Absurdist Media

Return to the Fold: a 50 Post-a-bration of Sad-Sackery

At some point, I came across a record I never knew I had in my collection. I have no reason to think I bought it. It was not a record from my sister, father or friends collection that I ended up with somehow. It was not one I could recall picking up in some thrift store or off the street. This was not something I could recall borrowing. It was just a record sitting to the right of my Springsteen and Dylan collections-- completely out of place.

Somewhere in my scant amount of traveling I had come across something I could not do without, never used it and now realized how unnecessary it was. I can't say I want to hear the record or care about it, it's just comforting to know it's there. Like this site, a tossed-away idea that ruminates in Tedd and I's afterthoughts every now and again, this record produces nothing of quantity, but who's to say it's not quality? Not to bemoan or laud my own non-accomplishments, but this site is pretty good for 50 posts in over a year. It could be better-- more readable, less snarky and updated on a bi-annual basis-- but it could be worse.

The original big-picture idea of this thing was to have most of my friends who wanted to write for a living try out new ideas on people (mostly ourselves to be sure). Absurdist Media was, and to some degree still is, completely dysfunctional and without point. Instead, this became a place to share obtuse ideas between two friends living ten feet away from each other. Sure, that's fine. The best laid plans are usually the ones no one wants any part of anyway. Or, more exactly, the best laid plans are the ones that only benefit yourself.

Thus, Absurdist Media goes away from time to time. I get emails or reminders from a few friends and I begin constructing an idea of what to do (whether it be the ill-fated reviews of my favorite forgotten albums or the wildly stupid "experiment" series). The finished product, acting as a terrific metaphor for the web log itself, seldom looks or feels like I want it to or how I intended it to. So it goes, perhaps, but the idealist writer in me is as pissed as the perfectionist with a stain on his/her shirt or as mad as the athlete finishing in second place.

Slipping past me, then, is the fact that the last two years have been chronicled quite well in these 50 posts. My New York City experiment is, thus far, a miserable failure. Most of my time is not spent writing or reading these days, but pondering the finances and resources it may take to gain some sort of sober view of the future. It's pretty bleak. Dark, and with demon rum in hand, I spent last night with a pair of Roseanne reruns and a sneaking suspicion that being up at 6 AM was a terrible idea. When I finally did sleep fitfully and drunkenly (awaking three hours later with no chance of sleeping through my hangover), I was overwhelmingly fretful-- afraid of having another day laid to waste.

The point of this diatribe about my night is suposed to set up a further mirror on why this site's dark periods are reflective of a larger whole in my life, but it's not going to. It's just going to linger there like a racial remark in the workplace or a unused record sitting lifeless on a shelf full of worn-out wax.

So, instead of making the corollaries to failure and regret, I'll close this therapeutic rambling by quoting what could be one of my favorite sentences... ever.

"It is one of the splendid yet sinister fascinations of life that there is no tracing to their ultimate sources all the winds of influences that play upon a given bark-- all the breaths of chance that fill or desert our bellied or our sagging sails." --Theodore Drieser, "The Titan"

It's fitting, then, that someone else can say what I've tried to for years in one sentence. Fitting, as well, for the fiftieth post to end on a bitter and unsure note.

Labels: etc, hangovers blow, Sad-sacking, Theodore Drieser Ain't Nothin to Fuck Wit

posted by Jeff Laughlin @ 7:06 PM