welcome to motes, little bits of writing I’d rather put in a post than your Notes feed. they’re not Notes. they’re motes.
When I was in elementary school I wanted to be an actor. I still do, despite never having acted in my life (except, as you’ll see, this one time), but I really wanted to back then, in the way you ask a little kid what he wants to be when he grows up and he says “baseball player!” or some equally unrealistic thing; “actor” was my choice.
So my parents put me in some special program that was the combined elementary schools of my district putting on a play. We were going to do Romeo and Juliet (by William Shakespeare, look him up). They sent us home with the play script and said we could read for any role we wanted.
Well, I wanted to be Romeo, obviously! So I practiced. I practiced! All day every day. I memorized all the lines. All of them! I tired my parents making them read with me. I leapt to the coffee table, proclaiming to the top of the stairs, BUT SOFT! What light at yonder window breaks?
Auditions came and for some reason we got to watch everyone’s auditions? A couple other kids read for Romeo, and they didn’t even have the script memorized. They had to read from it! Then I got up there, no script, gesticulating, loud, all excitement and enthusiasm. The other kids laughed and clapped and cheered.
They called me in to tell me what part I got. I remember the teacher putting her hand on my back as she bent to tell me:
“You were so, so good in the audition, Clancy. But we are going to give the part for Romeo to Ricky. His mom just passed away and we think it would be good for him to have something like this to do.”
I got the part of “Dancer 4”.
I went home and cried all day. Stupid Ricky and his dead mom! Ricky, one of those kids whose nose was always running, always sniffling, who didn’t even memorize the lines!
My parents lectured me on not always getting what I want.
Never acted or even tried since then. What good was it to be the best, to put in all the work, but then have it not even matter? The truth is, I probably wasn’t as good as I remember. I probably butchered the lines. The other kids were probably laughing at me in the not-good way.
And even if I got a part, what if I was taking it from someone like Ricky, who just lost their mom?
Bikes, for me, are the best form of transportation.
In walking or running, the feeble locomotion of our bodies makes the world seem too huge, something insurmountable and just unknowable enough to be not worth it.
Cars—I could go on a tirade, but suffice to say, they remove the pleasure of the voyage. They might as well be a little capsule transporting you through a space portal. Trains—similar, but at least they move slow enough and you’re removed from its operation to watch the world pass by. Airplanes—unfair, we weren’t meant to fly.
But bikes are a good in-between. You must still rely on the body, but you move through the world while connected to it, breathing its air. I used to be able to ride my bike to work, weather permitting, and this allowed me to separate work from life as never before.
Last week, after yet another interview rejection, I went on a short bike ride around my neighborhood, in the same way people take walks to clear their head. It was cloudy, windless, cold in a way it hadn’t yet been. As I stood on the pedals in the approach to a four-way stop, with not a car in sight, nor any other distraction or impediment, riding straight through the middle of the road, I turned my head—then was flying through the air.
Perhaps “flying” is not the best word for it—it’s unnatural to fly, as aforementioned—and if someone saw my “flight”, they’d object to the term, as most likely I only traveled a couple feet, even if it felt like several. I landed first on the side of my right knee, slid, put my hand down to avoid slamming my head (un-helmeted, idiot) and smashed my shoulder into the asphalt. The damage was mostly to the knee, a quarter sized second-degree burn.
I popped up quickly, too quickly, seeing spots and wondering what the hell happened. There were no witnesses. My chain guard was bent and the bike was unrideable. Luckily I was close to home.
What happened? my wife asked. I didn’t know what to tell her.
All I know is I have been distracted lately. Maybe I threw myself off the bike, or maybe it bucked me.
It is, though, still the best form of transportation.
At my middle school, Axis vs. Allies was a war of purple-nurples in the hallways between classes.
(Purple-nurples [nerples?], for the uninitiated, are pinching and twisting another’s nipples.)
I participated, but only as The French Resistance, i.e. a third team to the game. You may think, well, this puts you on the side of the Allies, surely, right? Historically, yes, but to a mass of uneducated boys giving each other purple-nurples, this went under the radar (or over their heads) and some thought I was on one side, some on the other.
