Fear and Coasting

Vancouver skyline

Wow, is there anything less clickbait-y than existential dread? This one is probably just for me, but here we go...

I've been reading Cintra Wilson's substack, Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain, after recently rediscovering her for the third time in my life. I started reading her Salon.com articles back in the mid-90s when I was working at the first of many office temp jobs in my early twenties and her acerbic, florid, funny as fuck, Hunter S. Thompson-inspired prose got me through many of those long days in dark beige cubicles. One of her articles even inspired me to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which became one of my all-time favorite books, while she (and Hunter) inspired me to write as much as possible, whether I was ever going to get paid for it or not.

Back in the mid-90s, you would follow writers online and know very little about their personal lives. Only what they told you in their articles or what they revealed in the very sparse bios printed at the bottom of the page, often even less than that. All I had to go on was the heavily stylized graphic image of her at the top and her words, but I still felt like she was a kindred spirit, amped up and ultra urban but maybe what I would have been like had I grown up in California and moved to New York to live the dream of writing on the internet.

Blogging idol

Her writing was verbose and vitriolic, every baroque sentence whipping through your senses like a cat o' nine tails, bejewelled with arcane cultural references and studded with stinging barbs that embedded themselves in your brain, seeding and taking root in your imagination, eventually sprouting mutated offshoots you could call your own. She was my blogging idol before the word blog was invented.

Years later, I bought her hysterically funny book, Fear and Clothing, based on her New York Times column on fashion. (And can we pause for a moment to reflect on what an amazingly perfect title that is?) That's one book I no longer have on my shelf because I loaned it to a friend who is no longer a friend. One of my favorite quotes about books is from John Waters: "if you go home with someone and they don't have any books, don't fuck them." Maybe it's a little less relevant in the digital age, when they could be hiding an entire library in the cloud, but this piece of advice is timeless: don't lend books to bitches. I just ordered it again because it is one of funniest and most ferocious things I've ever read, and maybe buying her book (twice) is the least I can do to support an artist who's been inspiring me for most of my adult life.

Movin’ on out

Cintra's latest substack post, Movin' on out, is about how she's leaving her "sleepy  California dream home" to get a real job for the first time in 25 years. She grew up in California before moving to New York in 1995 to carved out a literary career, "back when those were possible," but now she says she has coasted as long as she can.

She doesn't say what that real job is, and she also says, "Don't cry for me, Argentina," but as someone who was raised by hippies to believe that creativity is the ultimate goal, a la Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and that the only way to really achieve self-actualization is through some creative output, it pains me to hear that one more artist got tired of starving and has to go work for the man like the rest of us. It's more than a little depressing and terrifying that someone I admired for so long and considered an idol in many ways can't make it as a writer. If she can't do it, what hope is there for anyone? As she says that career doesn't exist anymore. The fact that her book is one of the last I can remember paying full price for, versus listening to it on my library app, means I'm part of the problem.

I guess on a long enough timeline, if you follow your mentors or muses long enough, you will witness them in a moment of despair or compromise or selling out or whatever you want to call it... Or sometimes they just shoot themselves in the head.

The passage that really gutted me was this one:

"The worst thing I have to move is myself, translation: boxes and boxes and file cabinets and more boxes of stuff I wrote before the internet era, which can now only be found in print. Plays I wrote on a typewriter. Yellowing magazine articles. Reviews of my plays. All the things that used to make me think I was a legitimate human being are now like a wagonload of dead skin I am carting around. Someday I’ll find a scanning service, throw it into the cloud and be done with it, not that anyone probably cares."

It reminds me of all the little things she and I have in common... not that I ever made much money writing on the internet. I've written for numerous online publications and had a blog for over 25 years, but my money has always come from working. I don't have the stomach for being a starving artist... I never did. I had my first summer job when I was 13 and, after art school, I immediately joined the workforce full time. I've achieved varying degrees of self-actualization, the low points being those temp jobs like the one where I first discovered Cintra Wilson. The high points are too multitudinous to name, but the main benefit is that working nonstop has enabled me to live in one of the most beautiful and expensive cities in the world. Even in the rainy season, not a day goes by that I don't feel unspeakably grateful that I could carve out a life for myself in Vancouver, which being a starving artist or writer would never have allowed.

Another friend of mine... a real friend, not just someone whose words I've been reading in darkened cubicles for 25+ years, recently gave up her incredibly overpriced Vancouver apartment to pursue her dream of living in a van, and in the interim, housesitting and doing odd jobs. Most of my friends have roommates or are in some sort of rent control situation, like myself, and we joke about never being able to leave our current dwellings. Home ownership? Don't make me laugh. And even affordability is a luxurious problem to have, compared to many of my friends who are suffering through unspeakable loss, grief, depression, health scares and the endless litany of horrors that go hand in hand with being a human on this planet.

The inevitability of change

But change is inevitable, horse drawn carriage drivers had to be retrained to do other work with the rise of the automobile, and all those cliches. This would probably be an appropriate time to go off on a rant about AI replacing all the marketing writers but that hits just a little too close to home and I'm not ready to go down that rabbit hole. AI is our friend and I look forward to a long and productive professional collaboration with our new digital colleagues.

It's another cliche to say that change is always for the better, but then they wouldn't be cliches if there wasn't an inescapable nugget of truth at their core. As frightening as change may be, we can only coast for so long before the rug, or tablecloth or unstable fault line, is ripped out from under us. Better to find a way to ride the wave than wait for it to crash down on top of us, scattering all the things we spent our lives hunting and gathering and creating, and carrying them out to sea with the relentless tide.

Container ships on the horizon.