Thank God vacation's over.
I don't mean, thank God that dreadful airline experience is over. Or that bout with an Indonesian stomach bug is over. Or that college fund-erasing run at Vegas, taxi-hostage situation in Mexico City, or coke-fueled sex tourism adventure in Thailand — is over.
No, I mean, thank God that vacation — that socially mandated stretch of pre-Labor Day downtime — is over. I barely made it through this time.
In all the externals it was idyllic: a dozen days with loved ones in a bucolic New England setting, lovely weather, no injuries or acute illness, even bizarrely light traffic. Within days of our return, my hippocampus had fashioned this stretch of time into a pastoral, IG-ready inner photo-stream and edited out the constant buzzing angst that was shrillest in the most placid-looking frames.
All this is to say that I appreciate your indulgence for the two-week hiatus from these witty, trenchant observations about our maddening culture, room-temperature takes, and personal stories I use to illuminate trends political, intellectual, and pharmacological. And that, while I'd love to say I'm refreshed and raring to go after my time off grid, I’m still scrambling to return to the factory settings I had before the fam decamped to the geographical source of my deepest-set pathologies — Greater Boston — and found a familiar place for us all to simply exist. To spend time. To relax. To be. Perchance to lose one's shit.
I realize that with some percentage of these entries, I'm drafting my own psychiatric intake form, but I still think it's worth exploring how certain people might be ill-disposed to extended periods of time where they face a socially-constructed mandate to...relax.
If such people were show dogs, they'd be in the "working group," although some of us aren't so into working either. Nor are we kin to the redoubtable plough horse Boxer, in Animal Farm, whose false consciousness, misplaced faith, or bog-standard dumbness (he can remember four letters of the alphabet at a time) produce the totalizing workaholic psychology — expressed in his personal mantra "I must work harder" — that got him betrayed and sent to the glue factory. (Btw: did anyone else first read Animal Farm as a boring, depressing story about animals at a farm?)
Anyway, I must not work harder. I must work smarter, softer, and, ideally, less often. As a middle-aged member of the precariat, I’m no fan of drudgery, tedium, rise-and-grind, or any of the other features of this late-capitalist, post-pandemic, email-based middle-class existence we call "work." I'm grateful for every gig, and please, yes, give me more. I just wish they paid ten times as much and took a tenth as long, which AI does for precisely one demographic: CEOs of AI companies.
I enjoy all the usual things one does when not yoked to the digital plough. Hiking. Swimming. Reading. Working on impersonations. Fashioning ambushes for the kid, working on my "Cha-Cha Slide" for his birthday bootyfest, learning be-bop heads on tin whistle — nothing weird.
But for my entire adult life, when someone suggests to me that I "need a vacation," there's an internal smash-cut to the same tropical purgatory.
There I am, jackknifed into a hammock. A gentle breeze riffling the palm fronds behind me. A fuchsia-colored, umbrella-topped drink on a nearby table. Some lazy post-war slack-key guitar plays on the non-diegetic score. Against this militantly languid backdrop, a trembling shockwave begins somewhere at the base of my spine and travels upwards through my body — think Warner Bros. cartoon — until it sets my head furiously vibrating back and forth, like the clapper of an alarm bell. This being how I envision a seizure, psychotic break, or whatever the clinical diagnosis would be.
It's odd that this nightmare scenario is so externalized, not shot in POV or some more subjective cinematic convention. For some reason I'm an object in such imaginings, as I am in the scenarios that keep me from ever willingly submitting to a "me day" at a spa or similar house of horrors. Since I’m 100% sure that, as soon as I've changed into a terry cloth robe, laid myself on a table, and submitted myself to the luxurious pampering Instagram calls "self-care," I’d quickly be either dispatched by a silent intruder’s garrote or shot through my eyeglasses like Mo Green in The Godfather. (My neuroses insist on AFI classics.)
I wonder: did Brian Wilson go through something similar, having to force all that psychological darkness through the sunny Beach Boys filter? Is this some psychiatric pathetic fallacy, possibly relieved by a category-5 hurricane or volcanic eruption to reduce the cognitive dissonance with what's going on in the old bean?
Years ago, Trent Reznor told me about an ill-advised creative retreat he made to a lovely setting to work on material for a follow-up album to Nine Inch Nails' seething, kinky, pitch-black masterpiece, The Downward Spiral. He decamped to a well-appointed chalet on the spectacular cliff-formed coastline of California's Big Sur, where he could drink in the space, scenery, and quiet and just create.
