The Harlem Diaries (May 4, 2020)
A segment from The Harlem Diaries
*I have compiled my diaries from February 2020 to June, 2020, the four-month period when I was living in Harlem while the Pandemic was happening. The diaries are 55,000 words total, so I think I’m going to publish the whole thing here in installments as a book in the near future. I’m going through the whole thing now, editing. This segment from May 4, 2020, struck me. The book has many organic themes: Covid lockdowns; societal unrest; politics; being a late-thirties writer in New York; reading classic literature; the psychology of isolation; sexual loneliness and desperation; and much more.
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MAY 4, 2020
Jack,
Well, it’s Monday again. It always feels somehow surreal when yet another Monday arrives. They seem to come too fast. Despite the Pandemic, and the slowness of Time, the fact is that time is flying back pretty fast, really. It’s May 4th, 2020, for Christ Sakes. God, it was February just the other day, and now we’re a month away from Summer. (It already mostly feels like Summer.)
It’s 11:52am. I’m sitting at one of the desks/tables Mom bought me from Amazon back in August, 2019, when I moved into this apartment. I’d moved into my bedroom but that corner feels isolated and stuffy and lonely. The reason I’d moved to begin with was that the kids were playing basketball at the court across 130th, and they were so fucking loud and crude—“fuck you, bitch, eat my ass, Nigga!”—that I moved the desk to my room.
But then, of course, a few weeks later or a month later the city closed down the courts, literally pulling down the hoops. Thank fucking GOD, I thought. And still do think. Course it’s temporary; eventually, probably sooner than we think, those yelling kids will be playing again, I’m sure.
I’ve been thinking: Personal Responsibility. That’s something which has disappeared from our modern—or should I say post-modern—society: Personal Responsibility. Where have all the adults gone? Poof: After Gen X they just disappeared, up in smoke. It’s all race and gender and hyper sensitivity and social justice warriors and being “woke”—whatever the fuck that even means; who decides what is woke?—and being angry when someone—God forbid—disagrees with you.
Modern gentrification—meaning post-90s, early 00s to now—is I think the worst cultural scourge since Maoism. America has been drawing closer and closer and closer over the years to being run by angry, spoiled, immature children. And, finally, in 2020, we’re here. We’ve arrived. Trump is the penultimate symbol of this: A 70-year-old man who acts like a narcissistic, social-media-obsessed child. In other words: All of us. I hate how liberals shuck off acknowledging the fact that Trump is us. “Oh, I didn’t vote for that monster; he’s not ‘my’ president.” Bullshit. Think about more than Trump; think about Trump as a symbol…because he is one. He’s a symbol, more than ever, of our culture. Trump isn’t political. His actions—or lack of actions—get translated into politics…but he himself isn’t political. He’s a cultural symbol, pure and simple. And he represents American greed, immaturity, decadence, lack of morals and values, and narcissism…which is exactly where, to some extent, we all sit comfortably now.
We ignore the rampant homelessness and poverty we ourselves create. We white privileged ones move into cities and push the non-white people on the margins out. (And then all the angry young white women scream about how we’re doing it…as they themselves do it.) We are far, far too caught up in FOMO and Instagram and Face Book and Twitter and whatever new app is out, or buying the latest iPhone, or watching the freshest, most original new TV show. (“The writing is spectacular.”)
We’re living—let’s face it—in a “post-moral” world. We no longer need to deal with reality on reality’s terms because…we no longer, strictly speaking, fully live in Reality. We live in a lightweight environment of Artificial Intelligence. We project our film lives onto Facebook for everyone to view because our real lives are complex and sticky and contradictory and sad and beautiful and scary and confusing and real and raw: In other words: Human. And, c’mon, we can all now say the obvious: Human is so passé. It’s boring. It’s embarrassing. Grotesque, even. So instead of leaning into Reality, we push away from it, we snip the strings of human connection.
Humans are good at creating their own problems and then victimizing themselves. Women are doing it gorgeously with #MeToo. Black Lives Matter has done it. All Lives Matter has done it. Each group now splinters off into a million trails of self-identified “oppression.” But the truth is: We are oppressing ourselves; all of us. We’re outside of our own Humanity now, looking casually inward from the distance. We see our old selves—those complicated, messy beings making racist and sexist jokes; fitting into clean sexual roles; being open and politically incorrect—and we scoff now, saying, “God, we were so unsophisticated.”
And we then pretend to be more sophisticated than we actually are or ever have been or ever will be. I love how Steinbeck always wrote from the perspective of biological determinism; in other words: Underneath all the fancy clothes and the new warping language and boiling political division and expensive tastes and fashionable Upper West Side sense of style there lies the same biological realities as early civilized agricultural Man 10,000 years ago. Men want to spread the seed; women want to provide. Is it that simple: On a certain level, yes. On a more detailed, deep level: of course not.
