Zechariah’s Notes

I’m in my notebook tonight, not where I’m supposed to be. It’s late and I should be in bed by now, but it’s rare for me to actually have the energy to write like this.

Anyway, 

There is an old man in the Bible named Zechariah that Peter, my good friend from The Observer, told me about. The man loses his ability to speak when he questions the validity of the Lord’s angel, Gabriel, who visits Zechariah to tell him he will have a son that will be the newborn John the Baptist, despite him and his wife being old in years. “You will be speechless and unable to talk until the day these things take place,” Gabriel said to Zechariah. When the day came that Zechariah had a son, people asked him what his son’s name would be, and he wrote on a tablet: “John is his name.” At that point, his speech was healed.

I am somewhat of an Atheist, but anyone is capable of telling good stories, including Christians. And for some reason, it seems to me that the best things we have to say come to mind when someone has cut off our tongue. At least that’s the case for me. When I get anxious, I have a lot more to say. But just then, for professionalism’s sake, is when I also most need to keep quiet. One night when Peter and I were working together in the office, I tried a technique for which I used a whiteboard to write what I was thinking in order to talk to everyone less. It didn’t work, because I kept talking to people in the office. But in class, I’ve come to do it with this notebook. So the great thing about writing is that I can say the things that I want to say with more permanence. And I’m not interrupting anyone at work.

First, though, I should probably set some ground rules.

Rules:

1) There is no subject that is permitted from discussion in this notebook, only subjects that sound so stupid talking about that you might as well save the embarrassment.

2) Your grandma might read this.

On radicalism

Radicals: I think radicals are more conscious than humans should be. If you look at them, they’re probably pretty damn depressed. Very little acts of cruelty will surprise a radical, though it will upset them if they’re real enough. They likely already knew it was possible for humans to do such a thing, to be so evil. It’s a depressing view, if you don’t simply dismiss it as wrong. I don’t mind radicals because — as long as you don’t disagree with them to their faces — you can easily become one of the “good guys” in their eyes.

I have an aunt, for example, who hates COVID vaccines. There’s dangerous shit in those Bill Gates shots, she’ll say. I love her, obviously, but just like how she can fake her vax card, I can fake it and say that I don’t have one. I’m not a communist, but when I’m around a communist named Alex, I can act like one to him! And then I become what Alex agrees with, the type of person he likes, even though in the end, what a young member of the radical bourgeois hates most is himself.

Notre Dame’s Solidarity Club, the school’s democratic-socialists club, hosted an off-campus party on a Friday night in the spring, and I showed up to watch the live music. The Rug-Rats were playing live music at the party, and their bassist, Ben, is one of my best friends. And all his friends, who I also love hanging out with, were there. And they had weed, too. Lit. The acoustics were shit, but I was having a great time. An old friend approached me and laughed at me: “I didn’t know you fuck with the radicals,” she said. I laughed it off, but that wasn’t necessarily true. That day, I had texted Ben asking him what time he’d get on to perform: I didn’t want to spend more than a little time listening to radical poetry about pp space condoms — I wish I was lying — if I didn’t have to.

I don’t know how to classify my thoughts on radicals, but I would say that my depressed day is a radical one. I relate to the radicals. I, too, love the feeling of listening to the Strokes. It’s fun to say anything starting with “fuck the.” Any sports fan knows this: Fuck the Celtics. Fuck the Cowboys. Fuck the Yankees. And as the radicals put it: Fuck the CIA. Fuck the Republicans and fuck the fake-ass Democrats, too. And fuck me for being nothing but a part of the problem. But depression combined with more depression does not produce happiness. It produces more depression, that’s all. It should make sense now why I didn’t want to hear those fucking democratic-socialist poems. It might be true that democratic socialism occurs, and works, in some parts of the developed world. Or so I’ve heard. But all I know is that in South Bend, Indiana, the hopes of the “dem-socs” are bleak as could be. It was an odd thing — a weird vibe — being at a social gathering of semi-marxists featuring booze and bands along with manifestos and gloomy poetry. The group’s goals for the night were conflicted: social fun does not mix with a hyper-consciousness about our fucked-up world.

On free shit

In college, you learn the value of free shit: take it while you can. I’m writing with a free pen I picked up yesterday morning, in fact. My desk is filled with library books. They let me check out as many as I want for the whole semester! It’s like free books for a semester! I have 14 books checked out at the moment.

