#7daysofcoping

Yeah, don’t know what to say. Here’s what I’m working on currently. But yeah, cut me some slack. Just look at the cat in the photo above. Cute, right? The cat’s not doing anything, just relaxing, taking a nap. Kind of like how I’m just trying to relax, maybe take a nap, or–I don’t now where I was going with this but, yeah, now I really want to take a nap. 

—

 

I leave a note, unsure if anyone will notice. Really, I wouldn’t care if they did. But then five miles out, I find the note in my pocket, unfinished and unaddressed, and I wrestle with the urge to turn back. I tell myself that I don’t care, because it’s true—I don’t. Look at me: I don’t care. I’ll stay true to the left lane and in no time, I’ll find somewhere else to crash, where I can breathe easy, and the streets and storefronts mean nothing to me. Surely I can manage that—but still, there’s something about how a single thought can repeat itself in your head over and over until it’s all you can think about. It’s enough to drive a person mad. It lingers, and that’s what convinces me to turn back.

I don’t have any interest in carrying anything along with me—not a memento, not even a mood. It’s a late or early, depending on who you are and the life you lead. If you ask me, I find nothing better than these late nights, the fraction of time where everything slows and the sky, it isn’t sure whether to reveal itself, a solemn blue, or remain bashful, ashamed.

This far out, with only half a tank of gas and the sixty, maybe seventy if I counted all the change I’ve tossed in the glove compartment, my chances are that I’ll get about as far as the city limits. I’ll pass the theme parks and the random strip malls until all I see is the road. And the road continues for as long as I want.

This isn’t really even my car. I mean, it was given to me, but I didn’t pay for it. My name might be on the title, but someone else, who will remain nameless, pays for the insurance, paid it off, and has paid to keep it well-maintained. Does this mean I’m driving a stolen car?

Yeah, okay—I’m turning around. It’s different, the feeling of returning rather than departure. Leaving feels almost hopeful, bittersweet if you let it sink in; you are the one leaving. You are the one moving on. You are the one carrying everything you own, everything you consider a part of you, away from where everything used to make sense.

Look in the backseat and see that I’ve got one duffel bag and a laptop.

What do I really have? What am I really worth?

This road returns to me a series of memories that I almost felt were missing. The street corner where I stood around drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, with people I could have called friends if I stuck around long enough to remember their names; they went on about the show we had just been to, a show by some local band I can’t remember but, strangely, still hear their songs echoing through my mind. I hear one now, the same sequence, repeating—These words invade, are the only sound… that you’ll hear from me. The band, hometown heroes, and they were all excited.

What happened, I don’t know.

On either side, there are whole stories where I could easily play a small part—I know for certain that I’ve watched a few films at that Regal theatre there; you bet I could be one of those people standing around at that Planet Smoothie across the street, wasting time before show time. Sushi Hanna, that sushi place where I’d go to sit at the bar there, mostly because it was quieter than the other nearby locations, able to sit and have a drink and never get carded. Maybe because they remembered me, but more likely because they really needed the business.

No matter that a whole year has passed without much momentum. Something holds me down, keeps me here. Well tonight is different. Tonight I leave. The strip malls are sprinkled amidst different suburban neighborhoods. Everything’s green, planned out, cul de sac, roundabout, floral street names, the road itself, continuing to bend and buckle as it carves through the manmade wasteland. If I keep going, eventually I’ll see vacant lots, which I imagine used to be forested before the trees were cut down and cleared out in anticipation of more strip malls and neighborhoods and amenities.

Really I haven’t been anywhere but still, I have that inclination that wherever this road takes me, it’ll all be the same.

The belief that I got enough: I have purpose in my step, a song in my heart, a fire inside, the motivation to take this road to its end. I’m going and nothing’s going to stop me. I just want to be free. I just want to be me. Isn’t that all a person ever really asks for?

