Blog 001 - the Werther Report

Some incredibly boring information about my life

I started writing this on Tuesday but even then I was already tired. Starting to feel a bit burnt out with work. The weekends feel too short, like there isn't enough time before they disappear again. The work days don't feel long either — everything seems to zip by. Weeks are quick, days are nonexistent. Evenings after work are gone in an instant. Part of this is just that I've been doing a lot of running around. A great many of those little life problems that eat up time have cropped up all at once in the last few weeks. Insurance issues, car issues, etc etc. I've spent a lot of time on the phone. Something I've noticed - when I answer the phone, I give my full name no matter how inconsequential the call, a sort of formal convention I picked up from my dad. "Hi there, it's Werther N. calling," to some random secretary at an auto shop or an office bureaucrat at an insurance company. What's nice about this is that it forces people to learn your name, and then when you call back, they already know who you are. People are afraid of phone calls. People — especially lazy bureaucrat email job type people, who just want to be left alone to do nothing — hate being called on the phone. They hate in person visits even more. When I want something done, I call or I just show up at the persons door. I tell them my name, make sure they write it down. The Sam Hyde method is real. You’ve gotta be annoying. "You're gonna listen to my fucking story for an hour." I'm gonna come into your office, I'm gonna call every single day, I'm gonna make you listen to my whole sob story until you give me what I want. You have to do this because these people, they just don’t want to be bothered. Their goal is to avoid being bothered, so you’ve gotta bother them. Eventually the effort of ignoring you surpasses the effort it would take to actually help you, and they’re forced to help. “Hi, Werther N. calling. I called yesterday, and the day before — oh, you remember me? Excellent, great. I'm here to inquire again about —” Email job people, noting this threat to their comfortable cocoon environment, will find a way to get you the thing you need or at least pass you off to someone else who can actually help you.

The unscheduled, in-person visit is the nuclear bomb of this approach. They get very upset about an unplanned visit. “Sir, you have to schedule an appointment!” “Oh, do I? Oh, geez, sorry, well pen me in for the next available slot, as soon as possible, and can I just go chat with Mr. So-and-so quickly, for five minutes? That's who I'm here to see. Yes, I couldn't get through, I called and emailed, I'm just going to go talk to him. Yes, I’ll just step through here and — no, I’m sure he’ll be fine with it.” You have to be as polite as possible (that’s the only way this will work) while in your head repeating fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

The goal of people these people is to do as little as possible. They just want to sit for 8 hours and then go home. The best possible outcome for them is to shut you down — for them to say, "sorry, you're calling the wrong office," or "sorry, I can't help you with that, because..." This is satisfying for them on two levels — one, to shut you down is the fastest way back to their stagnant, yeast life existence, it gets them out of work as quickly as possible and two, because the only way they can derive satisfaction is through depriving you, a random stranger, of whatever it is you want. "You have the wrong office," but what they would like to say is “You have the wrong office, dumbass, go fuck yourself.” Then they’ll go off to the break room and laugh with their similarly resentful coworkers. The only thing they enjoy is to deprive. I refuse to take it. I make myself even more annoying. I force them to help me, I call every single day until they get me the thing I want. I will not be longhoused by the office secretary.

It’s not all bad, of course. Eventually you get someone who is capable, who answer your call with “yeah, let me get that sorted out for you.” It’s a relief. When you speak, finally, to someone who uses language not to try to get you to leave, not to politely tell you to fuck off, but to actually communicate - thank God. All that to say, after enough calling, I’ve found myself a good mechanic who doesn’t bullshit me, and the insurance problems have been solved. Praise the lord.

Anyway. What’re we up to here. What’s this all about. My idea is this: I’d like to write some blog posts that are true blog posts. The idea is off the cuff, rambling, talking about whatever is going on in my life, posted rapidly with little editing. More than anything putting to paper those smaller ideas that aren’t quite ready for an essay. Sometimes writing a bit about a half baked idea turns it into a full idea. More importantly, it gets the idea out of my head and onto paper so I can stop thinking about it. It’s a kind of therapy. Get the fingers moving, think out the idea physically with my hands. Of course I also figure that content that comes faster than once every two months might encourage more subscribers.

I’d also like to write in a more personal manner sometimes. I feel as though the essays I put together must be a impersonal, but sometimes I’d like to just talk to the reader. Have a chat. Friendship simulation. Hopefully I’ll bang one of these out once a week. I don’t plan to stick to a schedule because I’m terrible at scheduling stuff like this, but once a week is vague enough that I think I can pull it off.