"That was terrifying," he told me, someone who needed no further explanation. "I hate thinking about it, to be honest with you. Everyone was saying, 'Oh, there's a magical quality there.' Well, there was, but it wasn't the kind of magic I was looking for. It was an evil, a darkness."
Reznor said that most of the songs he wrote in this lovely place sounded "like something off Billy Joel's The Stranger," which he did not mean approvingly. And if I wrote songs, I'm sure I'd produce something similar under those conditions: soapy, melodramatic cries for help or something even darker, like the 3-minute and 25-second work of distilled, impenetrable FM-radio blackness that is "Summer Breeze," by those apparent chaos magicians Seals & Croft, blowing through the jasmine in my mind. Brrrrrrr.
What's wrong with him, with us? Masochism? Insufficient mindfulness? Since the people I'm thinking of were like this long before the dawn of smartphones, don't tell me to unplug or go do a screen detox. Deepak Chopra says he’s not a human doing, he’s a human being. But what's that being doing when he’s being human?
I think of what Wallace Shawn says in that I Ching of bourgeois-boho angst, My Dinner With Andre:
I just don't think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you're not trying to do anything. I think it's our nature to do things. I think that purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots. But without branches or roots, it wouldn't be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.
Or indeed a bump on a log.
When Andre pushes back with a little psychoanalytic non-directive response — "That makes you nervous" — Wally's exasperation speaks for all of us Club Med-phobics: "Well...well, why shouldn't it make me nervous! It just seems ridiculous to me!"
Yes. Nervous-makingly ridiculous.
Still, it’s fair to wonder from whence comes this inner shitstorm whenever some of us try to not just do something but sit there. I'd like to think that it’s sheer, blazing intelligence that prevents me from enjoying languid tropic idylls or those lazier, hazier days of summer. For that reason, I treasure that photo of the paradigm-shifting Marxist Freudian philosopher Theodor Adorno, don of the Frankfurt School, cowering under the shade of a cabana thing, dressed not in post-war tweeds but a damn one-piece bathing suit, musing on dialectical enlightenment.
But who am I kidding? My ancestry and wiring better suit me to cutting and hauling peat than creating a new school of critical theory. Yet I'd still face the exact same issues every time I visited the surface, took the wee lads to see their gran on the coast, or otherwise found myself assigned the task of vacationing, of going on holiday.
Again, Wallace Shawn comes to mind — guess it's that kind of week: check out his timely new NYRB piece on an earlier US global misadventure — as the title character in Louis Malle's post-Dinner With Andre play-within-a-play version of Chekov's Uncle Vanya, Vanya On 42nd Street (which is admittedly, the only version I've seen). In the final act, after his vicious, escalating confrontations have led to thwarted murder then suicide attempts, Vanya slumps down at a table where some bookkeeping awaits, and says, "I have to turn my hand to something." A resigned acceptance follows.
Turning your hand to something doesn’t sound so hard to do. And yet, once or twice a year, I somehow forget how much I need to do it every day. To write, build, construct, create, or otherwise put my opposable thumbs to some use some inner part of me can recognize. I can relax or even have fun as long as this isn’t the stated goal.
I do find a minor switch in terminology helps, calling whatever it is we’re doing not a vacation or holiday but a trip. Partially because this post-hippie usage is capacious enough for both horror and ecstasy, and partially because it reflects the lateral intention described in a (potentially bogus) etymology that I once read for the word serendipity. That being, Serendib, an island that, per some Arabic myth or other, you can never reach by navigating directly to it. You can only get there by setting out for some other destination, getting lost, and winding up there instead.
Is that where characters end up in every other heist or madcap crime caper? After they’ve pulled off the long con, the priceless jewel theft, or the string of casino robberies? When they’ve beaten the odds, defied their life circumstances, and set themselves up for life? With nothing to do but kick back on a hammock, sip a daiquiri, soak up the dividends, and watch the gorgeous sunset?
No wonder I hate scenes like that so much. They mean the movie’s over.
I've reached the perhaps sad state of fearing the "true" vacation I keep saying I need. In truth ... a whole afternoon at the beach? Ouch. I've got ants in my pants. ... Love the "trip" distinction.
Wow, I definitely relate to this. Vacationing is a skill I’ve never quite nailed, and I judge myself for it. Workaholism is a thing, and I have all the reasons to fall into it, via both nature and nurture.
I love the word ‘trip’ too, because at least it sounds like we’re doing… something! Hiking seems like a good middle ground.