Micronarratives of Resistance, No. 2

Beer and televised football are two of the ways America co-opts dissent and makes you part of the party, and I’m a sucker for both.

Sunday mornings, Monday mornings, Tuesday mornings, and Friday mornings are when one answers for the consequences of the beer one has consumed the night before. This morning I’m in okay shape. I didn’t really overdo it last night. I was smart and drank plenty of water between watching football and going to sleep. I’m not hung over, just a little bloated. And as I think back to last night, watching football with my sister and drinking Yards Philly Pale Ale, I remember feeling moments of nervousness that I couldn’t quite connect to any particular thought or fear. And my response to that delicate feeling, which I should have tried to just sit with and maybe discern the reason for, was instead to drink more beer, or eat a slice of cake, to use my diet to try to drown it, which even as I was doing I knew was the wrong thing to do, but this behavior has acquired the force of habit.

Diet and exercise are two of the most important factors shaping your body, and at the moment I am just shaped like someone who consumes more and exercises less than he probably should. Which is a nice lifestyle, to tell you the truth. But this whole writing project is about discipline and potential, and I am under the apprehension that I need more of the former to reach my latter.

I’m writing Google Docs, which I always do because it’s fast and handy. Writing on a laptop means the Internet is always just a click away, so right now I’m facing the same temptations that I was facing yesterday with my phone — randomly checking Facebook and twitter without consciously thinking about it. I just find myself on one of those sites and don’t remember deciding to open it. I just sort of do it without a conscious thought process. That’s how I’d define a habit.

So, then, writing will be a habit (or perhaps a practice) that I will use to at least observe the slavishness with which I allow these other habits to divert my time and attention from what I’m supposed to be focused on, which is the present moment. There are many theories for why we are so prone to slide into empty diversions. I prefer to think about them in philosophical or religious terms. The theory I currently favor is Peter Rollins’ idea that we humans have a lack that is part of the nature of our being, and we are always trying to fill this lack although it cannot be filled (except temporarily, with beer or sex or love or football or, say, god). I recently read his book The Divine Magician and I’ve been watching a five-part webinar he’s been giving over the past few weeks. For someone who was raised in a Christian faith, as I was, and who suspects that it has something to offer me but has never quite known what to do with it because of the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of belief, his ideas — his theology, you might call it — are quite enthralling, and I typically come away from his webinar episodes feeling an intellectual excitement that fills me up until it wears off, leaving me craving more.