Caszh Blast 4.1 - What’s Life Without Whimsy?
P.S.
This year I’ve been sinking back into passion and uncertainty.
Several iterations of self in the past I was a teenager with an oily face, smelly underarms, and naïve assertions about causality and truth. I felt an unwavering certainty that if you believed in something strongly enough it would come true, or more precisely that it would be revealed to have always been true. It seemed to work over and over again, and I tumbled through life one impassioned kiss and extraordinary adventure after another. I don’t do such habitual certainty anymore, but curiously when I lived and internalized that life of insistent optimism I never really was proven wrong. Things always seemed to turn out in my favour. I treat myself to such an optimistic aperitif every now and again, asserting that life and the people who surround me are inherently good and that things will turn out for the better. It feels good to be proven right with years like this.
In that time of rigorous optimism I chased uncertainty and abstraction wherever I could find it. I had two mantras: “what’s life without whimsy?” and “get your daily dose of uncertainty”. They popped up as daily reminders on my phone. Those two ideas fuelled a probing curiosity and a willingness to put myself on uncertain footing. Like skating, or flying, perhaps, life is not so much about being steady on one’s feet as it is about being comfortable falling and sliding in style. Douglas Adams said that the key to flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. I was generally uninterested in long-held plans and grand designs, and at every fork in the road I chose whichever path would give me the better story at the end. It was this template for life decisions which enabled a long streak of gallavanting through unknown cities with strangers, loosing the wonders of the modern world and its kindnesses on my teenaged psyche.
As time passed, my myopic decision-making began to exact its toll. My optimism began to fade. I look back occasionally at photos of myself from this era, swept away from shore by riptides of depression and substance abuse. The photos barely look like me. I remember searching an alien’s eyes in the mirror trying desperately to find any shred of myself. I couldn’t see it. More days than not I tore my hair out and screamed frantically at my situation. I ritualistically removed the skin from the bottoms of my feet, forcing myself to work sweaty shifts in a hot kitchen with raw, unprotected soles. My optimism and the search for new experiences had devolved into a crooked nihlism. I believed that every bodily feeling, no matter how depraved or sickening, was one worth having; that our role as human beings was to seek out the wide selection of sensory experiences, to chase every dragon and ride every roller coaster into the ground. Every sensation was just as worthy to experience as any other. I routinely destroyed lifelong relationships, leaving them to dry up and wither away like previously lush wetlands systematically drained by land developers. This, I learned, is unhelpful.
In my recovery from such a bold and destructive worldview, I found myself relishing stability and isolation. In the beginning of 2024 I got a job at Long & McQuade as a private music teacher. For the first time in my adult life I had a steady weekly work schedule and reliable income. I became enamoured with the routine, letting the days and weeks flow over me. The regular paycheques washed over me like meltwater, eroding the jagged striations left by the Laurentian ice sheet. The ice age was ending, but enormous pressure and continental forces felt over milennia leave scars in the landscape. The Georgian Bay is cold and deep, and it is easy to lose oneself in its vast isolation.
Time flows on. The Laurentians are smooth now, and they rise and fall over the long slant of Appalachia. I started living alone again for the first time since I was 20 and gradually transformed my space into one of reckless creativity. I brought people from all over my life to carve inscriptions into my dining table and leave poetry stuck up on my wall. I held rehearsals and recording sessions, slamming away on drums and guitars and wailing away well into the night. This year, inspired by similarly raucous spaces, I also started to throw house shows in my apartment. I invited “anyone who knows where I live or knows someone who knows where I live” to come and leave a poem, scribble on a wall, paint on a mirror, appreciate some beautiful music, and jam it out into the wee hours. A dear friend painted a mural on my living room wall while the music was happening and we tossed handfuls of paper cranes at unsuspecting partygoers. I became enraptured by visual art, noise, and crosswords, spending days on end at the coffee shop down the road opining on poster design, illustration, and wordplay with my closest friends who insist over and over again that they love and appreciate me. This year has been kind to me.
Down this long and winding road I have dived into art and experiences which amplify that uncertainty I loved so much in my teenaged years. Earlier, I tried to reject my wily ways in favour of stability and control over my environment. This was a necessary step, and it worked for a while—but I have the experience and foresight now to see how change is the only viable long-term plan. I have to choose the path which gives me the best story for the sake of a life well-lived. I think the reason my boundless optimism worked in my favour was not because the universe happened to be on my side, but because when you assume there is goodness in the world it is awfully easy to find it—and every time you try it gets a little easier.
On Christmas Eve I stepped out of my house only to immediately slip and fall on the icy walkway. A colder me might have grumbed their grievances and angrily crawled their way back to their feet. That day, I took a moment to lie there and look at the bright blue sky. It was beautiful.
Happy New Year.