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familyvisionis2020 · 4 years

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Day 6 - The Drive Home

Today was the last day of tour. I wake up in the morning feeling guilty because I have a groggy memory of waking up around 8 to go to the bathroom, Paul was waiting to go, but when the person came out I just fronted him (a word I just now remember from elementary school, cut in line, but southern), used the bathroom and went back to bed. Rude. I am wiping the cold from my eye, taking in the undecorated walls of the apartment, and Jeremy comes from down the hall and says ‘Did you get the memo? Louisville cancelled. Tour’s over.” I said ‘fuck’ and processed it. I feel sad for Jeremy and John and Kabir because I know they wanted to play this last show in Kentucky. It’s not that I didn’t, but also for the last three months and for especially the last month I have been feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about this tour, about feeling out-of-control, about being away from loved ones at home, about being available to show up for people in my life, about completing regular routines of hygiene and spirituality and task completion that make me feel boring and comfortable, both. Touring stirs up dredges of the tea leaves that I had let settle into a fine filmy sediment at the bottom of me. I manufactured a jello mold two years ago and poured myself into it: regular 9-5 in the legal field as a means and precursor to law school, then diligent study for 3 years, then a professional career, abandoning the party life, abandoning trespassing in abandoned buildings, abondoning the luxury of resentment and unproductive time, trying to cool and firm into something reliable, serviceable, dependable, available, a resource people could draw from for once, rather than a leech or slug. And when I go on tour I take that jello mold out of the fridge and it holds its shape but also it warms and the longer I’m out the more liquidy it gets and sloshes over the sides and so forth. So I’m ambivalent because I like what I have to offer to this band, I like the physical process of drumming and expressing myself in the context of music and being a member of a band, but also I feel like I’ve kind of chilled enough and it’s time to settle down. And I’m at a way different point in my life than the other guys in the band it seems like, for the most part. So anyways all this to contextualize the fact that the news of tour ending even earlier than early honestly makes me feel relieved, if not happy, and so then I work to temper that boosted mood for the sake of grim decorum befitting a tour taken before its time.

All our stuff is locked in the venue from last night and we learn we won’t be able to pick it up until 1pm and so we have about 4 hours to kill in the apartment. Phillip puts on a pot of coffee that will turn out to be some of the wateriest on record, but still, a super kind gesture, and then he also puts on The Wire on HBO Go and we just settle in on the couch and watch for awhile. Some of the scenes are familiar, there’s something seductive about this show, and it brings me back to the precise moment of Summer of 2013 right before I moved to Philadelphia right after I got evicted from the squat/music venue I had been living in that winter and spring, I watched all episodes of The Wire on DVD on Matt Martin’s couch at 3 Pomroy and felt deeply depressed. It ranks up there with when I watched all released episodes of The Office in bed in the winter of 2009 after my girlfriend broke up with me, in terms of memorably devestating life phases offset by the amniotic fluid of full-series of TV. So we watch The Wire and I find myself not too inclined to sit and watch and I want to write so I sit at my laptop on the table nearby and write an email to a female (sorry) but I actually do and its purpose is to make her smile and bring some levity and play and purple prose to a moment in her life that, from how she tells it to me, is just so heavy, nightmares and waking horror and a future that feels like it hangs by a thread. so I’m glad to spend time showing up for her in this small way rather than watching The Wire, and also I write yesterday’s blog post, another activity that feels sort of like a pittance but also like: doing-writing is something I have been putting off, in phases and seasons, for my entire adult life, because to me nothing ever matters enough to write about, or if it does my perspective is deficient, or my research inadequate, or my skill incommensurate with the subject matter, or it won’t properly reflect my feelings, or any number of self-sabotaging excuses to not do this thing I so love doing, and love sharing. So for me, writing this blog is a very meaningful and special act of reclamation of a personal mode of expression that constitutes a break in my winter’s depression and what feels like a new phase of happiness, of believing-i-have-a-future, of feeling more authoratative and qualified to know and describe my own experience in a lifetime marred and dampened by dissociation, oblivion, amnesia, and fugue. So it feels like nourishment to get some paragraphs done and to move slow through my days, get them onto the page.

