Welcome to the Drowning

Are you unduly fascinated by your own experience(s)? Do you rack them up in your mind like points on a scoreboard, or like so many lines of mnemonic cocaine for you to snort obssessively through the otherwise stultfiying twilight of our civilisation? Do you collect photographs, postcards and monomaniacally repeated anecdotes about yourself in the hope of one day being favourably judged by some orange-tuxedoed God of consumer capitalism who, at the End of Days, will have the task of ranking us all from celebrity chef to couch-potato, a god whose principle function is give you a big tick for not being "as bad as Other People?"

Do you find yourself thinking wry, bittersweet thoughts about your magical, heady, endlessly absorbing existence in such a way that you can basically SEE the Hollywood biopic of your life condensed into a single moment of pure Mozartian vision (the kind over which time has no dominion, but where an entire symphony is a single point of light)? Do you think you FEEL so vividly (and have such funky opinions) that you can't stop yourself from putting lifestyle (rather than life) affirming drivel to paper in the hope that you will, for one shining moment, have a speaker's chair at a 'writer's festival'? Do you constantly cluck your tongue at how much better the world would be if people were only as open-minded, big-hearted (and presumably as openly self-regarding) as yourself? Do you see yourself striking a blow against injustice and poverty every time you pour a drink, buy a shirt/get a shag/ or choose to watch good television over bad? When you think of the history of humanity, do you find yourself thinking tha there cannot have been any epoch, person, or any ideal in history that compares favourably to your own lifestyle and the opinions that lead you to approve of it? Do you live finally -- I'm going to stop asking you questions in a moment -- in an inner-city seaside suburb, such that you can mentally exploit junkies and prostitutes to provide "grit" for your sense of urban-guerilla authenticity? Do you think of yourself as an artist/poet/activist/philosopher/super-parent/saint: someone who can live on the margins of society even as they reap the bounty of its centre? Do you keep yourself warm at night embracing your various uncritical opinions like a teddy bear?

If you said "yes", to most of (hell, any) of the above, congratulations: you are a happy, productive, reasonably sexy middle-class citizen of the World Order of the third millenium. You have climbed to the top of the great detritus pile that is culture and society of our epoch and may now wave smugly at all of those lesser symbol manipulators and service industry slaves to whom you feel yourself so effortlessly superior.

If you haven't already done so, you might still achieve that taut-abdomened apotheosis of Western Culture which is to be one of the world's Interesting People. If you have a job, you will probably get to lord it over other people with stories of your success in chic bars and crazy clubs. You will command armies, while still preserving your pretension to boho chic. If you are a student, you wiil believe yourself to be the first generation of true activists, the first people to "epater les bourgeois" since the Dadaists, irrespective of how much said bourgeoisie applauds every moment of your Bohemian pantomime (and pays your rent in the form of a cheques from Mum. And, hell: you're right. You ARE awesome: no generation has ever achieved more (not in all their decades of struggle and toil) than you have in a single moment of placing dittoes around the word 'good' while at university.

When you ring your parents (or talk to less succesful siblings) you doubtless get a kick of suggesting to them that you have known, are in the process of getting to know pleasures (culinary, sexual, social) that they could only find hopelessly esoteric. If you are an adult, you probably preen yourself, on finding yourself more interesting, more open, less "conservative", more genuinely appreciative of wine, coffee, music 'life'/your DVD collection than other people.

If you join a creative writing class (and let's face it you probably will) you'll almost definitely return 6 months later with a (sexual?) auto-hagiography in which you constantly make self-deprecating remarks about how HARD it is for you to be extraordinarily sensitive and literate while keeping your down-to-earth, getting-along-fine-with-ordinary-people, hard drinkin', straight-talking, self-made ways.

You will win prizes and dream of the award ceremonies. You will vacillate between your idea of 'high falutin' and your idea of 'streetwise', just enough to make sure that everyone should at once think of you as a kind of cross between Mozart-T.S.Eliot and God, while at the same time, a kind of egalitarian lovechild of Che Guevara and the The Girl Next Door. Rejoice then for yours is the Kingdom and the Glory.

If on the other hand, you've never seen the prizes mentioned above-- if you don't want the laurels and would rather lock yourself in a toilet and spend your 5 decades in one endless session of drunken origami, or strip solitaire: we at "Drowning in Vitriol" want to hear from you. If you would rather slowly drown in your own bile than visit a single nightclub, if you hear the horrible creak of thumb-screws everytime someone talks about "having fun", or "enjoying/affirming life", we embrace you as one of Our Brethern; you are our ne'er do well brothers and sisters. You are -- if I may quote "Fight Club" -- the "all singing, all dancing crap of the world." If I may quote Thomas Pynchon: the passed over. You are one of a million spiritual slum-dewellers exiled from the light by uncoolness, anxiety, and fatigue at the desire to pass the threshold into self-satisfied self-respect. And if you're not such a person, why are you here, at a blog clinging to the flotsam of a shipwrecked culture?

But you needn't be afraid or ashamed. We are all joined in the great fraternity/sorority of the passed over. We are the lost children of lost generations, now playing Beethoven's symphony for kazoo. (Pynchon again) We are the undaunted partisans of the Preterite. The Disavowed signatories of the Invisibility Manifesto. (Forthcoming)

If you won't get over things, or won't do the right things, or are too sick of everything to start entering your life into the endless, nameless, pointless competition of lifestyles: we want to remind you that you are not alone. You are one of millions left behind by our amnesiac civilisation. The twentieth century was a shipwreck; the children of the survivors remain bewildered. We look forward to the day, when we will come, blinking out into the sunset, and glory at the wonders of our riverbank world.

And one of the causes of our bewilderment(as well as our unhelpful indignation) is that -- today -- so many people fall by the proverbial wayside. So many will never be given the musical montage sequence that every life deserves (or at least that every MODERN life craves). There are people (you,me) who will never accept an award, will never walk the streets with the arrogance of youth, beauty and the sense that the world is theirs. They will eat a block of cheese in public (like a woman I once saw on a tram) knowing that everyone is shuddering with horror around them. (I did). They will get nervous when the phone rings. They will be shy around people that they adore, and dream of transcendence that seems to conceal itself from them, but not from others.

There are many causes for this state of things and doubtless there remain many things that could be done about this. Much could be said about such topics in the arenas, of philosophy, sociology, theology. Much could also be said, by the average ranting crackpot. But we will not proffer solutions here. Instead, we at "Drowning in Vitriol" want to offer a haven where unproductive negativity will not go unnoticed or unreciprocated -- a warm, well-lit place where people (starting with well, myself) can rant pointlessly without fear of censure or the concern for productivity.

No one is free, as long as any of us have to affirm anything or accept anything to justify ourselves.

Love,

-Maladjusted