Isa Sheikh, my other best friend, reflected on his lifetime love for libraries in a beautiful little inside column for The Observer, in which he successfully convinced me to return to libraries for myself. “During my far too frequent study breaks,” he wrote, “I search up a book in the library catalog to find its reference number and go up the elevators, sauntering through the aisles to find it. Whether or not I ultimately read it, that ritual has gained its own significance.” It’s true: books are far more fun to look at than to actually read. Isa, by the way, has over 30 books checked out of the library. Curiosity in this world persists. 

Free books, even if temporary, are free, and so make us happy. Free shit makes us ridiculously happy. Free food? I’m on that shit. Free coffee? Hell yeah, even if I’m already caffeinated. Free stuff is so great that it makes us happy even when it’s not free. Think about sporting events where a $90 ticket gets you a “free” rolled-up poster. You still hang that shit up in your room. Notre Dame gives us students $500 to spend on campus for the semester, and it feels good to spend regardless of what our parents spend to send us here.

Intermission: quotes that I’ve liked recently

“I think the new American dream is to leave, to go to Hemingway’s Paris, say “goodbye to all that”... I came, I saw, it hit me: moving to a different city won’t fix you.” –Some guy I saw on Twitter.

“Down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might have-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home.” - something Joe Gould (1889-1957) apparently once wrote

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”-Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Pretty incoherent shit (page 1)

Everything we try to define is fated for questioning into why we define it that way. Anytime we say “____” is “____,” some fucker out there would be willing to put up a fuss about it. Question, though: Why should we expect anyone to have particularly good opinion on the question of what is art? And on the flipside, how could anyone have a particularly bad opinion on the matter? Art is subjective; which is to say art is; which is to say nothing. But as a verb, art can be anything. And people have done this verb, they’ve art-ed in so many damn ways you’ll never be able to understand all of them or even appreciate any but a select few in a vast ocean of useless shit.

Random digression (page 2)

 I liked author Joseph Earl Thomas’s response to that dumb Economics student (dude rubbed me the wrong way), who asked him if he worried about violence being desensitized among youth. Thomas was answering questions in an event at Notre Dame about his new book (which the kid said he didn’t read), Sink: A Memoir. I was there because I thought I had to go for a class, but I apparently didn’t have to.

Thomas employed a broader consciousness in response to the kid, pointing out the way in which the very land we live on is ours following 400 years of slavery and genocide of indigenous people, and therefore we’re already desensitized to violence. Great answer, maybe smart people having to answer questions from dumb people is quite important.

It was also cool to me how Thomas unapologetically thought out loud during the booktalk. People often scoff at those who like to do this, like, “okay, Socrates.” At least I do that to myself, to my brother who does the same thing, and to that kid who we called “Socrates” from my freshman year dorm who always wore a trench coat, smelled horrendously, and always talked about philosophy. But so what if you haven’t read as many books as Oscar Wilde? It doesn’t mean you can’t think worthy thoughts because these days, our exposure to the surrounding world is far more than ever before anyway. Of course it’s still on us, though, to sift through all this information, to make connections between unlike things, to notice what is weird and appreciate it.

A Note On Keeping a Notebook (my version)

I’m dizzy in the head and I have to wake up in 5 hours, but I’m glad I got this writing in. This red spiral notebook, I won’t lie, has been my saving grace this semester. It’s like a life-line for the thoughts that seem too urgent to hold in.

I’ve always loved the idea of notebooks. For $1.99, you get limitless potential, depending on how you fill the damn thing up. But an empty notebook, of which I’ve had many, becomes wasted potential with enough time. It’s a classic problem of hopefulness, perhaps showing how dangerously similar it can be to hopelessness. You let the notebook sit on your desk for a while, maybe doodling on some of the first couple of pages, not exactly thinking of anything special to do with it. Eventually, you lose faith in it, and throw it away. And a few months later, you cycle back into it when you see a cute little notebook for sale at the school’s bookstore.

That said, when you do form the habit of turning to your notebook as a friend in the way that I have, it becomes hard to control. When I did, it became such an important part of my night to write down my thoughts that I felt the definition of Didion’s “compulsivity” stir through my gut. It became my time of self-care as a bogged-down student. And the most amazing thing was that I began to enjoy sharing these thoughts with others. It is, after all, an outlet for my thinking when I have something to say.