The Saga of Winston, the Destroyer of Super Clubs

First, put on headphones and listen to Scienide 1995’s dub techno mix “Dub Stroica.” This entire essay was written while under the influence of the silky smooth dubscape that scienide cooked up for us.

Right now, I am enjoying practicing anti-influencer writing styles. In order to counter act all the people trying to tell you how awesome their life is, I’m going to tell you wouldn’t like my life or be jealous of it. That’s more human to me and more normal anyway. That’s the exact sort of normal conversation you might have with someone when you are shooting the shit whole out in the world. As part of my continuing effort to write real, human stories that reflect some of the reality of what it’s like to live now, it’s just important to remind everyone that really I’m just a fool with few actually useful skills.

There is no better way to humble yourself in the 21st century than to have water leaking in your home. I was walking to my desk in the basement and suddenly stepped into a puddle of water. “What the fuck?” I thought to myself. I was frustrated, given that we just had to turn the water off to the kitchen sink facet upstairs. I could not believe my incredible luck that two plumping mishaps had happened in one week. The kitchen sink faucet, whose silicon tube was punctured and spraying a high pressure stream of water in all directions when turned  on, was an obvious fix. Now, mind you, not obvious in the sense that I had any idea of how to fix that. No, I just was able to wrap my mind around the issue. This random puddle of water was another matter. Not only did I not understand the puddle’s origin, but also had no basis of knowledge to begin to understand how to figure out what the problem was. There is no worse feeling to a man who does not really perform masculinity in conventionally-approved upon ways than to have his dearth of socially-approved masculinity rubbed in his face by a f$&@in’ puddle.

Therein lies the rub with being able to understand the punctured kitchen sink. When one is able to explain and understand the problem to the plumber, you are given an honorary membership into the “man” club for the extent of the repair. With this puddle, I am out of my depth. Lucky me, each of the 5 million plumbers who have entered our basement have required a recitation of the entire work history of the last week, seemingly unable to read the previous notes in the case file. It’s exhausting. I mean, it’s exhausting to have to deal with plumbing problems in general, but as is evident in this discourse, I bring my own baggage to the encounter too. I feel like I am stuck in one of those shitty stock nightmares that seems encoded into our DNA at this point where you find yourself taking an oddly familiar test in a vaguely recognizable classroom that you don’t want anything to do with. In this specific case, I’m just trying to hold onto my “man” card at all costs.

The problem is that I have never really been a typical man. I didn’t have a dad who played catch with me. Hell, the only way I could get him to show up to any of my sports ball contests was by playing tennis, which he taught for a living. He didn’t teach me how to fix anything or how to fit into male-dominated spaces, except for earning respect by dominating some other poor sap on the other side of the net. So every time I enter into one of these situations where I can perform my masculinity, I am hyper aware of the stakes of the encounter. Well, it feels high stakes to me at any rate, as I have always simultaneously hated male-dominated spaces while praying that my expression of masculinity is deemed acceptable so as to still maintain access to the spaces. Ahh, yes, a classic case of hating a social construction, but doing the bare minimum so as to not poke the hibernating bear of the group think that drives a lot of male dominated spaces. 

My favorite thing about being alive is when all this baggage is rendered to be so patently absurd by the happenstance of life. By absurd, I am thinking about it in the Camus sense where the circumstances of life reveal to you the stark lack of meaning that truly exists within your performance of any number of roles while you traverse life in an animate meatsack. Well, I was listening to the drain guy, who followed after the plumber and dispatch guy talked to me, talk about the illogical nature of my plumbing architecture. I nodded along with him while he explained Y splits and the benefits of PVC piping. Suddenly, I remembered that I left my sandwich on my table upstairs. In our house, this is a cause for alarm because Winston, my fur child and comrade in arms, is the most ingenious tumbler and scaler when food is left out. I walked up the stairs with an urgency saved for only the most emergent problems to find Winston had already eaten 6 inches of my 12 inch sub. Not only that, he did so in the most meticulous and clean manner. He didn’t rip the bag open. No, he carefully slid the 16 inch sub out, ripped away the wrapper, and left no crumb behind as he devoured half of the Super Club sandwich. I took the rest of the sandwich away and chuckled to myself. The drain guy then appeared from the basement. I explained Winston’s genius feat, and he offered the gentlest, disarming giggle. The facade of masculinity and our previous agreed upon roles dropped away in the portal of the absurdity of a very tiny dog being able to eat a sandwich that was almost as long he was, We both laughed gently while Winston licked his lips in satisfaction, the tenor of both our voices quite changed as a result.

