I’m losing my sense of what constitutes an excuse anymore.
I can’t seem to find the dotted line that separates it from empathy or explanation.
I try to excuse certain people their disagreeable actions, understand that they’re, perhaps, in a rush, insecure, just havin’ a bad day. I try to give myself that same grace, excusing away my fatigue, my timidity, my inability to have done something that I’d said I wanted to.
But then I end up making excuses.
And when I go and look on the internet for little quotes to put at the top of my newsletter about excuses, all I get are aggressive tropes like “EXCUSES ARE FOR THE WEAK!”
At what point, though, is it an excuse when we know that the food is bad for us, the pants hurt our backs, the screens make us unable to sleep, the people making the news just want us to be angry and confused, and the social media keeps making teens commit suicide?
I’m sorry to be morbid, but when “Deaths of Despair” is a stat we now track1 how much slack are we allowed to give ourselves? Ask your friends if they feel like they’re achieving what they believe themselves to be capable of: perhaps that overwhelming sense of “No, I have it all right in front of me, but I just can’t seem to be who I want to be” is not exactly some grand coincidence.
But at what point is that all just another excuse?
Clearly, I don’t have the answer.
But perhaps asking the question is the best way to find out.
Three Things I’m Grateful For
1) The White Album by Joan Didion
Many of us know the famous opening lines (“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”) but it was what came next that most made me grateful, having just the other day picked back up the book for the umpteenth time in search of inspiration— and finding it, yet again, in its tidy pages.
Time’s a flat circle, and here we stand again at a moment of calamity, of head-spinning twists and turns that seem almost engineered to leave your sense of reality slipping out of your grasp.
Enter Joan, documenting an era of paranoia and calamity (the late ‘60s) and her attendant nervous breakdown. “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself,” surprisingly soothing words at a time when I feel quite similarly2.
To know that while perhaps we haven’t exactly been here before, but have, in fact, been here before, is always a bit reassuring. But it's her manner of restraint—the way she simply holds things up to the light with a cocked eye, letting you in on the judgment without saying it out loud—that feels like an important reminder.
It was hard to surprise me in those years. It was hard to even get my attention. I was absorbed in my intellectualization, my obsessive-compulsive devices, my projection, my reaction-formation, my somatization, and in the transcript of the Ferguson trial.
Are we meant to find fault in her? In the therapy-speak of her age? In the way “those years” made her feel?
Or are we just meant to be sympathetic because damn I don’t feel much differently these days…
2) Radiooooo
I’ve said a few too many times in these internet pages that I don’t know what to listen to these days—and the Spotify algorithm just ain’t cutting it.
So, I’ve taken to listening to Radiooooo (yes, it has 5 Os), an app that lets you literally scan the globe, pick a country and a decade and choose your multi-select of “Slow, Fast, and Weird” and let it’s DJs curate a playlist for you.
Brazil in the 2010s has been dope for getting going. 1960s Ethiopia has been great for slowing down. But there’s also mood playlists and fun shuffle modes that take you across the globe. Save tunes you like to your own playlists, and discover new stuff as you go. No robots involved.
3) Good Produce
One thing I most certainly take for granted living in Los Angeles is the year-round abundance of good, fresh fruits and vegetables. They may try to sell you a peach in a New York February, but I would not recommend eating it. Here, it’s actually not bad.
When we got back from our latest trip to France, our subletters had left some “American Food” in the pantry: Doritos, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, microwavable chicken potpie. And yes, of course, eventually I ate all it3.
The stomach aches and general feeling of terribleness did not surprise me. The desperate craving for more fake-sugar-stuffs did.
Thankfully we have now rid ourselves of things that make you full but keep you hungry. Our fridge is full of cucumbers and berries, pears, peaches, and sweet potatoes. They make me feel good inside.
And they also make me feel better about going to get that donut every once in a while.
-David
P.S. My Next Single is out on March 13th. Give it a lil pre-save love pretty please!
Spoiler: it’s on the rise!
My next single comes out March 13th and opens with the words “I’m pretty sure I don’t believe most of what they told to me cuz mostly what they told me wasn’t true.”
Sorry, weed is legal.