Baudrillard Live
POST :: 111 :: “Thought can no longer keep itself in a critical equilibrium. It has to be spread-eagled between violent nostalgia and violent anticipation.”
I woke half-rested. For the past month, insomnia has been creeping into my sleep: ten minutes awake at one in the morning, then twenty, then thirty. Last night I was up for more than an hour, my mind running round and round like a dog tied to a post. I took a shower, then put on a podcast. I’ve been listening to a new one about astrology. The host is my age, but sounds much younger. She tells me about how magic June is going to be. How it is a fine time to finally do the things I’d been thinking about doing. Not spontaneous things, like, I shouldn’t go stabbing my life open with impulses. More like the decisions I’ve been teetering on or dithering around. Edge work, where I’m looking down at the dark water, wondering if it’s deep enough. Everything is known but the feeling of surviving it.
I eat a quick breakfast and bike into the city, listening to the screaming passion of emo bands I’d all but forgotten I loved. I run small errands I’ve been putting off for weeks. I brought a dead motorcycle battery to Napa Auto Parts, where it would disappear in the best way. I sold a Trader Joe’s bag worth of old books to a Moe’s in Berkeley for $37.50 in store credit. Good books! They bought all of them. I spent $20 of it then and there on a collection of interviews with Jean Baudrillard; Baudrillard Live. This is my Baudrillard Summer, I decide. Everything is hyper—more of itself than it can contain. All that is left is to appear, just appear again and again.
At 4 pm I spent $5.50 on a shot of espresso that tasted like bubblegum and came with a small glass of seltzer. I sipped it as I finished the last twenty pages of a book—the birth to death story of an English professor. His life was full of restrained passion and quiet pain, but it seemed to me that he experienced everything. As he died he wished for nothing at all. It was beautiful. I try to wish for the same, but can’t quite.
The evening chill settles over the cafe patio, and my t-shirt and cut-off jeans seem foolish suddenly. The astrologer’s youthful spell is lifting, leaving me in the second half of things. I feel each second as the last moment I will be this young. Old and young. Coffee and bubblegum.
Before I leave, I do book tarot with Baudrillard Live. I turn to a random page and read the first line.
“Thought can no longer keep itself in a critical equilibrium. It has to be spread-eagled between violent nostalgia and violent anticipation.”
I bike straight home, but feel uneasy in my empty apartment, not ready to surrender to dinner and a few streamed episodes of something I’ve seen before. I put on pants and a hoodie and go for a walk around the nearby lake that divides downtown from Adam’s Point. The street lights have come on. The air is the hazy yellow of old plastic. A hundred yards ahead is the fluorescent glow of a Colombian food truck. Its floodlamps turn the park grass neon green and make the thin trees bright and gray as ghosts. The sound of Cumbia music mixes with the gravel hum of a small generator. The noise feels earnest. Half a dozen app-delivery drivers mill about the truck in loose conversation, a few more snooze or scroll in canvas camp chairs or the reclined seats of parked Priuses. I pass the truck and one of them steps off the sidewalk to let me by. We nod at each other. The trees look like they are underwater. It reminds me of a lake my grandpa took me to—a flooded valley. Underneath the boat stood hundreds of ashen trees, frozen in catastrophe like the bodies at Pompeii.
Past the truck’s bright floods, my vision adjusts back to the night. I see an old man walking towards me, grumbling at no one. As we are about to pass he mutters something to me that I don’t quite hear.
“I’m sorry?” I say.
“Spare anything to help an old man tonight?” He says with more clarity.
I only have fives and twenties and it is more than I want to give. But really I don’t want to give him anything and I don’t know why. I feel callous.
“I’m sorry, I can’t spare anything,” I say.
“What are you sorry about?” He asks.
“What?”
“What are you so sorry about?”
“I don’t have to do this.”
“Tell me what you’re sorry about?”
“I don’t owe you anything, man!”
Our voices get louder as we circle the same exchange. The delivery drivers take notice. A few wander over, the oldest looking one has his hands held out, palms down, raising and lowering them in smooth unison.
“Cálmate, cálmate.”
If a volcano had suddenly exploded, burying us all in pumice and ash, we’d all have died huddled together. They’d have found us a thousand years later and assumed we were bound to each other by something better than all this. Like those trees together in the water, cast against a disastrous indifference. We quiet down.
“Just wanted to know what he was sorry for,” the old man said to us, or the air. “A man should know what he’s sorry for.”
He turned and walked back the way he came. The drivers went back toward the glow of the truck. I stood for a half minute, then walked into the grass. I’m just sorry is all.
If we all died suddenly and preserved…that got me thinking.