The Wire grows tiresome at some point and Jeremy fires up the PS4 and then the PS3 looking for games but none are multiplayer and so eventually he settles on Skyrim and starts from a new file. Me personally I love watching let’s plays and this is as good as TV. There was a moment last tour when we were in this strange small town in Connecticut called Torrington (the town all touring bands are required to go to, we also joked), in this town Jeremy was describing the sort of surrealness he experienced there and he said he felt like the townspeople in Torrington were like NPCs in a FPS RPG like Skyrim wherein you would go up to people and press A to talk, say ‘What news?” and that I thought was really funny then, I like his sense of humor. Really Kabir and Jeremy and Royal represent this sort of humor that is to me equal parts razor wit, cleverness, timing, accents, absurdity, and broad conceptual placticity, all for the most part very clean too, never or at least rarely blue (you’re gonna inevitably make a D’s nuts joke and that’s just that). And during happy times I am so grateful to be nearby this humor and during less happy times I get self conscious about how great their humor is and how I sometimes feel like I don’t measure up. But that feeling doesn’t weigh for long. Skyrim is fun to watch, it kills some time, we all take turns trying to kill wolves with swords before Jeremy finally does it, there’s a dragon, we loot corpses, discuss Bloodborne and Dark Souls and comparable games. A lot of the main media activity in this group is discussing how a given media relates to another media, Kabir and Jeremy and John know it seems like everything between the three of them when it comes to record labels, band narratives, artist’s hometowns, etc. So we play Skyrim for awhile, and then eventually it’s time to go to the venue and we drive back to The Salty Nut, load in all our gear, do a final sweep, and say our goodbyes and thankyous to Phillip. We return to the Bandido place one last time for one last round of free local Taco Bell which we absolutely scarf and are very vocally grateful to the people for giving it to us for free again, it’s clear they really put effort into being hospitable to touring bands here, at least through Phillip. His band, Thomas Function, was signed on Fat Possum Records, which also had bigger indie acts like Jay Reatard (who Phillip tells a story about him demanding $50,000 in cash for a show fee to feed his coke and heroin habit, Reatard died at age 29 from cocaine toxicity with alcohol also), The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Wavves and Soccer Mommy, but which Kabir postulates has most of its success due to having signed octogenarian southern blues legends like R.L. Burnside and King Ernest and raking in royalties from what Kabir speculates is due to poor management of the estates of these dead leagends who each had more than a dozen children. It’s truly fascinating for me to hear how deep and complex the analysis of music these guys have is. When I feel insecure, which is often, I tend to veneer these sorts of expertises and shibboleths among music-heads as snobby, elitist, exclusionary, petty and asinine. But I think most of that comes from a fear that I lack the insight, cognitive absorbency, and passionate research skills to collate and catalog data about artists in the way these people do, the way my bandmates do. I feel inspired to take time to dig deeper into the musicans I love, to make them real to me, to get a sense of their story, their lived experience, for the sake of corroding the mediation between us somewhat, or at least polishing the media membrane.

I volunteer to drive for the first half of what will end up being about a 10-hour drive back from Huntsville to Chapel Hill. We go to a Whole Foods in Huntsville upon Kabir’s insistence where I purchase a nootropic snakeoil energy affair in beverage form, Kabir gets hot coffee and a La Colombe Draft can of latte, Jeremy gets a kombucha made from yerba mate (“best of both worlds” he says), John black coffee as per, and Kabir also buys a slice of Tres Leches cake in a clear plastic to-go clamshell: “they can take away my tour, but they can’t take away my tres leches.” Later he’s eating it in the van and he accidentally spills some on himself and he says “shit…spilled some on myself. oh good, it was only one leche” which to me is so funny and perfect humor and just like kind of a paragon of the kind of joke I so treasure from this friend group. Another is when Jeremy and Kabir are recalling a favorite running joke from two tours ago, wherein they were in Philly, home to the famous Schuykill River (pronounced skoo-kill, at least when i lived there, at least around the non-indigenous people i knew), and while there they would affect this blaring Brooklyn accent, deployed heavily on this trip as well for basically any purpose, but back then they would say “UGH MY SKOYKL IS KILLING ME” like Schuykill was lombago or sciatica and also would say “YEAH LET ME GET A KWATA POUND OF SKOYKL ON RYE” like it was a deli meat, and they laughed and laughed. Also they liked doing rhyming jokes like last night there was a chair nearby the combo amp Tired Frontier was going to use for their set and Kabir goes ‘amp on the chair, tone everywhere’ and then I say ‘amp on the ground, makes a bad sound’ and then I tell Jeremy later how Kabir would put me in good spirits whenever I was describing to someone how my LSAT score is very competitive but my checkered past makes the acceptance process a little less than straightforward, and Kabir would see I was getting kinda down and anxious, and he would say ‘You gotta break the law before you make the law,’ and we all laugh and I love that, the function of humor as balm, salve. I want to wield my humor like that.

