Week 9: The Purpose of Rash Action

In which the podcaster travels back to a snarkier time, performs strange rituals in the underworld, and witnesses a life-changing moment of physics.

NOTE: THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 17. 

THEY ARE NOW DROPPING ON ODD SATURDAYS ONLY.

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 10 – WEEK 9:  The Purpose of Rash Action

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 10, covering Week 9 of My 12-Month Video Fast. This will be the first of three episodes to drop this month on the first, third, and fifth Saturdays, or as we say, Odd Saturdays.

I had a big, fun episode planned for this week, but it proved to be too ambitious for the time I had between doing a little paid work and a lot of looking for it. The good part is that you’ll get the ambitious ep next time, and the also good part is that I found something both amusing and relevant to do this time, so my butt is podcastfully covered.

I’ve had a lot of different jobs over the course of my rambly life. I taught college writing and Humanities for eight years. I did almost everything you can do in a restaurant for fifteen. I’ve done tons of administrative and organizational work, including for my own business. (I’m a total Excel maven.) Worked in bookstores. Served cocktails. I was a bicycle courier for a few years in San Francisco (in my 20s of course). Painted ski lifts and machines in factories. I have a long list of skills, some of which I wouldn’t want to do anymore (or couldn’t), and somewhere toward the bottom is a line that reads: Looking for Work. I suck at it. Doesn’t everybody? It’s like that scene in The Amazing Race where the contestants have to eat two pounds of caviar as fast as they can. (It was a gross and painful scene.) But the truth is, I signed up for this life long ago, and as inconvenient as this timing is, I’ve been here before.

Of course I work all the time on my own writing, which is largely unpaid and, by all but literary nerds, mostly unrecognized. One of the most dangerous things you can do around me by the way is refer to my creative writing as a hobby—[Large Tiger Head Biting]. (It occurs to me that the real work of writers and artists might be a good topic on here sometime. I’ll have to do that.) That said, there’s still the old food-clothing-shelter thing. And since my naming and messaging business is at least for a while in the AI doldrums, I’m being forced to reinvent myself; and since I’m delusionally optimistic, I’m trying to do things that I actually enjoy. Go figure. I’m looking for voice work (so if anybody wants to hire me to sing to them…[clip of ONION LOVE], I’ve been doing some editing for both business and creative writing, including a couple of poetry manuscripts (which is sweet), plus I’ve led a few writing workshops and provided some other paid literary services that help me to eke by and are things I love, which is always a bonus. If you’re curious what those services are, by the way, I’ve got a website for them at www.PowerUnit17.com (that with the number, not spelled out), and if you hire me you get to find out what it means. End of commercial.

So yeah, this has been on my mind, and lucky for you, it made me think of a monolog I wrote years ago about just that: having to reinvent myself and doing something desperate for work. I dug it up and whaddaya know, it’s pretty good. Doncha love it when your younger self does well? So I’m going to share that with you today, and you’ll get a taste of the younger Loranger, snarkier, less refined, and full of vinegar. I used to do monologs, after I developed a crush on the work of Spaulding Gray – because he ROCKED! – and I occasionally still do, like every week since June.

The one you’re about to hear I wrote in my 30s (that’s the 90s) and was originally a feature-length monolog which ran about 45 minutes. That long version, which I performed a couple of times, was called “The Sluttiest Thing I’ve Ever Done” (really liked that title). In 1994 I condensed it to a prose chapbook with about half of the original material titled “The Purpose of Rash Action”. It was one of three which together were called the Mythkilller Series that I made to sell at Lollapalooza. I was a touring poet for them that year, back when it actually was a tour, for 12 shows around the Midwest. And since everybody asks, yeah it was fun, especially if you enjoy yelling your life’s work all day in 100° heat at drunken teenagers. (Maybe more on that some other time.)

