2020 Vision: Who Am I...

Who am I...

There are choices that seem to drive apart the divergent roads but they all must come back together again.

Man or woman, family or friend, professional or hobbyist hobo...

New Media or What Generation... (NM was my major in college, WG was my band that started after graduation as an alternative to starting a career in the commercial arts) New Media or What Generation says to me, where am I going so hastily in this new culture without knowing where I come from, where we all together come from.  Generations lay the foundations for movements of culture... families of heritage lay the trappings for rebellious youth to start fresh new identities, with their styles, clothes, the lingo the jive the newspeak... musics, arts, writings and poetry, places dates and events that hold special meaning to those who are in the know, to those who were there.

To put it mildly and simply, I am a hippy child, born in the eighties, but yearning for the wild and free-loving sixties.  But I am also a child of the nineties... unfortunately?  I am the butt of a bad joke about misunderstood alienation, sarcasm, angst and despair, if only to cover up the boredom of a pre-internet, pre-cellphone, pre-climate change I mean indie music carefree ADD age.  Okay I am also a millennial.  Gen X, Gen Y, Gen XYZ I don’t know.  Aren’t we the ones that don’t care that there’s no official name for their decades.  There’s no official anything anymore. That’s just the thing about it.  Iconoclasm is “in”.  This is the time to put the “cult” back in mainstream culture.  I know, I don’t know what that means either.

I have a disorder that no one figured out.  I don’t know how common it is.  But it’s quite simple now that I look at it.  My life depends on family and friends, supporters and coworkers, acquaintances and complete strangers all.  When I was young I was shy.  I shyed away from lasting friendship.  Somehow this worked for me - I think I slipped away under the maternal care of mother school system.  But I was an outcast.  To others it may have seemed that it should be easier to just make friends than to push them away.  But I barely had to push.  And I had Gen X music and TV, indeed MTV, to back me up.  Shy gave way to anti social.

But antisocial yielded some magnificent if hellacious codependence.  Whoa back up.  Let’s just look at the words for a minute cuz they make sense to me.  Manic Depression is a common enough diagnosis.  I think everyone experiences it to some degree.  But it mis-prioritizes the causes of life’s essential formula.  You’re not a product of a combination of emotions.  Get too happy all the time for the wrong reasons, and you’re bound to get sad again, to fall in a rut.  Manic-depression.  Bipolar.

But even when I was alone and pushing against every overlooked opportunity to be normal (which I had the common nonsense to hate, the very idea of normal) even then, I had people.  I am not a sob story.  I have a family that loves me, and to this I owe apology.  And coming around.  Because I only experienced my chosen imaginary pain of being alone.  I’ve never truly been alone.  Thank God.  Wherever He is, because when I need HIM the most, his people are there.  And my family.  Two divorced parents who both agreed to love and support their family of three children.  No matter what.  That’s called unconditional and the proof is in me.  Because I now come around to the fact that they were there for me to put up with a culture of alienation that I was sold by people I didn’t even know, and their distant stories of woe and subtlety.  But I took that in and made it my own.  I don’t need to make those excuses any more.  For much longer.

My family loves me the best they can.  But I need friends.  Everyone needs friends.  Entering High School I was coming away from a successful 4.0gpa year of almost complete self-styled oblivion.  My first and only year in public school.  Oblivion: this is the degree to which I held the extremes.  My chosen alienation.  Antisocial to everyone around me, but codependent on mother school system.  Antisocial/Codependent, another bipolar disorder.  Maybe there are others like me... anyways it’s nice how it makes sense in the end.

 Signs and rubrics said I could forge ahead into a college prep school where everyone seems to care about academics as much as I seemed to.  It wasn’t Dead Poet’s Society.  Public or private, mother school system was no match for father culture.  But I wasn’t entirely aloof..., I followed along or at least noticed some of the trends of the day...  surfing, ska, SNL comedy, Weezer and other alternative music, Jim Carrey movies, Beavis and Butthead meets Religion class: at one point the valedictorian put his shirt over his head and bade his followers to join him.  They called him “Joe of Nazareth” but he looked like “the great Cornholio”.   Hmm so maybe I didn’t miss out on that much.  Oh and um... after school sports.  

