Out of Bounds

I was at a party the other night and I was talking to someone about zoning out. How I love to do it, especially out a window—was once called a bit of a house cat, a comparison I wear proudly. I desperately need a window, some sight line to the outside, and if I don’t have one, I’ll bore through the walls now and again with my attention.

Two work things: the brewery I work at is in an old firehouse with beautifully large windows facing out to the street (you know, where the trucks zoomed out of). Recently, the sun has shifted in course enough that at around 6pm it pours through the windows and onto the dining room. We have those handy pull down translucent shades, and on occasion they get pulled completely to the bottom. And when they do, I feel like when I was a child, and I never wanted my door closed all the way for fear of being trapped for the rest of my life. Thing two, August is the slowest month (July being second slowest) and being slow in service can be a very loaded prospect. Usually when the dominoes of not making enough are set up, I pull out my phone, I go to the bathroom, I drink soda water, I mindlessly eat, I get in an anti-social headspace at a place where I mostly get paid to be a particular version of sociable.

So instead of all that, recently I’ve just been zoning out. Defined here as being physically present and available for what few tables I have, but otherwise just staring into space. A tiny, translucent meditation in plain sight. I’ve dabbled in work nothingness before, out of requirement and sheer 10,000 hours experience, but also in the past, phones were something you were chided for having out and so a zone out was always in the cards. But now we’ve escaped from the realms of questionable permissibility, the dam washed out a million gallons ago, a phone is accepted as a sterile appendage and extension of your hand and therefore always available for a lil check in, a lil text, a lil scroll. 

But, back then, when a zone out was on the menu, if I would attempt one looking over the dining room, I would in short order get self-conscious. Playing both sides of a call and response that has happened all of my life. To wave one's hand in front and say “Earth to Greg” or other adolescent sitcom stock phrases. Or, less generously, to see someone staring into the void evokes a read of simple(”not much going on upstairs”), or sad(”1,00 yard stare”), or for instance when a homeless person does it on the street, a sort of vaguely de-humanizing pallor takes hold (”poor thing”).

Young Greg was particularly insecure about two things, not being thought of as desirable and people being worried about him (current Greg is still grappling with both of these things in therapy). A desire to be seen as self-sufficient, never needing anyone’s help, but also that sufficiency being extremely impressive, (especially to the ladies AMIRITE) was my never-uttered credo. It comes from my childhood of course, but I was as much raised by pop culture and film and books, as by my parents, and so I embodied some particularly themes of our culture at large. Your lot in life is ultimately how you will be seen, for better or worse, and your value is based on an objective, measurable rubric (you’ll remember this measurement theme from a couple months ago). Basically, in a public that functions so much in surface level tallying, your ability to perform in a variety of scenes becomes an extremely important survival tool. If people are marked for their misfortunes, then it’s important to try not to appear misfortunate. Hard times come for us all, but also ”I don’t want to hear about them, that’s depressing.”

There is a homeless woman who recently has been passing by our broad firehouse windows, talking and gesturing to tables where no one is sitting. An unthinking impulse might go “oh, there’s no one there” a hiccup from what you might expect to see. She is talking in the exact manner of more than one. But she is alone. A simple friction. But moving past the instinctual interpretation I must admit a truth. The main difference between her and me is just a house.

I live alone and have talked to people who don’t exist my whole life. I could convince you it’s a dialogue of the chorus to the muse, but why pretend I’m not like her? Being outside of society like that must put you through many different indignities, and in this moment her desire to perform for herself has overtaken her desire to perform for propriety. As a homeless person, you are incredibly visible and rarely seen. But there is nothing wrong with this expression, nothing wrong with running lines with only yourself as a dialogue partner. When a kooky artist type, or a neighborhood character gets away with it, dresses flamboyantly, collects odd things, speaks differently, or bluntly. the "it" they get away with is always being abnormal. But normal isn’t an honest description of anything in a performance culture. It would be more honest to say people are afraid of being called different. And this fear of being pushed out of bounds keeps us from seeing ourselves in others.

My friend Natasha has a bit about this in her most recent show “Childless Freak”** about the disconnect between her and her friends when they see a neighborhood character GETTING THE FUCK AWAY WITH IT, only to realize that’s not the group’s takeaway from the interaction. We are in a deeply individualistic culture, where comparing ourselves to others is a great joy, but also a recipe for the kind of wholesale thought spiral that’ll have you joining a cult, or god help you, crypto gambling.

Those are the individual outcomes of an individual society. Except there’s no such thing, and on the whole, that lack of community-oriented thinking can make us susceptible to the notion that we are facing an immigration crisis, despite the numbers not showing one. That there are millions of dangerous people living among us and not being brought to justice, despite the lack of evidence. In the comfort of the global superpower, it quite simply doesn’t mean much until you see it for yourself. What did anyone think detaining millions of “violent criminals” to our overcrowded brutal prison system and then deporting them would look like? They simply didn’t. They had to see it for themselves.

At a wedding I once compared myself to someone’s sister who they suspected was using drugs. Saying that I wonder if my family thinks of me in a similar way. This very misguided comparison, was a perfect example of trying to relate but only being able to do it by my own, not remotely relevant experience (don’t worry she just laughed at me for talking nonsense, and I laughed too). We are looking around at each other and we don’t know how to accept all the possibilities of human life. When so many of the outcomes are deemed “unacceptable” are used as marks on the door frame to prove we’re taller.

This person I was talking to at the party (let’s call him Ted, to protect his identity and also because I can’t remember) was talking about how growing up, he had a shed. Full of lawn mowers, tools, WD40, probably a pile of old boards, with just enough room for two folding chairs and a grand view of a plywood wall. And his dad, or his uncle and he would sit and just stare at the runs in the wood. And over months and years faces began to appear, characters, a particularly crazed bulldog shows up and these many landmarks become mapped to the pith and phloem. Seeing shapes outside the spotlight. And connecting with the grander nothingness of being. And what could you call it but the language of the unperformed. Let’s not let it be lost.

**Natasha will be performing Childless Freak in NYC in November