I’ve been reading widely, kind of all over the place. I reread Hamlet for the first time since highschool. There will be much to say about that, but the gist of it is, I am stunned by the language and now realize I have to read all of Shakespeare. I’ve nearly finished Anna Karenina, which I’ve been reading on and off. I think I’ve cheated myself by not reading it continuously — I’ve forgotten characters and situations and themes because my reading of it has been so sporadic. Maybe a reread someday. Working on the Ordeal of Civility, of which also there is much to say. Some books on personal finance that I’ve been dabbling in. Thinking of picking up Faust next, which I was putting off on the premise that someday I’d learn German and read it, but I haven’t learned German and I don’t think I should wait up.

I finished a play I wrote. I’ve submitted it to some places. I don’t expect to hear back. I think its good, and I’m pleased with it, but it is also plainly a first attempt at a play. That Nietzsche quote about how one knows how to build a house after having built it. I won’t be publishing it here. But again, I am pleased with it, and I am inordinately proud that I have finished a project of such length. More than anything, it has given me ideas for more plays. Writing the first has opened a dam and I feel that I have much, much more to write for the stage. Writing plays is a pleasure. There are things you can do and say that can only be said on the stage.

I have an idea for a new play, about Paches, an obscure Athenian general who was really at his height as Athens fell. That will require more study of Thucydides, which I’ve stopped and started at least three times. Not stopped because it wasn’t interesting, but because the work was massive. You have to keep notes to read Thucydides. You have to be very engaged, you have to reference maps and explanatory texts about Greek economic and political and legal systems, about how they build their boats and how specifically their engagements are fought. And you have to keep the players in your head and you have to think about them. It’s hard and necessitates all your focus, which I haven’t been able to give it. I want to do a good job of it.

I’ve got some other ideas in the pipe. An essay about Oedipus, Hamlet, and Uncle Vanya or maybe The Cherry Orchard, about how Freud got the idea wrong about Oedipus, about what tragedy means, and how the conception of tragedy — beginning with Aristotle’s immaculate Poetics — has carried through all of these works. About how the superego is not the father but the Thou, the big Other — the superego is guilt, not shame. Freud thought it was shame. Freud raised his particular shame to the level of the Universal, turned his own resentment for his father into a Universal resentment of the father. That is his sin. Ordeal has appeared at the perfect time for this essay, it has clarified so much, but I think I have to finish it before I start writing. I’d like to write something more artistic in the meantime instead of an essay. I have some ideas for that — a short story, written in the style of Buchners Lenz, about mental illness but really about being Alone. I have ideas for the style and tone that would differ from my usual penchant for imitating the realism of Chekhov or Turgenev. Another short story idea, focusing on style again, about a summer night in May. Really honing in on the aesthetics. I’d like to write that in the opposite tone of realism, with the author speaking to the reader like he is telling the story to a friend, as a little experiment. As for the content of the story, who knows. My notes are vague on that part.

Finally I’d like to write some more poetry. I’ve sent a few poems to a good friend and he has not, to my surprise, told me they were dogshit. Reading Hamlet has shaken me, in terms of the poetry of the English language. The words of Hamlet, the rhythm of them, has been ringing in my head. I want to write like that. Part of my idea for the Paches play would be to write it nearly in verse — not quite, but extremely poetically, to almost trick the audience into sitting for a verse play. That implies a theater audience, which as of yet I do not have.

My bench press is up. 165lbs for three. Went for four but had to drop it. Laugh at me if you like, but you forget that Werther, my namesake, is canonically a twink, and so am I. I’m doing the Nietzschean thing guys. I’m overcoming my natural condition. Man is a bridge between twink and the physique of the average Athenian male. Every time you think you’re looking pretty jacked, remember the Doryphoros, remember that it was not an ideal as the lying scholars will tell you — “no group of people has EVER been handsome, strong, and intelligent!” they cry, hunched over their desks — but remember that in Athens it was a cultural standard, they all looked like this, and despair. You think I am being romantic, but you haven’t read Xenophon, where Socrates chastises a young man who has given up the weights in pursuit only of intelligence. He can chastise him like that because it was expected that the young man lifts — not for himself, not for girls, but for the good of the state, because the bodies of the people did not serve the State but in fact were the state, because in Athens the people did not serve the State, but were the state.

Visited my family last weekend. At their house in the country I got to witness a little family of foxes. The mother was bright orange, the father was a silver fox which means his coat was black, with a white tip. Healthy, well fed, beautiful animals. Bounding after them were two little foxes. They let me watch them for ten minutes, staring back with ears up high, before scampering off into the woods. A beautiful little family. God, I’ve seen what you’ve done for others, and I want that for me.

Next time I think I’ll write a bit about Chekhov, who has long been my ideal, both as author and human being. I haven’t written about him much because it strikes so close to the heart, he means a great deal to me. But in a blog, maybe I can be a little more personal.

That’s all for the WertherReport. Back to reading. Every hour is precious for it. Good luck.