Thank sweet Glob themself for this moment of absurdity and for its ability to kick me out of my own need to wrench every last ounce of juice out of my performance of masculinity. I think seeing myself get lost in my own performances of a role is the most startling revelation of this whole past week. It’s a very rare experience for me to have to play a role other than father, husband, friend, worker, artist these days. With working from home for the last nearly four years and not being much interested in leaving a 1 mile radius from my home, I have had this time away from society. That space affords one the ability to find a sort of silence and privacy that makes one so painfully aware of the rigors of normal human interaction. Yet, seeing as I am an animate meatsack whose hardwired social programming finds expression in the presence of others, I still needed that moment of absurdity to reboot my system while feverishly engrossed in the age old “man-card” performance. And thank great glob almighty in their infinite gelatinous glory for the fated happenstance of absurdity. It was nice to put down the weigh of the man-card baggage once again.

This is not to denigrate other roles or performances that I am still very invested it. I just have no interest in reifying the structure of gender within a random interaction with a plumbing professional, ya dig? I would rather have the great meaninglessness of those sorts of culturally-prescribed performances be cremated in the fires of our burning hearts that blaze with a deep yearning for more imaginative ways to understand who we are. For instance, I am much more interested in the joyful reciprocal play of being a dad, a husband, and an artist. I don’t find those performances heavy with a sort of unagreed upon, unaccepted responsibility that is foisted upon me by convention. No, I have consented to each of those theatres of possibility and joyfully engage in the contours of the difficulties and ease with which each day inhabiting those roles provides.

Honestly, it was quite a surprise to rediscover Camus while writing this essay. I remember reading The Stranger at 17 and being struck at how he was able to create a world with such little meaning. I must confess that it was quite over my head at the time, being the emo, meaning-soaked teen that I was. Yet, here at the vantage point of having lived some 20 more years, the absurdity of so much of the architecture we affix around ourselves is so blatantly obvious. I suppose that one needs to chase down the common rabbit holes of pursuing success in athletic, work, and artistic realms and, at the terminus finding nothing truly concrete to hold onto before one can understand the great meaningless Camus is speaking of. Now, here I am now, so many years later, just nodding in agreement with what Camus has to say. Ahh, the great joy of intellectual surprises that abound from the firing of electricity in the brain. I never want that firing to end.

Not surprisingly, I think Camus has wonderful advice for all of us as we sit at the precipice of another world world. Writing from his own vantage point in the early stages of World War II in the 1940’s, Camus called for individuals to understand their responsibility to history:

So, yes, existence has no meaning, but our work to create the course of our world’s history does. Sound familiar? This is precisely where I have found myself these past few years, puzzling over how to move forward with how people responded to the immediacy of the worst public health crisis of our time. I think Camus’ point is a shot in the arm for anyone feeling despondent. Remember, the way society is structured is a social fact that we all are born into, but how we will respond to that structure and seek to change it is always open to us. Whether our actions change the entire course of history is of no matter. All that matters it that you stood up when individuals were killing people in a genocide in Gaza. Changing that sort of history of bloodshed is all I am interested in.

Thanks for being here as always. It is a great joy and pleasure to write for my paid subscribers on the weeks when the pay wall is up. I know I can be freer in my writing and say things that I normally would feel reticent saying. I am eternally grateful for your support in this project. May our almighty gelatinous glob bless you with eternal cherry Jello.

Until next time, dear reader,

James