Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The Autobiographical Sketch

There are many out there who tell us not to look back, but I think that sometimes we all have to. I don’t want to imply that we should hang out in the past like some bored teenager in front of a convenience store; it’s good to move on, but every once in a while we should, just for kicks, peek in on the younger us to, at the very least, get a good life-affirming jolt at the tragedy and splendor of it all. Reflection sort of works a lot like those “don’t do drugs” propaganda films we were all forced to watch in high school. It’s highly disturbing, a little bit funny, and extremely difficult not to be entertained by.
I guess like every other person who has left their twenties behind, I sometimes feel the need to waste breath telling others my stories and giving unsolicited advice that really serves no purpose other than providing the opportunity to live it all again in my own mind. I don’t know if I really miss it like many claim to, but I definitely enjoy returning there to sift through all the hope and misery of my twenties—the hope and misery that seemed to pave the way to the cynicism and complacency of my thirties. Just to be clear, I don’t use the words hope and misery in an entirely positive or negative connotation. I look back with fondness, although at that time I probably would not have used the term fond to describe any of it. Things change though, and as I quickly grew, with age, my tastes began to turn a full one-eighty, transfiguring many of the ideas I once thought I would die believing, now seeming exceedingly obnoxious, rather than heroic and noble.
Being from a middle-class background, my tragedies were fairly limited, so like any teenager, I had to deliberately intensify them in order to procure adversity substantial enough to rage against. I definitely wasn’t worldly, destitute, or haunted by any sort of torrid past, but, at the same time, I had hoped to create art that canvassed my misery like something out of a Trent Reznor song. So every time a girl didn’t call me back or the vending machines at my high school ran out of M and M’s, I pretended that the world was trying to slowly wage a war against me and that my only true source of combat was writing self-indulgent journal entries and poetry that even most junior high girls would consider cliché. This was a war I waged into my college years, one that grew more intense as soon I discovered a “deeper” selection of books and movies, ones that most main stream society couldn’t care less about, and like all my non-conformist brethren, I would use my manufactured love for these works in order to validate my position as an outcast. As I slowly wove my way through college classes and an endless plethora of server jobs, I devoted about half of my energy to each (probably a little less to the server jobs), resulting in mediocre grades and countless hours wasted on barroom movie bashing and shit talk about main stream consumerism.
When I graduated, I think it was probably a shock to most of my family as well as myself, and I was rewarded favorably with a pair of Rey Ban sunglasses and a dinner at Papadeux’s. At 24 years of age, armed with a bachelor’s degree and a head full of new-found arrogance, I had no idea that this victory would symbolize a slump that would carry on for the next five years. With an intense mixture of shitty jobs, lack of focus, and an overload of hopes that I would later find to be extremely idealistic, I dove into the volcano of my mid-to-late twenties. In just five short years, I received a magnitude of mental ass kickings in the form of what I assumed to be a series of more responsible jobs. Although the jobs seemed to feed into the illusion that I was living the dream so many film students seem to misinterpret as success, it soon died and I found myself swallowing the truth. My dreams of changing the world all ended in a paycheck that was too small and in mediocre weekends that didn’t last long enough. Hopefully, this doesn’t convey the idea that I think life is hopeless. Life, I believe, is full of meaning; work, on the other hand, is not. It’s just something we all have to do, which to me was remotely comforting. I’ve always felt that melancholy emotion was primarily universal, thus working as a catalyst for camaraderie and improved human relationships, kind of like The Breakfast Club but with the added pressures of kids, failing relationships, and Nazi bosses. In the end, all any of us can really do is suck it up, roll with the punches, and enjoy the vacation time.
Going to Korea after the U.S economy fell into the bowels of Hell was probably one of the best decisions I have ever made. I spent a year there pretending as if I were some sort of “dead poet,” telling myself that with every drunken escapade and temple stay I was actually sucking the marrow out of life. Seems to me though, that marrow sucking and being a lazy ass are two pretty comparable things, except marrow sucking is just done in a more aesthetically pleasing environment. At this point, I’m not going to bore you with some divine story of a life-changing escapade; just say that change inevitably comes more quickly and more intensely when cultural norms are altered.
The late, great Sam Cooke sang, “a change was gonna come,” but what he didn’t say was that once you return home from your vision quest, you quickly change back into the jobless slacker you were before you left. Money plays a considerable role in productive evolution, and when we run out, we have to find ways to supplement all the smoke that was blown up our asses while we had it. For a while, self-help books like How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie were comforting, and I managed to apply the principles I learned for a little over a week before losing them all in reruns of “Good Times” and “Thirty Something.” My girlfriend, whom I met in Korea, seemed to add a bit of an edge to my triumphant return. Maintaining my allegiance to the self-help philosophy, I eagerly breezed through Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus in a torrid attempt to master the art of being a more understanding and loving partner. The book only managed to wedge a deeper rift between the two of us because I misinterpreted most of what I read and just used it to validate all of my bad behavior and insubordinate ways. The sections on women’s needs I just sort of brushed through like some speed reader on crack and ended up having it re-read to me by my girlfriend once she took the inclination to actually read it for herself.
So here I sit after my third cup in some notably obnoxious Canadian coffee shop, writing an autobiographical sketch for a journalism program I no longer have any intention of attending. It’s a sketch I initially thought would result in some deep form of self-discovery—and maybe it has, but in some mangled form, kind of like the idea of Santa Claus once we all grow out of adolescence. I guess maybe I was under the impression that my life story was going to be a sweeping epic, rather than some sort of perverse episode of “The Brady Bunch.” I guess in the end it all comes down to what we as individuals decide to take from the world and all the subjectivity that goes with it; life decisions, I assume, are indicative of that. Is there really much of a story in all of this, that I up to this point call my life? Is it something that will sweep people off their feet? I don’t know, and furthermore, I don’t care. A cheese burger and a few warm comments would be nice. In the end, that’s probably what I’ll remember the most.