Anyway, to the monolog. The only background you need is that in the mid-80s while driving from Michigan to San Francisco, I stopped to visit two old friends in Chicago and stayed. I knew both of them from high school in Detroit: one was a writer, Jim Garner (better known now as James Finn Garner, humorist and author and if you can find his three Rex Koko: Clown Detective novels, you will be a happier camper) and the other, Dave Riley, was a musician, who at the time was playing bass for the post-punk band Big Black. So I had access to all the goodies.

Besides that, I think you might find a couple things different in this monolog compared to these pedestrian podcasts. First, it’s a good deal edgier (the satire is a lot sharper and the rhetoric less…mature, but consider the intended audience). And second, I’m seeing a bit of embellishment here and there; it is meant to sound mythological, but the story is fundamentally true, if fancifully expressed, and the final image is totally true. (You’ll see why I say that.) In the talks I’ve been presenting here, wild as some of them are, I try very hard not to embellish (and yes I’m claiming that those feral hordes of miniature nuns were real, um, figuratively). But you’re going to hear this one essentially unedited and as it was, because did and done, and it’s pretty fun the way it is.

Which leads me to a final note about the word “slut”. This was written several years before the publication of The Ethical Slut (Celestial Arts, 1997), which shifted the connotation in its general usage toward a more positive and sex-positive stance. Prior, it had more of a connotation of giving yourself away freely for questionable rewards – which was not necessarily any less fun.

So here’s “The Purpose of Rash Action,” coming to you from a younger version of myself.

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THE PURPOSE OF RASH ACTION

Have you ever reached one of those special moments in life where something has got to change?

Imagine this:

For once you’ve got your shit completely together, you have earned the merit badge and it is Playtime – you’re gonna kick back without delay, and woe to he who gets in the way. You crack a beer, you drift off just five minutes to fantasize about the unsuspecting individual who poured your coffee at the diner yesterday, you’re about to find out what they smell like underneath the coffee, when the steam blows off in an icy wind, you jolt awake, and you’ve been fantasizing longer than you thought – you’re too broke to buy a cup of coffee, your lover left you for your boss (who found a fast excuse to fire you), and your schizophrenic cousin’s living on your couch watching Pay-Per-View… Get the picture?

Whatever it is, the world is seriously imposing on your day, if not your year, and you’re in no mood to eat shit and live. You act FAST, panther-calm and so precise you startle yourself – half of you has taken charge, half is watching from a dream, somewhere in the distance you hear yourself think, What am I doing? Then it’s over and you’re amazed: somehow you did exactly the right thing – you averted disaster, didn’t hurt anybody (seriously), even worked a free cup of coffee, and it seemed almost effortless.

Sometimes, at just the precise moment, the only worthy action is rash action.

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A couple of years ago, on my way cross-country, I stopped in Chicago to visit two old friends for ten days, and stayed for five months. Such behavior, I realize, could be taken as a sign of either rash action or vast confusion. What the hell was I doing?

Well, I was having FUN. Not just fun, but FUN, like I’d forgotten what fun is, which I had. I’d spent a miserable winter lodged in Ann Arbor, Michigan – broke, depressed, sleeping on floors, pathetically involved with an old lover, dogged by family crises – you know, typical Western dysfunctionalism. Come spring, that wretched town spit me out like a Heimlich maneuver, and I hit Chicago like some giddy chunk of flying gristle. And friends, there is no fun like the fun of a freed man. In those first (and theoretically only) ten days, I whirled through nineteen bars, four poetry readings, three wild parties, two pizzerias, and a Big Black recording session. Not to mention my waking hours. I was having so much fun, in fact, that my friends asked me to stay.

But mere fun has never been known to hold me anywhere. Shortly into my visit, I found myself in a truly strange state of mind. I started seeing differently than I ever had, everything actually looked different – sharper and a little less civilized, halfway between the usual world and some primal memory – and over and over I kept thinking that I was seeing everything as myth. What? Had I been possessed by the insane succubus of Alistair Crowley? I think not. Was I seeing people turning into trees? Maybe. Did everything everywhere, without so much as a kiss from our friend Psilocybe, seem most vividly alive, and in deafening discourse with everything else? It was deafening.

