I wrote something bad today. This, what I’m writing now, is a eulogy, to the bad thing I wrote.
It had style. It contained phrases like “alternately purple-clad and crumbling,” for all the wrong reasons. It was about two of my favorite cities. They were juxtaposed to show that I’m not just a normal liker of things, but a complex liker, a discerning liker. The kind of epicurean who entertains varieties of displeasure as well as straightforward comforts. I was writing it, basically, to advertise my status as an interesting person.
I didn’t know that was why I was writing it. The topic came naturally. It seemed reasonable. But reason is fundamentally motivated. Experience is based on our needs. We desire someone’s affection, and they’re suddenly incandescent. We wonder whether someone deserves us, and their modest requests become insane demands.
When I opened my laptop, I was insecure. This week, I’ve done things poorly—not as poorly as last week, but not super well. So far, January is a month of moderate-quality me. Does my wife still find me attractive? Do my peers still find me impressive? Am I capable of feats of strength and wisdom? Suddenly, memories of my travels arrived at my fingertips: evidence that I had been intrepid and complex. Well-worn anecdotes, traces of tears shed, meals ingested, discomforts surpassed. When I put them down, I felt cool and handsome.
Yesterday, I wrote something about a District Attorney who spoke smoothly, to placate those around him. I wrote about his tricks in a somewhat superior tone. Today, I wrote smoothly, to placate myself, and you. But, later, as I watched TV, I began sweating as I realized that what I’d emitted earlier was a total piece of shit. I am now filled with a new level of respect for the District Attorney. He’s confident enough in his confabulation skills to test them in front of a live audience. Mine wilted in rehearsal.
I’m probably still engaged in self-deception now. There’s no alternative: we’re all selecting and curating our impressions to fit our predictions about what kind of person we’re going to be today, which is a convenient fiction. But the degrees of deception vary, and, currently, I feel relatively transparent to myself, as the owls hoot ominously outside. My motives for writing this are:
1) The need to finish this series of essays so I don’t feel ashamed about abandoning a project.
2) The desire to be sincere.
3) The love of attention, even the modest levels of attention afforded me by my work.
But maybe this discussion of motives is already too fanciful, too complex. Maybe it’s just inertia. I’ve said that I’m a writer long enough for it to be the truth, so now this is my habitual way of encountering reality. I summarize and disassemble, label and categorize, and I’m too scared to be another way.
Recently I’ve been reading some of my old essays. It’s clear to me, now, when I was engaged in pretension, when I was attempting false intensity, or cloaking myself in narcissistic self-deprecation. But I’m sure that when I wrote them I wasn’t thinking of it that way. It just felt like I was telling the world who I was. I wrote of passion and despair and thought, “that’s me, right?” But the constant need for self-definition is evidence of psychological instability. If I’m ever telling someone who I am, maybe I shouldn’t believe it.
The two cities I wrote about were Budapest and Bangkok. Budapest is great. Have a bath there, when you have the chance, particularly at Rudas. Bangkok is also good. For a nice drink, I’d recommend Rabbit Hole, in Thonglor. Here lies the ruin of a bad day at the office. I’ll try to be less of an asshole tomorrow.