When I was a kid and getting sick, my mother would ask me to breathe on her. I now do the same thing with my kid. Why? Because sickness stinks.There are times in my life when my odor changes and, yes, I find myself stinky (others may, and do, find me stinky all the time). And then I know that something is off, that’s something’s wrong. We know the world by its stench.

(Watch a dog who’s outside. His nose bends and twitches to the steady flow of odors both familiar and not, making sense of the world as it comes to him. His ears, too, lean this way and that. This is the animal thinking and it’s beautiful.)

In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche writes, “What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognize who has turned out well? That well-turned-out person pleases our senses, that he is carved from wood that is hard, delicate, and at the same time smells good.”

This is such a deft move that reverses Platonism swiftly, mercilessly, and hilariously — there is something fundamental but it is not hidden, not obscured by the flesh. On the contrary, we are turned out, visible to the world, our entrails hanging out for all to see: we are as we appear.  Weare how we make sense of the world, how we digest it. We are metabolic engines, taking in the world, processing it, playing it back. What we choose to take in, how we metabolize it, what we shit out and what becomes our flesh is who we are. (I was always suspicious of rabid Hegelians: what happens to a person who digests all that?)

So when it comes to “The Problem of Socrates,” well, “We know, we can still see for ourselves, how ugly he was. But ugliness, in itself an objection, is among the Greeks almost a refutation. Was Socrates a Greek at all? Ugliness is often enough the expression of a development that has been crossed, thwarted by crossing. Or it appears as declining development.” (From Twilight of the Idols, if you care.)  Nietzsche dismissed Socrates for being ugly — yes, for his face being ugly, but Nietzsche does not separate this from the ugliness of Socrates’ thinking, his relentless negation. (Nietzsche, of course, also loves Socrates — which is why he even feels the need to address him.)

When Nietzsche turns the world inside out, he does not merely reverse priorities making the beautiful moral and the ugly, sin. No, the logic of reversal is the logic of morality, the logic of opposition.  So when he turns morality upside down and human being inside out, he erases opposition, as well. This is a reversal that inaugurates a fundamental reordering.

Nietzsche is not privileging the outside over the inside. He is not the classic aesthete bored with politics and such and just wanting to get his manicure and absinthe. No, Nietzsche gives us something much more thorough, much more devastating: he eliminates the inside all together. There is no inner you. You are what you do, how you go, how you smell. Accidents don’t happen to you. You are everything that happens to you.

This is not shrugging off of all ethical obligation. On the contrary, your responsibility has become total. No more saying, “Why do these things keep happening to me?” They keep happening to you because of how you go. Maybe you can discipline yourself to go differently; maybe you can’t. But it’s not you doing it to you (as there is no inner agent acting on you); nor is it the world doing it to you. It is just you and how you go in the world — which is redundant as you are how you go in the world.

Nietzsche’s aesthetics is his ethics. His mode of aesthetic assessment is his ethical assessment. He does not judge actions by their principles but by their behaviors, by what they actually do in this world. Consider all those who stand out on street corners with clipboards asking you for money for this or that cause: they may feel ethical as they represent a so-called good cause but, by aesthetic-ethical assessment, they are nudges. (Of course, there may be other ways to conceive standing out there with a clipboard other than morality vs. nudge — it pays, it’s social, etc.)

The entire critical apparatus shifts: not only does Nietzsche introduce aesthetics as his ethics, he critiques ethics aesthetically. That, in fact, is the whole On the Genealogy of Morals — an aesthetic critique of Judeo-Christian morality.  Where it claims superiority, he finds ressentiment, self-loathing, ugliness. He does not assess morality by its claims but by its actions. And they stink.

To make sense of the world, to make one’s way, does not demand a rigorous moral code, a so-called moral compass. It demands a refined sense of smell.

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Sometimes, I have thoughts about something. They are fleeting images that flicker across my mind and body. They don’t cohere into a point of view or even into a lucid argument: they are moments of thought, images without narrative.