I pull up to the house, putting the coupe into park, doing my best not to make a sound. Not that it matters. Lightless inside, they’re all asleep. They’ve been asleep since nine. How predictable. So much to see and do and yet it never changes—their routine outlined to occupy a small little sliver of the world. I guess I’m a little resentful. Baseless, perhaps. Maybe not—but that’s not up to me to decide. I feel what I feel and I know what I want to do. It doesn’t involve wasting another year here.

I have to get my shit together.

And how can I do that if I stay here, doing what—taking online classes, going to community college? That road goes in circles. It goes nowhere. It’ll end with me living, at best, a few miles away in some apartment, with a roommate that I do my best to avoid, while I work some job I don’t care about, one that pays the bills but doesn’t give me any pride in what I do or promise in life.

Yeah, not for me.

After a minute, I kill the engine. I pick up and read the letter, angling it away from me slightly to catch the nearby streetlight. It reads exactly like what it is—an angry letter written by a self-proclaimed runaway.

What am I running away from?

I’ve run away from things for a long time. Can’t say much else has changed. I haven’t committed to anything but my own ambitions, and those, they wear on me so heavily, you bet I’m thinking about them right now. What I should be doing. And most of my childhood, I was all about the convenient escapes—videogames, comics, and movies. But mostly videogames. I bought and sold and built up serious credit card debt just trying to keep away. But what do you expect from a kid that cared more about Mortal Kombat than making some basketball team.

Where I’m going, credit cards need a name. Where I’m going, credit cards are about as valuable as the plastic used to cut the cards.

The house, and everything inside, all of it—there’s a past here. It’s mine, and I really should go back inside. No reason not to. There’s a bed, a whole room full of memories I’d never admit to anyone as being full of nostalgia, the sort that could take hold, keeping me in the moment longer than I’d like. It’s the sort of feeling that makes me feel like, sure—maybe I could get used to this. So instead, I break free, doing my best to never let it become an important part of me.

The letter’s embarrassing but it gets one thing right:

I can’t get used to this.

I’d be twenty people if that were what it took to be alone with my thoughts, capable of getting where the going got real tough. I want the worst, if only to help weigh in on what I need right now. I need to feel like there’s something more, feel like I am actually getting somewhere. I have an idea of what that might be, and it’s a collision course of rejection and anonymity that lengthens to stretch past the road. Depending on who you are, it might go on for longer than your lifetime. I’m talking about the struggle. Yeah, struggling artist, a cliche. I wrote that in the letter. Part of the reason to leave.

I tear up the letter and let the pieces fall into my lap. I watch one particularly small piece get picked up by a gentle gust of wind, carried out the passenger side window.

I watch it disappear and think about my own disappearance. Surely there hasn’t been just the one. My life is a series of disappearances. And it’s my hope that there’ll be plenty more.

One day, I’ll wash up to the surface as someone you’d never expect.

10 texts to cope by:

#coping #apocalypse #melancholy #theworldhasnotendedyet

War & War by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes (New Directions, 2006)

The only streetlights burning were those at the top of the stairs and the light they gave out fell in dingy cones that shuddered in the intermittent gusts of wind assailing them because the other neon lights positioned in the thirty or so meters between them had all been broken, leaving them squatting in darkness, yet as aware of each other, of their precise positions, as of the enormous mass of dark sky above the smashed neon, the sky which might have glimpsed the reflection of its own enormous dark mass as it trembled with stars in the vista of railway yards spreading below it, had there been some relationship between the trembling stars and the twinkling dull red lights of semaphores sprinkled among the rails, but there wasn’t, there was no common denominator, no interdependence between them, the only order and relationship existing within the discrete worlds of above and below, and indee of anywhere, for the field of stars and the forest of signals stared as blankly at each other as does each and every form of being, blind in darkness and blind in radiance, as blind on earth as it is in heaven, if only so that a long moribund symmetry among this vastness might appear in the lost glance of some higher being, at the center of which, naturally, there would be a miniscule blind spot: as with Korin … the footbridge … the seven kids.