Whether my celebrating had set off one humungous flashback, or the sadistic winter had caused some neural trauma, or maybe just spring hit Chicago, I’ll never know. But I did know some weird shit was going down, and I have to admit, I’m a sucker for special effects.

That’s why I thought I stayed in Chicago. Why did I really stay? For what mystical event did I there linger? Near as I can figure, I stayed five months in Chicago to do the sluttiest thing I’ve ever done.

I’m totally serious – when I say slut, I don’t mean some cute promiscuity, I mean overboard indulgence of questionable ethic, I mean sniffing the underbelly of corruption, I mean slut.

If I was going to stick around for the show, I had to find a job – but not just any job, no, there the weirdness had something special in mind, there lay the tripwire. Reluctantly I turned to face the working world, and saw instead a vast landscape of gnashing demons, slavering monkeys, slaughtered sheep, shattered cities, the dungpiles of the Beast. How often do you get a chance to scrutinize the underworld? Before I could think, I’d taken the bait, and was off on the scent of the original Maker of Dung. I’d embarked on a new profession, a survival method I believed fit for only the scalier forms of life, and for the next four months I became – a Temporary Office Worker. We’re talking rash action here, major leap into the void, express el train to slut central. My aura turned instantly a deep kelly green.

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Why, you might ask, does a presumably intelligent man proceed with an action despite a chorus of selves shouting, “No! No! No!” in his mind? There’s a purpose for rash action, the invaluable wild tool. Forget the myth of the avant-garde – we’re all living on the edge, brink of the chasm. And we all topple, usually with enough balance to fall back on our asses, and occasionally sail off, each of us, into the abyss. Forget the myth of sanity. Still it’d be a bleak story, wouldn’t it, if that’s all there was to be done – hanging on enough to merely crack your butt, fearing the abyss, hanging on – but there’s another choice. You can jump, right out into madness – though is it madness when you leap with purpose, descend feet first, glimpse the lay of the land, geography of the world you greet – greet violently, perhaps, but with some chance of wisdom? Is that the only way we see this world really, by landing in it again and again, each time the same world slightly more seen, until you find another brink to live by? And how often do you go mad, topple off into void, crash, topple again – every few years, every full moon, every sleep, every minute or millisecond – tumbling frame by frame down the advancing film? At that rate a well-timed jump is only wise. In most epic myths, the hero chooses to descend to the underworld, at great risk, to gain a necessary knowledge; and it is that choice, their pure intent, which allows them to return when they are through, unscathed if not unchanged. And when descent is inevitable, what better way? So why does a presumably intelligent man proceed with an action despite a chorus of selves shouting, “No! No! No!” in his mind? He’s listening to that other chorus syncopating in the din, “Jump! Jump! Jump!”

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There I was in mid-air over the abyss, that tantalizing moment before the plunge when you imagine you’re hovering. Somewhere in the distance I heard myself think, What am I doing? So much for afterthoughts. But what happens in mid-action, in suspension, in the leap between nerve and muscle, between sparkplug and gasoline, in a quantum leap? What is the leap itself? To an innocent bystander, it’s a flash, the visible charge, the firing; but from inside the spark, within the leap everything else stands still, everything freezes for a long, drawn-out moment.

I was living half in myth, the lines were blurring, and it felt the sanest, healthiest course. We are trained to consider this sort of myth-living as psychotic behavior, to be avoided by rational adults. Forget the myth of adulthood – real myth, so visible to children, is a glimpse of the pinions of this world, ghostly underpinnings, gates opening to gears, vast cauldron of spindles, cogs, pulleys, slowed to visibility only by your force of leap. Leaping into myth may be psychotic, it has that danger, but myth is not for leaping into, it is for leaping through – the myth is the leap. 