The drive back is fine, some sprinkles, nothing major, clear traffic for the most part, I feel like I have a good command of the van, keep it around 75 for most of the trip, feel smoth and confident switching lanes, passing, etc. We do another two NYT Wednesday classic crosswords together, Kabir is getting probably 40% of the clues, me maybe 30% Jeremy and John the other 30%, Kabir will just to YEAHHHHHHHH after getting a clue and I start doing that too after Jeremy says “X down, ‘on the table’ 15 letters,” and I say UPFORDISCUSSION after only a couple seconds and it fits and is correct and I feel like a damn genius and we’re all laughing and kind of praising each other half-jokingly for being strong beautiful geniuses who also we know songs. This is a great passtime and the drive flies by and before I know it we’re in Western NC just outside of Asheville and we make a stop to refuel the tank and get dinner. We decide on a Waffle House across the street, not wanting to venture too deep into Asheville for something healthier and better because of the time and money it would likely eat up, Kabir says that FEMA uses the closing of Waffle Houses as a bellweather to indicate the severity of a given natural disaster. We go inside, the waitress says ‘ya’ll aren’t from around here are you?’ in a way that I take to be hostile and I suggest that to the guys and they seem like maybe slightly offput but not very much and we decide not to abort and I later feel foolish because I think I am doing this thing where I become excessively vigilant or sensitive to a perceived slight to a friend who is brown for the putative purpose of interceding on their behalf against racism but what’s actually happening is if someone was racist to them they could just stand up for themselves and make their own call regarding their own comfort or lack thereof and I would do better to act less motivated by white guilt when avoidable. That passes, it’s fine, we eat hash browns and waffles and eggs and grits and toast and cover everything in tobasco and tip well and get back on the road, John takes over for the final stretch.

I return a call from Marty and catch him up about tour being cancelled and we discuss our fears and hysteria and cancellations and reaction and so forth. Marty remarks that he is a gravedigger during the plague, which is the best possible job to have. It’s not a joke because he actually drives a backhoe working for a cemetary and digs actual graves, super weird and eminently punk/goth and kind of a curiosity but really perfect for the lead singer of one of the South’s premiere punk bands, especially after his being fired from the swish cafe he worked at in Richmond before that. I love Marty and catching up and it feels good to hear his voice. After I get off the phone it sort of becomes campfire spooky story time in the van with everyone proffering their take on the panic, market failure, the likelihood of Capitalism as a superstructure to require perpetual growth even at the peril or death of its working class, the superior response to covid that South Korea and Norway seem to have mounted, a lot of fear of financial insecurity. Eventually this digresses to talk of touring, and the guys discuss all manner of various routes throught the South, Midwest, Northeast, plains states, PNW, Mexico City, Jeremy says ‘I can get us a show in Colombia’ which he can, Argentina or Venezuela through a mutual friend, then Europe so long as the label foots the bill for the plane ticket, then Japan, setting up camp on Honshu would make it easy to hit TOkyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya no problem, except where exactly are people playing shows? there’s gotta be somewhere all these Japanese Noise and Hardcore bands are getting gigs, and then from there of course it’s not hard to get to Australia, John knows a band there, and they go all around the world and this is stressing me out a little bit, only because I wonder about how much they think I would be involved or want to go on such a theoretical tour, and the answer is I don’t 100% know. Part of me wants to say this is my last tour, lean all the way in to law school and leave behind this chapter. Part of me feels like it’s better not to make a hard and fast statement like that because what if the economy collapses and for some reason school is a no-go but being in the band becomes the most plausible source of income or something. I get anxious and psych myself out and quiet down and feel foolish and wish to be home. I fantasize about my future life of stability, but I second guess myself because I just don’t know for sure how my life will be, and want to be careful to work toward the goals I think will be the most fulfilling, self-actualizing, spiritually nourishing, healthy for me; I also want to not forsake the friendships and bonds I’ve forged in these weird intimate moments in the van with the guys. I have the wherewithal to know that nobody is requiring me to make a decision right this second, and that as time passes it’s likely that the best course of action will be revealed one way or another if I can keep from panicking. So I watch videos of the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championships on my phone, eat two candy bars, watch videos of a streamer named Wumbotize play the latest Tetris game, Tetris Effect (2018, PS4, PC), and am pleasantly awed by how crazily far the skill curve of that game has shot up. I have some time ahead of me that is completely free, which is so nice. Before I know it I’m back home in my clean apartment which is tidy like a tetris field at the beginning of a new game and I get into my bed and lay down flat and if my bed is the well than the line of me clears and the well is clean, smooth, primed, for whatever falls tomorrow.