So I sit down to write. My writing, in this case, is not simply an expression of my thoughts. Rather, the writing is the thinking.  As I string words, sentences, paragraphs together I am forced to find connections — causal, affective, complementary — between and amongst my otherwise scattered thoughts.

Language, at times like this, is amazing. Its more or less rigid structure coerces sense from nonsense, order from chaos, effability from the inchoate. It can be a frustrating process as the thoughts aren’t sure of how they connect to each other — or whether they even want to. Maybe I sense a structure to the thoughts but that structure doesn’t fit into the linear structure of language.  The fault, then, is mine: I need to make the words wind and pleat.

Usually, however, it’s exhilarating. I sit down before a blank screen and then lean into language to see how my thoughts will meet words and grammar. Which part of my thought will become the subject of the sentence? What action will it take? And how will it do it all — emphatically? Dead pan? Ironically?  Not only does writing distribute sense, it distributes affect — the feel of the idea.

As thoughts are distributed on and by the page, constellations crystallize and dissipate, sometimes simultaneously. Perhaps there is no argument here, no narrative for these images: perhaps it’s a Harmony Korine film, moments strung together. Perhaps it’s nothing at all, all gossamer to be washed away by the stronger winds of an idea or the sheer force of chaos.

The means of assembling and distributing the ideas are many — logical derivations, anecdote, sheer sentiment. There might be a generalization or three, perhaps a quote or vaguely remembered citation; there could be a tangent that suggests another direction; or a polemic that awkwardly but powerfully glues disparate thoughts.

Writing like this is what we call an essay — a try, an attempt. This is, of course, the etymology of the word — from the French, essayer, to try. This is not about creating a highly polished, clean, clear monolith. It’s about seeing how thoughts meet language and what kind of order might emerge. Sure, a good essay enjoys a certain lucidity. But this lucidity doesn’t turn on singularity or conclusion: it may be a multiplicity that never reaches its climax, a jouissance of thinking.

Essays take place on the page, in and of the strange and beautiful space of writing. Essays are open to all sorts of connections and sutures, including caesuras and ellipses. Unlike, say, the article, the essay is a generous form, embracing multiple modes of address, even in the same essay. It can follow a digression, fold back around into a new beginning, or just entertain a passing whim.  (Compare this to the academic article.)

And the essay asks for this same generosity from its readers. Don’t look for a point, the essay says. Just let it lead you here and there, see where it takes you. An essay is uncharted: you never know where you’ll end up.

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One night, I found myself in my regular bar surprised to find there was an amateur stand up comedy event happening. The young comedians were not very good — they were aping the all too familiar tropes. But one comedian broke from his script a couple of times to engage the audience — which was a tad rambunctious — and in those brief moments he showed signs of vitality.

I wanted to discuss his act with him. I didn’t just want to say good job or, for that matter, crappy job — because what do either of those things accomplish? I wanted to talk about what worked and what didn’t, his ethos, his rhythm, how he stands towards other comedians, comedy in general, how he wants to stand towards the crowd, what his desired terms of engagement are.  Which is to say, I wanted to critique his performance.

But there was no way, socially, I could do that — at least in my position as some random dude drinking at the bar. From strangers, from the general audience, we expect either thumbs up or thumbs down or a so-so.  Now, he may very well be right not to listen to me — who the heck am I? — but that’s not my point. My point is that we expect judgment from each other but when it comes to critique, we take offense.

And this just seems insane as what is more generous than critique? It demands time and energy, a lending of oneself to the performance of another. Judgment leans back in its chair and, exerting the bare minimum of energy, points a thumb up or down. But critique leans forward in its chair, poised and attentive, heeding and contemplating, digesting and imagining.

