#1: Resolutions

ADDITIONAL TOPICS: Lemony Snicket; formal constraints; AlphaSmarts; Nicorette; YikYak; seasonal affective disorder

Nash’s iPhone \ Notes \ iCloud

December 7, 2021 at 8:05pm

New Year’s Resolutions

1. Stop ordering takeout out of laziness. You like to cook and can’t afford triweekly Indian

2. Meetings 2x/week minimum

3. Read Moby Dick

4. Write in journal 5 nights/week minimum

5. Finally start some sort of blog for anodyne cultural thoughts 

6. Work in library M-F — your apartment depresses you 

7. Stop eating peanut butter M&Ms etc. in bed. They are terribly caloric

8. Keep dream journal

9. Be nicer

It’s in the service of fulfilling (5.) that I’m writing this — the first in what’ll at best be an erratic string of dispatches with no thematic organizing principle beyond my own narcissistic self-indulgence. (Philosophical question: is narcissism a lesser moral ill if the narcissist acknowledges/embraces his narcissism on its own terms, rather than sublimating it into, say, smug political sanctimony on Twitter? Let’s find out!)

I feel I should acknowledge and clarify what might look like a redundancy between Resolutions (4.) and (5.). (It’s in the self-perpetuating nature of the narcissist to assume that he occupies far more real estate in the minds of those around him than he actually does; choosing to believe that you, dear reader, are actually parsing these lines for redundancies is preferable to accepting that you’re giving this post a dutiful flick-through before going back to Instagram.) I’ve inconsistently kept a journal since third grade, diligently transcribing the melodramas and tragedies that limn my autobiography (12/2/2021: I went to Chipotle again); why, then, do I need this? Why not just turn to social media, where those who haven’t unfollowed me have presumably built up a pain tolerance to my exhibitionism?

In both its formal constraints and cultural ethos, Twitter just kind of sucks as a place to think aloud. To distinguish myself from the adult babies who moan about cancel culture and thought police, I should clarify that this is less a comment on the medium than on me as a writer/thinker/tweeter/whatever. I have a huge amount of envy for people like my friend Dan D’Addario, Variety’s chief TV critic, or my beloved Gabe, who manage to be trenchant and funny and sincere in 280 characters and who can turn the same ideas into a thousand-word essay with the same elegance, but I personally have never been able to temper the recursive, circuitous, self-conscious that inflects every thought I’ve ever shared in class or put on paper. (Cf. the first draft of my novel, which clocked in at a literally biblical 976 pages, and also the post you’re currently reading.) Maybe I’m just pissy because I average maybe like three or four likes per tweet; I dunno.

When my novel finally sold in November, I shared the news on social media in the way that all writers born after the Carter administration announce a book deal: with a screenshot of the relevant Publishers Marketplace Deal Report notice (which, by the way, are unfortunately rather ugly; I’m ninety percent sure the headline font is the same typeface used in the Arthur children’s book series) and a maudlin little caption I’d been rehearsing in my head and revising in my Notes app for months. On a few occasions since, I’ve recycled this post with supplementary commentary in subsequent tweets and Instagram stories, marveling wide-eyed at my great fortune. The content of these posts was essentially true: I had promised myself at fifteen that I’d write a boarding school novel loosely based on my three years at Lawrenceville; I had realized by fourth grade that I wanted to spend my life writing, which for as long as I can remember has brought me an almost somatic pleasure (when I force myself to do it, at least.)

The disingenuousness here is in what’s omitted. Since at least late childhood, I’ve never been able to disentangle the joy of writing from the joy of being read.

Wallace — whom I probably unsurprisingly regard as the best writer of the last half-century — once described writing as the first “thing [he’d] gotten food pellets from the universe for”; I think this really says it all. When I was in fifth grade, the state of North Carolina supplied each of its elementary schools with a truckload of AlphaSmarts, which were basically electronic typewriters: keyboards encased in the translucent teal plastic that I associate indelibly with early-millennium consumer technology, with the same sort of greenish-gray display window you’d find on a TI-84. Sitting in art class one day, merrily under the sway of the A.D.H.D. that eluded multiple clinical attempts at diagnosis until my mid-twenties, I began writing a story I would call The Flea, The Maid, and the Flying Pig. If memory serves, it was a bad thematic and stylistic impersonation of Lemony Snicket’s wonderfully baroque Series of Unfortunate Events — with which I’d been occupying the interval between Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince — except with a precocious and troubling interest in bestiality. (The titular Flea and Maid produced a child together; I don’t remember what the Pig was up to.)

