assessing blame

Something washes over me as I go to a downtown credit union to cash my paycheck--guilt. Some whiskey-eyed old black man often stands inside the bus stop, scanning the passersby for willing donors to his pass-time.

Why do I feel guilty? I suppose he has less than me, but I cannot readily judge that other than by what I see, which is an old, black man with a winter coat pulled up such that only an aging smokey face pokes out, accented by bulbous chapped lips that have buffeted many a winds and many a 'no thanks.'

I was preparing myself for such an encounter then a wave of indignation washed over me. "How should I be the shill for this guy's habit?' That among other emotions and their justifying sentences belted out of my mind's mouth. At their core was a "shared" experience with poverty. I place the word in quotes because all is highly subjective--even the state of poverty. And in the politics of signification and the mobilization of words, "poor" and "poverty" have had found themselves lobbed like so many Civil War cannonballs among the indignant and the indigent. And their supporters, that veritable army of social workers, weekend philanthropists, and Sunday apologists, who toss their pie-charts and pathos into the litany of opinions about poverty and how to address it, force a schism in my thoughts about my vacillation of feelings.

Here I stand. Here I drive, edging closer and closer, city block by city block, until I see that familiar navy blue figure standing at the edge of the bus shelter. He is staring at me. I quickly avert my eyes and try to emphasize my own filth from work and the DIY repairs showing on my car. I am but one star in a grand constellation that I'd identify as poverty. But between you and me, I had choices, and therefore I am not yet completely a victim of circumstance. After all, I am white, male, educated, and I work for my older brother at a steel mill.

Hold on a second. Where did I go wrong? Shouldn't I have used that big brain of mine to go into finance so that I could scan markets, create exotic derivatives, sell trading packages, and make and lose lots of money really fast? A job like that requires a lot of communication skills--not only phone calls but face time with potential buyers. I could have been a whale by now, literally swaying markets by my vast and purposive imprint upon them. I could make solar big, or buy up a small web company that specializes in providing a small, yet handy tool for social networking sites.

Hold on a minute. I went to school and after about 2 months all of my doubts drowned out any opinion I had otherwise.  By my second semester I was riding on auto-pilot, and was getting better at it. How strange that is. Then I proposed to throw it all away by going to junior college. That plan was shouted down by lots of 'monied' relatives. And by 'monied' they threw a couple grand, collectively, at my 'indecision.' A lot of good that did me. I still owe a rather stubborn 15 grand in outstanding tuition.

I am digressing from my point. I had chances and choices, the kind that are made available by one's placement within a network that isn't one's design. I was born into a family that had a modest income and the wherewithal to push me toward academics. I did just that, but I saw it as an end in itself. That was my first bad choice. Instead of choosing classes for their intrinsic value to my personal interest and enrichment I should have done what any self-respecting middle statistic male does: go away to school, join a fraternity, and go into a relatively straightforward profession, then use the ties gained via the fraternity to land a first or subsequent lasting job. No, I went commando, solo that is, into higher education only to find myself in my junior year, by course work, without a major and with a serious existential crisis facing me. I had to pick a major. And what did I do? I did what any self-respecting student does; I sought out student career services. The first thing I did was go take a lengthy Myer's-Brigg Type Indicator on the day after I got so drunk that I smashed by car into a telephone pole. That test indicated that, among a slew of potential careers, I was made for urban planning. Aha! My Simcity playing payed off! The career counselor sent me onto the MBA track.

I started out in the business course track, took some computer courses, and fell quickly in love with the early software and internet mark-up language. That was 1997. I was at the threshold of another exploding career track. I jumped out of business into computer science, and landed my first substantive course--Java Programming. The teacher was completely not there. He showed us a Sun Microsystems CEO talk about the web of the future and how we would be basically using computing appliances, not the free-standing cat hair collectors we were using then. And the program we had to run was on CD-ROM. I didn't even have one on my computer at home. When I tried to find time in the computer lab no spaces were available. At the zero hour I went to my cousin's place and fired up the software while he and his buddies played D&D in the other room. I got nowhere and soon found myself dropping the class. "W" showed up on my transcript, and I once again reshuffled my career choices through my degree options.

I settled into Communication Studies. What a vague concept that one was. It worked out. I stayed on the cusp of obsolescence, studying old-world journalism and editing, while scanning photo slides into a digital dark room called a photo shop. The whole thing was laughable. I graduated with a CD showcasing my ability to time the swapping of low-resolution hockey pictures to the tempo of a Sepultura song. Wow. That is all I did. I really had little to show other than that. I had no interest in turning my passing interest in this ability into an occupation. Once again, it was the job that dogged me. Nothing sang to me. Nothing. And so I did what any self-respecting white, male did. I applied to graduate school. That was an easy one. My advisor during my undergraduate education more or less secured a spot for me. Another sure-fire window of opportunity was opened for me, and so I went back to school for a Master's Degree.