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balioc · 6 years

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Sexbots, Plato, and Jung

Apparently today is the day for sexbot discourse. Joy of joys.

So...why does anyone want a sexbot? What’s the value-add in this proposition?

There’s obviously a wide spectrum of possibilities here, but I think we can usefully divide them into three conceptual buckets.

On the one end, there’s the pure straightforward object-oriented desire for a better sex toy with cooler features. “Give me a vibrator/fleshlight, but, like, mobile, with arms and legs and a face and stuff, because that’ll make the orgasms better somehow.”

To the extent that anyone is thinking this, I have zero trouble saying that there’s absolutely no objection to it at all that carries any water. Go and get the best tool for the task. Have fun.

...on the other hand, an honest assessment will compel us to admit that basically no one will be thinking this. Sex is mostly mental and emotional for pretty much everyone, the things we want out of it are mostly about complicated deep-laid psychological stuff -- and to the extent that it really is just about pushing physical pleasure-buttons, existing technology has that covered just fine. This is kind of a strawman, and I’m mentioning it only for the sake of thoroughness.

All the way on the other end, you get a number of variations on “I want a sexbot so that I can fool myself into believing that it’s a person with whom I can have a relationship.”

(A few of those variations entail “...so that I can fool myself into believing that it’s a person with whom I can have a cruel/abusive relationship, one that for moral or practical reasons I can’t get with a real person.” But only a few. I’m not going to discuss them separately; I think we’ve had quite enough of that particular sub-discourse.)

Some people actually will think this; some already do. In particular, if your conscious mind has become so soured on relationships (or so soured on the-opposite-sex-as-a-whole) that you believe them to be worthwhile only for the sake of fulfilling extremely simplistic psychological needs, you might be inclined to think that a non-sapient robot with a good user interface -- something like a current-tech video game NPC with a meatspace body, let’s say -- could fill the role of a human partner without much being lost.

This is not a correct or healthy thing to think, and anyone whose mind is on this track is going to be painfully disappointed by the reality of having a sexbot.

This is true for a lot of super-obvious reasons that boil down to “people are intellectually and emotionally generative, the value of being close to them mostly involves getting to interact with their complicated thoughts and feelings, the sexbots we’re talking about will not give you any of that.” It’s also true for some slightly-less-obvious reasons. A lot of what people want out of relationships, a lot of the thing whose absence actually drives lonely people to madness and despair, is social validation -- the validation of having someone (especially someone with a high social value) think that you’re worth caring about, the validation of everyone around you thinking that you’re cool or mature or successful or whatever -- and none of that can be faked, even if right now you feel like you’d be totally happy to settle for the external trappings.

For whatever it’s worth, I also do agree with @jadagul that fooling yourself in this way is Unvirtuous, independent of any utilitarian fallout of any kind.

So I’m happy to say that using a sexbot, for this particular kind of reason, is probably bad for you and you probably shouldn’t do it. That in itself is not a good enough reason to make policy, we allow all sorts of bad things into society because trying to enforce a ban would be much worse, but it’s a judgment.

But everything I’ve said thus far is kind of pointless, because the vast majority of the world’s desire-for-sexbots would in fact fall into the third bucket, which sits in between the other two.

OK, our first Weird Philosophical Analogy: Plato’s tripartite soul. You’ve got your semi-physiological animal appetite soul, you’ve got your seething subconscious emotional psychological soul, and you’ve got your conscious intellectual soul that contains your actual personality and goals and ideas. In your “average” “normal” person, all three of them are united in strongly wanting sex. But that desire means totally different things to each of them.

The appetite soul can be satisfied with a vibrator or fleshlight. The intellectual soul definitely needs another real person, someone who can constantly feed you you new thoughts and cause you to grow, someone who can be a part of your life and contribute things, no substitutes accepted.

[I think that, in modern parlance, a person whose appetite soul doesn’t have that kind of need is called “asexual,” and a person whose intellectual soul doesn’t have that kind of need is called “aromantic.” But maybe that mapping doesn’t work? Discuss.]

The “emotional soul” -- which is a terrible name for it, but there isn’t a better one in modern language, which has lost the semantic distinction between nefesh/psyche/soul and ruach/pneuma/spirit, thanks, Church Doctors -- is roughly akin to the subconscious mind of the Old Psychologists, although you certainly can be aware of its workings under many circumstances. It’s the part of you that cares about feelings and social cues in an unreflective way, much as the appetite soul cares about sugar and temperature and orgasms. It’s the part of you that cringes when you feel shame, without any consideration of whether that shame is endorsed or desirable or appropriate. It’s the part of you that crows like a rooster when some stranger likes your post on social media.

