Robb Schuneblog

Before Anyone Else Comes in the Room, Examine This Post Carefully.

I woke up about an hour ago at 11:30 after having gone to bed at 8. I wasn’t tired at 8, so much as I just looked around and said “Hmm. Might as well go to bed.” Upon waking 3.5 hours later, I thought, “That’s kinda sad. Not terribly, but kinda.”

These days, I am incredibly bored. Boredom is fine, and good even. But if left to itself for too long, it leads to strange places. Serious places. And I am not a serious person. That is to say, I don’t take myself seriously. I can discuss serious issues. Philosophy, The Global Situation (It’s still desperate, right? It’s always desperate, right?), bring them on, I will discuss them. But, bad things happen when I start taking myself seriously.  So, I think I shall not take myself seriously ever again. So, I think I also simply will not be bored ever again.

Also - it would be good to have something to tell people when they say “what do you do all day?”..something other than “Teach. Then go to the gym, then sit on my duff. Then teach.” 

I thought about diving back into video games..just so I’d have something to do when I am not in class or at the gym, and full of this wrestless lazy energy. But then I remembered that video games, when played alone, are really kind of pathetic. Also - I want something I can give more zeal. More gusto. Zeal and Gusto are the overwhelming orders of the day. I want something that exercises my mind as much as my work in the gym exercises my body.

So, as I face something of an extended vacation at home with little to do, in addition to becoming a modern version of the Greek God Adonis, I am going to write a lot more. I don’t know whether it will be fiction or blogish or (most likely) some strange amalgamation of things which I call “Robbance”. The -ance is because it’s romantic. Duh.

I propose the following daily schedule:

Monday - First Word Randomness - Every sentence will begin with a word picked randomly, and made to fit.

Tuesday - Picture Blogging.

Wednesday - Random writing prompt. From one of the writing prompt webpages.

Thursday - Random word prompt. Random dictionary search presents me with a word which will be the theme or jumping off point.

Friday - Random Wikipedia prompt.

Saturday - Viewers choice. Whatever you submit, I’ll write about in one form or another.

Sunday - A million tries at the same thing. I will write a bunch of paragraphs or “groups of paragraphs” and they will all start with the same sentence, and I will try to take that sentence in as many different, interesting ways as possible.

This will be in addition to anything else I feel like writing. Also: Please understand, dear friends, this doesn’t necessarily mean I will post every day - though I hope to attain a certain level of discipline. It merely means if it is that day, and I’m like “Oh man, what can I write about” then I’ll think “Why were you all like  ”Oh man, what can I write about”, Robb? Don’t you recall that you made up a schedule that one time? Merely look upon it, and receive your fill.” And I shall be filled.

I shall write with passion. And it will likely passionately suck for a while. I haven’t consistently written anything since college. But maybe it will make you smile or laugh, and eventually capture your interest. I desire one thing in life, and that is to make you smile or laugh. Barring that, I desire that my children have freakishly, dastardly attractive kneecaps. Good kneecaps = Good breeding. When looking for a prospect to breed with - always check her kneecaps.

What?

Writing is thinking for me, and I only consistently write IMs these days - but due to time differences, and having lives, or different views of IMing, most of my friends aren’t online to IM with. So, I can’t think. So - I shall write to the blobous mass of anonymity, but I’ll be thinking of certain people as I write, probably. For instance, this post is for you.

I am really tired again, so, that’s pretty awesome.

This is the Story of a Boy Named Ted, if His Mother Said, “Ted, Be Good.” - He Would. (Robb Walks Around and Listens to Music)

SO: yesterday I walked around listening to Paul McCartney’s first album: McCartney. I’d sort of been in the Lennon side of the “Who was more important to the Beatles ridiculous awesonimity?” argument - largely because I’d only listened to McCartney’s late solo stuff and thought at the time that it was mostly average, as well as the fact that most cool people say that - and I desperately want to be cool (insecurity!), and I watched a few documentaries on Lennon, and he seemed like a very cool fellow.

