the neo-bum

I’m not blogging about rap, about basketball, about who I brought home last night; I’m not writing vapid poetry vaguely masked with dorm-room eroticism; there are no video games or mp3s here, in fact I’m so fucking out of it, or shit, maybe I’m just old – you get to the ripe old age of twenty-eight and you realize you’ve filled in a lot of those holes you dug, or is that burning the bridges you built?

what do we mean by building, friends? all this anxiety about achievement is so very linear. at the same time there’s anxiety just the same: we pretty much know we’re fucked, consistency these days doesn’t get the girl, sticking with the company doesn’t guarantee you a pension…. heck, my social security’s as good as morganstanley’s by now, and I’m pretty much owned by Citibank….

I don’t have a job, and now, a hush falls over the room….

I don’t want to work.

I don’t want to work!

And this has been a revelation. really. It’s been liberating. I don’t want to do anything.

But I would like to somehow carve this desire out of a nineties context of slackerdom, or the eighties neocon context of welfare-mom bum-dom, or the sixties hippie context of drop out and tune in; I’d like to think about my not getting up and going to work as a subtle form of social protest, a lone hunger strike.

so what if I don’t want to cultivate myself? I tried the concentration thing, the career choice thing, it just doesn’t work. I’ll go out on a limb with a metaphor, here goes – it’s sort of like those stories of men who all along felt they were women, and when they finally go through with the surgery, put on a bra, they feel like they’re home….

I’ve shed quite a bit of my achievement anxiety, lopped off my equipment, as it were, and I’m here. I’m home.

It just sucks that I don’t have any health insurance.

Working is the Hollywood solution, I mean, you know where it ends and you know where the next scene is taking you; you’ve got your rising action and your denouement, etcetera; and maybe now you’ve got your Wes Andersons and your Charlie Kaufman’s infiltrating tinseltown, we could maybe use them to represent the freelance graphic designers, the mail-stuffers from home, a vague sense of freedom, but when it comes down to it a movie is still around two hours long, you got the titles, you got the stars, I mean, John Malkovich, for chrissake –

But then you ask, what about money? And I ask, how did working get all wrapped up with money?

maybe in peeling off those gender roles, growing those tits, finding myself at home in my new body, I’m looking in the mirror and realizing… I’m not a man in a woman’s body or vice versa, wait a minute….

I’m a communist!

!!!

God, I’m so naïve. Fuck, like invasion of the body snatchers, infiltration, the enemy within… Is it a choice or are you born with it? Maybe it’s something I can get tortured out of me…


…………….

It’s actually OK that I’m here in America, you know, we don’t have any of the neo-institutionalized co-opted nostalgia for the squats, for the ‘real’ left; this is a bit of what I got out of visiting Europe recently – how do I put this – they’ve got nostalgia for something legitimate.

Here our signals are so crossed we don’t know what we’re nostalgic for; anyway, to even say that the sixties have been tamed (rutinized? sp?) and re-understood to sell sneakers is really a cliché in itself, that shit is old hat; I’m just trying to find the tiniest fissure somewhere to start pounding in the revolution, the revolution…

maybe I’m not just a communist. seems I may be a terrorist.

a terrorist without health insurance and a lot of student loans in deferment.

anyway, seeing as we have no real revolutionary culture on which to build (this is of course setting aside abbie hoffman, the weather underground, martin luther king, and you know, our founding fathers) I’m excited to be in America because the form it takes has the potential to be truly new and kind of weird. and yeah, I’ve read a bit of negri, I know about this whole 'movement of movements' thing, we’re working in a new ‘globalized’ reality, all nodes in a network, a ‘multitude,’ blah blah, but strangely enough that too seems old hat, and not much fun.

And now I’m back onto the apocalypse….. Maybe we can co-opt and reframe the apocalypse. Shed this insidious deconstructionism, ‘moral relativism,’ psychoanalysis; dress ourselves up in our robes and ride in on that white steed. except it gets to be some transgendered neo-communist in martin margiela in an English saddle.
that’s it. if it’s the apocalypse that everyone’s yearning for, why don’t we reframe it for ourselves… incite the apocalypse.

and I mean, don’t worry, it never comes anyway.