The narrative of Adam’s life during 2009 has many details, and no real overall theme. But I’ll pretend there’s one anyway, because it suits me for my purposes in the present moment, which are really not to look at the past, but to consider the future.
The most salient narrative for me at the moment is something along the lines of wishing I’d had a bit more independence, motivation and curiosity in my youth to seek out more people, knowledge and experiences that faintly interested me from afar. I didn’t, instead embracing the contentment of my insulated solitude. The real world right around me was so often a disappointment that I preferred fantasy and imagination. Television and books. Science fiction and horror and escapism.
Fantasy is good. Entertainment, escapism, imagination – useful tools for a variety of purposes. But, it’s time for a different approach, one I’ve tried my hand at in dribs and drabs throughout 2009, and earlier I suppose, but randomly and without much focus. Keeping with the narrative, the world around me is a disappointment – specifically, my workaday world, and its common culture. The old Marxists would have said something about “bourgeois.” But, this isn’t all there is in the world. I want to seek new people, new hobbies, new pockets of alternative options. I’ve tried this briefly before but the goal was political, the goal was external. Now the goal is simply happiness, and to practice taking more care in how I treat myself and live my life.
It helps to have heroes. I have new heroes, really. New companions, friends here and there to carry with me. As Van Zandt sang, “I got a brand new companion, man, I’m gonna do my best this time.”
And so at the end of 2009 and the dawn of 2010, I’d like to take a moment to pay a bit of respect to my new heroes: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, William Kamkwamba, David Graeber, Alison Bechdel, Armistead Maupin, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Patti Smith, Sarah Cracknell, Kristin Hersch, Exene Cervenka, Melissa McEwan … and well, there are too many to name (and besides, famous names breed too much useless hero-worship; they’re all just regular people). But there’s a common thread, I think: storytellers and translators, rather than the historicising objectivists of my past. (Not that there’s no place for that – in reading about Foucault today and his way of removing subjective narrative from history and instead looking at the numerous small causes and effects that lead to things we think of as big change, I couldn’t help thinking of James Burke and his Connections documentaries that I loved as a teen, which seem to me now to have taken precisely a Foucaultian approach to history, although at the time I loved them for their objective subject matter. But I digress! And am probably wrong on more than one count!)
Really, the biggest set of heroes in my mind these days have no names. They are all the various other humans out there on planet earth who have somehow acquired an autonomous, perhaps anarchical approach to life, and/or a “living well” approach. Counterculture artists, DIY punks, riot grrls and pragmatic ironists of all kinds.
“Gee, Adam, that’s great.” *rolls eyes* “So um, what are you actually going to do in 2010? Aside from move.”
read!
keep learning cooking
keep relearning anthropology
relearn french
be a bit more in touch with my niece and nephew, as I wish my uncle had been in my life
learn some dancing
learn bicycle repair & maintenance & get a bike and stuff
meet more new people, try more new things
That should get me through to summer. In the fall I’ll go see if I can learn some specific computer skills, partly for a career change, partly so I can better contribute something useful to the people around me. Who knows what after that.