When the Words Don’t Come

by: Paul Cantor

I haven’t written that much on Medium lately. I haven’t written that much, period. I’ve been thinking about writing, but for whatever reason, just haven’t gotten around to it. I think I’m somewhat busy, but perhaps not as busy as it might seem. I could certainly find 30 minutes to jot something down here or elsewhere. I don’t know. I guess I’m kind of blanking on things.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this — I just didn’t feel like writing. Partially, it’s burnout, which I’ve discussed here before, and partially it’s just an all out feeling of having nothing of real importance to say. I’ve always wondered how people who blogged a lot during the heyday of blogging actually kept themselves going, and now I realize why they eventually stopped. At a certain point, you just run out of things to say, or you get hired by someone and go on to write words professionally.

I’ve always written here in tandem with freelance work I’ve done elsewhere, sometimes using this platform to promote that work, because I’m a very important writer you see, and for a time, I was even a contributor to Medium’s music vertical Cuepoint. This was all very fun and productive and I rather enjoyed it, but by and large I think the nature of writing — and creative work, period — is one that benefits from time off.

I can’t help but think that the months or years that musicians once took to make an album, was likely spent sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing. God knows I’ve spent countless hours in recording studios with artists who basically came in every night and yet didn’t really record much of anything. They’d show up just to show up. It was work, but then again, it was not.

In the modern era — the ‘always on’ era — I’m not sure if this is really doable. There is sort of this incessant desire on the part the audience to always be consuming things, and it’s almost like you can’t take any time off, because the minute you do, someone is there to fill the void.

With social media, every day feels like the first day of your life. It doesn’t matter what you made yesterday or a month ago or ten years ago — nobody who consumes anything actually remembers who made anything, and there’s almost no relationship at all between producer and consumer. It’s just — this thing is going viral, that thing is going viral. It’s all about topicality, not the person behind the creation.

So, you do this long enough and it does become rather tiring. Exhausting. I don’t get paid for this shit and frankly, it’s of my opinion at least, that not too many people care anyway. If I stopped this, nobody would really care. And it’s not like I have any real thoughts on any and everything that happens. The online news cycle is often pretty pitiful, and nobody who actually has to do this for a living actually wants to keep up with that shit unless their bills depend on it.

It’s also, and this I think will get more attention moving forward, particularly unhealthy. At least from a mental standpoint, that is. Subjecting your mind and attention to the often uninformed opinions and tastes of the masses every day, all day, tends to drag you down.

To wit, last year, around the time when everything online was about Israel and Palestine, at a certain point I was like, holy shit, get me the fuck out of here! It’s not that I didn’t care about the conflict per se, it’s just that it became an all out assault on my thinking. Like being exposed to a horror film for 24 hours a day, I just wanted someone to change the channel (this is not to diminish the actual real life horror the people going through it experienced).

It’s not the fault of social media or the news or even the general temperature of where society is at right now, more just a commentary on this sort of endless subjection that we sometimes put ourselves through, particularly if our bread and butter is in the world of online media and the exchange of information.

I used to feel that the internet provided some sort of respite from the real world. Like, I turned to it to escape some of the things that were going on in my own life, things I may have not wanted to deal with. What I got from it helped me exponentially in the real world, because by and large I was using the internet to inform an actual life that existed out there in the universe.

But now, things feel very circular, almost like there is line between the real world and the internet that no longer exists, and as a result, some aspects of merely even existing online no longer make much sense. The novelty of it all, the excitement, the surprise — it’s gone. When everything is on demand, nothing is on demand.

My new thing lately has been the real world. It’s my feeling that the real world is the new internet, that anything that exists online is probably no good, or at the very least on its way there. I’ve probably felt like this for a long time, but it wasn’t until recently where it really set in.

Recently, since I’ve had nothing important to write about and my general feeling is that nothing I write about has any real value to anyone anyway — no matter how much I’m getting paid these days (which is a really favorable amount, I should clarify) — I’ve taken to just going on long walks, sometimes for hours, with my camera, but occasionally without it, and sometimes not even with my phone.

I try to go somewhere I haven’t been before, because that can be at least mildly interesting, and in the process I find myself observing and discovering small things that maybe I wouldn’t ordinarily pay attention to. Or, maybe I would, but I might not necessarily note it down and/or remark on it.

One day a few weeks ago I walked to Chinatown and while walking in Chinatown is not the most unique experience, one thing about New York is that it’s always changing — every day is a little more unique than yesterday. Different people, different conversations, different weather.