I was very proud of my little story, and used the AlphaSmart’s proprietary USB cord to transfer the file to my classmates’ devices. For whatever reason, my fellow ten-year-olds went absolutely nuts over it, as did our Language Arts teacher, who several years later would be fired under opaque circumstances. I don’t really remember how all of this happened, but two weeks later, we’d printed and bound the book for the school’s library; within a month, it had begun circulating across New Hanover County’s elementary schools. At least three invited me to give readings. Soon thereafter, I appeared on an interview show on local public-access television, where with multiple still-uncorrected speech impediments I proudly held forth on the truly bizarre tale I’d crafted. I’m wary of this sort of pseudo-psychoanalytic narrative tidiness, but if I’m forced to identify a point of origin to the self-indulgent peripateticism that’s organized my adulthood to date, it would be this: sitting there on that chintz armchair in my little suit and tie, lurid under the white heat of the studio lights, happy as a fucking clam.

—

I suppose the short version of things is that I’m beholden to my own neurology. I’m rather fond of my brain; once or twice a day I actually cackle aloud at my own antics. Yet there’s an unmistakable aspect of gallows humor to this self-regard, hints of an effort to stylize the macabre in order to nullify it. Few things irk me like the romanticization of alcoholism and addiction as uniquely literary ailments: I say this as someone who decided to quit drinking and hard drugs at the age of twenty-two upon — among many other unpleasant things — the realization that I was no longer able to write a cogent sentence. I didn’t drink because I was smart, or because I was misunderstood, or because I was interesting; I drank because I was born with a brain configured to regard dopamine as no less biologically essential than oxygen or water. It is what it is.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that getting sober doesn’t reprogram anything. Today, I subsist on sugar-free Red Bull and cinnamon Nicorette and pats on the head where I can get them; today, I’m writing this blog. (Do we still call these things blogs? I’m going to.) My senior year at Johns Hopkins, while my internal neurochemical orchestra was otherwise warming up for the coming Wagnerian coda, I managed to write a couple of very acerbic (and honestly pretty hilarious) pieces of campus commentary for an undergrad magazine, in at least one instance doing so while violently hungover.¹ My Hopkins was a numbingly lifeless place devoid of any communality — metaphorized, I always thought, by the eerie vacancy of campus after dusk, animate and interesting only as the school we didn’t get into — and yet somehow these essays fucking blew up. The Politik’s website crashed under the burden of the traffic. I was briefly a minor celebrity on Hopkins’ YikYak. (Remember YikYak?)

I’ll withhold the lurid specifics of my relationship with recreational chemicals at this particular historical juncture. Suffice it to say that it was multivalent and very colorful. This is relevant here only to contextualize the freight of what I realized in the fall of 2014: that this — writing these bitchy jeremiads; having them read — was better than basically any drug. It’s cheap and insubstantial, these moments of thrall at my own cleverness, but so was vodka. 

I’m older now; I’ve had enough pieces of journalism published to general disinterest to accept that people aren’t going to fall over themselves at the cosmic majesty of every sentence I write. Again, I expect that most of the people reading this are doing so because I sent you the link; if you’ve gotten this far — in which case: bless you, and I’m so sorry — I assume it’s because you’re waiting for me to say something deliciously unhinged. (I’d argue that 1,500-word essay on — what, exactly? Childhood? Addiction? Megalomania? is itself unhinged; if so, I promise you I’m actually doing very well.) Still, I like making my friends laugh; at the best moments it’s better than going viral.

And, once again, I am beholden to my own neurology. It’s wintertime. Right now it’s just before four o’clock in the afternoon in Chicago: the wind off Lake Michigan is thrashing against my windows; the exhaust-steam rising from the westward rooftops below mine is ripe with a sun that’s already setting. I swear the Midwestern sky is bigger. I spent fifty dollars last month on a new seasonal affective disorder lamp that I keep forgetting to use; tomorrow, I’ll dutifully activate Freedom and make sure my professors have given me the right Zoom links. I have a book to read by then, but I take a utilitarian approach to procrastination. I feel better now than I would have if I hadn’t written this; it’s in this spirit that I intend to honor Resolution (5.), though you have my full sympathy if your attention is better directed elsewhere. It’s your life. I’m going to click Publish and go watch The Sopranos.

I turn twenty-nine in two days.

1. I embedded the links to the pieces within the text above, as any good former digital journalist is trained to do, but I also fucking love footnotes, so here are two links presented in full:
(i.) https://web.archive.org/web/20150709225211/http://www.jhupolitik.org/2014/09/21/why-hopkins/
(ii.) https://web.archive.org/web/20150709215811/http://www.jhupolitik.org/2015/04/12/editorials-bylaws-and-apathy-the-sham-of-civic-life-on-campus/