After, you know, actually listening to stuff before casting judgment upon it (novel concept!) - I think the whole argument is stupid. They are/were two folks who together were the greatest songwriting team ever - and apart, are kind of great but not so consistently timeless. They needed each other.

That said - I vastly underrated the enjoyability of McCartney’s sweet-tooth pop sensibilities before giving it a repeated listening yesterday. The album was incredible, and it never once grew tired. And, if John Lennon had “Imagine” as his testament to being “the one” of the group - well, McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” is its equal. Somehow I didn’t know how ridiculously great that song is until yesterday.

I also greatly enjoyed “Junk”, “Teddy Boy”, “Hot as Sun/Glasses” and “Man We Was Lonely”. Greatly. Every one of them is fantastic! “Man We Was Lonely” kind of seemed just good - until Paul holds out the “Alooone” in the call and response - it’s so simple but somehow made the song fantastic instead of good.

I thought, while walking, about how so often, and so unintentionally, adoration and desperation misunderstood can lead to cruel objectification and dehumanization of other people - as well as just generally acting the fool - and how we’re sort of set up for this deceptive shift by our society, but ultimately the blame comes down to individuals.

I also thought about the future, and decided to apply to some programs to see if I can get an MFA in Creative Writing. It’s not much of a career choice, but what the heck, eh? Gotta go for stuff sometimes - and whether I ever write anything or not, I’d like to actually learn how to do it.

This is scary for multiple reasons: First, and less importantly - I don’t really have any ideas. I’m not that guy who writes long entries in his journal every night. I’m a terrible blogger because blogging is something like public journaling. I’m not all that consistent in temperment or mood or desire or impulses. I’m not witty or clever - I can’t come up with stuff quickly, and if I try it is often forced. Basically - it’s not like writing is this great joy for me where I start typing and feel the world fall away. It’s more, when I do it seriously (nothing on a blog is serious), like an intensely tiring, somewhat cathartic experience that is the only way I know how to get some things clear.

For some reason I always assumed writers were the latter - the people who always carry notebooks and just have heaps upon heaps of material. But, I’m encouraged, in skimming their respective books on writing this morning, by the fact that the experiences of Kundera and Vonnegut (my two literary heroes) seem rather to resemble my thoughts - though sometimes writing is a fun way to pass the time, sometimes writing something out there where I can see it, and then revising it, and then rewriting it again, and repeating this 15 times trying to get to my point, is the only way I know how to think about certain topics.

I’d like to get back to that sort of writing - right now I only write blog posts and Emails, and thinking more than a minute about the way something’s stated in either seems like the surest way for stuff to end up in the draft folder instead of the sent or posted one.

Oh yeah, haha, the second reason: Writing is one of the only things that people (outside mom & dad of course) have thought I had any skill at, especially people with some authority, teachers, professors and the like. Yet, I’m very likely to find out I kind of suck at it. That’s not at all a remote possibility. At that point, I’d be exactly where I am now in life - except instead of being able to say “Well..I could always pursue writing.” I’d..not even have that.

Beyond sucking - it’s possible I’ll just find out I don’t enjoy it, or am not good at it in a marketable way, or..basically, there are a number of avenues that lead me back directly to where I am now, except maybe 2-3 years older, and with less options.

It’s not that I lack confidence so much as I’m just kind of aware that, were I to pursue this, it’s kind of a last shot. That’s not so much scary as sobering I guess. Maybe it’s not all that bad, really, to end up in some office job - maybe it’s possible to carve out a space within that life that’s wholly enjoyable and fulfilling. Maybe not.

But, oh well, eh?

Perched Somehow Halfway up the Shallow Incline (Robb Walks Around and Listens to Music)

I have initiated a new exercise project. This one is entitled “Robb walks around and listens to music” - it is the brainchild of yesterday afternoon, whereabout I was walking to get coffee at the coffee shop 2 minutes from my house, and decided instead that the music I was listening to was much better than expected, and so walked to the coffee shop one hour and ten minutes from my house, downtown, listening to the album nearly twice on the way, then nearly twice more on the way back.

