Don’t Jump on Me, Spider
I have been teaching in NYC now for a little less, or a little more than half a year, all the while unable to build the linguistic boundaries required to culturally classify myself so that I may be satisfied as a being, as a human. That is perhaps why it has been so hard for me to write concretely about my life, why I have so easily thrown aside the genre of ‘blog‘ for thoughtless poetical meanderings on the past, rather than the present. This blog, in it’s inutility, represents something of a liminal space between the present, the past, and the future, it calls back to a time when I was studying writing for fun, when the idea of publishing was something that could happen later in my life. Now, I have a manuscript to finish, and yet, despite my desire to write so earnestly about life, life, real-life, not the falsity of an elite white institution of higher education, seems so uninspiring. It is perhaps that the lofty ideas of academia really have nothing to do with life, real-life, that linguistic parallels don’t come really matter, when my dreams reflect reality, just a little bit too much.
I dreamed last night that I went to a protest, something that I’ve never done before, what could my body really add to the calls for the oh so obvious, that would be more than the pleasure of a the warm embrace of three to four screens at once, maybe I would even work on my manuscript instead. But, regardless, there I was, nothing in my view, besides two white men with short hair standing against a concrete wall, and few other protestors next to me. I knew that these me were Nazi-sympathizers, I do not know how, maybe one had a swastika tattoo. I had told one of them that Nazi’s ought to be punched in the face, but, I implied, without saying it, that I was for the moment better than the violence of colonialism, of fascism. One of them taunted me, so, as the story goes, I decided to throw a punch at the man’s cheek, in typical dream fashion, my fist felt week, sluggish, something that it has never felt in real life, and then the dream ended.
Why did it end so soon, did I not deserve the satisfaction of violence? Did my subconscious wish to tell me that this was the end of the story, that the violence was idealistic, and should not be reveled in, that it was simply a means to an end. I’ve never to been to a protest, I’ve never punched someone in the face, I’ve punched a punching bag thousands of times, but I’d rather not spend a night in jail. I usually don’t do thing that I wouldn’t do in real life in my dreams. And, I think I would punch a Nazi in the face, but I don’t know what I would do next. Probably, one of the Nazi man’s friends would pull out a weapon and I would either run away or die. Still, it feels like the right thing to do. Nazi’s should not have a monopoly on violence. In this context, I have seen a rise in progressive activists calling for their constituents to arms themselves, to take self-defense classes. But I wonder, what does this have to do with reality.
This morning, I wanted to buy a book, Stephen King says you need to read to write, and he makes a compelling arguments, but yesterday, I saw a Tik-Tok of Brandon Sanderson telling an audience that you need to write to write, just write as much as possible. So, clearly they’re in disagreement. I dole out words in my manuscript as if their are chunks of goat cheese in an expensive salad. I have not been given enough of them, and must place them only where they exactly where they belong.
This blog post was supposed to say something about the jumping spider that I noticed in my classroom last week and chose not to share with my students and co-workers because I new they would most likely be scared, and perhaps ask me to kill. And I would most likely have obliged, for my allegiance to humanity outweighs that to arachnid-kind. So, I just took pictures of the spider, and hoped that it wouldn’t jump on me.
