dealt with personal darkness as a parallel pantheon to the coming end times.

But as I reread Sorrow of the Future, another possibility, and new path, a fresh narrative dawned on me. I cannot wait to see how this story turns out.

I am fascinated by the end of the world and I am trying to capture its stark fateful slab within the context of the narrator’s concurrent existential demons. Capturing the end of the world is an authorial test in that one must describe an utter void that will not reflect the slightest bit of light or hope. Writing this story is to shape something in the absolute barrier of a concave pit of which escape cannot be part of the narrative. It’s an awesome chore.

Rest assured, it will no longer be called “Sorrow of the Future.”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

It’s a sorrowful story of the angel who always believed he was.

Of the angel who assumed he was angelic, a natural privilege. The angel had no cause to doubt his virtuous soul. The angel lived a life of unquestionable pride and righteousness. The angel grew up to believe he was the light, the life, the gift. He erected a clandestine life built around this preternatural “knowledge” which ultimately proved only a supposition prompted by his own self-neglect and gullibility. How can an angel doubt the goodness in his soul? Everything he does is coated in the splendor of purity of intention and sincerity of motivations. How could the angel doubt such a thing when this is what he was taught since he was young. How could the angel doubt virtuosity when he had internalized that it was all that could live in his own invisible soul? So confident was the angel in his own purity of soul that he became blind to the darkness that occasionally peeped out.

A strange deviation, he explained. He excused the non-angelic actions as a momentary blip in his personal toolkit that was additionally exacerbated by a ruthlessly uncooperative world.

When the side of him that was not angelic roared, so convinced was he of his own angelic nature, he attributed the cause to anything but the possibility of a kernel of evil (that surely did not live in his soul).

And the tragedy was that one day, perhaps, he awoke to discover a beast of such wiliness lurking in his bosom that it had convinced him all his life that the angelic mask was flesh.

As darkness settled, the newly transformed beast bellowed in pain and anguish, and begged for the light again, but was only greeted with stark cosmic indifference.

And this was his indelible path.

Last Tuesday, my first day on the job, I returned from lunch break. My new manager and I talked about the crazy-ass neighborhood that lurked outside the windows and the hordes of goofballs to be witnessed walking the streets of today’s balmy Hollywood. She seemed to delight in this environmental hoopla. In fact, she encouraged me to also share her delight by virtue of the endless “people watching” to be accomplished outside. She had a point, I suppose. That is, if these fascinating “people” are your thing.

They used to be. For me, anyways. I once enjoyed studying people in all their despicable shapes, sizes, hues and misshapen randomness. I can definitely remember a time when the simple diversion implicit in looking at people entertained me for spans of time. What the hell was it about strangers that was so damned entertaining?

People are just not that interesting. What could have been going through my head.

I hear that phrase repeated as if it is an experience worthy of our time. It is held with lofty esteem and praised as an exercise that should be indulged by all with boredom in their hearts: people-watching.

Not sure man, but I’m way, way past this stupid activity (ie, worthless pastime). People are downright reprehensible, boring and common. How lethargic must one’s mind be in order to find any sort of intellectual succor in sitting passively while watching hordes of stinky, ugly, egotistical and obnoxious people parading by? I do not find this interesting. In fact, I’ve mentioned on this blog before about how I consciously avoid looking at people during my entire public transportation commutes. I try to keep the number of people I look in the face limited to 3 or 4 during my morning and evening commutes. I consciously avoid looking at people.

Looking at random people accomplishes absolutely nothing for me. Nothing auspicious, I should clarify. When I do indulge in people watching, I feel like a vapid piece of crap. The human species generally does not warrant any sort of lucid “examination.” People must be tolerated and ignored en masse.

I’d rather read my Kindle. People-watching ranks in intellectual stimulation up there with most prime time television programing.

It’s more fun trying to find ways to avoid watching people, especially when there are so many compacted into your environment that they clog every inch of your unwilling vision.

You all go ahead. Do your stupid people-watching.

I love “people-unwatching.” That’s where it’s at.