Eric Showbiz

I have a problem with Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, and anyone anywhere who proliferates the idea that life can just magically improve: “it” pretty much stays the same anywhere you go, at all times, probably forever.

I say this from some experience. I was one of those high-school kids who snottily bought into the idea that while these were the golden years for those muscle-toned, track-running, Adonis-looking, smirk-faced youths from good families, all of that might as well fall into a chasm because I would have my day after graduation when I ascended to the holiest of all holy lands to the high-school bottom feeder, college. College might as well have been Atlantis the way people gravitated to it to comfort teenagers struggling with the high school experience — “it” was going to get better!

And this actually turned out to be true for many of the people I knew; “it,” as they knew it, did get a lot better, mostly because they themselves got much worse. When I imagined going to college and it redeeming all of the misery of high school, I didn’t realize the reason was because now I had the opportunity to burn out in spectacular fashion. Suddenly everybody had “freedom,” but what the hell kind of freedom was it? Freedom from underneath the thumb of numbskulls and unsympathetic/idiot townies/parents? As if those things don’t reappear in every form imaginable over and over in mind-numbing succession throughout LIFE. But there was the freedom to run and hide in new and exciting ways, as if that did you or anybody else any good.

So I have to ask, what needs to get better — “it” or dealing with “it”?

Because, admittedly, part of my problem in high school was that I actually did suck, a lot. I deserved what I got for the way I handled things, in the sick way that the Cleveland Cavaliers deserved to get clobbered when LeBron James and the Miami Heat first returned to Cleveland to play a team that decided only to boo, and not to rebuild, in the wake of losing their superstar. And I sucked in college too, which turned out to be Atlantis in the sense that it had a much wider variety of people who sucked who maybe I could have bonded with if they had sucked in the same way I did, which mostly they didn’t, which was mostly my fault because I still got off on pinning my problems on others rather than merely sublimating them to be a part of some hippy granola drum circle, which is just a different kind of poison, really.

To make the distinction, I didn’t suck inherently because of who I was, but because of how I made the biggest deal of external forces that really had nothing to do with me. And those external forces never go away, and in that sense, it never gets better. And, trite as it sounds, if you’re waiting on “it,” you have already given up on you.

As someone who has spent the last few months on somewhat of a hot streak, working my ass off in a way I’ve never before bothered to, I will still tell you that “it” is as bad as it’s ever been, but I’ll do it with a smile on face, which should be an important distinction.

The walls of my father’s house might as well not be there, they do such a bad job of keeping the noise of the TV out of my room. But my dad is deaf in one ear, so maybe he cranks the sound up. And my stepsister is 16 years old, so maybe she cranks the sound up. And my stepmom has to yell especially loud at 7AM (and then at 7:05, and 7:10, and 7:15) urging her teenage daughter out of the bathroom to take her to school (the same school I went to six years ago when I looked forward to leaving the city and not coming back). And none of these people has any reason to start being any quieter.

And when they are all three out of the house I so relish the silence above all else–above writing, reading, and blindly submitting my resume to places I guess might be tolerable to work at. I do all of those things, however, when they come back and there’s no other escape from their noise.

Should it be the other way around? Should I enjoy their company while they are here and use my solitude for solitary pursuits? Why does their sound bother me?

The members of my family, and by extension my stepfamily, all seem to have very little in common with each other. The fundamental thing uniting them all, though, is their shocking satisfaction with being tremendously unhappy people. It is the thing that attracts them to each other, seemingly, since they are lacking in more normative attractive qualities. Spending time with them, I now have the feeling of being lazy, of all things–lazy for being satisfied with the same things they satisfy themselves with: all the hallmarks of a defeated lifestyle. And by spending time with them, I have come to realize, I give them the perfect grist to lash out at me for not trying harder. In me they see themselves, and since they will not change, they become angry for my sake. And as noxious as their misdirected anger is, it is the greatest gift they can give me. And I have come to believe that when I completely seclude myself from them–when I am not under the same roof, and when I have gained complete financial independence from them–I will have broken the mirror they use me for, and they’ll have no other choice but to rebuild themselves rather than focusing on me, their projected image.

And maybe then solitude won’t feel so much like respite.

But families are as disposed to inertia as everything else in the universe. In fact they require it to sustain themselves. I wonder if it is the unconscious fear of my father and mother that I should ever become completely independent of them, and so without realizing it they put me in a position to fail. I wonder if they do everything to resign me to a life like theirs without even pausing to imagine that it should be anything otherwise, because they think of me as the unsatisfied one. On one side is the paragon of an unexamined life, and on the other is me at my desk rearranging my resume so that I look like I’d make a good assistant, and the osmotic link is the noise coming through the paper-thin walls.

And I probably would leave if the noise weren’t there to press me into action. And they’d probably ask me to leave if the silence from inside weren’t so cozily reassuring to them.

I have the idea that I’m searching for the thing that will reclaim my independence for me, but I will only have that when I no longer need their unhappiness to spur me to look for it.

This blog represents a monumental cave-in to modern forms of self-expression/promotion, or “show business.” No relationship to the entertainment industry, or entertainment, is suggested.

The abiding theme here is the struggle to remain secure in one’s individuality while surrendering to familiar tropes (or are they facts?) and virtues of the era, such as the acceptance of work ethic, relationships, and technology as a means to monetization/contentment.

With regards to “blogging,” Eric Showbiz is all too keenly aware of the “blah” that is right there at the beginning of the word, but he pledges not to let this weigh on his intellectual being.

Patron saint: The intrepid American frontiersman transported to year 2011, made to sit at a computer.

Essays and articles will touch on a number of relevant topics.