To say whether you like or dislike something is, alas, not very interesting to anyone outside of your immediate circle of friends. To them, the mere fact of you liking something might say quite a bit. After all, they know your taste, what you’ve liked and disliked in the past and, hopefully, why. You have a style; you are an algorithm of selection. But to anyone not familiar with this algorithm, the passing of judgment is as boring as a stranger’s dream.

To be critical is to go with something. It is to make sense of its style, how it metabolizes the world, what it takes up and how. It doesn’t just say, “Cool” or “Duh.” It lends its own body to the performance, follows its moves and motivations.  To reckon the style of a thing — of a booze, book, or band — is to fully digest that thing, let it run through you to see what kind of sense you can make of it. And then to extend that sense, to follow it beyond this performance to see how it can go, its possibilities and extensions.

One of my favorite things to do when I was teaching MFA students in fine arts was to do studio visits, especially as I’m not a visual artist. I’d go to the student’s studio and look at work in whatever state  and lend some words. Imagine, now, if all I said was, “That’s good! I like it!” or “Man, that’s not good.” Both are equally worthless. My job and my pleasure — a rare alignment of the two — was to articulate what I saw happening and then wonder how else it might go, what other trajectories it might take, how it might inflect the world.

Judgment has little to do with the other; it is solipsistic. And, often, that is great — after all, few things are worthy of one’s time and energy, worthy of one’s critique. Like it or hate it and move on. Judgment is brutal and callous — whether you like something or hate it — and as such can be a good parry for a world full of shit (although I prefer indifference to judgment — less energy expenditure).

Critique, on the other hand, is generous: it engages the other on its own terms — or on terms of the event.  It lets the other do its thing and then wonders how the other can extend it and it, in turn, can extend the other. It is a glorious repartee.

I had a former art student of mine ask me to write about his work even though he knew I didn’t necessarily like it (I’d been hard on him in class). And, without batting an eye, I agreed. Because whether I liked it or not, I knew that he was up to something and that spending time with that something would push me, teach me, extend me. I wrote one of my favorite essays from that experience as his work asked me to think and see and experience differently. And I, in turn, asked it — and him — to think and see and experience differently.

I’d like to say that to critique is, quite literally, to make love.

The things I love exist beyond judgement (isn’t that what love is — to take something up without judgement?) They live in a place where things flourish in the totality of their becoming, multifarious and glorious and strange. They live in a place of critique. I don’t even need to conjure them: they live in me. They are me.

Unfortunately, we don’t teach being critical. I know as I taught critical writing for 10 years at UC Berkeley and had to negotiate 18 year olds who’d had 18 years of ill training. Across the board, they had no idea what being critical meant or demanded. Teaching them was like teaching an alien the infield fly rule (and I loved almost every moment of it). Critical thinking is simply not a part of American education.

As a nation, we don’t read or hear much that is critical. Thumbs up, thumbs down; like, dislike: this is how we engage the world. For the most part, we experience judgment and a regurgitation of the known — I’m liberal but he’s not so I hate him! 

Critical practice is all but dead, murdered by cliche and vapidity and the royal ease of judgment. It’s become so bad that we associate being critical not just with being judgmental but being an asshole about it. (No doubt, it’s not in capital’s or power’s best interest to teach criticism.)

But if we want to be a vital society — or you just want to be a vital human being —, then we must learn to forgo judgment and take up being critical, take up being generous and thoughtful, take up the will to proliferate and extend possibilities: take up the love of life.

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So one day you wake up and for no apparent reason you’re thinking about your friend Jamie. You haven’t talked to Jamie in, I don’t know, 2 years. But there she is, her virtual self staring you in the face. Never mind, whatever, you go on with your day.  And then there’s that distinctive pluck of harp strings announcing a new text message: it’s from Jamie!

“That’s weird,” you say to someone. “I was just thinking about her and,bang, there she is! I’m telling you, man, it’s weird!”

But, of course, nothing is less weird. It’s only weird because, for some reason, the basic forces of the universe elude our science and everyday assumptions about the world.