In the course of my travels that day, I came to a park, Columbus Park, down around Mulberry Street. It was brutally hot that afternoon, and I had ventured into that neighborhood from the West Village, so I was already pretty sweaty by the time I arrived.

In the park, there were hundreds of older Chinese people, most of them above the age of 50, playing games, smoking and just generally having a chit-chat. Off in the center, an older Chinese woman played an instrument and sang songs in a Chinese dialect.

It was about 7 in the evening, just around the time when many of the professional people in New York get off work, and so while I sat in the park, I saw a few people — mostly white people, since Manhattan is all white people these days — scurrying across the park on the way to their luxury apartments, or whatever it is that people live in downtown these days.

The professionals seemed nice enough, in as much as most people in New York are generally nice these days — the angry New York is a relic of a bygone era, for sure — but I noticed that almost every one of them was staring down at their phones as they walked by. I’m not sure that a single person that passed through that park during the course of an hour looked up from their phone. It was interesting.

And yet all around them there were these people there, speaking a different language, lost in a social world of their own, almost none of them looking at any sort of technology, occupied with games and conversation and almost a primitive sensibility. It was like I was looking at the year 1950, except it wasn’t 1950, it was 2015, and the world had grown up around these people.

That is not suggest that this park was like an episode of the Twilight Zone, although the more I think about it like that the more it seems plausible, because some of the older Chinese people did have phones and occasionally someone would get up from a game and wander off to text message another person.

I suppose the most interesting aspect of it all was just the leisurely nature of everyone. People just seemed so relaxed. And I’m sure it was after a long day of work for some, because businesses in Chinatown — whether it’s fish markets, Chinese restaurants or little places that sell odds and ends that are imported — appear sort of strange and torturous in a very different way than staring at a screen. But there was this level of detachment there, and I felt kind of envious of it. I wanted to detach like that. To be mentally free of the bullshit, whatever that bullshit was.

And yet, I was not able to do that. I was occasionally glancing at my phone. I was thinking about things I had to do, things I hadn’t done. I was looking at other people, wondering about them and their lives. I was thinking about Manhattan, and all of its changes, what it meant for these people, and me, and everyone else. Whatever was occupying my mind, it was, to me, an inability to relax. A problem with shutting off. A problem with shutting down.

But I was not terribly inspired to write about the experience, up until I started jotting this down, and even when I set out to write this about an hour ago, I did not know that it would lead me to talking about that, specifically. In essence, even though I was there and I had these thoughts, and I was seeing these things that I certainly don’t see every day, it wasn’t like I had this strong desire to express anything about it.

Which leads me to think about the nature of experience and documentation and how the mind processes different things, how we filter out this thing or that thing for some sort of greater purpose, perhaps as a blog post or perhaps in some other story we will write, song we will sing, or picture we will paint.

A few days after I went to Chinatown, a Saturday for that matter, I left the apartment in Chelsea around 7 PM. I was alone the day prior, as well as the entire day Saturday, and so I had a lot of time to myself to sort of just think and read and be still. There is a lot of power in being still.

I took my camera out and I walked from Chelsea to Union Square, then through the East Village to the Lower East Side and eventually back through Chinatown, up and out via Little Italy, which has become touristy to the point of being laughable. It’s like Times Square with only Italian restaurants.

I found myself looking for things to take pictures of, but wasn’t terribly shocked and awed by anything I saw. Maybe because I’ve walked those streets so many times, and seen the faces and places change so many times, that it’s just not as interesting to me as it once was. I couldn’t say.

Mostly, I took pictures of people. A woman in a beautiful, long white dress, likely on her way to meet someone. A man and his companion standing outside of a bar smoking cigarettes. A bum passed out in the street with a book open in his lap.

By and large, the city felt empty to me. It could be a summertime thing, it could be the places where I was at, or it could be my age. I don’t know what it was. It just seemed sort of vaguely boring. I don’t know what happened to all the people in New York, or what happened to New York generally, but it feels kinda desolate these days.

If you walk on Houston Street, for example, right around Essex and Chrystie, there used to be so much foot traffic there on a Saturday night. People were everywhere. Now, there are big construction zones in the middle of the street, storefronts that are empty — it’s a million dollar wasteland.

By the time I came home it was around 2 AM and I was sufficiently sweaty and tired. In place of writing, where the words have been hard to come by, I took some photos, which I guess I might call progress. I’m here writing about that now, and while I have significant doubts anyone will have read this far — I don’t have much faith in the internet or readers or people for that matter — at least I know it got me to put my fingers on the keys and start typing, and it wasn’t about some bullshit that was trending on Facebook.

That’s good enough for me.