The Stranger by Albert Camus, trans. Matthew Ward (Vintage International, 1989)

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

Melancholy by László F. Földényi, trans. Tim Wilkinson (The Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2016)

Melancholics are prominent…precisely because they are too full of life; because of them, existence overflows itself.  This explains their unappeasable sense of absence: since they have left the world of moderation, overflowing is inconceivable without being emptied.  The universe is damaged in their person; hence, melancholics’ sense of being among the elect, but also their self-hatred to the point of self-annihilation.  That makes them strong and outstanding, but also exceedingly frail.  Their strength is infinite, because they have gained knowledge of the end, but they are unhappy, since having experienced the ephemeral nature of humans, they have lost their trust in existence.  Their strength and frailty, their unhappiness and their heroism, cannot be detached from each other.  This leads us back once again to the starting point of our argument, to the Aristotelian question “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?”

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage Books, 2006)

He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.

 

Jesus, he whispered.

 

Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.

 

Christ, he said. Oh Christ.

 

He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry.

 

He’d dropped the lighter. No time to look. He pushed the boy up the stairs. Help us, they called.

 

Hurry.

 

A bearded face appeared blinking at the foot of the stairs. Please, he called. Please.

 

Hurry. For God’s sake hurry.

Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009)

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin Books, 2006)

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

 

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes (New Directions, 1989)

Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on, feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain permeated by evil,  then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees  could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against  the powers of terror, she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that first glance seemed not only  stupefying but downright impossible. Not far from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through the  winter night down the middle of the road-that is if this satanic conveyance whose desperately slow crawl in the direction of  the town centre reminded her of a steam roller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could be said to be moving at all:  it wasn’t even a matter of overcoming strong wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a tract of  dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an  enormous wagon, was covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark brown shape hovered at the centre of the  inscriptions) and was much higher and longer-she noted incredulously-than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass  through town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was being drawn by a smoking, oily, and  wholly antediluvian wreck of tractor which was making fearful exertions in the process.

Melancholy by Jon Fosse, trans. Damien Searls (Dalkey Archive, 2006)

I am a darkness without you. I miss you. I am walking up the street, but I can’t see anything. I am my longing for you. And I hear laughter far behind me. But the laughter is just there, because in me is only my movement toward you. I am only a turning toward you. I am walking. I am walking to you, I am a turning toward you. I am my longing for you. I am only a turning toward you. I am walking. I am walking to you. I can’t do anything else, I can only be a movement turned toward you, whether you’re there or not. All I am is a movement toward you. A movement, a turning, toward you. I am nothing but you, who are not there. And it’s precisely there, in what I am not, in that which is turned toward you, it’s precisely there, in that which maybe isn’t there, in what is just a turning, a movement, it’s precisely there that I am in everything I paint and I see. I am walking down a street and I am my desperate turning toward you. Nothing else is.

Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog, trans. by Alan Greenberg (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)

I see ever so many mice. No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it’s unimaginable. The mice rustle very lightly in the flattened grass. Only he who walks see these mice. Across the fields, where the snow lay, they’ve dug tunnels between grass and snow; now that the snow’s gone the serpentine traces still remain. Friendship is possible with the mice.

 

In a village before Stotzheim I sat on the steps of a church, my feet were so tired and a sorrow was gnawing at my chest; then a window opened in the schoolhouse next door, a child was opening it following orders from inside, and then I overheard a young teacher scream so harshly at the children that I hoped no one would notice that a witness to these terrifying screams was sitting below the window. I went away, although I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I headed toward a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith (Hogarth, 2016)

The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

 

 

 

 

I’ve spent the past week thinking about what coping means and debating its value. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but I’ve come to at least one personal conclusion: coping is not enough.

The news this week has been awful. The executions of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile cannot be coped with. The violence of the state against black lives stretches out into every area of our criminal justice system. And the criminal justice system upholds the larger network of oppression built into the fabric of our society and lives every day. Coping is not enough.  

