Sufficient Champagne

I’ve always had a sort of intense aversion to New Year’s resolutions: I don’t think the fact that an arbitrary amount of time has passed is a reason to celebrate or to plan, for one thing; I’m inclined to think that if I really wanted to, say, lose weight, I’d be doing it, for another; and the overwhelming fact of their failure, resolutions’, is just too much of a cliché for me to handle falling into. So this here blob is not about a resolution. It’s about a decision.

I’ve been doing a little shaking-up recently, following my most recent trip to the booby hatch. I’m terminating with my old psychotherapist and transitioning into full-blown, on-the-couch analysis, and I’m midway through a dramatic change to my meds, one which called for a thoroughly miserable complete medication washout. Meanwhile, I’m writing my thesis, instead of “writing” my thesis—viz., masturbating and despairing—and this even at a time when all my supports feel like they’ve been withdrawn.

Which, side-note, is actually not the most unproductive state to be in. Apparently when work is literally all that I can rely on, work is literally all that I do. If I relax even for a second, I totally collapse—I tried it last weekend, relaxing, and was in bed for days—and so I’m hounded into actually doing something. I keep thinking of this passage from Susan Sontag’s essay on Walter Benjamin, “The Last Intellectual”:

It is characteristic of the Saturnine temperament to blame its undertow of inwardness on the will. Convinced that the will is weak, the melancholic may make extravagant efforts to develop it. If these efforts are successful, the resulting hypertrophy of will usually takes the form of a compulsive devotion to work. Thus Baudelaire, who suffered constantly from “acedia, the malady of monks,” ended many letters and his Intimate Journals with the most impassioned pledges to work more, to work uninterruptedly, to do nothing but work. (Despair over “every defeat of the will”—Baudelaire’s phrase again—is a characteristic complaint of modern artists and intellectuals, particularly of those who are both.) One is condemned to work; otherwise one might not do anything at all. Even the dreaminess of the melancholic temperament is harnessed to work, and the melancholic may try to cultivate phantasmagorical states, like dreams, or seek the access to concentrated states of attention offered by drugs.

But and so the decision. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s absolute bullshit that I’m not exactly where I want to be. So I’m going to get there. Which means work. All of this, I’ve decided, the new doctor and the new meds and the renewed, frenetic commitment to at least one project, is going to result in more work. Constant work. Whatever parts of my life I have control over are going to be rearranged with one goal in mind: producing.

I’m also pretty sure that I’m too good for obscurity, so that’s gonna change. It just is. Because now I’ve decided. I don’t care how much liquor and amphetamines it takes, I’m going to shift from delusions of grandeur to certainties of grandeur. If I can make it from my parents’ house to New York, from UChicago to the New School, and from dead to alive, then I can submit a goddamn essay for publication.

That’s the sitch: no more laziness and no more languishing. I wasn’t made for either. Decision made.