think piece

non-fiction

April Fools! Thanks for tolerating me on this one—had a lot of fun with it. I hope none of my non-fiction think piece-ers take offense. Fiction will be back Sunday.

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You should know I’m compelled to write this, the words bleeding from my fingertips and into the keyboard, where they are absorbed by the computer and the literary cells within them animated to rhetoric. How much wordily blood shall I give this machine such that it becomes me? How much essay does it need until it talks back, until it can read and rehash my DNA and find exactly what makes me human? To talk to myself, that is the greatest gift this thing affords me and you, providing recourse for so many thoughts and actions, and what compels me now.

In short, consciousness compels me, and the need to reaffirm it as I move through this physical thing outside the LED boxes we call ‘the world’.

If I don’t think about something that happens, did it even happen? If I fail to write about it, have I even achieved comprehension? If you don’t read this, how will you ever understand anything in the same way I do?

It may seem like I am asking a lot of questions, but questions are the essence of thinking, and answers are the essence of essays.

No thought goes in vain. By entering these characters into this word processor, I connect with you, you connect with me, and together we are in conversation in the public space, cave people leaving drawings on cave walls for the next cave people to marvel at as they go on by.

To ask another question: What am I talking about?

Answer: Discourse.

I will enumerate what I mean by this word and its varied and unvaried interpretations thusly (via Roman numerals, that way you know I am serious):

i. what happened

Somewhere, somehow, some Thing happened.

Something happened in politics. Something happened in sports. A TV show began and ended.

A man died.

A dog barked, an injustice was done, a justice was accrued, a rent was a paid, a weather was weathered, a penis was erected, a tithe was quarried, a frittata went unfettered, a cornucopia of corneas went quartered and a clam—claiming consciousness—said, “I am!”

ii. the thing is bad/good

Whatever happened, it is clear it should be adjudicated. Nothing exists in a vacuum of moral polarity.

Everything could be fascist; equally, everything could be communist.

At the very least, men with mustaches are bad—this we know, no matter the length of the mustache upon the lip. We must call these things out as they happen within the quotient of mustachioed-ness which precedes them: Shortened Morality (Hitler-stache), Elongated Morality (Stalin-stache), Strange Morality (Dali-stache), Bermuda Morality (Hemingway-stache), Blue Blood Morality (Selleck-stache).

If I let you escape the confines of this text without knowing my disposition toward the Things that have happened without its place upon the Mustache Quotient, then I have failed you, and myself. Things may not happen at all if we are not to adjudicate them.

iii. we live in a time

We live in a particular time in which things happen. This time is both better than what came before, but also worse. It is worse than the time which shall come, but better than the time that shall come to pass. It is an epoch of both modernity and exo-modernity¹. Whatever time it is, it must—it has to be—defined and categorized: decades, generations, fads, memes, culturomyosynthesis²—all of these phenomenon are transient in the Time In Which We Live.

Currently we live in the time of Roman Numeral Lists. Why? You and I are sharing the time in this piece. Temporally vague as it is, you are reading this in the same moment as I am writing it.

iv. well, actually

This is undeniable.

This is unrefutable.

A stance on something in particular dissonance towards the gathering of collective wisdom on such thing. To be contrarian, in all sides of and in between all light cast through the prism of the Things, is to be wise.

Indubitably, for someone to be right, someone has to be wrong. It is best to take up the ancillary positions before they’ve become overrun with commonplace takes and brunt force reactions. Stay there and hold the line, a phalanx of the mind, before you even know how you got there, and you’ll find yourself gleefully unable to escape.

v. have you noticed how

Have you ever noticed many of the things are like a and maybe even like b or x?

This calculus serves to boil a gladdening of our incredulity toward the other items above and it might also best be presented in the form of the list. From the time of Al-Jabr to now, we can hardly ignore the mathematical matrices of all Things which within them contain many other Things, and within them other Things, and so on. The microscope becomes ever elongated, and for good reason. Noticing meets observation, and observations mean airplane food, and indeed—what’s the deal with everything?

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In conclusion—and as you can see—the manner in which I’ve communicated my thoughts have left an impression on you that you simply can’t help sharing.

And my hope is it shall be shared, relatable it is, among many people, shared and shared such that everyone might nod their head at once and agree with me and my sentiments and I might accrue boundless validation. For I have done a service: these thoughts, formerly stagnant in your brain, have been shifted to move freely, given a shape and choreography to move to they previously did not have.

I would ask for your thanks, but the knowledge I have done such a service is thanks enough.

Instead, I thank you for reading. Next week will be my essay on exo-modernity and all it entails (far more complicated than you think).

Also, if you enjoyed my musings, please be sure to check out my other viscerally real, raw, and uncensored non-fiction Substack about the time I abandoned my family for a year to get my philosophy doctorate and lived my masculine fantasies to the fullest, featuring: drugs, fucking, swears, violence, and a lot of self-loathing. I think you’ll find it rather compelling and definitely very true, with a certain level of verisimilitude.

regards,

Clancy Steadwell

[very much accredited]

1. I’ll explain this in my next essay (paywalled).

2. I’ll also explain this in a further essay in two weeks time, The Time of Essays (paywalled).