In the face of all of this, it is natural for any one person to feel helpless and hopeless. So, here are some links to resources on how to do more than cope.

 

Campaign Zero

An organization dedicated to the idea that “we can live in a world where the police don’t kill people by limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability,” and which offers and promotes “a comprehensive package of urgent policy solutions – informed by data, research and human rights principles – can change the way police serve our communities.”

 

15 Things Your City Can Do Right Now to End Police Brutality

An article by Zak Cheney Rice, which offers some concrete responses to the questions “How, besides protesting, can we actually make sure no more black people are killed, beaten or tortured by the police? And how can we promote justice and equity in law enforcement more generally?”

 

The Real Cost of Prison Project

An organization that provides further links to numerous resources and organizations related to ongoing efforts to reform the criminal justice system.

 

The New Jim Crow

If you’re not quite ready to act and want to start by educating yourself, Michelle Alexander’s book “about a glaring wrong that we have been living with that we also somehow don’t know how to face,” is a good enough place to start.

 

Curriculum for White Americans to Educate Themselves on Race and Racism – from Ferguson to Charleston

A site that compiles a large amount of articles and resources around the idea that “the movement for racial justice needs more White Americans to get involved. And it’s our responsibility to help each other get involved–and get involved productively.”

 

I want to talk to you about video game speed running. But first, a little context:

Throughout my stint on #7daysofcoping, I continue to be skeptical about the inherent value of “coping.”  While the definition is positive enough (“dealing effectively with a difficult situation”), common usage is a bit more concerning; we don’t usually apply the term to problems that can be handled or solved, but more often to situations that are seemingly beyond our control, to things that appear intractable or unchangeable in the face of our best efforts. Coping with losing a basketball game is not travelling back in time and winning; it is more often processing the fact that the outcome can’t be changed.

In other words: coping is typically not the act of changing a difficult situation, but rather the act of processing our own inability to do so. This conception becomes dangerous precisely when we “cope” with our inability to impact situations that we actually can. An unhealthy relationship. The political process. Complex social issues. From this angle, coping can start to resemble something like a kind of apathy in disguise (an active, engaging, and potentially rewarding form of apathy, yes, but apathy nonetheless).

And that’s why I want to talk about video game speedrunning.

We all must answer to life’s most immovable concerns: the passage of time, the fact of our own existence (and eventual non-existence), the presence of our minds within a fragile body, and the grand fallibility of human understanding (of ourselves, the world, and one another). And always we have before us: What will I do with my day? Where will I expend my energy? How will I occupy my thoughts? By default, whole lifetimes are dedicated to and defined by our responses to these questions. What I want to reflect on is the fact that some people answer these questions primarily by finding loopholes in the construction of video game mechanics in order to win at speeds that would otherwise seem impossible. Those people are video game speedrunners.

Video game speedrunning is the act of trying to complete a video game as fast as possible. Players compete to achieve the shortest time. If you remember spending hours playing Super Mario Bros on the NES, then you may be impressed to know that a player named “darbian” recently completed the Italian plumber’s quest in about 4 minutes and 57 seconds. And if, like me, you spent the standard 15 to 20 hours beating N64’s Zelda: Ocarina of Time, then you may be shocked to hear that someone named “Torje” was able to reach the end in 17 minutes and 42 seconds.

In its purest form, a speedrun consists of just playing the game really well. This involves memorizing routes, knowing the location of important items, and deftly defeating adversaries. It takes considerable time and practice, with many hours of intense work leading up to any single, successful speedrun.

The “pure” form, however, is not what interests me.

