What a weird place to be on the spectrum between the obsession with fame and the desire for privacy, anonymity.

Brian told me once about a story he read where after years of social media narcissism and a culture of unchecked self-aggrandizement, the pendulum swung the other way and people wore masks and hid from surveillance cameras.  Everybody wanted to be a ghost.

Today I caught my reflection in the window while I was buying water ice and with my big sunglasses and surgical mask, I was unrecognizable to myself!  I shut down my Facebook page too, I feel the urge to sink further and further back into the ether--for people not to know me, not remember me.  That seems more desirable to me now than attention, and yet I am writing this. (But nobody reads this.)

This morning I had a thought about life here on earth being a gestation period.  Maybe we're meant to develop as souls--serve, learn, expand our spirits--and when our bodies dry up and slough off, consciousness emerges into another phase.  A better one?  An easier one?

When I started working at Bancroft I learned about the four functions of human behavior according to B.F. Skinner and one of those was attention.  So many things we do we do solely for the attention of others--to be seen. Is it possible to outgrow the need?  Sometimes I think I can feel myself getting past it, but my involuntary fantasies tell the truth.  I always dream of writing the perfect song, making a perfect recording and feeling the glow of everyone finally recognizing my genius (that was a joke).  Is the deep need to make art just another expression of our need for the attention of others?  Yes, probably, but at least making art is a thoughtful, constructive way to assert yourself.  Better than a cheap status update.  Or is it?

Years ago, back in the 90s, I took a sleeping pill and wrote in my journal as it was taking effect.  I wrote that in the future there would be a literary movement called "Literature of the Immediate" and that instead of conceiving stories, essays, arguments, people would literally just write about what they were experiencing in the moment.  I saw Twitter coming a mile away, I guess you could say.

We're here now.  A lot of people don't let a moment's planning, second-guessing, or refining get between them and what they want to say.  Is it better?  No, I don't think so, and I am trying to go back to the old way of thinking before I speak/write.  Still--the moment is all we really have so....

There goes the monkey mind again trying to categorize existence--are you famous or are you anonymous?  Are you taking your time to think carefully enough about what you want to say and writing for "real" or are you throwing any whim that bubbles up right onto your Facebook page?  Is it weak to want others to see you or is it just natural?

Alt-right conspiracy wackos see mask-wearing as prostration to the Illuminati or whatever, an admission that one is a sheep.  But what's wrong with being a sheep?  That's what I want to know.  Every time I try to control anything, life just happens to me anyway.  So....baaaaaa, I guess.