WLTM
"No, don't tell me to listen, man, I've heard it a thousand times, man ... I know a thousand cats that look just like you, man, talk just like you ..."
Bob Dylan to worthless opponent, "Don't Look Back"
I've been reading the add_me entries on my friends list with interest over the last few weeks, the same way I like to read the "Would Like To Meet ..." columsn in newspapers.
The first thing that is evident from these columns is that it's the smallest things that make up individuals. Running an eye down the list now, several Breakfast At Tiffany's icons (no relation) appear, a hell lot of "I'm really random", "I make my own trends" (some irony, there, methinks) and most of all, "my music is my life" (which, since your music is Bon Jovi, would mean your life is some facile piece of schlock rock wanked out on a guitar by some middle-aged addicts trying to sell out their next arena). Of course, the usual "I hate fake people, I hate posers" thing comes up regularly - because we all do, don't we? Those fucking scenesters. You know who hate posers most of all? Posers do.
I don't hate posers for the same reason I don't hate any of even the most hackneyed friend advertisements - it's just people struggling to define themselves, with an item of clothing or a hundred words: both being equally limited. It occurred to me the other day that these emos that we complain so much about looking the same must spend a hell of a lot less time on their clothing than the average indie fashionista - in other words, the more individual you look, the more shallow you probably are.
But the add_me applicant's dilemma pales before that of, say, "FEMALE, 35" in the Guardian. I read these things like other people read Shakespeare tragedies, and they can affect me so much more. Is there anything more heart-rending than the oft-repeated plea, "interested in companionship" - for the fifty year old divorcee for whom the excitement of sex is now an absurd dream? But what, I suppose, I am getting at, is that unlike the showy "lj_friends" ads, these small spaces in the newspaper are people's lives being condensed - they are not an unwieldy attempt at winning over some cyberpals, they are the pure essences of their authors' lives, of their loneliness and their desire.
I used to wonder why people didn't try to 'write up' their graves a bit, to say 'here was a person!' ... 'I was no "devoted mother", sometimes I used to wish I could run away and pursue my dream of singing. I loved my husband, yes, but the day we were married was the saddest day of my life ...'. Some last strong truth, something everlasting, something impossible in life ... but I realised that perhaps the reason is how dreadfully unoriginal they would sound, like the WLTM columns: how desperate and sad. No, let the dead rest in peace, faceless at last - shorn of their characteristics, and of their mundanity.
Because mundanity is the only true state of existence. It fills our lives, our dreams, our achievements - and it becomes most painfully evident when the most extraordinary things happen. My father, who has just come back from working as a diplomat in Afghanistan, told us that a suicide bomber blew himself up right outside his house (he didn't tell us at the time because we would have been worried). No-one else was hurt; the squaddies boasted of how the man's face had landed on their very roof, and his head had landed another half-mile down the street. There was great debate among his servants as to whether one of the pieces of ex-suicide bomber in my dad's garden was in fact an eyeball. Some people came round offering counselling, and then life went on.
I could have ended there, but it wouldn't have seemed to be tied together ... and that's what I like about my lj posts. I don't know what I'm going to talk about, and so I end up talking about the things most bothering me - things I want you to hear, but also things I just want to say. I over-write because I can only cut down the excess with editing, but you don't judge me for it, and I am truly thankful. Look between the lines of any of my entries and you'll see a hell of a lot about me in them - not what's being said, but the associations I make, the things I care about and the things I seem not to. Listen. I feel as always now as if it's one person I'm talking to, and I'll say this to you because you've read this far: this whole fucking journal is a WLTM. And I can say that I'm lonely in all sorts of ways, but at the end of it all it's just another "youngish-looking, GSOH". That's not meant to be self-pity. WLTM columns highlight the alienation, the absurdity of human relationships ('I met him in a newspaper ...') and I wouldn't make such a confession to you if I didn't think you hadn't experienced something of the same. I'm not looking to meet you anywhere except here, in cyberspace, and it's when you respond to me where I'm at my most despairing that I feel a sort of warmth, and this whole thing gains some sort of meaning.
