Phthursday Musings: Maintaining Balance

I was sitting in the recliner tonight. Just sitting. My mind was mostly blank, except that I was aware that I was sitting with a mostly blank mind. But I was not staring off into space or anything quite like that. I was aware but my mind was empty.

Five minutes later, out of nowhere, I was in the middle of a long explanation to my poor suffering wife about how her two-out-of-ten-annoyed tone and her six-out-of-ten-annoyed tone are pretty much the same, and I had deep thoughts about this.

The sitting there blankly was at a point in time where I was trying to figure out if I would have anything to write tonight. All of the things I’ve thought about writing I haven’t been able to summon the energy or inspiration for. But now, somehow, I’m writing about this.

I am a lot more conflict avoidant than I used to be. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the ones I want to mention here are how at a high level I find conflict to be thoroughly draining, and recharging from the drain to be slow and awkward, and the sense of being drained very vulnerable. In addition to all of that, I find the efficacy of conflict to be fairly low in a lot of cases.

I don’t think what I describe above is unique, though I do imagine I apply a level of meta thought to it that not everyone does.

I bring this all up to explain how and why it is that, as much as I think people could benefit from actually talking about the terrible state of affairs in Israel and Gaza right now, the thing is that I don’t feel any particular capacity for conflict, I don’t feel there would be much to be gained from any kind of argument I might have with anyone, and I feel like no matter how nuanced I might try to be in expressing my opinions, I would inevitably trigger some kind of argument, some kind of conflict, which I do not think would be healthy. And I’m not really sure all of this is a healthy place to be in. But that’s kind of the state of outrage culture today. We’ve been so thoroughly trained to respond with outrage and offense. And then so many of us just… need to avoid that. Even when we do have opinions. Even when we wish we could just talk to people. Even when deep down we know that The Answer lies in people coming together, not in people being separated and feeling they can’t even communicate with one another.

What I will say here is that the person I’m reading most closely is Jonathan Katz, who I think I can fairly describe as a liberal anti-Zionist American Jew, and who I find to be incredibly thoughtful and honest. Maybe you’ll agree, maybe you’ll disagree. This is what he wrote a couple days ago:

It can be difficult to talk about Other Things when a particularly saddening war has broken out, and the night after the latest extreme mass shooting. But I think we have to, because as human beings, we’re not supposed to just be consumed in sadness and fear. When we succumb to that, we’re letting the evil win.

I write to try and work through some thoughts that, I don’t know why, I find them easier to work through in the process of writing. Maybe I could also work through them in the process of singing… I should try that out. I’m sure my wife wouldn’t mind.

We all have to try and strike a balance from time to time. Maybe sometimes that balance is one between making sense and not making sense of the world at large. What I’ve found though is that when times are heavy, I go into retreat more than I used to. And I think it’s not conflict avoidance for the sake of conflict avoidance… I think it’s that inability to recharge.

For as much shit as anyone who’s younger than a boomer might give to boomers collectively, I think this idea that it’s harder to recharge might be something we should all think about a little more. I’m not talking about people being old and frail here. I’m saying that even the healthiest among us, I think we’re like rechargeable batteries, where when we get drained, it’s a slower and more arduous process to recharge.

And this is stream of conscious thinking here, and so this is just me spitballing, and maybe I’m full of shit, but I wonder if the outrage culture we’re in so happens to work the way it does in part because outrage is kind of like a drug that compensates for the inability to recharge. In the last season of Cocaine and Rhinestones, Tyler Mahan Coe talked about how the legendary country singer George Jones, after discovering cocaine, would literally walk around with a straw in his shirt pocket, so as to have easy access to the coke in the same pocket. And I feel like that’s how a lot of people are today with outrage, and certain elements of the mass media - primarily on the hard right - are all too happy to feed that addiction.

And then in turn I think there are a whole lot of us who, even if most of us don’t necessarily exactly think about things in the strange terms I’m spelling out above, certainly sense this outrage culture and do what we can to sidestep it. Sometimes we’re explicit about it - think of hearing about how people have cut toxic relationships out of their lives. Sometimes it’s less overt than that and it more so takes the form of somehow managing to only talk about the weather, or to only interact with people with whom we tend to agree about everything.

