Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Why I live in NYC
I talked to Susan for like an hour last night, mostly about her fledgling adjustments to life somewhere in Philly. Meanwhile for me, New York has that sad “end of a novel” feeling since her leaving.
Yesterday’s installment of Eastern Standard Tribe via DailyLit featured the beginning of a rant by Art Berry, our protagonist, who is (betrayed by his friends and coworkers?!) brought forcibly to a mental hospital for impending committal.
In his first group therapy session, he describes exactly what I tried to explain to my mom when she expressed concern that the values and ideas I’d been raised with were becoming corrupted by my “environment.” My response was that I had in fact never been at home anywhere else, had always been this way (remember when I was 13? etc) and sought those more like myself, just as she had done in moving to Naples, FL where her friends and neighbors reinforce and support all of her notions about the world, both deeply and superficially. Just as my father had when he moved to Pebble Beach, California, and so on.
It all starts with the opening page of the book which asks, “would you rather be happy or smart?” Of course, your mom (my mom, hi mom) just wants you to be happy. This only creates tension when happiness looks different from person to person, so it’s harder to confirm. [update] This Flight of the Concords video is totally what my mom thinks my life is like. tee hee
I have my place and my purpose. It’s why I’m immune to Oprah.
If one day there’s any proven truth in the notion of genetic memory, this frustrated “different” feeling, this need to find, or found, a tribe will be noted in my ancestors on the Mayflower who were either annoying enough to others, or FTW enough to get on a boat and risk death rather than watch more Oprah.
OPEN QUOTES
“It’s a Tribal thing.”
“I see,” the doctor said.
“It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you’d grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you’d never even think to question it. If you were a genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if you could pull it off, you’d either gather up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you’d go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people who didn’t get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died.”
“Very interesting,” the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, “but you were going to tell us how you ended up here.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, “this isn’t a history lesson, it’s Group. Get to the point.”
“I’m getting there,” I said. “It just takes some background if you’re going to understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city, chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go and --” I waved my hands, “be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town, you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay—you might think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.
“So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was religious, but that was just on the surface—underneath it all was aesthetics. You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course—jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is like gravity.
Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in the end—in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with the people that are most like them that they can find.”
CLOSE QUOTES
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