Because, as it turns out, the world teems with forces that exceed us. Egad! The world is not just an object of our will! No, no it’s not.  The world has a lot of bodies in it the least of which, in many ways, are human bodies. There are rocks and bugs, clouds and winds, not to mention all the shit we’ve made from Pokemon to airplanes to nuclear bombs to Borges to the bible and this here interwebs. There are planets and asteroids and black holes and suns — so many, many suns, so many more suns than there will ever be people.

Now picture the life of all of these things. What is the life of a sun like? My god, it’s intense!  Makes your latest break up look a tad, well, paltry. Not that the break up isn’t important, too. But just consider life, for one moment, on a cosmic level.  This shit is complex. And to say there are forces at work — more than gravity and centrifugal — is putting it mildly.

Pay attention to all the information, all the flows of mood and energy, that run through any given day beginning with your dreams and the state they leave you in when you awake. And your day hasn’t even begun! You wake with a mood, with a sense of the day that comes from all sorts of places — the weather, what you ate the day before, what you think will happen that day, and then…all the solar storms, all the moods and thoughts of all the people you’ll interact with today, all the people who may be thinking about you in one form or another, all the debris that’s kicking around this cosmos.

And then there’s you, a node amidst this vast network. And you think it’s “weird” that you were thinking about Jamie and then — and then! — she texted you.

Now carry on with your day. What’s the temperament of traffic? You jump in to a coffee shop to grab an espresso. What’s the vibe? You know there’s a vibe. So what is it? And how are you feeling? Ask yourself why. Try to see all the forces that might have lead to this mood at this moment on this day. It’s only 8:42 a.m. and you’ve experienced so many forces, so many moods and flows, that exceed you. Keep up this interrogation all day and then tomorrow and the next day and the next. What patterns emerge? What have you learned about the cosmos and how you go in, and with, it?

The universe is overrun with energetic forces, the human amongst them. We are not actors on a stage. The stage is alive and complex and various — it’s playing us. There are so many forces at work at any given moment, driving your moods and experiences, from the solar to the digestive.

So wouldn’t it be even weirder if you were thinking about Jamie and she didn’t text you?

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Reckoning age is not easy, especially in this culture of youth. I, for one, like to imagine myself as 27, jewfro grad student, newly married but still stewing in the full potency of my past — I was in love, no doubt, and this love was fueled by all my previous loves. I could still feel Joy, my high school love, vibrating in my loins and heart and belly and schnoz. I could still feel the magnetic pull of Sabina, my college obsession, the resonance of her still palpating my heart.

With time, all this has come to fade.  Not the facts, mind you, not the memory per se. But the affective resonance of that memory is no longer there.  I don’t feel that pining for Sabina that I did for so many years. I remember the pining. Indeed, I can regale you with tale upon tale of my longing, my humiliations, my joys.

But the scent of the event has dissipated, its feeling gone. It is now a movie I saw ages ago — I know the story but I don’t feel the power of it anymore. In many ways, it might as well have happened to someone else. I don’t know it happened to me, not from the inside out.

And I find this loss unbearably sad. I am coming to understand, perhaps, that it is this loss that defines aging — not the loss of motion or hard ons or memory but the loss of our own past’s resonance.

Sometimes, I try to beckon these lost affects, try to charm them back into being, performing a perverse kind of seance for dead memories, for the dead me. It is a curious, difficult thing to do.  I  reach with all parts of my memory, not just for the images, but for the literal and metaphoric feel of it, for that sensation that permeated my belly, my blood.  I try to remember with my whole body, hurling not just my mind but my frame and flesh into the memory, into the vortex of the facts.  Sometimes, very rarely, I can conjure it for a fleeting moment, usually by finding virtual traces of their scent.

I wish I had a better way to manage this loss, a way better than my seance which is all too pathetic.

This loss is what’s become of my whole childhood.  All the joy and anger and fear I felt as a kid has now become a series of facts that may or may not be correct and is irrelevant, anyway. Their power, their resonance, is nearly gone all together.