Rather, there is another branch of speedrunning that involves knowing and exploiting the inner-workings of how a particular game is constructed. The act of utilizing these methods exists somewhere in the blurry area between breaking and following the rules. That is, the player does not literally manipulate or alter the code of the game. The game remains itself, entirely intact. It is the very same one that any random user might play. The speedrunners are simply aware of the underlying structures, and they use that knowledge to do things which would otherwise be impossible. These speedrunners do what anyone could do but would never think to do on their own: travel to a seemingly mundane spot, engage in an absurd combination of footsteps and jumps, and finally make the rules of the universe fall away like meat from a bone. The result of these exploitations looks in practice like a kind of magic or wizardry. For example, a player might discern that, within the underlying code of the game, the “levels” are numbered in a particular way, such that areas which normally would be very far apart in the “natural” progression of game may in fact be very close “physically”; by utilizing a few exact and complex maneuvers at the start of the game, a player just might slip through a wall and arrive at a secretly adjacent space hours ahead in the timeline. It’s teleportation, it’s time travel, it’s impossible. And it’s happening.

One of my favorite examples involves the initial positing, subsequent discovery, and ultimate exploitation of parallel universes in Super Mario 64. Really. The presence of these parallel universes within the game were first theorized, and have now been tested and utilized in unbelievable in-game moves. Players can rely on an elaborate map of where the parallel Mario universes “should” be (in combination with a special kind of jump that takes literally hours to “charge”), in order to propel Mario through numerous alternate planes of game-existence — only to reappear in initially unreachable areas within the central game. Players themselves don’t actually get to witness Mario travelling to these theoretical realms, nor do they get to see what the parallel universes might look like (to any observer, it appears merely as if Mario is here one moment, and then on top of some mountain the next), but their existence is all but confirmed by dint of the fact that players can faithfully and predictably rely on the theory to achieve observable and repeatable actions in the game.

What is amazing to me here is that a large amount of people have considered the questions of what to do with their time, how to occupy their thoughts, and what to dedicate their energies to, and have proudly answered by spending hours and hours on an entirely niche endeavor with almost no impact on anything at all. It seems pointless, foolish, absurd, and almost offensively inane. It’s tempting to dismiss these people and their work. I might counter, though, that most things that people do and commit their energies to are pointless, foolish, absurd, and inane. From a broad enough spectrum, everything is (your good works will crumble at the foot of time, like every other mundane distraction). And, of course, as a writer, I can easily see myself mirrored among video game speedrunners. That is, I too spend hours and hours nitpicking the details of imaginary worlds, hoping to manipulate the underlying rules in pursuit of a kind of magic, all within a niche market that will have little to no impact on anything. I mean, here I am writing an essay on video game speedrunning. I might as well be charging my super jump for parallel worlds in Mario 64. And, in some respects, I am.

That is, I believe in the inherent magic of useless things. Given that I think pretty much everything is, in some sense, useless, I find it an important exercise to empathize with and find meaning in what might otherwise easily be dismissed as trivial or insignificant. If we can find meaning in even the smallest and most foolish of endeavors, then it should hopefully be easier (or perhaps less important) to recognize it in broader pursuits. And, of course, video game speedrunning is a great starting point. It’s as pointless as pointless can be. But when looked at closely, anything that people truly give a lot of time to — anything that people put their whole heart into — will ultimately be suffused with the beauty of their innate human frailty and somber dedication. Yes, video game speedrunning is inherently meaningless (as is anything), but here’s what isn’t and can’t be: a person crumbles under the weight of the world, gets up in the morning, returns to the thing that brings them joy, gives care and scrutiny to its inner workings, and through sheer insanity creates something new and previously impossible. I challenge anyone to not see the art and fear and joy in Narcissa Wright’s now famous speedrun of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The hours of her life spent working and reworking can be felt burning through into that moment of culmination. The absurdity underlying this act does not diminish its meaning but instead amplifies the sense of wonder, awe, and relief. We all should be so blessed as to have any of our efforts come together in such seamless unity.  

Of course, it is apparent that many speedrunners themselves have questioned the inner value of what they do (who hasn’t!). I know this because they have banded together to create at least two yearly charity events, Awesome Games Done Quick and Summer Games Done Quick, wherein speedrunners perform live in an effort to raise funds for organizations like Doctors Without Borders and The Prevent Cancer Foundation. Together, they have contributed millions of dollars toward efforts to improving the world. Certainly, their speedrunning has contributed more to charity than the work of 99% of the writers and artists I know combined.