This, combined with the earlier Mingus inspired walk, has led me to believe that walking around listening to music on my new incredible sounding but also incredibly dorky looking headphones, might work to make me, you know, move more during the day. At least for now.

This project consists of walking around at a somewhat quickened pace for at least 2 hours a day, smiling at people, nod-bowing to them if I catch their eye, and thinking about stuff, while listening to some album 2-4 times, depending on that album’s length. From yesterday to today I lost 4 pounds. While I fully acknowledge this will probably come back - like, still..

This project succeeds such projects as: “Robb dances in the shower to music, and that’s pretty much the most exercise he gets for the day”, “Robb goes to the gym under intense pressure from friends until friends move - because he is utterly co-dependent in such things, even though he hates to admit his co-dependency in anything” and “Robb does lots of sit-ups for a few days until his stomach hurts from it. Then he stops doing sit-ups.”

It is hoped that the infusion of music will help this succeed where the succeeded projects failed. There’s also the fact that I like saying hi to people while walking around, and I like that kids run up and smile at me, and it makes time go really quickly.

Also - I might be able to post here briefly about what the album listened to in focus and the thoughts I had were like. I’d like to keep such things brief, as that is a challenge for me (yay! Challenges!) and increases the chances that said posts would actually be posted every day and serve as some sort of accountability, rather than piling up in the ridiculously full drafts folder! Forced brevity seems a good remedy for frustrated perfectionism. Of course, brevity for me means..I don’t know, not so much a length thing as just whether I have to stop and think about what I’m writing or not. For instance: In some crazy way, I actually consider this post brief. The brevity coming more from the time I took to write it than however long it takes you to read it. Also - there is no obligation, feel free to never read these posts - they will mostly be poo and garbage anyway.

Trying Not to Judge on the Basis of Who Laughs and Who Doesn’t…

Though Schact buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism; and Schact doesn’t even have to worry about obsessive training like Inc or Stice or get sick so often from the physical stress of constant  ‘drines like Troeltsch or suffer from thinly disguised psychological fallout like Inc or Struck or Pemulis himself.  The way Pemulis and Troeltsch and Struck and Axford ingest substances and recover from substances  and have a whole jargony argot based around various substances gives Schacht the creeps, a bit, but since the knee injury broke and remade him at sixteen he’s learned to go his own interior way and let others go theirs.

Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller - which is a big reason he can sometimes forget to finish his portion of a given substance, so interested does he become in the way he’s already started to feel. He’s one of those people who don’t need much, much less much more.

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 267-268

Yes, Sure, Why?

I respected that man, Jim, is what’s sick, I knew he was there, I was conscious of his flat face and filter’s long shadow, I knew him, Jim. Things were defferent when I was growing up, Jim. I hate… Jesus I hate saying something like this, this things-were-different-when-I-was-a-lad-type cliche shit, the sort of cliche fathers bach then spouted, assuming he said anything at all. But it was. Different. Our kids, my generation’s kids, they…now you, the post-Brando crowd, you new kids can’t like us or dislike us or respect us or not as human beings, Jim. Your parents. No, wait, you don’t have to pretend you disagree, don’t, you don’t have to say it, Jim. Because I know it. I could have predicted it, watching Brando and Dean and the rest, and I know it, so don’t splutter. I blame no one your age, boyo. You see parents as kind or unkind or happy or miserable or drunk or sober or great or near-great or failed the way you see a table square or a Montclair lip-red. Kids today…you kids today somehow don’t know how to feel, much less love, to say nothing of respect. We’re just bodies to you. We’re just bodies and shoulders and scarred knees and big bellies and empty wallets and flasks to you. I’m not saying something cliche like you take us for granted so much as I’m saying you cannot… imagine our absence. We’re so present it’s ceased to mean. We’re enironmental. Furniture of the world. Jim, I could imagine that man’s absence. Jim, I’m telling you you cannot imagine my absence. It’s my fault, Jim, home to much, limping around, ruined knees, overweight, under the Influence, burping, nonslim, sweat-soaked in that broiler of a trailer, burping, farting, frustrated, miserable, knocking lamps over, overshooting my reach… God I’m I’m so sorry. Jim. You don’t deserve to see me like this. I’m so scared, Jim. I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand? Are you enough aof a big thin prematurely stooped young bespectacled man, even with your whole life still ahead of you, to understand?