This is not all bad. I have reconciled a lot of shit with my family, not because I forgive but because, frankly, I don’t feel all the anger and disappointment anymore. What seems like my noble gesture is, in fact, just a reality of aging.

There are times, I can still see myself in high school, high as a kite, so vital, rocking out with Willy Jacobs to Jethro Tull. Damn, Tull rocked me inside out. I was so enthused, so infused, by that maniac flautist.

So, from time to time, I will mine the Tull catalog — not on vinyl, even if I still own them all, but via Rdio on my iPhone — in search of that memory’s potency. I can find fragments of it on an album here and there, in a refrain, a lick, a musical apogee. But, as with my seance for lost loves, this conjuring is short lived and, in the end, feels pathetic.

Alas, this is aging. We become alienated from our own past, from our previous selves, from our youth. It can be liberating, sure, but I find the loss devastating. But I suppose such is what we might call maturity: bearing precisely this loss — not the loss of memory but the loss of memory’s resonance.

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Picture this.  You’re sitting around your living room with some friends and someone comes in, an acquaintance perhaps, and starts filming you. You’re not sure why. Do you do exactly as you were doing before the camera entered the room? Or has your behavior changed — what you say, do, how you interact with others in the room?

Cameras necessarily shift social dynamics.  How can they not?  They are eyes, after all.  Only they’re the weirdest eyes ever in that they are the potential eyes of everyone, everywhere, from now until eternity. That’s gotta have an effect, don’t you think?

Now take the digital camera which is at once camera, processing, screen, and distribution: the time from click to world wide viewing is nearly instantaneous. Well, that’s gotta have some strange effects.

The social web is a kind of always on camera, ceaselessly capturing text and image — capturing imprints of ourselves — our likes and dislikes, the pages we view and how long we linger, the Yelps, the tweets, the reposts and shares and retweets and so on and so on.

Suddenly, we are all actors, all writers, curators, critics, and photographers who relentlessly publish and distribute.  We are all actors on the screen that is the web.

Think about it: We update our FB status with an insight, link, image, or report on the song we listened to or game we played. We comment on others’ insights, links, and images. We Yelp and comment on others’ Yelps; we tweet and retweet. We write emails and texts, mini-essays and haikus. We imprint ourselves on the collective social film which is a distributed, networked cinematic event.

And then we await judgement from an unclear, and at times unknown, audience: applause, boos, or indifference that take the form of page views, likes and dislikes, comments, shares, reposts, retweets, deletes. Google Analytics is an applause meter. I got 193 uniques today! 17 people liked the photo of my Halloween nurse slut costume!

This happens all day, everyday: we publish, we perform, we are seen and we are judged by an audience with unknown extension — and anything we do could suddenly “go viral” and be seen by millions. This is not just life in a panopticon as we are not only always being watched.  We are always being commanded to perform — and then are judged for that performance.

No wonder the kids today are so anxiously and constantly checking their phones: Did they like that post? Did I do good? No wonder that the 25 year old girls who swarm our cities on Saturday nights are dressed like prostitutes: Gotta impress — and fast!

Indeed, there seems to be a very strange desire amongst the 20-somethings of today. They fancy themselves individuals — Look at me! This is my taste! — while at the same time they fear individuality: Do they like me? It’s a crippling anxiety that leaves these 20-somethings stuck between safe sweetness (don’t want to offend anyone) and merciless judgment (everything’s a threat and a thin veil of anonymity affords casual nastiness).

While my generation, so-called Gen-X, has its own anxieties, this is not one of them. I may be happy or sad because some post of mine gets good or bad comments but, fundamentally, I don’t give a shit. Like most of my actual friends, I have a life that precedes and exceeds my online identity such as a kid who doesn’t yet check my status updates. I live in the old world where I don’t interact with my real world friends online. And, like the anachronism that I am, I continue to publish to the web as if it were a printing press. Which means I don’t publish pictures of myself at parties or eating breakfast.

