Life of diminishing returns

This has been a long time in the writing. I’ve been feeling unsatisfied with everything I read, watch and play. Everything. It’s been a year maybe since something—--TV, Cinema, Books, whatever--—seized me, sat me down, and oozed truth into my various skull-holes.

Like everything else I've ever said, that'’s not entirely true. Sopranos Season 4 on DVD. The DVD part is essential. Wake up early, eat breakfast, stay in your jammy-jams, send the kids to the neighbor’s, turn off the phone, empty your bladder entirely and allot the adjoining 13 hours to maybe the most brilliant television writing ever. Lock the door.

So there’s my first caveat: I’m unsatisfied with absolutely everything--—except that one thing.

Here’s what brought this to a head. In the last week, I’ve consumed three works--composed in various media--each created by a person I consider to be a genius. Each person has a track record of repeatedly and consistently impressing me .

As I battled my way through each new work though, a book, a movie and a video game, respectively, it became obvious that each was going to be a patent disappointment.

I can't decide if this is some kind of freak coincidence, that so many people I admire would simultaneously succumb to Kevin Spacey syndrome, or if the problem is me.

I guess I'll let you decide, beginning with the least banal, so as to ramp up your emotional investment so you don't bail once I start in on the trivial crap.

Exhibit the First: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.

A full three years ago my friend gave me Naked, a collection of autobiographical essays. Pressing the volume to my chest, he looked me deep in the eyes, “"Read it, dude."” I went to my room and parked myself in my recliner sometime in the evening. I didn’t move until 5 the next morning.

That is, I didn’t leave the chair. I certainly moved. My body was almost constantly wracked with convulsive fits. My mouth open, a pained expression on my face, very little noise coming out. The laughter tore the air from my lungs. With my head tilted back, some occasional ack, ack, acking escaped over my vocal chords. My jaw opened and closed like a baby sparrow after its mother'’s regurgitate.

If you ever see a redheaded kid clutching a book in the throws of what looks like a grand mal seizure, it’'s more than likely not me, but you’ll get some idea of what I looked like that night.

You read David Sedaris and you'’re sore the next day.

This event repeated itself two more times in the next year. I read Barrel Fever that summer. I found Me Talk Pretty One Day tucked amongst all the trivial crap they line airport bookstores with. I immediately put The Subterraneans on hold. One of the more important things I learned in college: Jack Kerouac has nothing on David Sedaris.

I barely noticed when the flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt turned back because of a blown engine. This was September 17^th, 2001. Forceful.

I don’t think, though, that Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is a David Sedaris book. It’s more like a David Sedaris outline. It’s full of ideas and asides that might become wonderful stories, but remain, by themselves, underdeveloped and mostly unsatisfying.

In the collection's symbolic climax, the Rooster makes a triumphant return that approximates the greatness of his first story. But, as they say, one redneck black sheep of a brother does not a memoir make.

Exhibit Two: Intimate Strangers

I admit, I'm not as familiar with this filmmaker, but Patrice Leconte rocked my world last year. The Man on the Train was the most forceful character portrait I’ve seen in a long time. It was for sure in my top ten last year—and probably would have made my top ten of the last two or three years combined.

Despite my ignorance of his larger body of work, Leconte fits because Intimate Strangers is similar to The Man on the Train in essential ways. Both are intensely voyeuristic and obsessed with discovering personal truth through unraveling the mysteries of other people's lives.

Aspects of the film are brilliant. Leconte coaxes a transcendent performance out of Fabrice Luchini, a guy I've never seen onscreen before. He plays the straight man with wide-eyed abandon. He's great.

The story as a whole keeps with the strange bed fellows theme Leconte delights in. It just feels more contrived, I don't know if I can explain it better than that. The payoff is less satisfying and Leconte can't achieve the same level of visual symbolism because, I think, there just isn't as much to work with.

Exhibit Three: Doom III

I like games. In 8^th grade, Doom II was my baphometic fire baptism into the world of computer gaming. It was revelatory. I was changed. I was not the same.

John Carmack created it. He is the godhead behind some of the tightest games in history, and is responsible for almost every significant leap in 3D engines, starting with, I guess, Wolfenstein (also a seminal moment in my life) in the early nineties. He’'s big time.

Doom III though--—the culmination of like four years of work by Carmack and company—--was summed up perfectly by my friend Tas, "“it makes 1 level last an entire game".” It's repetitive and exhausting. The load times are ridiculous. The game functions as much as a test of my patience as it does a test of my demon-killing skills.

It looks pretty though.

Conclusion

I don’t know if there is one.

Does the inevitable loss of novelty that comes from making your way through life mean that nothing will ever be as shocking and amazing as it was when you were younger? Once you digest something, will everything afterward inevitably lose some of the edge it might have had if you'd seen it earlier? Do the new things in life become ever more unsatisfying?

I think my reflection on this subject began in July, when I watched a movie, and inevitably began comparing my life to it. Is there a connection between one's passion and the amount of novelty one feels? They seem to at least run parallel in my life.

My interest in Philosophy has waned steadily with each work I've read. There's a futility to the whole program. That was certainly the case in my abortive career as a Computer Science major. Semesters one and two were pretty tight. A sharp decline in interest ensued.

This makes the prospects for my next 60 odd years seem a bit dubious.

One bit of philosophical minutiae I've clung to, though, is the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. My professor, Dr Liu, described it as feeling as though you have no head, but that each moment brings a feeling of explosive and instantaneous newness as you continually rediscover the world around you.

To put it into more contemporary terms, it's like watching the fourth season of the Sopranos on DVD for the first time forever.

That, apparently, is true peace, and "that's why Buddhists are always smiling," Dr. Liu would say, through his giant grin.

Break me off a piece of that.

Come for my selfish complaining, stay for something really important.