Newsletter from Jay Wilcox - December 2022: On Complaints

Good morning/afternoon/evening!

I remember my first encounter with abject nihilism. When I was in high school, I took a class on short fiction at the community college. One of my classmates, a few years older than me, was a young man with stringy black hair and painted black nails. He wore a plain black t-shirt and faded black jeans, a battered baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. During a round of introductions in the first class, he gave his name and explained that, because of the inevitable heat death of the universe, nothing mattered. Life equaled stimulus-response and simple gratification. He spoke with smugness and disdain and halfway through the semester stopped showing up.

I've met others like him. It's tempting, for many, to manufacture despair into a sort of counter-striking weapons system. To preempt and thereby wrest control from so much arbitrary ugliness. Heck, I empathize with the feeling of "If the world didn't want me to be this way, it shouldn't have been that way." It's somewhere along the spectrum of completely giving up, this rage against one's helplessness--this search for some "Suggestions" box hanging from the universe's door. After all, if we register enough bitter complaints, enough self-pitying vitriol, maybe the universe will listen and relent. If we fold ourselves up really small and tight, all our anger and sorrow and aching bones, maybe we can even fit ourselves down through the slot, our whole body a protest against The Way Things Are.

When I find myself thinking in such a way, I remember sixth-grade homecoming. Nobody danced with me. I even waited along the wall and gazed at my feet and twirled my toe forlornly against the linoleum. Where were those pitying young ladies when I needed them? I don't necessarily believe the young man from my short-fiction class wanted people to notice him--but I do see in him another soul seeking mercy through implosion. People struggle their whole lives with this feeling. Entire personalities coagulate around it. Remember how in 2007's smash hit Spiderman 3, Peter Parker gets fused with the symbiote and becomes evil or something and does this badass walk through the city, and everyone's like "Oh, he's dark and mysterious now, let's notice him?" The world won't do that for us. Aloofness begets no mystique, and the universe won't oblige our internal monologues. To believe otherwise is to punch fog.

Put another way, where you see an Embattled Antihero, the other Arby's patrons see Just Another Asshole.

I write this because I sometimes realize I'm waiting out my self-pity, running out the clock on some acidic thought. I'll find myself back in the darkened cafeteria of Monocacy Middle School, circa 2001, waiting for Change Personified, some angel who'll take my hand and pull me from the wall. Who'll say "Don't worry, things are good over here. We were saving all the Linkin Park and Sum41 songs just for you."

I write this because there's no hope along the wall. If you're not dancing, no one notices--and at life's end, you'll stand astride so much discarded time, an Ozymandias of wasted feeling. It's not too late, but don't wait! Get in there and have some punch! Dance like you don't know how! Insert additional self-helpy platitude here! In all seriousness, just by existing--by putting up your good fight, day in and day out, embracing those tiny inevitable wins along the way--you've become so much of who you want to be. Keep up the good work, friends. Keep it up for its own sake, and feel free to keep in touch.

Infinite Regards,

Jay