I didn't regret a second of my Master's Degree, nor did I regret much of my Doctoral studies. Times got tough, sure. I doubted myself, like no other. But when it came time to finish up, I choked up. And here's where I am now. I was scheduled to graduate in 2006. It is 2012, and I work in a steel mill, ABD. I studied cultural studies, social theory, technology studies, communication theory, and critical theory. Now I apply these skills as I stand in place with a blaze orange and yellow reflective blazer--much like what crossing guards wear--and watch fire. Yes, I watch fire. I watch to make sure that a one-in-a-thousand accident doesn't happen while my co-workers are on break or are leaving for the day. Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer eat your collective Jewish hearts out. Here I am, the dilettante of a million little things with no real, substantive thing to show for my education other than some alienating and obsolete vocabulary.

And who is to blame? I could blame me. I could finish my dissertation and find a fitting job at a university. Damn, I hated my last one. I fucking loathed it. The whole ugly apparatus of higher education showed its milky sac of marketing, its wreaking caudal of efficiency education, its waxy reproductive opening of community, and I worked with the whole rank underside knee-deep in its malodorous smart classroom. Day-in, day-out it was a low point in my life, so low in fact that after I quit my job I basically took to drinking and playing a fantasy video game to avoid the reality that I knew for a whole year. Once again, I had the luck and wisdom of white maledom to save me from standing at the bus shelter in my navy parka staring vaguely, teary eyed at passersby. No that won't do for me., I had money saved up, and so I watched from atop the perch of a 30-beer cube of Busch Lights as the economy went into a second notorious depression. It was nothing but notorious and depressive, for even from the haze of 13-plus beers an evening I saw nothing great about it. And it was hardly recessive, no goddammit, this was its dominant trait.

So in my long journey down a memory trace I have nothing truly substantial to show for my vagabondage other than it shared a similar root to all forms of slavery, be it self-enforced by a routine, other-enforced by an oppressive whip, or simply a consequence of one's Dasein, of one being thrown into a situation well out of one's control. No one blames the child of poverty, the crack baby, the child of alcoholic parents, or the serially molested foster child. Why blame the man at the bus shelter just because he is drunk? Maybe he drinks to cope like so many others?

And so like the serially molested foster child whose ass became a fistula and must shit into a bag at his side, I too am a victim under a milder set of serially abusive situations. And most of these were of my own creation. At the moment that I made meaning of a challenging stimulus I retreated to a depressive state of self-doubt. And so, I ducked in and out of opportunities and only stayed until the water reached so high. This explains why I am currently the fire watch for a small maintenance crew repairing steel beams around a larger power plant inside a steel mill. There, I freeze my ass off, and am quite luckier than the bus shelter black man, for I make 22 dollars and hour, plus some time and a half for waiting after my colleagues have left for that one-in-a-thousand fire to start. Hell, I've never even used a fire extinguisher. Perhaps this life is truly a scam of the highest order. I can either find hope in the scam filled life to grant me a reprieve, or, like the bus shelter black man clad in navy, I can go about slavishly within the bosom of my circumstances and etch out a routine. I will call this range of awareness and opportunity 'reality' and my reaction to it will be 'common sense.' For there, I and the bus shelter black and his navy blue coat and split lips share destinies. Perhaps we share these destinies with countless others of various stations in life. We find within our situation a range of capabilities that come to our awareness by feeling out these surroundings, call it 'life' and judge our actions 'agency' and reflect upon the persistent facts of our life our 'common sense.' And where our lives intersect others we each retreat to some kind of pidgin that both secures our ego-identities while granting us some kind of performative space to either engage the other for money or sneer at them with indignation. I am finding the most common pidgin is to pretend like a person is not even there.

We are all victims of that envelope of awareness of our situation that one may objectively call consciousness. This situation is the fount from which we came; it serves as our context; and our interaction with it forms our sense of agency. Nothing new has been said on this line or on any of the others above, for each word is itself a victim of sense-making. I cannot wrest from these things anything that hasn't been said before, nor can you understand why I write what I write. Even if you fool yourself into thinking such, all you have done is entertained some discourse genre that you've taken to living with as a credo. And even the tidiness with which I call someone's constellation of knowledge and vocabulary for talking about certain things in their world is an illusion that I cannot begin to completely put to some kind of empirical test. And we perch upon the precipice of a multitude of abysses. And their realness is a mirror of our convictions to the words we believe by and the signifying to which we put them.

I am not to blame. That man at the bus shelter is not to blame. This world, in all its buzzing confusion is a vast orchestration of many actions begun before us that will continue after us. We are machinery in this type of world. We don't speak its words, they speak us. Communication is ventriloquy. I am its dummy.

running away

I recall a vibrant moment in my life back in the summer of 2002.