Sometimes it’s even more passive than that. Literally, I’ve worked from home for 8 years, and if I’m on a Teams call with coworkers, do you really think we’re talking about Israel or nuclear power or defunding the police or arms control or any number of other things like that? We have a hard enough time sometimes talking about internal department policy or what the correct way is for a screen to work and we need to work together. We’re not going to talk about politics or anything of the sort.

And yet that’s what I did for years on end. I was co-chair of the Green Party’s National Committee, for crying out loud! And here I am explaining that I don’t really want to have to get into a conversation about nuclear power with someone who might disagree with me. Instead of being trained to take the outrage drug, it’s like I’ve been trained to believe that we can’t even talk to each other. And maybe this is all an overstatement for effect, but it’s not a misrepresentation. Hell, maybe it’s not even an overstatement. Maybe this is just how many of us are at this point.

None of this is something I had any intention of writing about tonight, but I’m understanding now how I’m expressing - however coherently this may or may not be - a certain frustration and resignation with wanting to be more engaged with the world but feeling kind of helpless and hopeless and just needing to disengage instead. And I very much believe this is how a lot of other people are feeling as well. No, you and I aren’t going to go magically discover peace in the Middle East tomorrow. But retreating from any engagement is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Not that we should be blaming ourselves and entering into that kind of negative spiral. As I wrote above, we’ve got to find balance.

As I’ve sort of written a few different ways in the past, for me a critical part of finding some sort of balance in the world is and forever will be live music. After going almost two months without seeing a show, I’m in a little run now where I’ll see at least four shows in four weeks.

Last week was Nathan Graham, a Chicago-based singer-songwriter who I saw back in July opening for the Murmur show. I said then that he was somewhere between blues and Americana, and I guess he and his publicists agree, since his website says he “meshes South Side Blues with Nashville Americana”. I’d say he feels like a throwback, but as is the case with so much of American popular culture, he’s not a throwback but a synthesis, and evidence that there absolutely is more to be found in rock and roll.

Monday night was a “house show”, though it was in more of a tiny community venue adjoining a coffee house, with the always incredible Eric Bachmann. He is of course the front man for the Archers of Loaf, who released Reason in Decline, their first album in two decades last year. The Archers are a loud and noisy band, and it’s always a little weird to see him in a setting like this, nevermind that it’s the fourth time I’ve seen one of these house shows.

We were among the last people to arrive, which resulted, schoolroom style, in us sitting right up front, five feet from the man as he shifted between guitar, keyboard, and a 1959 Kay banjo. (I had to be sure to get the year and manufacturer right because that’s the first question my dad would have.)

Sitting five feet away from a banjo rendition of “Greatest of All Time” is not something I ever would have predicted.

I’m always intrigued to find that people are still releasing videos. This one is from his most recent solo album No Recover from 2018:

Next week, it’s a reunion tour for the wonderful Blonde Redhead, and the week after that, some 20 years too late, I am finally, finally seeing My Morning Jacket.

My best guess is that I’ll see 25 shows this year, the most I’ve seen since I was in college. That’s a lot of balance. I think I’ve needed all of it.

On the subject of balance:

When I was young, 5 or 6 or so, and we’d go to my aunt’s house, she had this toy nobody else had, and I loved that thing, it could hold my attention for a surprising length of time. Years later I found one on eBay for my son, who was never interested at all. So it’s just mine, and its sits on top of my tall CD shelf.

I guess it’s called “ADD-A-COUNT”, which it notes is “A CHILD GUIDANCE TOY”. It’s just a scale with numbers, where the gimmick is that the 5 weighs 0.5 ounces and the 7 weighs 0.7 ounces… probably not exactly those weights, but proportional weights. So what you see above is that on the left there’s a 5 and a 6 and an 8, and on the right there’s a 3 and a 9 and a 7. 19 on both sides, so it’s RIGHT. It’s in balance.

If only I could just hang a metaphorical 6 off of my left earlobe.