ASSIGNMENTS:
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Steve Porter
San Francisco, California USA
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REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
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Advice to myself at age 22
Dear Steve,
I'm writing to you from 12 years away on a day that did not go well. I stormed out of (yet another) office cubicle job after my passive/aggressive condescending lower level manager got so far under my skin I thought we were going to come to blows right then and there. Good thing I got the hell out of Dodge, too, he's a big black dude.
Steve, you will not get adjusted to the American working world. This is a very heavy piece of news, the magnitude of which you will only comes to grips with by incremental degrees of pain over the next years. Of course there will be a few moments here and there when you can come to the surface and breathe a bit more than usual but essentially you have a problem with authority figures that is very ingrained. You'll get laid again, don't worry about that. Not as much as you'd like, of course, but don't sweat that. It's the job thing. It's bleak and even from an older and (theoretically) wiser perspective it doesn't look like there's any end in sight. I write this because there is one thought that is as crystal clear to me now as it has ever been: most people are getting strung tight and aggravated about things that don't really concern them and because of this they begin to decorate their drudgery with false pretensions of meaning and altruism. It's a sickening hypocrisy to hear, when the word spirit comes from the mouths of those gathered by nothing more than stark economic necessity, and the rage you experience when you witness this distinctively American phenomenon will keep you up at nights.
And as strange as it may sound, I don't have any advice for you to set it straight or try to make your struggle smoother in some way. Far from it, this letter is to try to prepare you for some degree of acceptance of the fact that you will not follow in your father's successful footsteps. Instead I advise you to pick up that guitar and learn how to play ASAP instead of at the age of thirty. It's been four years since I started and I love it. As long as you play, I mean really play every day, your outward/statistical/financial world can fall apart-and it will, many times-but you can stay sane. As long as you play an instrument you are doing something productive and meaningful even if the shits at the workplace can't hear it.
Over the next few years Henry Miller, Max Weber and his thoughts about the Protestant work ethic, and Nietzsche will influence you profoundly and this is for the most part a good thing. BUT you have to remember to read Nietzsche carefully. Stick with his inspiring moments and dispense with his dark ones because they can be very bleak indeed.
(Dad, by the way, will begin to speak of a prolonged adolescence-his words-when you begin to recount your struggles to him. When he does this please ask him what adulthood is.)
Four more things before the Closing Thought:
1. That Nicole girl is something else. Maybe you shouldn't be so apathetic about what she's up to when she graduates a year after you.
2. Beware the guys you grew up with. They are friends from boyhood and you had some very bonding drug experiences with them but that doesn't mean that as an adult you are obligated to spend time with them.
3. When that food runner at Perry's Restaurant starts calling you an SOB while you're training to be a waiter, this will happen on a Sunday morning during a horrible brunch shift, smack him. Smack him hard.
4. True, the year in Heidelberg was wonderful, but you can't have it, nor the Parisienne by the name of Isabell, back again. Don't get overly nostalgic about your care-free European days.
And finally, a consoling thought from Friedrich himself and one that I think will see you through some hairy shit:
"Any man who seeks to construct his own heaven finds the strength for it in his own hell."
-Nietzsche
Sincerely,
Steve Porter
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