This is not to say that I have a life and you don’t.  This is just to say that the web plays a different role in my life than it seems to play in the lives of the kids today.  I can turn off the web. But the kids today can’t, not really.  They’re like Neo, born inside the matrix: they were always already turned inside out, always already enmeshed in the ever-emergent text that is the social web.

It’s the anxiety of being filmed or being an artist but now played out through all facets of life and identity. Artists have the relative luxury of only being present for their art work; the rest of the time, they can live more or less free of scrutiny (the paparazzi, of course, is the first Facebook wall). But the kids today don’t have that luxury; they must produce just to participate in society.

The very conditions of identity, then, are the acts of being seen and judged by an audience of unknown scope and power.

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So I’m watching Somewhere on HBO and I’m thinking: really? This is the vision of debauched Hollywood?  Where is Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant or the over-the-topness of Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond?  In Lost in Translation (I know a lot of people like this film but I found it underwhelming even if quite beautiful and, at times, exquisite), Bill Murray might not give us a whole lot but his face, his posture, speak to a richness of experience and character — the romance of being an individual. In Bad Lieutenant, Keitel is, as the kids say but don’t understand, epic: he’s the stuff of myth.

But Stephen Dorff’s Johnny Marco? He is so, well, bland. He’s so everyday. In fact, there is nothing extraordinary about him — he doesn’t dress flamboyantly; he doesn’t have odd taste in sex (the strippers, well, they are odd but they just reiterate the banality of consumption); he doesn’t throw fits or tantrums. He’s just like you and me, only famous.

Fame, here, is not well earned.  He’s not an amazing  musician (he’s ok at Guitar Hero); he’s not a great actor lost in his characters.  He is basically on American Idol or a viral YouTube video or he won Survivor. There is nothing fundamentally extraordinary about our stars today. It’s all so, well, banal.

This, alas, is what the film gives us — the banality of consumption.  Sofia Coppola is not, and could not be, Billy Wilder or Abel Ferrara. She is the spawn of a new age, even if she comes from old school royalty (can you imagine Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in one of Sofia Coppola’s films?) The stars of today are, indeed, so well behaved.  It’s to the point where when Tom Cruise gets a little nutty and jumps on a couch, he’s considered wacky.

Now look at Cassvates, Faulk, and Ben Gazzara:

Or Abel Ferrara on Conan — he is lit beyond belief, bigger and more deranged than the Spectacle (even if constituting it — it’s the constitution of the unattainable, of the excessive):

The decadence of yesteryear no longer glitters with either promise or romance. We are always already watched, always already judged. Throughout Somewhere, Dorff screws beautiful women simply because he can. It is neither depraved nor decadent. The girls are beautiful. They all seem to have fun when screwing. And yet it remains banal, a non-event, a blip on the radar.

Compare Coppola’s Dorff to the silly Vincent Chase of Entourage. The promise of Entourage is naive, the promise of Hollywood from the 30s with a hip hop beat: fame and fortune and women women women! Ain’t this the life, boys? Johnny Marco is Vince in 10 years: pussy is pussy, there to be had just like everything else, so what?

Somewhere is banal, no doubt.  But that is precisely what makes it so beautiful, so pitch perfect: it is of the banal, the beauty and banality of the banal.  There’s no ugliness.  Reviews of the film claim it’s just beautiful people kvetching (I don’t think they used the word “kvetch,” however). But that’s the point — there is no ugliness.  Dorff is the star of a new day and while the romance, and fundamental enigma, of the individual has disappeared, our loneliness has not. The extraordinariness of the ordinary has vanished but that doesn’t mean we don’t get lonely — or that there’s no beauty.

Coppola’s challenge here is monumental precisely because she doesn’t have monuments to reckon.