I’m not suggesting that women should “get back into the kitchen.” What I’m suggesting is that we’re all a fuck of a lot more messed-up, scared, angry, biologically-driven, confused, etc, than we currently pretend to be. As Joseph Campbell says in “The Hero’s Journey”: We are no longer aligned with Nature. Humans should, Campbell says, find harmony with Nature, versus trying to control it.
Steinbeck makes me—strangely—also think of Stephanie Danler, a mid-30s American author. She wrote the book, Sweetbitter, an autobiographical novel about her arrival in New York City in 2006, at age 22, and how her life changes. How she makes mistakes and falls in love and gets hurt and “lives every experience on the pulse.”
I relate so much to her book for many reasons. For one, it’s gorgeously rendered. But more important: I came to New York City for the first time in 2006 as well. She and I are the same age. I remember the New York of then versus the one of now and they are very different. Just like New York in 2006 had changed drastically from the New York of the 90s, and the 90s from the 80s, etc. The short way of saying it is: Manhattan used to be an expensive but makeable city where artists and writers could actually afford to live; now it’s a city for The Rich. That’s an over-generalization but I don’t think it’s too far from the mark. I am guilty here along with others, of course, for gentrification, etc. I am not excluded. This isn’t me judging others but rather trying to be more honest than most. (It’s hard to look at yourself in the mirror and face stuff. I get it.)
But what I love about Danler’s writing is that she owns her actions. At a certain point in the book an older woman—the protagonist Tess’s female boss—tells Tess that she doesn’t have to pursue the shitty, hot guy Tess craves. In that moment Tess goes internal and she realizes, suddenly, that she had put herself in the position she was in. She had aided Jake in treating her badly. It wasn’t “the patriarchy”; it wasn’t Dad when she was growing up; it wasn’t other men: It was her. Tess. She alone had to take that personal responsibility. No one is forcing her. She is not an automaton. She is a young American woman. She has agency.
I respect Danler so much for owning her own shit. That takes courage, especially in The Age of #MeToo (the book came out just before the movement started.) She is clearly more interested in art—aesthetics; meaning—than in the dreaded identity politics, or in having some kind of ulterior motive or agenda. What’s bizarre about young people on the Left today is that they literally expect every single thing—word; utterance; sentence; novel; design; painting; etc—to not only have an agenda and a motive, but, and this is crucial and unbending: It must be their agenda specifically.
To disagree nowadays—to these young people—literally is violence. It is rape. It is racism. It is sexism. Social psychologists have actually done large studies and have found that this new generation of late teens, early twenties kids are actually the first generation in America that don’t believe that the First Amendment is sacred; in other words, they believe that some things should be considered Free Speech, but other things should not.
They see no problem with this. We see the cultural definition of “Hate Speech” growing and growing and growing. It seems that, basically, what they want, is for all language to be torn down to the bedrock so that it’s so pure, so clean, so precise and unoffensive, that none of their little hearts will ever again be bruised. They see their sensitivity and their need for not hurting their own or others’ feelings as being absolutely paramount…to the point where they want to dissolve the First Amendment.
When you see this, all you can say is: Art is dead; Democracy is dying; Culturally we are screwed. We’ve raised whole generations of kids now in an America that is so wealthy, so privileged, so head and shoulders above most other nations as far as quality of life (not for everyone, but for most) that we have inadvertently allowed the kids, at last, to storm the castle, rape and plunder, and decide that they, finally, are going to write the rules.
But apparently none of them have read Animal Farm or 1984. They can’t see themselves. They can’t see their own cultural fascism. In denying Trump, they deny their own narcissism. In denying Free Speech they squelch the fragile freedom we all cling so closely to. In their ravenous desire for power I sincerely worry that they’ll—consciously or not—become just as power-hungry, righteous, censorious, and oppressive as they’re currently claiming that “they” are.
It’s funny: As a free-thinker, I used to be more or less aligned with the somewhat far Left. Now? Post-2016 election? I stayed where I was and the Left has moved so far left that they’ve unintentionally grabbed hold, unwittingly, of the Right. They are two sides of the same oppressive coin. Now if I mention an opinion that doesn’t jive with Lefties I get labeled immediately: Sexist; racist; fascist; Alt-Right Supporter. I can see why The Extreme Right and the Regular Right give these young, angry Lefties a run for their money: The Left gives the Right incredibly easy fodder. When you act irrationally, and get hyper-angry about absurd ideas that most Americans in the nation disagree with (there being more than just two biological sexes, say)…you’re bound to look crazy. Like Brittany Spears when she went through her shaved-head phase.
I loathe the Right. I think they’re at their most degraded, disturbing moment right now, riding the savage, corrupt wave created by Donald J. Trump. As for Trump himself: Pure sociopathy is what I see there. He terrifies me. But so does the Left. So does a lack of cultural self-awareness. So does ignorance and arrogance. People sometimes say to me, “Oh, what, so you’re so much better than us? Wiser, smarter, more sophisticated, above it all?” And I say: No. Just the opposite. I’m in the pig-shit just like everyone.
I’m just being honest. I’m just telling the truth.
That’s the difference.