The emotional soul cares almost exclusively about social, cultural, and emotional things, but...it doesn’t actually care about people, not in any sense that a thinking intelligence would find meaningful. It doesn’t understand their existence as beings with interiority; that requires abstract thinking, which is not a thing of which it’s capable. It doesn’t care about who they are or what they want. It cares only about what they do, in a very direct and concrete kind of way, because human actions line up with the happy-patterns and sad-patterns that it does understand.

The emotional soul has a lot of use for a sexbot.

An easy and not-very-loaded example: when you are despairing and full of doubts, it can be very comforting to have a beautiful-person-shaped-entity giving you the basic reassurances that you would otherwise have to give yourself. Today, in our sexbot-free world, this usually translates to “it’s nice to have a loved one comfort you in such a way” -- but in fact your loved one’s existence as an independent thinking entity isn’t providing very much value-add in this particular scenario. You already know the words in question, it’s not like you need someone else to generate them. And, let’s be honest, your loved one is going to say those things pretty much no matter what he’s actually thinking in the moment, it may be so much a ritual courtesy that his not saying the words would be a hurtful surprise. And yet it helps, perhaps quite a lot, because there’s a sub-rational part of you that doesn’t have declarative beliefs but knows that it likes seeing someone pretty say the nice words.

A much-more-loaded example: many sexual fetishes. No beliefs of any kind involved, no caring about anyone’s interiority, just some part of your mind that likes seeing someone pretty do the thing. It’s a happy-button; maybe it has its origins in some interpersonal emotional complication, but at some point your psyche contains an independent module that’s just “button push ==> happy.” And a sexbot can be pretty, and do the thing, just as well as a person with hopes and dreams.

(I am pretty confident that, in a world with actual sexbots worthy of the name, a big slice of the sexbot-buying population is going to consist of couples interested in doing Group Sex Acts without any of the complications attendant on involving actual other people.)

So OK. Evaluation time. What happens if this actually takes off?

A bunch of people get their emotional-soul needs met without having to rely on other human beings to do it for them.

This is potentially a very good thing.

You can say “it will allow a bunch of lonely people who can’t find partners to satisfy more of their needs than they could otherwise,” which is true, but in fact it’s the least of it. It could change the fundamental dynamic of human romantic relationships for those people who are capable of finding them. It could allow them to be less driven by raw psychological need.

We’ve never actually relied on our partners for our appetite-soul needs; if you’ve got hands, you can probably find your way to an orgasm. But we rely on our partners, extensively, for our emotional-soul needs. We demand that they do the thing, whatever the thing is, because we need a person-shaped entity to fulfill that function or we get anxious and depressed. We need them to play their assigned roles in our sex rituals and our comfort rituals and so on.

If we have convincing person-shaped-entities without interiority that will just do whatever we want, then we can slot them into our rituals. And maybe we can have a little more respect for each other as independent people, and approach each other in more of a spirit of exploratory appreciative wonder, and mutilate each other a little less in the name of creating the supportive partners we need.

A sentence you won’t hear very often these days, for good reason: I think it is helpful to think about this concept through a Jungian framework.

As Jung would have it, one of the important parts of your mind/soul/whatever is your anima if you’re a “normal” straight man, or animus if you’re a “normal” straight woman. (There have been lots of arguments over how this works if you’re not doing the standard binary heterosexual thing, I’m not getting into it now, just...roll with it.) The anima/animus is a sort of internal princess/prince figure, the living Grail at the end of the sacred self-development quest, containing within itself all the aspects of you that seem foreign and impossible-to-understand and not-quite-part-of-yourself. The muse who brings inspiration, the voice of solace and comfort in the depths of depression, etc. It’s represented as an idealized lover because it is all the things for which you reach out to the world in an attempt to feel complete. But it’s all there inside.

Achieving union with your anima/animus, in the Jungian scheme, is a key step of becoming a whole and happy person. Without that internal union, you try to force other human beings into the role; it never works, and it does lots of damage to both parties in the process.

I don’t know whether projecting aspects of your anima or animus onto a sexbot is a good way of coming to terms with it “properly.” But I’m damn sure that I’d rather you do that, and seek out your private hieros gamos in a psychological mirror made from silicone, than dragoon an actual person into the job of making you complete.

A lot of bad relationships -- and a lot of bad parts of good relationships -- are that second thing. People feel so much desperate need for one another, because they feel so broken. But love works a lot better when you go into it whole.

#sexbots #plato #jung #psychology #ethics

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