Still one of the only songs that can make me cry.
Bob Dylan to worthless opponent, "Don't Look Back"
I've been reading the add_me entries on my friends list with interest over the last few weeks, the same way I like to read the "Would Like To Meet ..." columsn in newspapers.
The first thing that is evident from these columns is that it's the smallest things that make up individuals. Running an eye down the list now, several Breakfast At Tiffany's icons (no relation) appear, a hell lot of "I'm really random", "I make my own trends" (some irony, there, methinks) and most of all, "my music is my life" (which, since your music is Bon Jovi, would mean your life is some facile piece of schlock rock wanked out on a guitar by some middle-aged addicts trying to sell out their next arena). Of course, the usual "I hate fake people, I hate posers" thing comes up regularly - because we all do, don't we? Those fucking scenesters. You know who hate posers most of all? Posers do.
I don't hate posers for the same reason I don't hate any of even the most hackneyed friend advertisements - it's just people struggling to define themselves, with an item of clothing or a hundred words: both being equally limited. It occurred to me the other day that these emos that we complain so much about looking the same must spend a hell of a lot less time on their clothing than the average indie fashionista - in other words, the more individual you look, the more shallow you probably are.
But the add_me applicant's dilemma pales before that of, say, "FEMALE, 35" in the Guardian. I read these things like other people read Shakespeare tragedies, and they can affect me so much more. Is there anything more heart-rending than the oft-repeated plea, "interested in companionship" - for the fifty year old divorcee for whom the excitement of sex is now an absurd dream? But what, I suppose, I am getting at, is that unlike the showy "lj_friends" ads, these small spaces in the newspaper are people's lives being condensed - they are not an unwieldy attempt at winning over some cyberpals, they are the pure essences of their authors' lives, of their loneliness and their desire.
I used to wonder why people didn't try to 'write up' their graves a bit, to say 'here was a person!' ... 'I was no "devoted mother", sometimes I used to wish I could run away and pursue my dream of singing. I loved my husband, yes, but the day we were married was the saddest day of my life ...'. Some last strong truth, something everlasting, something impossible in life ... but I realised that perhaps the reason is how dreadfully unoriginal they would sound, like the WLTM columns: how desperate and sad. No, let the dead rest in peace, faceless at last - shorn of their characteristics, and of their mundanity.
Because mundanity is the only true state of existence. It fills our lives, our dreams, our achievements - and it becomes most painfully evident when the most extraordinary things happen. My father, who has just come back from working as a diplomat in Afghanistan, told us that a suicide bomber blew himself up right outside his house (he didn't tell us at the time because we would have been worried). No-one else was hurt; the squaddies boasted of how the man's face had landed on their very roof, and his head had landed another half-mile down the street. There was great debate among his servants as to whether one of the pieces of ex-suicide bomber in my dad's garden was in fact an eyeball. Some people came round offering counselling, and then life went on.
I could have ended there, but it wouldn't have seemed to be tied together ... and that's what I like about my lj posts. I don't know what I'm going to talk about, and so I end up talking about the things most bothering me - things I want you to hear, but also things I just want to say. I over-write because I can only cut down the excess with editing, but you don't judge me for it, and I am truly thankful. Look between the lines of any of my entries and you'll see a hell of a lot about me in them - not what's being said, but the associations I make, the things I care about and the things I seem not to. Listen. I feel as always now as if it's one person I'm talking to, and I'll say this to you because you've read this far: this whole fucking journal is a WLTM. And I can say that I'm lonely in all sorts of ways, but at the end of it all it's just another "youngish-looking, GSOH". That's not meant to be self-pity. WLTM columns highlight the alienation, the absurdity of human relationships ('I met him in a newspaper ...') and I wouldn't make such a confession to you if I didn't think you hadn't experienced something of the same. I'm not looking to meet you anywhere except here, in cyberspace, and it's when you respond to me where I'm at my most despairing that I feel a sort of warmth, and this whole thing gains some sort of meaning.
Still one of the only songs that can make me cry.
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