Needless to say, this state of mind somewhat colored my first views of office work, and maybe in a quiet way, my first employers’ views of me. One of my earliest assignments was at an ultra-yuppie “financial corporation,” badly in need of an enema the size of the Water Tower – vibes so constricted I didn’t even like hanging my jacket in the common closet. Found myself on lunch hour (a very long hour) hanging out in their glaring white and lysoled “break room,”  big white coffin for twenty-five, reading The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnel amidst whispering gaggles of women (no joke) practically wearing sailor suits, and stone-cold hypnotized men, scattered about reading The Wall Street Journal rigid as tombstones and trying to digest their break meal with as little violence as possible, all wondering if they’ve left a pin up their butts while tucking in their pantsuits, all doubting they’ve enough room up there to slide a pin, all tapping toes or fingertips, automated timekeepers not listening to the faintest strains of “Fool on the Hill”, original recording, leaking from the intercom into the white, white air. It was April 1, All Fools Day, and I couldn’t help but suspect that most of these people, should they retain any capacity to remember past their goals, might recall some moment of getting stoned to this song and giggling gleefully, ferociously, knowingly at the established pinheads they would soon become, grotesque clowns of their own hatred.

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I was horrified at first. I felt like a Spy in the House of Death, a wolf in the dogpen, and slunk around with a vague dread of imminent exposure. I could just barely imitate what these people imagined to be “life”. Eventually I’d acquire the skill of appearing bland and harmless, and earn my invitation to the party. That’s when the real fun began. 

Oh, I waded in pretty deep, all right, and this “madness” (which I claim to have chosen) would lead me ultimately to that sluttiest thing I’ve ever done. This is the slamming heart of my confession: for two and a half months I worked for AT&T, the Ass Tits & Tongue, in their Chicago HQ, designing their first series of computerized maps for everything they owned in the Central Region.

In all humility, I ask you to take a few moments to call me a slut. Thank you.

But what’s in a slut? A slut by any other name would fuck as sweet(ly). And why does a slut – not a prostitute, not an average citizen temporarily hypnotized by hormones, but a slut – why does a slut fuck? Here I’ll take a risk, the risk of one who believes he’s been a slut at times, and suggest that a fucking slut is delving around the Bye-Bye Room of the mind, a slut dives pleasure-center first into the spinal playpen, rather than tumble awkwardly. And though AT&T might not seem like much of a playpen, let me assure you: I was suckling at the tit of the wild pig, freely conjoining with the Beast, and spying on the orgy of the damned.

Yes, I was studying, you bet, these creatures’ methods and psychoses, their imagined hierarchies, their speech, obedience, sublimated urges, pathetic power-plays. Honestly – call it a deficiency – I lack a drive to baaaaa. How else could I begin to understand?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to launch into it here – it’s not terribly entertaining, and a lot of us know far too much about it already. Besides, why should I expect anyone else to share my obsessions? If you should feel inclined toward a similar mission, go for it! But please, take utmost care and do not bide there. There are many who never return.

I also spent a lot of my time at AT&T doing weird magic rituals. I made them up as I went along, of course. I arranged all their little map icons into mandalas and other magic drawings to decorate (and protect) my cubicle. I often had them painted on my fingernails as well – not every finger, just a few – in lots of pretty colors. I’d show them off at the clubs and bars where I often lurked at night. Come day I couldn’t wear them into the “orifice”, but also didn’t want to remove them (miniature painting takes a while!), so I’d cover them for work with a few bandaids, with the pads covering the artwork, of course. On two occasions someone asked  what happened to my fingers; I explained that I was learning to play the harp. Such an angel. No one ever noticed that the bandaids were on backwards. My favorite prank was this weird bathroom ritual, which I considered some sort of territorial pissing magic. Whenever I needed to rest in the room, I’d trance myself lightly, try to instill my urine with subversive states of mind (boredom, apathy, defiance, uncontrolled joy), then spray that state of mind carefully all ‘round the urinal, to be passed on to the following patron. I suspect that my supervisors, had they discerned such behavior, would have had me not canned but confined.