I was planning to move to a new state, meet new friends, start a new program. And I had the naive idea that I'd start a new life.

Namely, I wanted to drop my porn viewing habits and perhaps commit to less TV and more books, more coffee but less of the pot. I quickly found that one can only run away from what they leave behind, but they can never leave behind themselves.

I recall a very depressing and lonely moment in the Fall of 1995.

I was attending a university, on the premed track in my freshman year. The first week was stressful, mostly because I dragged every book that I had to purchase to and from my Monday classes. They were back-to-back lectures in college algebra, biology, and chemistry. I through I'd test out of the math. I ruefully accepted chemistry. I embraced biology. During some evenings I went to my job at the grocery store. There, in my solitary profession of refacing shelves, I'd fantasize about walking away from it all. In this little solitary fantasy I planned to begin walking somewhere, I'm not sure, north perhaps. I just wanted to walk into a town where I had no money or obligations other than to live. There, I would start over.

Why I so quickly turn to a fantasy of leaving behind one's stressful life I don't know. This stress management option was quite stressful in and of itself. Why would I consider running away from a life, from friends, from loved ones, from a warm home and inviting bed? The choice is extreme to turn one's back on a life, a job, friends, loved ones, and to arrive 'new' with tattered shoes and dirty clothes in a strange town. It's not a practical stress avoidance option, but it's the one that returns like a siren's call every so often.

Where has it been lately? I am unsure what happened to this desire to leave. It has matured perhaps. Yes, that's what has happened. Instead of me wanting to run away I acquire some skills and parlay them with previous skills into a new profession. I am finding what I could be in a world that seemingly doesn't want me. I intentionally avoid preparing for a big sell, yet at the same time I could envision myself as a decent salesperson if the need were to arise.

So now my current dream is to return to school. Why? I like to learn. Most of all, I like to dream, and what better place to do it in an academic setting built around your future? Colleges are dream factories, places where I can dream, places that will eagerly slurp up what funding I can acquire to return to school.

I guess I am unsure what will come of these choices other than more deferment of a life trajectory worthy of a retirement portfolio and of a socially traded datum of class, occupation, and consumer profile. I aspire, as we speak, of being a non-entity. Or rather I want to disappear from here and reappear there, and never ever settle into one profession for life. I suppose I could grow weed all of my life, if I could get away with it. As of late, I have been unable to do even that.

Now the final question is what does this tell me of my neurology? I know that is a somewhat passe question, given how brains are one of many readily tweaked and state-adjusted concepts-entities that consumer society caters to with its speed drinks, vitamin cocktails, and "brain growing" puzzle sites. Two questions emerged. First, why does talk of the brain with any definitiveness raise my hackles? Secondly, what could one say about my neurology given my desire to constantly shift out of routine?

I'll tackle the second. This should be easy. This notion that the world out there reveals something about the world in here is nothing new. It would suggestively support a dual recognition of the importance of both the world in shaping people and people in shaping the world that shapes people. Somewhere in that dual process entity you will find an answer to the question I posed. In such a world lacking worn routine I would suppose that changes are a way for me to 'reformat' some area of my brain, to force me to rethink and relearn my world, reestablish an umwelt, and the such. I have nothing against routine. In fact, I am a slave to my routines, but I am also slavishly aware of my routine's effect upon me. So in that sense, the breeding ground and proving ground for my neurology is in forced changes to my routine. So now that I have both engaged in one of my pet peeves and explained one aspect of my own self I will conclude and move on.

The conclusion I'd draw about my neurobiology is that I want to shape it through ruptures in routine. I don't want to allow neuronal networks to establish around a paucity of data. Rather, I'd like to put them networks to making sense of new environs. Now, what does this tell me about my peeve?

My peeve is connected indirectly to the way I posed and answered my first question. I'd rather change my brain behavior through forcing change upon myself than through some 'brain teaser' puzzle housed at a website that touts its credentials about how your brain works. And that's it. I think the way to interface and making changes to one's brain, qua one's self, is a personal and fully challenging endeavor. There are no Matrix-style pills and quick training tapes to put one up to speed. No, the change takes effort, sweat, stress. Secondly, we live in a world where brains are the medical synecdoche for human behavior and the self. Owing at least partly to the means available introduced by medial terminology, people are swayed by these expert discourses and their ability to alienate a person from his own soul. And to add insult, the expert sells back to the alienated a brain training program as well as a set of drugs for enhancing some aspect of the brain the expert tells you you never knew existed.

And that's the subtle play upon subjectivity qua enunciative modality that I see occurring. But I'm running away from that as well.

As a wise man once read from his character's dialogue and said: "No matter where you go, there you are."