What the Fuck am I Doing?

When I was a sophomore in high school some friends and I made a horror movie called the Iowa Chansaw Massacre, a 2 1/2 minute excuse to trespass, break shit and pour Hershey’s syrup on each other. The end product has minimal dialogue, but during filming we briefly discussed whether the film’s murder victims should be established as having deserved their slaughter. In said raw footage, the dialogue goes as follows:

-Y’know what I have opinions about?
-No, what?
-Things.
-Dude, you should get a blog.

Enter Axe Murderer.

In my life, I’ve generally tried to avoid being pretentious enough to warrant retaliatory killings. I’ve also generally been hyperconscious of whether my actions—especially with regard to self-expression (namely writing)—are worthy of acknowledgment as somehow legitimate. Legitimacy—truly, always my main concern—is a barometer of both quality and purpose. I’ve always wanted my shit to be good, perhaps even able to meet some standard of peer acceptance. The shadow of this aspiration meant that nothing could be more embarrassing than being told “nobody writes like that,” or the like. Even if some of these accusations (though surely not all of them—I’ve written some unbearably stupid shit) were arbitrary, they could still make me feel like some sweat-coated piece of my heart had been stolen.

My anxiety, however, has also focused on whether my output was ever truly worth the time and attention of whomever was confronted with it. Worth it, as in whether or not it provided some sort of inherent (yet of course fresh) service or value to its immediate recipients and Greater Conceptual Audience. This was the underlying yet supreme meaning of legitimacy. My internal pressure to make a statement that would change the world became so strong that, for awhile, my sense of purpose was too large to be channeled into anything remotely functional. I could never write freely in such neuroticism, of course. But it also seeped into my ability to relate to other people, into how I ran my life.

May 2008: park bench, somewhere in Des Moines:

-How are you feeling?
-I don’t know…I don’t really have anything profound to say, anyway.

The response of a well-intentioned teenager with cripplingly ambitious personal standards, or just a self-righteous motherfucker? Your call.

I’ve actually been wondering about that one for some time and all I’ve decided is that legitimacy is a bitch to define. Once you’ve crafted out a meaning for it, all of your actions can then be scrutinized through the framework of their relationship to that definition of legitimacy. Contradictions—breaches of the integrity of whatever you’re trying to say—arise like skeptical eyebrows. And, despite the more conventional advice I’ve been given, I don’t think that navigating those inevitabilities is quite as simple as just writing what you know, or, in life, acting as your conscience dictates. Your work will still be internalized by others within a (generally critical) personal context; people can only understand their surroundings with the help of their own exposure to others’ works and their own life experiences with the subject matter.

My exposure is limited. So is my experience. Sure, I can be concise about some things in writing, but when I try to communicate big, personal ideas (profundities? I can only fucking hope so), they inevitably go through this gauntlet of the audiences’ immediate circumstances, long-term contexts, and previous biases about myself. Usually, this is okay. But it also means that any opinion, impression, emotion I express will be understood by the reader with some impurity, with some dissonance.

I won’t argue that an important job of a good writer is to communicate ideas through that discord, but the practice also serves more personal functions. Writing is a way of contextualizing observations for oneself—of giving life and meaning to our notions; building them up or bringing them down. It’s a way of interacting more dynamically with our surroundings by asking ourselves if we understand them well enough to say something. There are times when this can be as meaningless (or misunderstood) to the reader as it is therapeutic to the author, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t think that’s so bad. Sure, these instances could often be avoided by less compulsive writing or more careful consideration, but why should I cheat myself of that sense of urgency? I’d rather take a pure idea and have it run me into a wall than quietly contemplate a better place.

So, do I believe that legitimacy has more to do with purity of intent than the ability to communicate that intent? I suppose so, but my convictions can be prone to significant ebbing and flowing. What’s constant though, is the necessity of playing with them—of considering their worth, or even just considering them all. Which is really the point of all this post, and the blog in general: a medium for me to legitimize that consideration. So far it feels pretty alright.

But I do hope you enjoy it, too.