And, of course, this information makes it hard to dismiss speedrunning as pointless or useless, but I maintain that philanthropy is more like the icing on the cake. People doing what they love, amid the horror of the world (and despite the futility of their lives), is meaningful and important even before charity. I’ll maintain, in fact, that when we dedicate ourselves to useless things, what happens is not unlike Mario jumping into a parallel universe.  It’s only theoretical, yes, but what we return with from the breach has a value that can only have been achieved in that unreal, pointless place. We travel to a seemingly mundane spot, engage in an absurd combination of footsteps and jumps, and finally make the rules of the universe fall away like meat from a bone. There is a mountaintop that lives deep within the foolishness of our choices, and it is worth climbing. So yes: at the altar of what life hands us, what else can we offer up but our own exuberant uselessness?

 

Once again, Twitter and social media outlets are aflame this week with images of affluent college students in handcuffs, frat boys face down on the curb, and lecture halls raided. The photos are grim, disturbing, and sad, but not for the reasons that Social Justice Warriors (who are having a field day) would demand we believe.

Yes, reports of SWAT teams careening down the sides of dorm buildings in the dark of night, busting through doors, rounding up co-eds, and ushering them to jail in military-style convoys are without a doubt harrowing and alarming (even worthy of some concern), but their current proliferation once again ignores the larger context of campus life. I find myself in a state of déjà vu, drumming for the umpteenth time the tired beat of reason amid a cacophony of narrow-minded fervor. I’m tired of saying it, but: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

The news outlets, celebrities and activists disseminating photos, videos, and anecdotes of college students bleeding in police cars, spread eagle on the quad lawn, or cowering in their common rooms – without addressing the broader social concerns of collegiate life – do a grave disservice to the longstanding plight of our troubled college youth.

At the center of the current maelstrom is the story of Jacob Alhearn, a white Art History major arrested recently for his alleged part in a “massive campus amphetamine ring.” In the course of his arrest (a routine hallway stop), Jacob protested, resisted, and was subsequently subdued and ultimately injured. A lot has been made of Jacob’s wounds (which, it must be noted, are only superficial – most head wounds produce a lot of blood, even for small abrasions, and the fact that Jacob was covered from face to belt in a red gloss is an aesthetic shock rather than a medical dilemma), but these particular concerns serve only to obscure and ignore Jacob’s own culpability in the situation. If we do not acknowledge his role and responsibility, then we have not addressed the problem at the heart of university violence and crime.

The fact of the matter is that Jacob is not a good student. He is, according to teachers and peers, often late to class, only rarely participates, and has a subpar GPA. (His choice to study Art History is a red flag in itself: what should we make of a man pursuing such useless pabulum?) And, like so many other men his age on campuses across the country, he is unemployed, self-entitled, and carrying a long record of previous infractions: open container tickets, public urination, bicycling on the sidewalk, and at least one case of assault (though this never went to court, but was settled instead by internal campus authorities, a rare bit of extreme leniency that those same authorities are no doubt now regretting).

Whether or not police were right to stop him between classes, slam him into a wall, and briefly render him unconscious (leaving aside the issue of whether or not he was maybe carrying enough amphetamines to grievously injure up to two of three of his peers), we have to ask ourselves if Jacob is really the symbol of police brutality that activists want to rally behind. In fact, we have to ask ourselves if police doing their jobs in a harsh environment like the modern university system should be the focus of our national antipathy. What will that accomplish?

There are more important issues at stake.

Namely, personal responsibility. It’s the elephant in the classroom, and we have to talk about it.

 

Yesterday, for #7daysofcoping, I took a stab at my thoughts on “7 days,” or a week (tl;dr — weeks are useless and absurd). Today, I’d like to think about the second half of my assignment: coping.