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I’d never have made it through an infernal summer of temp work in Chicago without some form of therapy, and an odd one at that. And through this therapy I became sole witness to a strange and beautiful phenomenon. Witness! This is a glimpse of the cogs, pure physics, in brilliance.

I dragged myself home from the trenches five days weekly, mashed in the broiling el with gobs of nervous yuppies, trapped for god knows how long without their climate control, fainting and having heart attacks right and left; up to Dave and Lisa’s place to tear off the sticky monkey-skin; then near-naked out to their second-floor balcony, where I’d usually sit for at least an hour blowing bubbles. The balcony looked out over a nice neighborhoody intersection, near Lincoln and Belmont, which I inflicted almost every afternoon for months with clouds of annoying little opalescent soapbubbles, to the distraction of many, the sure pleasure of few, and the irritation of several in particular. They are delightful things, those cute little bubbles, but I’m at a loss to explain the extent of my delight at this time. I could bask somewhat in the late afternoon heat, hyperventilate a lot, and watch my little creations drift off into traffic. Soon there were several of us doing bubble therapy, though only I observed it as strict ritual.

One afternoon in July, the most mind-blowing storm of the summer ripped through town – driving rain for hours, branches blowing off trees, trees blowing over, floods amok, earthquake thunder and wild lightning everywhere, all over the sky every few seconds at some points, blowing power lines and smashing chimneys, sirens, sudden bolts, and rain, rain, rain. I stood watching it all from the porch, pure storm-glory; and about an hour into it, when the wind had died down but rain thick as rice was blotting out the street, I figured I might just blow some bubbles. I was curious, actually, to see how far they’d make it into the grind, water pounding down like sand, guessing maybe an inch, about their average diameter. So I blew a big blast, school of about 40 bubbles out into the rain, yes, heavy as buckshot – and watched them drift off into it, calm as can be in hardly a breeze, absolutely undisturbed, even their formation undisturbed, not even descending, disappearing into that wall of rain, one of the heaviest rains I’ve ever seen, as if it were not there at all.

Be as bubbles in the rain, good anarchists! The world is no one’s!

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And there you have it: the words of a 30-something queer disenfranchised punk, in lieu of a 60-something queer disenfranchised grump. Are they the same person? Let’s not get into the irreality of the self here, actually. I do wonder if the writing sounds any different, though, besides the hyperbole and histrionics, at least.

I did leave this piece close to intact, by the way, with just minor changes to address redundancy and readability. And I did add one detail that was in the longer version but not in this, which was the fable of the hidden fingernails. I remembered it being in this version and couldn’t believe it wasn’t. The longer version also contained, as I recall, a lengthy and densely detailed account of my descent from downtown Chicago into the underworld; an encounter with a three-inch spaceman on Michigan Avenue, who was actually the one who convinced me to stay; I’m pretty sure a couple of poems; and a few more creepy work places, among other things. I’ll have to dig around for that sometime.

And I do think it was relevant to my overarching pod-themes, at least as a sort of incantatory therapy toward enacting change either necessary or unavoidable. Plus it’s a good reminder to me, no matter what employment I find, to stay away from offices.

This week I’d like to bigly thank Tom Greenwood of Sway, Lymington, UK for publishing a lovely and heartfelt review of this very podcast in the newsletter for his sustainable web business, Wholegrain Digital. There’s a link in the podcast description if you’re curious. Thank you so much, Tom. That was super cool and uplifting.

Don’t forget, the next pod will be cast in two weeks, on Saturday, August 17, in which I’m going to try to get a little face time with Commander Shepherd of the Normandy, Aloy of the Nora, and other pixelated celebrities. 

Until then, this has been Episode 10, covering Week 9 of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks for listening and time traveling with me today.