Mostly my thoughts are negative. This is probably not a good thing, to be stewing in your hatred in the dark like this for an extended period (or at all).
But it is sort of a bad and a good thing. Being all alone in the dark like that reminds you of the base state of life: inaction, solitude, emptiness. It is almost a religious state.
I hated it when this happened what I had a job: it meant I would wake up in the morning and still be exhausted but would have to go through all the motions of the day, push through the commute and work and small talk on reduced rest.
Now - when this insomnia happens - it is still offputting, but I can work with it.
I'll put down some of my thoughts here, thoughts that I had while in that state.
No claims that they are interesting. I figure it is sort of like looking through a kaleidoscope in an unlit room.
The American's capacity to talk about themselves (as evidenced above, but more generally too) is unrivaled, I think, in forces of nature. Go to a party, even strike up a conversation in a public place, and an American will gladly divulge their entire life's history, unto the most minor detail, for maybe as long as an hour. If we could harness this force for generating power... As someone who is interested in stories this is good: I have heard so much crazy shit in the last few months. But jesus it is exhausting. The problem is that most of these people are far less interesting than they think they are, and they talk about the same shit, over and over and over again. And the effort it takes to listen to them, to feign interest in the boring parts, to press down your own ego and identity is immense. Plus the feeling that this person literally could not care about you and your life in even the smallest way is disconcerting.
Is this some national disease? Have we as a nation devolved in intelligence and empathy to the point where we can no longer allow for listening? What has caused this? Brain damage? The solipsistic, narcissistic push of the internet? The wide open spaces which we are used to yelling across? It is hard not to be cynical here, hard not to be misanthropic. Is it just me, allowing myself to be talked at?
We ran into two Germans outside of Zion National Park. Talking with them was really stimulating. We actually had a conversation where each person listened, then we put in our points one by one adding to the conversation like the group was building a machine, where each comment was a little piece that was built up to reach larger ideas.
How do we stifle this urge to focus on ourselves? I mean you can't do it in others, you can't just stop someone mid sentence and call them out on being so self-centered, so you have to do it with your own speech and thoughts and just (I guess?) hope people are noticing and act as an example.
I wonder if this self-focus is due to the fact that most American's only really feel qualified to talk about themselves. That is, they know so little about other things, other concepts and events and ideas, that relatively speaking they only feel comfortable talking about the thing that they know: the ideas, events and concepts related to their own ego. Maybe its not even a bad thing. If you have ever sat in a conversation where two drunk people go back and forth about chemtrails or their take on evolution you just want to beg them to talk about anything else, even if it is that story they told about themselves three times.
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I recently read Jesse Ball's 'Census' and I feel like I have stumbled onto one of the few really interesting fiction writers working right now. Reading the book, at points, was like looking through a window into another world. Very few writers can or have achieved this. It felt like being near another person too, the sort of fiction that makes you feel less alone which, as far as I am concerned, is about the pinnacle of what fiction can achieve.
I've been searching out his other stuff online, videos, interviews, drawings. Everything from his demeanor to his ideas on teaching/learning to the way he writes his fiction are fresh and innovative and subversive. It's cool to see someone who seems to be operating on another level. The novel itself I thought was fantastic because it seems pretty much devoid of pretension. Not just pretension in the sense of 'attempting to be smarter than it was', it also avoided pretension toward the usual rules of fiction: standard character models, plot, resolution and so on. This is far from revolutionary, I know, but it is still in the minority, and not always executed perfectly.
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