High Dudgeon & Low Self Esteem

Journey to the End of This Page

by William Ham
illustration by Mark Reusch

All right. I’d like the opportunity right now to revise my previous statement. Not refute it, mind you, deny I ever said it (I downloaded a particularly nasty virus that day! I opened the “Misanthrope Word” application by mistake!), or even contradict it. The thing about truth is that it’s mutable; our universal mind has been stoked to the point of rapid acceleration, and popular culture keeps pace with it (sometimes lagging slightly behind, usually half a stride ahead, but rarely does it pose the threat of overtaking us completely), therefore, for the man whose vocation (avocation?) is to analyze it intensely, the same truths that spread like a wet spot on the mattress cover of newsprint (a cover that never seems to contour to the box spring and tends to pop loose at the corners with the constant thrashings of the horizontal pas de deux between pen and paper, even when such thrashings are mere self-gratification) late one night have run dry by morning. Granted, we can cross our wounded galaxies at great speed, but our universe remains not only small but curved, and we inevitably wind up rushing past the same points over and over again, and since we’re too proud and embarrassed to stop and ask for directions, we smirk, say “I meant to do that,” and call it ironic when we really have no idea what it means. (That again – that’s been used so much you may as well put it on the Gen XAT: “irony: Alanis::potatoe:Quayle.”)

To jack myself out of the soft shoulder I’ve spun my wheels down into yet again, I have returned to state that, contrary to my (una)musings in this space last month, I have not quite convinced myself that my work here is completely futile, nor do I believe that music, the real reason I scammed my way into this tiny corner of the “biz” in the first place (free CDs and the opportunity to e-mail some of my idols on the company dime are pretty paltry enticements, but they’re enticements nonetheless), has ground itself to an inescapable rut as I may have made it seem. Again, I’m not questioning the veracity of any of my statements or denying the rage that made them so inflammatory, I’m just looking at it while trying not to give in to the overblown outrage we’ve conditioned ourselves to feel at this point in our history. It could be that I’m starting to feel my age – as I write this, I am less than an hour from turning 28 – but I’m starting to question the need to feed the negativism, the tawdry fascinations, and the easy sensationalism that has infected me as much as (if not more than) everybody else in our closed-circuit world. I’m getting a little tired. Tired of presumptive arrogance, tired of exclusionary petulance, tired of showing off my vocabulary in an attempt to prove to people younger, stronger-willed, and more driven than myself that even though I had a lousy education, I can still pile on the verbiage like nobody’s business. Are you sick of it all yet? It makes me vaguely nauseous to even be writing these words because I know how self-indulgent they sound. Really, who the fuck cares? No, stuff that, there are those who care, those close to me who keep trying to penetrate the stupid fortress I’ve built around myself. It’s that fortress from whence I issue my sarcastic communiqués, like a protein-deficient Ignatius J. Reilly (though I would never, ever wear a hunter’s cap, so I’ll 86 that analogy as well). I just feel I haven’t the right to write these words – ah, fuck, now I’m even indadvertently paraphrasing Cobain even while I pat myself on the back for outliving him. Course, that means he accomplished something in that time – just like Jimi, Jim, Janis, all the rest – which I haven’t found the stones to do. What the fuck am I doing, thinking I’m a critic, huh? Especially a music critic? (And I am that, I swear, hiding behind a cozy pseudonym and a safe persona for over two years.) What’s the point of being an opinion-maker regarding something so subjective as that?

I do it to support my habit. Follow the path of any music scribe and that whole music=drugs analogy becomes as starkly clear as the high-contrast black and white of some fifties dope-noir flick. It starts with a buzz, a snatch of a song heard through the crackling wires of a clock radio perhaps, something that sets the hair on your arms on end and washes away the petty pain and torment that walk hand in hand with everyday existence, a sensation as universal as it is personal. Soon, the rush fades and you go out to score a little of it to consume in the privacy of your own home – you start out with 45s for a quick, inexpensive fix, but after a while that’s not good enough, so you up the dosage to long-players. Before you know it, you’re caught up in the ritual – lustfully checking out the pristine surfaces of cardboard sleeves and jewel cases, fiendishly devising ways to scam the bread to make your latest score, jealously guarding your favorite tastes from everyone else because they will never understand the feeling. After a time, you’re ready to blind, maim or kill anyone who stands in the way of your bliss, a sensation so all-encompassing that you’re compelled to blab about it to anyone who will listen. The problem is that, all too often, you’re the only one who does. Finally, the fun is gone, and only grumbly compulsion remains – get the stuff, take a hit, toss it aside, repeat. Then you start to resent what it’s done to you, so you spend what remains of your energy scowling at the cheap little thrills those younger and less jaded than you are favoring – the same mild, innocous tokes and bags of musical glue you’d surely be inhaling yourself if you were their age – and trying to impart the glories of the arcane concoctions which are the only things that have any effect on your shot system on a largely unmoved populace. And on and on it goes until you kick or you die. Now do you see why us critics are so fucked up? It’s just not fun anymore. Gone are the days when a goofball turn of phrase was enough to satiate my writer’s appetite – now every word has to be weighted with significance, every pseudonymous 150-word record review planted in the concrete tennies of amateur sociology, set to a running boil by the heat of my frustration, my increasingly impotent rage, and the energy that only petulant tantrums over the fact that most of my friends have done or are doing the things I would like to do or have done with my life can bring.

And let us not forget the distracting beacon of digression, which is as serious a sap to the scribe’s intellectual stamina as any of those other things. For example, I was actually trying to write about how music doesn’t entirely blow dead ostriches this month, and yet again I wind up writing about me and my angst and a whole bunch of problems that nobody else could give deux merdes about. Boy, this combination soapbox/therapist’s couch of mine sure sticks to your skin once you’ve sunk into it. And I’m afraid that if you persist in acting all Freudian and passively nodding (out) when you should be taking me by the neck and seeing which way it bends, it’s very likely to continue in this vein. So whattaya say? I wanna know if any of this means anything to anybody or if this whole value system we’re locked into is just one big subcultural circle jerk. If this moves you to anger, violence, sarcastic laughter, whatever, good. If I’m misguided, totally off-base, or merely paranoid, I’d like to know. You know where to find me. The door is open. Let’s talk.