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image – Somewhere

Here’s an easy exercise. Look around the room and choose anything you see, anything you think of.  Me, I’m looking at my set of keys.

Now start listing all the ways this thing — my set of keys — can be categorized, thought, imagined, all of its uses, all the ways it connects to other things. My keys, for instance, are little knives; symbols of discovery; symbols of enslavement; a literal weight on me; a plethora of opportunity and possibility; the limitation of my possibilities; envelope and box openers; a child’s toy; a dangerous child’s toy thanks to the lead; a collection of like things; a security blanket when I’m out and about, that jangle and jab tethering me to place and vehicle; the history of keys, of secrets, of private property; children’s games of secret passageways; a sign of adulthood (my beast does not carry keys; at what age will he have his own key, I wonder).

What else?

Each thing — visible and invisible — exists within multiple categories, multiple series, multiple networks.  Most things have a more or less prescribed use: this is what you do with keys, silly man, you open doors.

Inventors, of course, find different uses for known things.  This is amazing: they find life, extend the thing, create new worlds from the old world.  It is nothing less than a miracle.

Artists do the same: they literally have us see anew. Take something as simple as Starry Night: doesn’t Van Gogh teach us to see the sky — something we see everyday — again and anew, as if for the evry first time?

Reading — interpreting, perhaps, but I don’t like that word for a number of reasons — can do the same thing. It can take a known object and make it unknown and then known again as something new. It is truly incredible: I can read some words on a page that make me see something I’ve always seen, understand something I’ve always understood, as if seeing it for the very first time.  What was dead is summoned to life, to new life, to new possibility.

This is the way I experienced when I first read Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality v1.  I was someone who believed that sexuality was a vital force that the powers that be repressed, beginning with the Victorians. Such and such culture or such and such historical period were certainly more liberated than we are.  Indeed, like so many others, my understanding of sexuality was defined by the figure of repression/liberation.

Until I read Foucault who told me that repression was, in fact, another form of power — that power does not only restrict, it constructs.  Look, Foucault says, look at how often and how much the so-called repressed Victorians talked about sex — relentlessly.  They were so obsessed with sex they covered the legs of pianos out of discretion.

Oh, man, when I read that the whole world yawned anew.  To have such a hallowed idea, an idea that I didn’t even realize I had because I simply thought it was true, to have such a thing so completely re-organized, redistributed, a whole new sense of it forged was invigorating, intoxicating,  making me delirious with possibility.  The whole world — every thing, every idea, every person — could be read from multiple angles and perspectives, redistributed and recast and repeated and become something new.  The universe becomes uncanny at its core, always shifting and realigning depending on how you look at it.

To think different, to think differently, is to create life.  It is the ultimate joyful act — to read critically is to perform Whitman’s great line: urge and urge and urge/always the procreant urge of the world.  

If all things are multiple, are nodes with different series, then to forge or discover these series is to breed life.

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The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing.I was a nick on a prepopulated page, the same as every other: a nick in a series of identical nicks.

In an effort to overcome my reduction to a number, to reclaim my sense of humanity, I wrote in my choice for president: my grandfather, Isidore Englander. It was reassuring to see my handwritten scrawl on this institutional document and to see a name so close to me, so absolutely idiosyncratic. I was confident that this would be Gramps’ sole vote. This paper would not be one among many; it would be singular.

I never voted again. More than the irrelevance of the act, it’s the demand for anonymity that turns me off. Give me a chance to stand up and voice my opinion, declare my decisions before the masses, and I’d consider voting. But walking into a beaded room bereft of the should-be carnal candy? Eeesh.

I have the same experience when buying things. The exchange of money for goods is prescribed in such a way that seller and consumer need not exchange anything else. This coldness, this reduction of ourselves to mere function, freaks me out. I just can’t do it. I need to have some kind of personal contact — a quick joke, a non-consumer query, a smile,something that acknowledges our respective selves.

