There are a lot of things keeping me from feeling like I can write that entry. The distractions multiply faster, of course, than I can lasso them into a representative strategy. I'll resort to a flat list. When I came into a coffee shop to write this, there was a baby crying loudly. Everyone was doing their best to ignore it, to maintain the coffeeshopness that underpins transactions. The reproductive was disrupting the ordinary flow of coffee, money and atmosphere, and people, including myself, were reacting by quietly retreating to the outdoor seating despite the cold. I wondered if at some point the employees would ask the mother to leave so that the business might run more smoothly. Why do I find myself falling into describing the kinds of things that Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects allots in its purview, attempting to tap into fields of ordinariness largely ignored by academic gazes?
The coffeeshop's music tries to drown out the sound of the baby and I try to drown out the sound of both with more music on headphones. On top of this everyone is talking around me. The auditory confusion becomes a metaphor for the other forms of confusion I'm experiencing. In another light--perhaps the light of caffeine--it's not confusion at all, but stimulating multiplicity. There are layers of form that I can float among, never having to sink into the tense, buoyant, cold void of myself.
I have a friend who hasn't really been my friend for years. A couple of nights ago I saw him play in a band at a bar, and I talked to him afterwards. It was an awkward conversation. Awkward is the word I use when I can't really understand what exactly is tripping us up. One word I used later was "wall"--our walls. I came because his facebook status reminded me that his band was playing that night. His facebook status half-joked that there's no reason for him to worry about how they sound because it was a New Year's show, and nobody would really be listening. I referred to his status, laughing about it and saying that everyone seemed to enjoy it. He said they were missing their guitarist, and that he wondered if anyone noticed. I laughed and assured him nobody did.
He also has a blog, the latest entry of which relates their rehearsal sessions leading up to this show. There was too much chaos, and there were too many people missing. The circumstances were "not optimal," as he puts it. The blog entry supplements my encounter with him, explaining the misunderstanding that "awkward" had deferred. He felt like things were going wrong, and that he was the only one aware of and trying to correct these impending or ongoing disasters. The guitarist being missing was one of many problems he felt that he was managing. I was one more person ignorant of what to him was overwhelming. This realization gives me a pang of sympathy which soon gives way to pity for his cognitive distortion. He wants everything to be perfect, and thinks that everyone can see the same failings that he sees. But they don't. That night they were busy dancing their hearts out to the music that to him was falling apart. In their drunkenness they were straining to celebrate, to feel like the "new year" is a beginning rather than an end. At the same time I had been straining to find all the private nightmares I was convinced are always occurring in loud bars. Of course when I strained all I saw was people having a good time. It's somehow poetic that one of the nightmares was taking place for the person whose musical performance was setting all this in motion. It's a speculative, retrospective perspective thrown together from times that I've felt this way and from the psychological navel-gazing of his blog.
His blog is a way for him to climb briefly out of the rubble of his life and have a look at himself. Through his blog he strives to be someone more than who the blog describes. He is constantly searching for the root of his problem and attacking it when he thinks he's found it. He's always catching up to himself.
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