Passion Fucks You

Brief thoughts on the pursuit of happiness, before I get back to it.

You know when you go to the ENT because your ears are blocked and they use that curved syringe thing to flush the wax out? And all you hear for a moment is the rush of roaring water inside your head?

Anyway, it’s been nine days since the start of the year and I haven’t written a goddamn thing. That’s after the entire month of December when the only thing I published was an interview with someone like me: shy, ambitious, self-conscious bearer of the artist’s sharp monocle. The difference is that he had the gumption to do something significant with his work, and I haven’t written goddamn anything in the nine days since I told myself to start writing again. Maybe I didn’t have enough ins and outs written down. My fruits are scraps, stray thoughts, caffeine farts clouding my laptop.

Writer’s block? I can’t have writer’s block. I don’t do anything. Living, usually, takes money. My story’s not on corners or in bars or housed on dirty floors and couches. It doesn’t take drags on damp cigarettes. It doesn’t cut itself at the wrist. It doesn’t burn dust or shoot light. It doesn’t throw a single punch. It doesn’t drain; it isn’t drained. In other words, nothing is interesting or voyeuristic about my struggle, which sucks because it is a struggle and I’d like to profess it in a way that makes for good copy.

The promise that was made to me, when I was first shown a map of where I lived, was that my destiny was whatever I wanted to make of it. That is a promise that continues to haunt every corner of this country, all the ancient blood and viscera grafted tar-like onto every surface, still seeping into every pixel on our screens. And somewhere deep down I took that to heart. We are made to be betrayed, but that’s a lesson you learn later. Before that, you internalize the individuality that all Americans and all American life holds sacred, and the immutability of that bittersweetness, and ask yourself if you have the stomach to pursue it. Most people don’t. They settle for the little things: the man across the bar, the media solutions job, a few long-distance friends on Discord, the occasional Taylor Swift concert. That may be a better existence, I am learning.

I spent the back half of 2023 trying to chase another dream. I was being pressured out of my day job, both from within and from outside myself. [If it matters to you, I was slinging lattes for a living, and I didn’t want to do that anymore; it was too much effort, too much energy at an age where for once I felt the urge to conserve myself. I’m good at customer service; good customer service in America is often borne out of fear. Lose the smile and you miss some kind of opportunity, face some random wrath. Both of those had happened enough times to me over the years that I had finally transitioned from a hungry vagabond in need of work to a slovenly soul who despised it. No passion left, so I had lost my guiding star.]

When I got moved down to three shifts a month, I spent the time doing what LinkedIn users quietly call “indulging myself.” I wrote about whatever I wanted and whomever I wanted. I read books about music and books about life, and oftentimes they were the same thing. I visited countless cafes and tipped too much. I took long walks up Lake Washington with my headphones in. I took deep inhales in forests, I trod on wet marshy mulch, I watched cottonwood float like the ghost of winter, I caught giant oak leaves in my bare hand. I passed blackberries ripening on the thorns, their bodies pumped full with skin-stretching sweetness, until one day I returned to find them having dropped in heavy burgundy bursts to the ground and become splashes, shoe prints, paintings of seed and juice that fragranced the air with their failure.

I remember thinking: this was the life I had dreamed of. I was happier, maybe more than I had ever been, during that time of blissful unrepentant freedom. And yet the only reason way I can write those words here and know that I mean them is because I can recall exactly what I was thinking at the time. Now it is not so blissful. Now I feel more inclined to repent. The feeling that lingers is that there is no feeling, that I have lost something in the process. My pockets feel lighter and my head feels scrambled. Is it January’s ante? Or is it the cost of having dared to touch the God of my design? Am I possessed by the spirit that haunts every corner of this captured land? Or has the ghost finally left me: hollow, barren, an empty vessel?

Years ago I had a brief fling with a guy who fucked me up in ways I can’t thank him enough for, and one day I was over at his expensive apartment drinking [fuckin] Soylent [shut up] while he told me how worried he was about his general apathy for life’s sweetness. I asked him what I ask everyone in veiled cruelty: what are you good at? What do you want to do?

He couldn’t say. He codes. He had a project in between work hours, but that was also coding. He takes trips. He goes to bars sometimes. Otherwise, relics of his forays into creativity and leisure lay strewn across the room. A chessboard is frozen in stratagem. A lone acoustic guitar leans like a hustler on the wall, untouched but for my lazy fingers. So he suffers, said he, from a lack of passion.

Passion. I hear that word in my head like it was spoken directly into a microphone with no pop filter. The plosive batters my brain like a haymaker. Passion. You live in a luxury box with smartphone lighting and monsterras and exotic whiskeys and over $10,000 worth of video games in a supercomputer. You visit friends in the mountains where you sip rich drinking chocolate from a demitasse in front of a fireplace. And I don’t own a car. I weigh 117 pounds.

I know, it’s different. We both have our pressures, and suffering is pointless to compare. But his were mostly external, and they were easy to compartmentalize. He could direct his burnout at somebody and then take a week or two off to go to Iceland or something. Who has my reins? Who gives my orders? They come from someone who is routinely working out of the mechanics of life, so swamped with branching paths and so frequently unable to decide the better of the two. Be ascetic, I tell him. You be ascetic, he replies, and puts his head back on the pillow. So I sit in front of the big whirring computer machine with dark syrupy blood pumping through my veins — always in public spaces where people sit and chatter and engage in life’s in-betweens, feel contented and stay distracted from the great Wait for Something to Happen — and I write, and I stop, and I rewrite, and I frown and eventually I delete everything and press my cold fingers into my eyes. Passion. Why?

It’s sometimes too much to think about. If I strain to recall, there are times I relish in the idea of carrying to torch of so many other writers who link music to life, who have used it to excavate its truths and translate its mysteries. But all I can think about now is the degree to which we have undercut its value in society, in so many ways. I think about the people who used to spend their days plumbing the depths of the human experience and not feel utterly enervated in the process. I wonder how much longer I can survive doing it without losing my sanity or my will.

And I realize with pins in my cheeks that I will continue to do it anyway, because that is my purpose. Something greater than me led to the edge of the bluff, over a trapdoor of black trees and ocean, and forced me to bear witness to the sunrise. Holy rays that never blind, color and light — nothing is untouched, and even the shadows are in focus. That is the image I hold as truth above all, close to my heart, forever, even as the dirt breaks under my feet and I plummet off the cliff.