I can't really tell if anxiety is really just endemic, in a sense, a rational response to the conditions of life and my life. There's too little that's really assured. Too little that's locked in and baked in. And too much that can be overthrown from day to day.
I flip between focus and distraction. At night, I'm filled with ideas for projects. Novels, screenplays, poems, plays. But when the next day actually starts, and the sense of inspiration has dissipated, and I have to force myself to pick one of the projects to work on.
I guess I'm addicted to infotainment. To think pieces and tweets about why the world works the way it works, or why it's going to stop working; infotainment makes me feel like we're in some kind of period of imminent collapse.1
Of course I can't stop something crazy from happening out there in the System2
The first trees are flowering in Prospect Park. Pink buds with little bees in them. Whatever I'm looking at isn't a cherry tree, though; I don't know the names of my trees and flowers.
I saw recently that the Oxford Junior Dictionary is dropping many names for plants and trees and flowers, and even many birds and animals; I'm not surprised. The most popular movie in the world right now is Dune II, which depicts a galactic future in which humanity has simultaneously rejected technology and embraced a mystical kind of authority.
There are many dystopian elements embedded in global modernity. I do think that this produces a deep collective longing for some authority to say no, because as individuals we're too addicted and easily hacked to say no. The kids who don't know what a raven is, or an earthworm is, or a dogwood is, don't have any ability to say no to their phones. Their phones are an extension of them. Their iPads, their Xboxes.
In a sense, Alpha kids are going to grow up secretly, unconsciously longing for a strong parental figure—because they clearly don't have parents willing to perform the duties of parenting (the plain fact is that giving your kids unlimited, or really any screen time is bad parenting). Because most American parents don’t set basic boundaries with the creeping dystopia for their kids, millions of lives are being curtailed and deformed in advance.3
On Saturday after playing football, I walk by two people in K95 sitting by themselves in Prospect Park looking absolutely miserable. And they stare at me while I stare at them. I'm a little embarrassed for them, and they are pissed at me for staring.4
Writing this diary, has helped me realize that I'm obsessed with the concept and possibility of apocalypse—apocalypse—apocalypse and personal apocalypse at the same time. The world going to hell or just my life going to hell.
Saturday night. A party in Crown Heights.
I guess like most people, I tend to vacillate between carefree and self-conscious at parties.