And, for me, I think one way that “I cope” (if I do at all) is by reading. Like many people, books have always been a refuge for me, and so I’d like to share some titles that I especially rely on. I’ll recommend seven, because whatever, seven seems to be a relevant number here. Yes, seven books for coping!

But let me preface this by saying that I don’t actually know what coping is.

The dictionary tells me that “to cope” means to “deal effectively with something difficult.” If we’re talking about relatively simple challenges like assembling a puzzle or cleaning the bathroom, then I can understand what it means “to cope.” You can “deal effectively” with a tile floor or a set of interlocking cardboard pieces, despite the inherent obstacles therein. Sure.

But if we’re talking about something broader, like being alive, here on this planet, in this body, at this moment in time, amid everything that surrounds us (and all of the things that can’t and won’t), then I don’t know if I truly believe in the idea of “dealing with it effectively.” In part because “dealing” is a little vague, and so is “effectively.” Definition-wise, we’re in an ambiguous jumble. We’ve got constraining terms, yes, but the terms are cloudy. Of course, anyone who is still alive at this moment is in some sense “dealing” with the situation at hand, sort of by default. Like: you’re alive? Okay: You’ve won! But effectively? That I don’t know. The universe is awful and doesn’t have a point system. Not like, say, basketball. I think we can agree that being alive isn’t, for the most part, basketball. I know how to be effective at basketball, but “effectively” is the part of “coping” that I think, in the broadest sense, might be impossible. And perhaps even unnecessary.

 

I want to talk to you about the concept of a week (and the reasons I hate it). Here’s why:

My publisher, Civil Coping Mechanisms, has a new project called “7 Days of Coping.” The concept is that, during the first seven days of each month, a new author posts on the topic of “coping” (or anything connected to that idea, interpreted as broadly as that author prefers). I’m excited to have been asked to take part in the second iteration, happening now in the first week of July (Alexandra Naughton got things started last month, setting the bar high). For the next few days (well, seven to be exact), I’ll be “coping” with the idea of trying to say anything reasonable at all about what people cope with in life and how they manage to do so. I consider myself a terrible judge of human behavior and am wildly inept at being a person myself, so we’ll just have to see how this goes.

One way I deal with my own ineptitude is by approaching things as methodically as possible (and, of course, another more common and “natural” way I deal with ineptitude is by approaching things in a state of total disarray and abandon, flailing about and tripping over myself, but today I’m going methodical). I often entertain and act upon the entirely illogical notion that if we break something down into small enough parts, or into a finite number of boxes, then we can address them one at a time, fully and with care. This thinking is, by and large, bullshit. But sometimes I need bullshit to do anything. To move, at all. To get out of bed. Take a step. Eat. So this is the bullshit I’ve chosen for today: to believe the lie that addressing the small parts of something can help us conceive of and take control of the whole. In that delusional spirit, I’d like to address the first portion of my assignment: “7 days” — or a week.

I am of the opinion that the week is a useless, foolish, and absurd unit of time. It’s the worst.

Yet somehow, the week is also immensely popular. Like: it’s up there (I think we can all agree) among the most popular units of time available. People the world over employ the week as a system of time management and as a guiding force in their lives. When you wake up and think, “ahhh, it’s Monday,” so do a few billion other people. It is pretty much everywhere. In the realm of useless, arbitrary things (which the week fits easily into), that’s a real accomplishment. I can hardly think of a more popular or universally accepted bit of total nonsense. To that end, I respect the week, for its sheer audacity. A king among pointless things.

#7daysofcoping is one featured CCM author, coping, for 7 days, with all of us, together.

#7daysofcoping is the first 7 days of every month.

#7daysofcoping is on Twitter.

#7daysofcoping is here on Enclave.

#7daysofcoping doesn’t end on the 7th day, but keeps going, again and again.

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It starts tomorrow, June 1st, with Alexandra Naughton.

We’re coping.

#7daysofcoping Tweets