Chillin' With my Imaginary Friend

Creativity is so weird. Honestly, sometimes its just gone. It just feels like this fleeting non-renewable resource that I direct in silliest ways, like writing a macro for more efficient spreadsheet formatting or analyzing a policy for problematic elements. Well, at least it feels like I am literally pouring out my spark into something that feels like fucking pointless. That’s a cynical take, but I am all about modeling feeling my feelings for my daughter. So, even if I am afraid of talking about the negatives of my job, we gonna run with it. Yes, I am stating my social justice job feels pointless sometimes when in the trenches of the minutiae of the paperwork and performance battles that I find myself in. We down with just being honest about the reality of labor in the 21st century where most people want you to just grow up and be more like a robot.

Yet, at other times, it feels like there is no limit to creativity. That sort of boundlessness and renewability usually comes to me when I am not doing anything productive whatsoever. Yeah, its in the thick of the cycling through just being an ordinary person, unstuck from any era or time, cooking, cleaning, moving my body, parenting that I find those little hits of inspiration or connection. Sometimes those hits are profound realizations into my place in the cosmos and other times its just a mash up of two ideas into a delightful little ditty that makes me chortle to myself a bit. The older I get, the more I live for those cultural mash ups that pop into my head and make me chortle.

For instance, Juniper and I were dropping into toddler gymnastics with our characteristic enthusiasm unknown to human kind when Chingy’s song “Holidae Inn” popped into my head. Yet, instead of chillin’ at the holidae inn, something I would never do because I don’t drink or seek to fornicate with multiple random strangers, I realized the line “imaginary friend” works almost perfectly as a replacement his line “holidae inn.” That made much more sense to my experience than the womanizing and glorification of getting wasted. I smiled to myself and then threw myself through the toddler obstacle course with no regard for my personal safety. After her haircut and requisite cake on a stick, I came home and made a sticker.

The best part was watching the video for “Holidae Inn” and remembering watching it on MTV, when that was a thing. Snoop Dawg and Ludacris were in it and they were at the peak of their powers. Snoop had yet to become snoop lion and ludacris had yet to become just a fixture in the fast and furious franchise. Ahh, the good ole’ days of commercialized rap. I meticulously watched through the video to see what colors I would use and really gravitated toward this yellow and green in the outfit that Chingy was wearing in a majority of his shots in the video. See, when you are just being creative to be creative, you can do stupid things like that sort of color matching that satisfy you on some weird instinctual level that no one else will care about but you.

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That feeling of creating something so unimportant and delightful is pretty tough to beat. It certainly is a lot different than weaving something where it typically takes at least a month to do all the spinning, dyeing, and weaving to bring a weaving to life. With making stupid stickers, I can get the idea out and into its form in like 20 minutes in Canva and post it to the internet. The best feeling is when someone else laughs at it too, but that’s not really necessary. I have learned that I think I am hilarious and delight myself to no end, but really only Lily and Juniper think I am funny. Maybe some of my friends think I am funny too, but that’s not a requirement. I am habituated to being the only person that finds enjoyment in what I make.

I don’t think its great that I am an island onto myself though. I think that is one of the shortcomings of my own work. I am pretty insular and in this long form conversation with myself and a few of my friends. I wonder if I am anything but this person marooned in my own submersion in American pop culture. It’s like I am, over and over again, welcoming myself to a plastic beach, a term I lifted from the Gorillaz album of the same name. That beach I reside on is really just a trash island

full of all the literal and figurative pop culture garbage that I have ingested while reading, watching TV, listening to music, and playing video games. The Gorillaz labeled it perfectly in “Plastic Beach:”

“It's styrofoam deep sea landfill
It's styrofoam deep sea landfill.”

Yes, my plastic beach is indeed a styrofoam deap sea landfill of useless factoids.

It’s funny and depressing — fupressing (?) —to think of your experience in last stage capitalism leading to this reality that is much closer to you being a zombie in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead walking around the mall, your grunts only intelligible to your fellow undead, than the supposed enlightened citizen of the greatest democracy on the planet that we are supposed to be.

This is why being a sociologist is sort of a bummer. You can make any simple necessity into some stupid, pointless social commentary. You could guilt yourself about anything by sharpening your sociological toolkit into a dagger by getting a PhD. “Wait, you ate and meal and then slept last night? Well, there are people in the world who aren’t eating or sleeping. How dare you.” “Wait, you drove a gasoline powered vehicle to your minimum wage job? How dare you pollute the environment” I am not belittling sociological analysis in anyway. I am just saying that if you don’t know how to balance than toolkit with expressions of joy and appropriate boundaries that its use is more likely to lead to mental illness than it is in significantly changing the world.

And yet, this year calls for the use of our skill in discernment. In Hannah Haddadi’s recent weekly divination, Hannah noted that this year’s tarot card is the Strength or Force card. Doing my due diligence, I did some research on the strength card in the “Meditations on the Tarot,” a christian hermetic text, and was struck by the resonance of that card’s message with the times we are living through.

This text, written in the 60s in a time of intense political tumult, feels as fresh now as it did then. Now, however, this message is even more resonant, given that the passionate pleas for our attention, time, and action can only be described as a ceaseless chorus that envelopes almost every moment of online time. It’s as if we have all turned into little miniature demagogues on social media, making our best attempts to sweep others away into what we think they should be thinking, doing and saying based on the talking points we have heard from others with explicit political agendas. Consequently, I don’t think there could be a better card to meditate on for this year.

As a preliminary approach to this strength card, I will be working on minding my own fucking business and not telling other people what to do. The miniature demagogue pipeline ends with me. Instead, I am going to try and focus my time on returning to my meditation practice, pressuring my representatives to stop supplying bombs and bullets to israel, and articulating what I am for, with no obligation that you be for it too. This, to me, is a great way of getting off that plastic beach and back into conversation with other people, a vital thing that our anonymous friend in the meditations in the Tarot argues we should be actively engaged in:

This might entail some difficult work to untangle yourself from folx who have no interest in your kinship. Rather, their only aim is to sweep you away into their world and assure your unblinking subservience to their views. This is not kinship; it’s one-sided patronage. Yet, I don’t want to give up on the belief that real conversation will lead to a better world and my own betterment. I don’t think those sorts of conversations are easy now, despite the ease with which we can find and communicate with one another. No, it seems that people have walled themselves off on their plastic beaches, happy to troll and police every person on the planet from their own fictitious throne of self-righteousness. However, I will honor the strength card by continuing to engage in the conversations with my kin to find that continued synthesis in the face of the changing world we all inhabit. That, to me, is a fine way to spend one’s time this year cycling with the strength card.

Anyway, thanks for being here and directly supporting this project with your doll hairs. Aside from my family, y’all’s support is what keeps me going in a world that looks like a dumpster fire. I save all the best stuff for y’all, even though all the experts say not to. haha All my best to you and yours, dear reader.

James