Mind you, this is not noble of me. On the contrary, it’s often obnoxious and certainly narcissistic. Some checkout dude at Walgreens shouldn’t have to suffer through my idiotic banter just to help me alleviate my angst.

Breaking personal boundaries is more difficult in the anonymous super stores. These places breed anonymity. Once inside, we become consumers, shopping to some prescribed algorithm. And the employees have no investment whatsoever; they barely acknowledge you. Their only desire is to get out of there as quickly as possible. What do they need, not to mention want, with my anxious interpersonal invasion?

Perhaps there is a freedom to such anonymity. By agreeing that we’re just numbers to each other, we are left alone to do as we will — no need to pass moral, religious, or aesthetic judgement on others. You do your thing; I do my thing. And so it goes. There’s no need for things to get personal.

This is one thing I enjoy about politeness — it allows strangers to be strangers with the least amount of friction. Sometimes, we need things from each other or, in this crowded world, we bump into one another — a simple “excuse me,” “thanks,” or “please” makes the interaction run smoothly.

Still, I have this deep seated desire to break through these barriers, to risk judgement in order to enjoy a whiff of intimacy, however slight. In that moment, there is the possibility of wonder, of the heartfelt and the hilarious, the witty and the surprising.

But that’s not why I do it. My need cannot be justified by anything other than itself: anonymity freaks me out. It’s as though I need the world to recognize me, not just this body, but me. Perhaps if those around me see me as an individual — not as just another customer, consumer, or constituent — then I’ll be better tethered to the earth, less likely to slip into the ether unnoticed.

Ah, yes, this is it: anonymity smacks of death. And, egomaniac narcissist that I am, I believe my individuality will be enough to keep me alive. But only if everyone notices.

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1. Everything has its way.  Scotch, after all, is not tequila and neither are gin.This is, of course, obvious. But I still find it profound and this seemingly simple dictum has had enormous repercussions in how and what I think.

2. The ways of things intersect and overlap.  I love spicy, perhaps a bit mineraly, clean boozes that are a little hot, a little complex, and never sweet: St. George Terroir Gin, Fortaleza Blanco, Glenrothes single malt, Old Potrero Rye.

3. Things have internal borders that need not unify.  The aforementioned boozes each enjoys, on its own, this fantastic array of flavors, each distinct — sun, fir, honey, black pepper. They don’t have to become one.

4. Moods come and go. Over the course of one drink, you may traverse despair, elation, resignation, contemplation, each with an emphatic umph.

5. The now is historical, forwards and backwards.  Drinking lots now can feel good now — then feel very bad the next day.  Sometimes, this is ok; other times, it’s not. In any case, there is a distinct correlation between this now and another now.

6. Everything has its occasion. I like my booze. I have a drink or two most days. But I don’t always want a drink — a midday beer or morning shot can be great but more often than not makes me sluggish and dumb.  

7. Some things have diminishing returns. Just because some thing makes you feel great doesn’t mean you can enjoy it ceaselessly — some pleasurable things become less pleasurable when consumed in the wrong proportion or quantity.

8. Things can interact in surprising ways. Booze is one thing. Now add this or that — sex, hooch, medication, driving — and the way of booze can be synergistic, a catalyst both good and bad, to say the least.

9. What was once right is not always right.  Starting in my early teens, I drank Jim Beam. A lot of Jim Beam. Now, I can’t touch the stuff.  I drink much less in general and rarely imbibe bourbon.  My body has changed, wants different things, needs different things.

10. Categories offer infinite internal diversity. Bourbon is relatively well defined — 51% corn, from Kentucky, I don’t know what else.  But try Makers then Buffalo Trace then High West and you’ll have three different, even if intimately related, experiences. Now take gin: other than juniper, there are no demands. Infinite variations is not only available but encouraged by the category itself.

11. Pay attention.  One drink too much, or the wrong drink, can be disastrous.  Booze has taught me to pay attention to what’s happening, to how I interact with the world.

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