You Are Not A Lifestyle Brand
The tip is not the iceberg.
The Texas sun rose high as the lord himself this fine morning. Too bright to appreciate fully. I’ve been awake for six hours, stirring, toggling between DVR’d NFL Network documentaries and chain-smoking cigarettes in the crisp moonlight. I walk out onto the balcony of my one-bedroom, feigning interest in the gym. I walk to the gate of my condo complex and, bleary-eyed, remember I’d left my headphones at the office. There’d be no workout today.
I saunter back inside and glance at a guitar that’s been collecting dust for months now. I miss that ol’ thing. I miss the way the spun-steel calloused my fingers as I glided up and down the fretboard. She’ll be back in my arms someday. Someday.
As I walk into the dimly-lit kitchen to Keurig a cup of coffee, I try to muster strength and a smile. Another wasted evening. Counting minutes, laying limp and catatonic, in a daze watching NFL morning shows. The thick fog rolls in. I slip away into sleep for fifteen minutes only to be rudely awoken by an alarm I’ve yet to outwit. I shower. I chug another cup of coffee, too quickly, and hop into my car to commute to work somewhere within the ballpark of on time. I used to play music in this car. Used to blast Kendrick Lamar at ear-splitting range and car-rap to myself. Most days it’s just quiet now. Thinking about everything and nothing. This is me — the me you don’t see. The me that we all share in common. The hidden layers underneath what we share with each other. The rest of the iceberg.
Iam going to die alone. I don’t mean that in the pitiful sense, but in the actual truest sense of the word. We all die. We share that in common. But we do not die together. We do not spend eternity in the same place. It is the grand cosmic loneliness of never being able to fully cohabit that partitions us into selves. We are all on our own icebergs, fractured and floating away from the poles of our youth, drifting toward and away from each other, watching time melt away until we inevitably sink. This is the loneliness of the self. This is the only identity we have.
It is the grand techno-joke of the 21st Century that we’ve convinced ourselves that our every activity makes for compelling content worth viewing: People now live-stream their golf practice, their morning routines, their cooking prep. People now Snapchat 15-second snippets of every beat-drop, every Beer-a-Rita, every snowball fight, every painfully long wait for the 7-train. I believe we do this because we are fundamentally lonely, and because the small, the quaint and the mundane is the undersea iceberg base that we all have in common — they’re the things that make us feel a little more connected. I introduced this column with a rundown of the iceberg below the surface because I suspect it isn’t all that much different — in tone, content or consequence — from what you might be doing with yourself. So, so much of what we do is so small, so quaint, so mundane, that it won’t register on the eulogy when we inevitably pass.
I’m guilty of stretching my insecurities, my experiences, my dreams and my occasional irrational optimism into sentences and paragraphs. I try and turn my uniquely individual burdens and boons and turn them into little art projects. Presumably for the sole reason of feeling less lonely. To feel less confined to the prison of my body. To shout across the ocean and hope another one of you on one your icebergs can hear me. Maybe we drift together, dock, and share a Beer-a-Rita. One more before I die. Or before you do. Whichever happens first. One will always happen first.
I suppose, in that way, what I do isn’t all that much different than posting a picture of my child and remarking how enchanting and fleeting this life all is, how precious every moment can be, and how I blessed I am to share this space under a sunbeam of So Much Love(TM). Our Instagram feeds have become a window into our lives, but they can never quite be a window into our deepest selves. That’s why we’re still lonely despite being so transparent. For a window is not a doorway. We can look, but not touch. Our brands are not our soul, no matter how much life we breathe into them.
It’s mid-day now. The sun has faded and the clouds have rolled in, and this bitterness is all that remains. I shuffle through some papers, and update my swipe file for things I may write in the future. I do much of this in the grayed-out quiet of an office. I sip some more coffee. I breathe deeply. I don’t have a compelling desire to turn this into anything of consequence, certainly nothing worthy of a re-tweet. I am not a lifestyle brand. I bleed. I spit. I snore like a buzz-saw. I am many things, but I am mostly a body.
That body is now 35 years old, 5'7", somewhere between 155 and 210 pounds depending on the day, and it suffers from a variety of ailments, mental and physical. I spend a lot of time talking about social media, friendship, the American dream, technology, ego, the awkwardness of self-promotion, achievement, learning, success, individuality, failure, expectations, thoughts, lies, change, love, time, death and the very nature of reality. Somehow, it all loosely hangs together. And I talk about myself, but very rarely talk about me. Not the me you usually read. Or the me you think you see. The capital-M me. The one below the surface. The one that drifts in and out of sleep texting casual acquaintances like we’re old friends while Netflix chills in the background.
I’ve been awake for 12 hours now, lamenting my awkward and unnecessary texts from last night, wondering when I’ll work up the energy to invoice a client, dreaming of cigarettes and whiskey, dreading talking to people until my confidence returns and this feeling of existential ache clears. I’ll hit publish now, and within minutes, I’ll see 17 views and zero likes. That’s fine: I didn’t write this for you. I wrote this for Me. I am going to die alone. Everything you read is just me trying to get all the words out before the iceberg melts. My data trail is my legacy. My soul will leave the earth. My body will decay. The Texas sun will set, and my words will be all that remain.
