some fever dream of my mother's
July 1, 2022
SUGAR CUBES 📷
Algimantas Kezys — Camp Rakas (1966)
Algimantas Kezys — Union Station, Chicago, Illinois (1966)
Algimantas Kezys — Venetian Blinds, Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984)
LETTERS HOME FROM THE WAR ON REALITY 🪖
Dear Lucille1,
Most cities make sense. They sit along a river or coast or out on the fertile plains where railroads carry corn and wheat far, far away. Las Vegas mystifies me.
We flew in from all over the country for a family trip. After a night in Vegas, we were scheduled to pick up an RV and depart on some fever dream of my mother’s in which the Grand Canyon was vaguely implicated. But first, a night at The Cosmopolitan:
The lobby and elevators have floor-to-ceiling screens that alternate between perfume ads and library shelves. Digital library shelves. Maybe it was a lingering hangover but the phrase the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race kept racketing around my skull.
We had some time to kill before dinner. My family lacks the gambling instinct (our neuroses lie elsewhere) so my parents and siblings fed loose change into slot machines for an hour or so. I don’t think anyone won or lost more than a dollar.
After dinner, we went to a Cirque du Soleil show and I spent two hours muttering Oh no and What the fuck under my breath until they let us leave.
Then we drove around the desert for a week.
I looked forward to the desert. After my birthday earlier in the month, I was deep into my annual crisis of meaning. I don’t journal but I brought one on the trip, anticipating plenty of time for introspection and hoping for some measure of revelation usually reserved for desert mystics and ascetics. (I was reading about monks who lived way out in Egypt.) Before we even got to the Hoover Dam I remembered that spending time with my family brings me entirely out of my head. So I spent the week without an original thought, staring at other recreational vehicles driving through the Mojave and wondering what it must be like to raise camels in Libya.
After the trip we gave the RV back to Las Vegas and flew home. I’m tempted to say more of Vegas. For some seventy years, better writers than me have gone there to flex their powers of description. Didion called it, “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.” Thompson subtitled Fear and Loathing: “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.” I’m sure there were other writers, but I don’t care to look them up.
I’ll restrict myself to one observation, which is that the gambling there is evenly distributed — it is an incredibly democratic city that way: there are slot machines in the Bellagio same as in the suburban gas stations and low-down fourteen-dollar-a-night motels. Everyone plays the same game. It’s a question of choosing your company.
A week later, I was at my five-year college reunion, where the situation is reversed: you’ll keep company with whoever shows up, all of whom are playing as many different games as exist on the casino floor.
The lawyers and doctors are just out of school, working their first real jobs. The software engineers discuss the finer points of making money. I have a hard time knowing what to do with the bankers and the consultants, who went into banking or consulting to figure things out or because you can do anything after consulting but have yet to emerge from their chrysalis of preparation and optionality and are still piling away cash and capability for something important but undefined and hazy on the horizon. Many have gone to business school, to continue preparing themselves.
Nobody has amounted to much of anything yet, though some are clearly on their way.
Suddenly there’s an impulse to drop off the map. To move to Paris and surface every five years; to not make any recognizable progress; to withdraw from the corporate body of believers in the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay2.
Of course I will do none of those things, unless something very good or very bad happens to me. What I really took away from the reunion was this: people do not change. They may mature, but they do not change. Maturity has its benefits (someone you remembered as an asshole is more agreeable) and its drawbacks (he’s also less interesting). Or maybe it’s not maturity but a sense of resignation — resignation to an age of which Didion (again) wrote, “That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Or maybe these are dumb things to worry about at 27. Life is long.
My parents visited San Francisco last weekend. On Saturday, we hiked around Angel Island, then went to a new restaurant on the water for lunch. Over drinks, we were working out another crisis of meaning for me or one of my siblings, I forget which. During a lull in the conversation, everyone looked at my sister-in-law, who looked back at us a bit blankly. My brother turned to me and said, “Their family does a lot less navel-gazing than ours.”
I was more or less consumed with navel-gazing when I went to the dentist last week for an annual check-up. In short, there was an incident involving one of those spit suction tubes and my uvula. In the midst of the wreckage, my uvula was about twice as long as normal and swollen, which, practically speaking, felt like I had one of these guys attached to the back of my throat:
and I can guarantee you, I can promise you with every ounce of my being, that there is no quicker solution to existential crises, to questions of wealth or prestige, to the problem of lovers who may in fact be irrevocable, than having to battle your uvula just for the privilege of drinking some gazpacho. The issue has since resolved and every meal is a blessing.
Until next time, you beauty.
Happy 4th and heart’s best,
Murdo
CONTENT CROP 🌾
The art of listening || aeon
Everyone wants to be listened to. Why else the cliché that people fall in love with their therapists? Why else does all seduction start with riveted attention? Consider your own experience, and you will likely find a direct correlation between the people you feel love you, and the people who actually listen to the things you say. The people who never ask us a thing are the people we drift away from. The people who listen so hard that they pull new things out of us – who hear things we didn’t even say – are the ones we grab on to for life.
note: Canetti wrote, “I have always enjoyed listening when people speak about themselves. This seemingly quiet, passive tendency is so violent as to constitute my innermost concept of life. I will be dead when I no longer hear what a person is telling me about himself.”
The Return of Recovered Memory || Compact Mag
Launched in the early 1980s and fought in the popular media and the courts, featuring national panics and scandals as well as thousands of unpublicized battles, the memory wars seemed to have concluded with the victory of the skeptics, such that Johns Hopkins psychiatry chief Paul McHugh could write in 2003, “The repressed-memory diagnosis has finally been repressed.”
Nearly 20 years later, the repressed has returned.
note: I’ve been inundated with psychotherapeutic content recently and am on the precipice of either denouncing the practice entirely or going back to school to practice it
Why do educated people believe in obvious stupidities like the crushing power of hybrid warfare in such a herdlike way? . . .
A reason that is less well-explored, I believe, is the West’s war on nicotine. The massive brain outages we see throughout the West, and particularly in America, are in no small part due to the war on smoking, which both makes people smarter and kills them before they become senile.
note: first Codevilla and now Luttwak. I will personally pay David Samuels to keep interviewing every anti-establishment Cold War strategist gathering dust in think tanks and NGOs that he can find
POSTCARDS FROM OUTER SPACE 🎴
UFOs IN THE COW FIELD 🛸
An oddly-shaped rocket crashed into the moon and nobody is quite sure who it belonged to. From NASA:
The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity.
THE BOOK BARN 📖
White Noise by Don DeLillo
(Fiction, 1985. $15.)
“This is death. I don’t want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years.”“Your status as a doomed man lends your words a certain prestige and authority. I like that. As the time nears, I think you’ll find that people will be eager to hear what you have to say. They will seek you out.”“Are you saying this is a wonderful opportunity for me to win friends?”“I’m saying you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave. What people look for in a dying friend is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor. You’re growing in prestige even as we speak. You’re creating a hazy light about your own body. I have to like it.”
note: I don’t care what anyone says reading DeLillo’s dialogue makes me feel like I’m really good drugs 👽
Lucille is a heifer