This neutral, third-party coalition of one I had formed with this French Resistance idea in the purple-nurple war allowed me to move between groups as needed; when in the hallway after fifth period, I could walk with impunity among the Axis kids, then later among the Allies outside the cafeteria at my lunch period. I never gave anyone a purple-nurple—I would never—but this affiliation allowed me to play the game without giving or getting, as I was simultaneously on everyone’s side, but also not.
Until the main players of both sides cornered me in the band room and, having deduced my little strategy, demanded I clarify the historicity of ‘The French Resistance’ and declare loyalty to either side in real life appropriately. I refused and they both twisted my nipples. Hard.
I told the school administration, they were punished, and the game ended.
This story, I think, proves I am annoying in a few ways, and outlines the couple of ways in which products of society like myself make things worse for everyone else.
One: I have to be a contrarian. By being different for the sake of it, one may play the game without the risks or costs associated with either side, never getting hurt nor dealing it. And two: I refereed the game without approval, ruining the fun for everyone else.
The more honest thing would have been not to participate, not tattle, and to remain a detached observer. I would have never gotten my nipples twisted and no one would have gotten in trouble.
And within this, I think, is the struggle I face when continually deciding whether to delete my Substack or not.
The ability to make fun of one’s self frequently and appropriately need not be confused with an inability to take the same self seriously. I believe only serious artists take themselves un-seriously. In fact, I am suspicious of anyone who does not demonstrate humorous self-deprecation from time to time, and doubly suspicious of those who would forgive them of this.
Just as we should be suspicious of art in this way: any drama without humor, comedy without weight, narrative without even a slight reference to itself—these cannot be trusted. It comes down to self-awareness, and I believe it is very hard to create good art without it.
(Perhaps what I am describing is a reference to the many oscillations of metamodernism, which—even when I try to escape the definitions of movements and philosophy—is a set of ideals I always seem to find myself squarely within.)
Some, I think, outsource their self-awareness to others who either fairly criticize them in an antagonistic, unfriendly way (random trolls on the Internet) or reinforce them in an over the top and drastic way (friends, a scene, etc.).
But to make fun of your peers in tenderness is by the same token so rarely accepted on the commons of the Internet, i.e. everyone is so sensitive these days!
It seems a social qualification of digital modernity is to not to make fun of each other, when in reality, light humorous ribbing is one of the few ways to make criticism amenable. If the person you’re ribbing has enough of the aforementioned self-awareness, then so long as what you’re ribbing them about rings true, they can laugh about it. This is why the greats are subjected to and approve of roasts—they are in on the joke!
When I am made fun of here on Substack—both directly and indirectly—is when I feel most accomplished.
So roast me!
This metaphor of artists being storytellers sitting around a primordial campfire has become a hackneyed and cliched one, easy to make fun of, a vestige of bong-circle discussions the world over.
But there is some truth to it. If society were to devolve back to the Stone Age or something like it (increasingly likely), the only way I’d contribute to any survival tribe would be as some kind of storyteller. My spaghetti arms could not fend off the mutant-zombie raiders. I would not be able to construct our rain-catchment systems or lean-tos. I certainly could not grow food in a climate controlled greenhouse, nor hunt for it over the ruined radioactive plains. Nor do I have a good sense of direction for navigating the wasteland. I don’t have the leadership or organizational planning skills that might see me boss other people around.
Instead, I’d tell the tales of those who could and did accomplish the great things of our end-times. I think this is how most stories, especially the old epics from Homer and others of ancient and oral tradition, began: people telling the exploits their contemporaries. Over the ages, an epochal game of telephone confuses reality with metaphor, and invention with fact.
Anyone can relay a story, but the real gift of storytellers is knowing which part of the story the tribe needs to hear, how to accentuate the parts of it that serve the culture going forward, and how to fill in the gaps where there are unknowns. How effectively the storyteller bends reality into narrative determines the staying power of the story, how well you and the others around the campfire can remember it when there’s no way to write it down. Those most true to human nature last forever.
And, in the post-apocalyptic world, entertaining stories might determine my staying power within the tribe, preventing me from being eaten, or worse.
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I liked the Axis vs Allies, and making fun of oneself the most. I know a guy who has posted a scathing review of his own piece of writing, for his own amusement.