My Year of Distress and Agitation: Desire and Prophecies

Ahhh… as the year comes to an end, I have gathered a couple more chapters for my memoir, a Lexapro prescription, and a promising esoteric plan for my effervescent future. As tangtang’s niche becomes deeply intertwined with modern relationships commentary (humiliationships are included), I, The Oracle, bring to you my wrap-up of the year. Prophecies on creation and desire, visions on the nature of wanting, and the suffering of living deliciously. My loyal, loyal readership… there’s an epidemic in the air… I worry about the public’s absence of self-respect, or worse, the public’s critical-thinking ability of a fucking tablecloth. As your scheming eunuch, let me do what I do best: advise. Here’s the first concern that truly, truly bugs me.

I’m going to call this the Unbearable Milan Kundera Effect (UMKÉ for short). I don’t love speaking badly about the dead, but here goes. Some of you hoes are tragically engaging in the thing Milan Kundera does in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where he thinly veils his own rhetoric in a poorly-developed relative metaphor. Satirising your feelings does not save you from vulnerability… I have this immense qualm with boring stories that lead to one monologue about the writer’s rhetoric on something. Be like the rest of us, write a think piece. See I’ve gotten started and now I can’t stop. There’s a plague of creating for the sake of creating. Miserable fragmented poems in your Notes app about your situationship with the aleatory ‘you’ as a way to distance yourself from the speaker, questionable slanderous songs in order to avoid actually calling your ex a cunt (like God intended), and theatre that suffers the UMKÉ phenomenon. Perhaps the outlet that allowed me to never fall into this horror is being an avid diarist. See, it is fine to make it in private as an outlet, but to attempt to commercialise it… I am not reading that essay.

How does this relate to desire? My one true passion… drawing everything back to personal relationships… the Horror of desiring in order to desire. We’ve talked about this before. Hannah has correctly identified that the desire to ‘have a crush’, to want in order to dissociate accordingly, is a widespread phenomenon (read The Year of the Situationship). Now, I do think that the feminine persuasion to do this is borne of the systemic pressure to desire a partner and to seek validation and affection. If you have ever read tangtang before, we know I’m not reserved about my opinions on women’s absence of enjoyment in singleness. No man will fulfil you. Let me not get side-tracked.

The Second-Order desire, to want to desire, is the idea that every accomplished wish is a simulacrum of the original desire. The dopamine horror of blindly wanting more and more. New clothes, new trinkets, new people, leads to the Buddhist idea that desire and attachment are the roots of all suffering. Listen, I understand better than anyone the desire to place down your devotion somewhere where it’s felt. I know this, in my heart I have devotion the likes of which could rupture the earth if it was ever unleashed. My prophecy: desire with purpose and take action in this desire. Channel this immensity into something worthwhile (not a man, I beg). Yes, desire is the root of all suffering but why should one avoid and deprive oneself of all desire, when suffering is so delicious? What is human life without loss? Possession, and grief, are not cruel ways to love. To avoid suffering is to avoid the very essence of the human condition.

Here’s the fun. crux though. You bitches like suffering. I said to NOT AVOID IT I didn’t say SEEK IT. Perhaps it is a religious thing, the Catholic penance, suffering as a means of purification… the feminine beauty of the damsel in distress. We are not gathering spiritual merit, and dare I say, in the least condescending of ways… suffering is most often not especially beautiful… nor artistic: (the Hannah commentary: see Rayne Fisher-Quann’s ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female characters’). There is nothing tragic and divine about moping around heartbroken about your situationship who isn’t in love with you, or your asshole boyfriend who makes you cry… it is self-sabotage. You, yes, you, I’m talking to you.

My year of distress and agitation has been full of brilliant anecdotes, as every year in my life always is. All caused by my hubris and inability to say no to a good story. To make you all feel better about the questionable nature of relationships in the modern world, I will share some with you. Highlights that will make the memoir include: the fully tattooed vegan who tried to convince me to bring communism back to Spain as aftercare, the Jim Morrison lookalike who almost killed me recklessly driving his huge motorcycle, and most stellar of all, Mr. “I’m falling in love with you so I can never see you again”. Best part? All guitarists. And so, I leave you here, with my beautiful fountain of endless unmedicated lore. Never stop desiring (with purpose), take the suffering as it comes, use protection. Swag city.