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 167-168 (excerpted)

Your Job Is NOT to Be These People’s Friend All the Time…

Marathe had settled back on his bottom in the chair. “Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, “fanatic,” do they teach you it comes from the Latin for “temple”? It is meaning, literally, “worshipper at the temple.”

“Oh Jesus now here we go again,” Steeply said.

“As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.”

Steeply made motions of weary familiarity. “Herrrrrrre we go.”

Marathe ignored this. “Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.”

“How are your wife and kids doing, up there, by the way?”

“You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for. Love of a woman, the sexual, it bends back in on the self, makes you narrow, maybe crazy. Choose with care. Love of your nation, your country and people, it enlarges the heart. Something bigger than the self.”

Steeply laid a hand between his misdirected breasts: “Ohh … Canada…”

Marathe leaned again forward on his stumps. “Make amusement all you wish. But choose with care. You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice. You, M. Hugh Steeply: you would die without thinking for what?”

The A.F.R.’s extensive file on Steeply included mention of his recent divorce. Marathe already had informed Steeply of the existence of this file. He wondered how badly Steeply doubted what he reported, Marathe, or whether he assumed its truth simply. Though the persona of him changed, Steeply’s care for all field assignments was this green sedan subsidized by a painful ad for aspirin upon its side - the file knew this stupidity - Marathe was sure the sedan with its aspirin advertisement was somewhere below them, unseen. The fanatically beloved car of M. Hugh Steeply. Steeply was watching or gazing at the darkness of the desert floor. He did not respond. His expression of boredom could be real or tactical, either of these.

Marathe said,”This is not the choice of the most supreme importance? Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times?”

“This from a man who - ”

Marathe was willing that his voice not rise. “For this choice determines all else. No? All other of our you say free choices follow from this: what is our temple. What is the temple, thus, for U.S.A.’s? What is it, when you fear that you must protect them from themselves, if wicked Quebecers conspire to bring the Entertainment into their warm homes?

Steeply’s face had assumed the openly twisted sneering expression which he knew well Quebecers found repellent on Americans. “But you assume it’s always choice, conscious, decision. This isn’t just a little naive, Remy? You sit down with your little accountant’s ledger and soberly decide what to love? Always?”

“The alternatives are - ”

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”

Marathe’s sniff held disdain. “Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments, a citizen of nothing. You become a citizen of nothing. You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself.”

A silence ensued this.

Marathe shifted in his chair. “In a case such as this you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.”

Another silence ensued. Steeply, who had made his early career with Unspecified Services conducting technical interviews, used silent pauses as integral parts of his techniques of interface. Here it defused Marathe. Marathe felt the ironies of his position. One strap of Steeply’s prostheses brassiere had slipped into view below his shoulder, where it cut deeply into his flesh of the upper arm. The air smelled faintly of creosote, but much less stongly smelling than the ties of train tracks, which Marathe had smelled at close range. Steeply’s back was broad and soft. Marathe eventually said:

“You in such a case have nothing. You stand on nothing. Nothing of ground or rock beneath your feet. You fall; you blow here and there. How does one say: ‘tragically, unvoluntarily, lost.”

Another silence ensued. Steeply farted mildly. Marathe shrugged. The B.S.S. Field operative Steeply may not have been truly sneering….Marathe thought of his victory over the train that had taken his legs. He attempted in English to sing:

“Oh Say, Land of the Free.”

