This is Grilling

Reflections after revisiting This is Water

For the unfamiliar: This is Water

Walk in the Park

A few weeks ago I was on a walk in Liberty Park. I was in a bad way. That evening I was going to “dump” my friend as a roommate and put him in a difficult position, but the resentment of the little habits and idiosyncrasies had accreted into a torturous mass and it had to be done. Even more, I was physically ill and not moving around easily. Strange little muscles ached, everything was arduous, the amount of sweat or chill I experienced moment to moment was all wrong. In the middle of the park there were some picnic tables, and I made my way over to attempt to enjoy the sunshine and unwind a bit.

Not long after I sat, I could see a woman speed walking toward me, saying something to me. She was too far away to be intelligible, but by the time she got close enough, it was clear she was a homeless woman. She made a convoluted, difficult-to-parse request for help. I guess she wanted to use my cell phone for something. Everything about her presence was an unwelcome intrusion at that moment, yet for some reason I asked, “what for?”. What followed was a very familiar meth-type scenario, and it was clear that whatever she was up to was not something I wanted to be involved in. When she finished her yarn, I said with some regret “I actually have to make a call right now, sorry.” This was basically true.

More fundamentally though, I had the phone, and she did not. She was at my mercy. The comfort of my power was shaken immediately when she asked me “why did you ask?”.

“What?” I said, annoyed.

“Why did you ask me what the call was for if you were going to say no anyway?”.

I really did not consider that there would be more to this exchange than my request for information, and subsequent decision to either let her use my phone for some kind of emergency, or decline. If you’ll forgive me, the part of my brain that quietly ranks everyone around me had already calculated an easy dismissal.”

I’m well trained. I know her present circumstances are the culmination of countless unfortunate bad-hands, socioeconomic injustices, neurological anomalies. All of my training went out the window when this person dared to question my refusal:

“Get out of my face”.

Whoa. This was really unexpected. I don’t speak to anyone that way. But much like the cow-eyed hordes in the grocery store described in This is Water, this person was in my way. The agenda for that day in Liberty Park was as follows: brood about the fissure between my friend and I, and be physically ill. This woman’s appearance was not part of the plot I was writing.

Where’s Wallace?

How did my good, liberal, progressive programming get entirely usurped in this moment and get vomited out as reactionary bile? Because of my familiarity with amphetamine trickery? Did my true lower middle-class stance toward the homeless finally come out because I was too exhausted to lie? It felt strange as quickly as it left my mouth. She stormed away, repeating what I said to her, to herself, in disbelief. I must admit I was even mildly amused by myself. I really did it, I told that woman to fuck off because I could, and she was annoying me, and there will be no consequences for it. How many calories does it take to be well socialized every day, I wonder.

I do not mean to say that good character means entertaining every little sidequest available to you in urban America. That is not a good idea. But my grace in hitting “decline” is clearly highly variable.

Wallace’s talk excuses itself from moral prescription several times, but warns that living this way will lead you to a dark adulthood. Specifically, if you allow yourself to live in the natural automatic selfishness that is always at hand, that you will want to “blow your brains out”. I feel it creeping more and more in my 30s. Not blowing my brains out, but the default settings. As my life begins to contain something that resembles more and more a “career”, as my class position creeps upward little by little, I can feel myself changing. In the abstract, I know that one’s class position informs their aesthetic preferences and adherence to social mores, but that’s always been something that happens to others. The nouveau riche, MAGA boat dealership owners, people that get thinkpieces written about them. The reality is, however, that sociology is about you too.

Revisiting the Grill

The grill pill is a useful concept here, if not a little outdated. It is the attempt of the chronically online political media junkie to become a normal guy. I’m not left wing or right wing, I just want a chicken wing! Taking the grill pill is what you do when you’ve made too many embarrassing political pivots and publicly posted about them. More charitably, the grill pill is wanting to turn off the feed and just spend some time doing something that matters. Less charitably, it’s giving up on politics and the belief that you can make a difference at any kind of scale. I think of the grill pill because that’s what I wanted that day in the park — to be left alone.

More and more I struggle not to see emotionally charged political posting as sublimated therapy, or therapy performed through posting. This might be generally true in the US, but it leaves a concerning remainder – how do you act morally on behalf of your fellow man while being a normal guy? This is one thing to do while grilling with your boys, but opting out of political consciousness leaves a lot of things on the table. My fear is that as my material concerns drift further from what they were at my poorest, the grill pill leaves room for reactionary reflexes to slip in. They’re very seductive. I may have been annoying online in 2020, but I also probably wouldn’t have told that lady to fuck off in the park.

I wouldn’t mind everyone chilling out a little bit. The membrane between the cyberspace and meatspace is more porous than it has ever been, and while it is sometimes funny, it mostly sucks. No matter how awfully violent things are far away, I do think the things that really matter are immediate, at least if your locus of control is intact. How do you treat your friends? Have you called your mom this week? Maybe you should even make your bed before you lob a brick through a Starbucks window. I don’t really have a prescription for political engagement in person or online, I try to engage where I fit in, but I’m barely less lost than when I was 22.

Wallace said that freedom comes from the little unsexy things you do for others every day, and the attention you pay to your own posture toward the world. I certainly can’t describe the little vignette I’ve confessed here as flattering, but I was paying attention. It stings to see yourself clearly. There is some freedom there, but at first all you get is the retrospective.