Avoid the dervish

Land ho. Home from the sea. We sailed for a week. Now we’re back in Chicago, on the cusp of frozen. But the sun is out.

Liam and Casey look out at the North Atlantic.

The people on the Cayamo floating music festival are kind. Some people balk at the idea of being “trapped” on the ocean with thousands of strangers. In our case, these thousands of strangers are so sweetly music-loving. They spend all day walking, ambling, scootering from atrium to atrium, pool deck to lilting in-ship theater, to appreciate music they’ve loved for forty years or never heard of before. With detours to the soft-serve ice cream machine in between.

My dad played a set with Nickel Creek (“Tweedy Creek”), a solo set, and a set with Liam, Sammy, and me. We played new songs. I cried behind my sunglasses from the poolside stage, as I can’t seem to keep myself from doing when we play (old or new songs, different overwhelmth, same salt).

We watched the Oscars on the ship, beamed in by satellite. There’s a photo of my family and our dear friends Austin, Matt, Sharon, Cathy, Leslie, and Crystal crowded around an iPad, looking at least 1% like the Situation Room on May 1, 2011. Maybe we’re watching Adrien Brody’s speech.

At the end of the trip, we saw debris from Elon’s Starship burn up in the atmosphere. For about twenty seconds, it streaked across the sky like a formation of slow-moving meteors. Or an ICBM. Or aliens. We had no idea. Thankfully no one was on board.

Speaking of loathsome, antisocial individuals…

I read Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte on the ship, after my dad read and loved it. What a disturbing, hilarious, depressing, fun, true-to-life book. (True to whose life, I’m not totally sure.) It’s a lampoon of vapid identitarianism. But it’s also a heart-tugging picture of terminal loneliness. Each chapter—especially the first two—has a protagonist who can’t seem to relate to anyone deeply, no matter how hard they try. Or else they’re incapable of trying. Or they refuse to try.

Those are the two questions of the book for me: Do those characters have any hope of building a real relationship with someone else on this planet?

And has their pain so far been caused by things they can control, or things they can’t? Can they choose to be cooler, chiller, less oblivious, less selfish, more genuine, less fearful, more secure, etc? Or are they just like that?¹

It’s a scary question because, if you can’t change those things, then, well, life is really hard.

I’ve been wondering for a long time how much stock to put into the idea that some people are just born with more of an ability to get along well with others. I’m definitely not interested in letting anyone off the hook for antisocial behavior or for their pity parties. But it seems like some people have to overcome a lot—both within themselves, and outside of themselves—to have the kinds of relationships that most people take for granted. And that deserves consideration. Maybe even active help!

Still, it’s more comforting to believe in people’s agency (because it means there’s hope for them and hope for yourself, too) and I believe, mostly, in Tony’s characters’ agency. Most of them could do more to get out of their heads, to be more sincere in their friendships, and to stop making excuses for themselves. They have many odds stacked against them (racism, all sorts of isms, “narrow shoulders,” repressive parents, small towns), but they’re still making choices. They throw every warning, advice, and punishment from the world back in its face. (That might be the most terrifying thing about the book, the best evidence of their lack of agency: that they never understand those signals. They’re impervious to learning, from the most gingerly given feedback to the most vicious chide.)

I’m glad that Tony eventually takes the book away from the plausible and into total absurdity so that we don’t have to bear the pain of those questions for too long. It travels from near to far in distance from our own most likely mistakes, pathologies, troubles. Mercifully.

If there’s any simple word of encouragement or direction in Rejection, I think it’s “beware of self-loathing.” You fail to figure out how to be ok with yourself, and then you turn into a whirling dervish of erratic, ridiculous, exhausting behavior.²

Avoid the dervish. Take care of yourself.

Spooncer

P.S. Big news from Casey. And a new song!

This post includes a Bookshop.org affiliate link.

1. There’s a moment in the book where some navel-gazing Stanford students ask themselves basically the same question: Are personality disorders a disability? We don’t blame people for their disabilities. We do blame them for being assholes. When do we say someone can change but won’t, and when do we say they can’t?

2. Kinda ironic to bring up dervishes in this context, since the real ones have a prayer practice of “listening” that UNESCO has called one of the “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”