So I was there.  I was listening, watching, and I was on the soccer team.  My antisocial tendencies weren’t strong enough to break through the blaise of going along with it all.  I drew comics in the back of class.  I occasionally cracked the odd existential crisis cry for help type of joke.  When my circle of non friends came up with what everyone would be when they grow up, I was given the job “serial killer”.  The worst part is it’s kinda true, in that I couldn’t laugh at my own dry joke, and it was killing me from the inside.

I needed a real friend.  One I could depend on.  I found one in Jonathan Bond, top of the class turned complete rebel, reject, drop out.  He turned my fantasy into a reality.  I was along for the ride.  Truth be told I didn’t know what was going on most of the time.  Not really.  But I know here was a person who cared about people more than about things, cultures, emotions, or any of the bullshit that fake people care about.

What Generation?  Friends are Forever

Yes the story of Jon and me started in High School and then picked up again after we were both done with college.  To sum up something complex and really beyond me in many ways... Jon was top of the class in High School.  He became a rebel after a year or two not because he couldn’t handle the pressure, but because it was too easy for him.  So I guess we had that in common - school wasn’t enough for either of us.  Social activities were also too easy for him, but that didn’t stop him from enjoying all kinds of fun... some mischievous and dangerous activities, some slouching around in parachute pants, more "sex drugs and rock and roll" than the average rebellious youth... he was like a one man “Dazed and Confused” in the middle of a stuck-up if co-ed Christian prep-school culture.  Did I become cool by my mere affiliation with such a character?  Who cares.  I was never in it for that.  But I did have some wild times driving all around Southern California, from the beaches of the coast to the tumbleweeds of the inland empire, to the suburbs of LA.

And we would return to L.A. as What Generation, And we would conquer the open mic and up and coming scene, and shout out misunderstood anthems from the San Gabriel mountains to the sleepy valleys below.

But even here in paradise, with a band, a best friend, a girlfriend, a job in a coffee shop, a car, and any opportunity I could imagine really, I was young and timid and in an inexplicable hole.  I’m sorry but it’s true.  I can say that now, because I am no longer in that hole.  And to be able to describe my situation in words and music is to approach mastery of it.

*

My self-diagnosis has developed from the time I’ve had alone, with dog friends, and support from my family as well as being cheered on by friends new and old.  I can’t be the rebel freak show that Gen X would assign to me.  It wouldn’t end well.  I survived that inside joke turned wasted mythology.  It’s almost over for the Me generation, and I survived.  And I owe it to everyone but me.  I realized last year that I am and have been a recovering misanthrope.  Shy>antisocial>miser.  I learned to hate people and thereby hating myself.

But I just now learned that I have never been completely alone.  They say that God is always there, even for the lowest outcast, the kid from “Into the Wild”, the volleyball loving savage in ”Castaway”, the rebel and the fool.  I don’t know for sure, but my faith in God is only as vaulted as the pillars of my faith in my family and friends.  I may not be a misanthrope today, and I have to keep my antisocial tendencies in check.  No, better than that.  I get to learn to be socially functional - to draw my happiness, my sadness, my peace - from a variety of sources.

I don’t want to be codependent anymore.  I want to ease the need and thereby strengthen the pact.  I want some breathing room from you, from me, for us.  Apart.

I am alive.  I am in my head and in my heart and in my body.  I am a confluence of forces.  I am not  a remote node of isolated consciousness.  I am a network, a family, a generation, a human race.

And we need more than peace.  Less than distraction.  We need to get it together for nothing short of saving the world.  Literally.

Oh yeah but also this is still about me and how I am learning together with everyone, to balance extremes and to not put too much dependency on any one force, no matter how strong it seems. There wouldn’t be a Gen X without the hippies and the beatniks and the activists.  There wouldn’t be country music without the blues.  There can’t be WiFi without a device to use it by, and a culture to make those texts and emojis and memes meaningful, and there can’t be a revolution without the stories that keep it true for each one of us.  Okay I’m stretching a little over the scope of this essay slash memoir.

My life is profoundly meaningful from a diverse variety of polarities and synthesis.  Sometimes it seems easier to struggle blindly than to just have an abiding peace.  We were designed to do the work before us, from evolution to metamorphosis, from social development to socialist transition.

We’re not happy/sad bipolar.  We don’t need pills.  We need each other.  We need everyone else more so we can need any one person LESS.  And that is so that we can be better individuals and come together more powerfully, if not more often.

Simple.  Our work is cut out for us.

Peace-out Daddy-O