Choose a subject of interest and:

“Discuss it
through a very specific
cultural lens”

This was on the radio; I don’t know where. They were talking about what a specific podcast I’d never heard of does. But I think it’s what I’m doing here too, and in fact maybe that’s what most of written or spoken art amounts to.

To begin with, this explains why I so dearly love Scott Carrier’s podcast and in fact why I’ve loved his work ever since the first time I heard it in the eighties. Because in the grand schematic:

Mr. Carrier and I share a loose opinion on what subjects are of interest.
Mr. Carrier and I have cultural lenses that are next of kin.

Additionally we could talk about a similar aesthetic, but I think maybe that’s part of the lenses in the end. At least in this comparative case–other times maybe it would be less so.

I could deconstruct the structure of the lenses but let’s just shortcut it for now. Both pairs of eyes, let’s say, are older now, nominally male, whitish (to the extent that race even exists), artistic/autistic, atheistic, Murican and Western (mountains matter all out of proportion) and somewhere out past ‘progressive’ on the political and maybe spiritual spectrum.*

In the other podcast, the one I never heard of, the specific cultural lens was “two people of color, husband and wife, who embrace Christianity of a pretty evangelical sort even though they hate the word evangelical”.

I’m not going to dig up the name of that show or think about adding it to my feed because it’s not germane enough to my … subjects of interest, or maybe more specifically to my cultural lens.

I think this is sort of thought of as a bad thing nowadays. Maybe it is. I’m not sure I care about that kind of criticism regarding patterns of media consumption. I’mma want what I want.

^^^ That was the fun part.

You could be forgiven for stopping here today (see me be so freehanded regarding your own patterns of media consumption) because the rest is less pure spill and a little more upchuck.

*So another shared part of the lens is that he and I have both had an uneasy relationship with academia, and that a good part of the uneasiness was probably born of the fact that neither one of us thinks what academics do matters as much as the real work of art. What most academics do is not the work. Professing is mostly a job, and a compromise made in the interests of paying the rent comfortably.

He has been much more of a success as a artist. I have been more of a success at being that kind of school employee (and what a two-edged sword that success has been). I got my version of tenure once upon a time, while his was denied.

A friend and colleague says the tenure committee fucked up: Not Good Enough for UVU: Scott Carrier

Another colleague says the first doesn’t know shit: Tenure case was not so troubling

—

I woke far too early this morning having a trauma relapse over my own former employment catastrophe. In the two years plus since it reached critical mass, I’ve gotten slowly and steadily better. At the start I could barely sleep at all. This last past long slow summer helped a lot. During the first two days of the new academic year I noted with happiness that I was feeling remarkably chill. But there is obviously still residual crap to be worked through, because … I woke far too early this morning.

I should have worked on it, with a little EMDR or something, but I didn’t. I stayed up a few hours distracting myself, slept like death a couple more, and then got up to go to yet another damn meeting. It was the divisional, and it depressed me far more deeply than I should have let it. The details are too mundane to detail mundanely.

After it shuddered to a close I drove around a bit. Pretty aimlessly. Knowing I should go back to the office and prep some more, but unable to be a good boy in the end. I found a shady park instead, and I wrote this with paper and pen:

“Even if the values of my heart were aligned with the mission as They now see it …

Even if the existing chain of command did not disdain my values and lack due respect for me …

Even then I cannot afford to be working for what they pay, beyond the horizon of the next two semesters.”

The truth is I should have found something better already, and that in a way the year just starting will amount to a wasted one in terms of my dreams.

But I forgive myself that much.

I am doing what I can. Even if I wish it was, had been, and always will be More.