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest 106-108 (excerpted)

The Chance To Play

And then also, again, still, what are those boundaries, if they’re not baselines, that contain and direct its infinite expansion inward, that make tennis like chess on the run, beautiful and infinitely dense?

Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: the true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again…

Junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without…

But then is battling and vanquishing the self the same as destroying yourself? Is that like saying life is pro-death?…And then but so what’s the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?..

“And so. No different, maybe,” Schtitt concedes, sitting up straight on a waffle-seated aluminum chair with Mario beneath an askew umbrella that makes the flimsy little table it’s rooted to shake and clank in the sidewalk’s breeze. “Maybe no different, so,” biting hard into his tricolored cone. He feels at the side of his white jaw, where there’s some sort of red welt, it looks like. “Not different” - looking out into the Ave.’s raised median at the Green Line train rattling past downhill - “except the chance to play.” He brightens in preparation to laugh in his startling German roar, saying “No? Yes? The chance to play, yes?”

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, 83-85 (excerpted)

The Analogous Part Is How Even the Ones Who Know the Pleasure of It Will Kill Them, They Go Ahead Anyway.

I often overstate things. I am an overstater of things. Some might say I am The Overstater of Things.

But walking home tonight from an appointment, I came to my house, and I kept walking in the slight cold for another 45 minutes for no other reason than to listen through the CD I was playing once more. I’d listened to nearly all of it once while walking to my appointment. I am still playing it now, on my headphones, in my room. This is the 4th time now. I am anxiously awaiting the 5th, and the 6th before my class.

It was and has been easily the best listening experience I have had in years. I’m tempted to say of all time.

I’m tempted to say that Charles Mingus’ The Black Saint and The Sinner Lady is the greatest album of all time.

I’m not sure that I won’t still be tempted to say this 10 years from now.

My God.

The Solution Forged by Our Best and Most Rapacious Creative Minds

People want to know where all the bailout money is going. In the end, it was all spent in saving the housing market. The Amazon.com small animal housing market, we mean.

Look,  that bunny is gosh darn cute, and needs a home, and by golly, we’re gonna give it to him, whatever the cost. (Stolen)

Pro-Active, Consumer-Driven.

The thing with Schtitt: like most Europeans of his generation, anchored from infancy to certain permanent values which - yes, OK, granted - may, admittedly, have a whiff of proto-fascist potential about them, but which do, nevertheless (the values), anchor nicely the soul and course of a life - Old World patriarchal stuff like honor and discipline and fidelity to some larger unit - Gerhardt Schtitt does not so much dislike the modern O.N.A.N.ite U.S. of A. as find it hilarious and frightening at the same time. Probably mostly just alien.

This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall. Schtitt was educated in pre-Unification Gymnasiumunder the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was basically just training for citizenship, that jr. athletics was about learning to sacrifice the hot narrow imperatives of the Self - the needs, the desires, the fears, the multiform cravings of the individual appetitive will - to the larger imperatives of a team (OK, the State) and a set of delimiting rules (OK, the Law). It sounds almost frighteningly simple-minded, though not to Mario, across the redwood table, listening. By learning, in palestra, the virtues that pay off directly in competitive games, the well-disciplined boy begins assembling the more abstract, gratification-delaying skills necessary for being a ‘team player’ in a larger arena: the even more subtly diffracted moral chaos of full-service citizenship in a State.

Except Schtitt says Ach, but who can imagine this training serving its purpose in an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship and the discipline which hardship teaches by requiring? A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:

“The happy pleasure of the person alone, yes?”

“Except, why do you let deLint tie Pemulis and Shaw’s shoes to the lines, if the lines aren’t boundaries?”

“Without there is something bigger. Nothing to contain and give the meaning. Lonely. Verstiegenheit.” (footnote: Low Bavarian for something like ‘wandering alone in blasted disorienting territory beyond all charted limits and orienting markers,’ supposedly.)

“Bless you.”

“Any something. The what: this is more unimportant than that there is something.

- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, pgs. 82-83