When I was eighteen, I
took an early graduation route from High School, which allowed me to have the
mornings by myself. The afternoon and evening was taken up with my job at
another high school – I had stuck my thumb into the great bureaucratic pie of
the Dekalb County School system and come up with a plum job as night janitor. I
worked at a school near Chamblee – it is now, I believe, a charter school,
alas. Back then, I was in a self-educating mood and thought of myself as
a distant follower of Tolstoy. Physical labor and soulful preparation, that was
the ticket.
My mistakes in life stem from eventually quitting that job and going on to college. But destiny is fate – and not fat. If destiny was fat, I’d have become head janitor and retired at fifty four with a belly like the boss janitor.
I learned a lot from that job – in terms of cleaning supplies, for instance – and I’d take the great books to read on the break. I read Montaigne’s Essays in the break room, much to the amusement of one of the other janitors. Although the spotlight on my weirdness was dimmed a bit, as the janitor who cleaned the downstairs – the gym, the locker rooms, etc. – spent his time on break playing a flute. He was, in my memory, a pretty aethereal guy. Which goes with flute.
Anyway, I learned something from the job that decades later came in handy – which is that underneath our writing and reading culture, there is another writing and reading culture. Long before kids were sexting each other, they were writing notes, on paper, sexting each other, and I would come across these notes every day as I swept up. As well, in the boy’s and girl’s bathroom, there was a constant message – denigration barrage of graffiti going on.
Thus, when I find so many people up there in the ranks “shocked” at Internet culture, twitter, Instagram, tik tok, what have you, I am amused. These were the kids who, evidently, never passed notes or graffittied on the walls of the toilet stall. They absorbed the lesson of the first level of reading and writing culture – that this is where the power is. But they took that to mean: this is where all the reading and writing is. Sure, there’s the pulp crap out there, the wankbooks, the romances, the lunkhead sci fi, but this was all like animal sedative business. The internet, it turned out, was not the bringer of the singularity, that idiotmeme from the 90s, but the bringer of school note culture writ large.
I find this pretty undisturbing. Or, perhaps I should say, I find it great. I still have a bit of the Tolstoyan belief in the peasants and their wisdom. Or the janitors and theirs. Any janitor who paid attention could have predicted twitter.
These thoughts are brought on by reading Patricia Lockwood’s No one is talking about this. Or the interviews and reviews of that book. Every interviewer and reviewer is very careful to deplore twitter, the internet, social media, et and et and et cetera. I find that extremely funny, since in many ways it is exactly the outrage of white homeowners in the 60s discovering that the laws forbidding discrimination in housing mean that ‘THEY” get to move in.
My mistakes in life stem from eventually quitting that job and going on to college. But destiny is fate – and not fat. If destiny was fat, I’d have become head janitor and retired at fifty four with a belly like the boss janitor.
I learned a lot from that job – in terms of cleaning supplies, for instance – and I’d take the great books to read on the break. I read Montaigne’s Essays in the break room, much to the amusement of one of the other janitors. Although the spotlight on my weirdness was dimmed a bit, as the janitor who cleaned the downstairs – the gym, the locker rooms, etc. – spent his time on break playing a flute. He was, in my memory, a pretty aethereal guy. Which goes with flute.
Anyway, I learned something from the job that decades later came in handy – which is that underneath our writing and reading culture, there is another writing and reading culture. Long before kids were sexting each other, they were writing notes, on paper, sexting each other, and I would come across these notes every day as I swept up. As well, in the boy’s and girl’s bathroom, there was a constant message – denigration barrage of graffiti going on.
Thus, when I find so many people up there in the ranks “shocked” at Internet culture, twitter, Instagram, tik tok, what have you, I am amused. These were the kids who, evidently, never passed notes or graffittied on the walls of the toilet stall. They absorbed the lesson of the first level of reading and writing culture – that this is where the power is. But they took that to mean: this is where all the reading and writing is. Sure, there’s the pulp crap out there, the wankbooks, the romances, the lunkhead sci fi, but this was all like animal sedative business. The internet, it turned out, was not the bringer of the singularity, that idiotmeme from the 90s, but the bringer of school note culture writ large.
I find this pretty undisturbing. Or, perhaps I should say, I find it great. I still have a bit of the Tolstoyan belief in the peasants and their wisdom. Or the janitors and theirs. Any janitor who paid attention could have predicted twitter.
These thoughts are brought on by reading Patricia Lockwood’s No one is talking about this. Or the interviews and reviews of that book. Every interviewer and reviewer is very careful to deplore twitter, the internet, social media, et and et and et cetera. I find that extremely funny, since in many ways it is exactly the outrage of white homeowners in the 60s discovering that the laws forbidding discrimination in housing mean that ‘THEY” get to move in.
1 comment:
L.O.L!
Post a Comment