I moved some stuff from a bigger, more expensive storage unit to a smaller, cheaper one. I rent from a storage facility up north that’s adjacent to a companion animal rescue nonprofit and an organic macrobiotic (mostly) vegan food prep warehouse.
The storage company was founded by a guy who’s into sports & adventure travel. Plastered all over the facility are ridiculously aspirational posters that depict people decked out in REI fashion gazing from mountain peaks they’ve just scaled or portaging kayaks that they’re about to launch out into the South Pacific. In the freight elevator is a testimonial from the world-famous surfing champ whom all the beach dudes at my Southern Cal public high school worshipped. All of this imagery is meant to suggest that the storage facility exists to hold your worldly possessions while you are out in wide world wilderness scaling mountain peaks and chasing the waves of an endless summer. I joke with the site manager about making new posters depicting the real reasons why people resort to storage: tiny residences, hoarding habits, lack of organization…
Miguel the mover helps me move my boxes from the old to new unit. He’s originally from Peru and radically friendly. As we stack boxes onto carts, we chase away the silence by talking about Peruvian food, East Asian food. Before he started his moving business, he drove a delivery truck that mostly carted supplies to Chinese restaurants. He got to know the restaurant owners well and they would gift him with dim sum, moon cakes, and other treats, because he was always nice & likable. “I’m always nice and kind to people,” he says, “because I don’t see any reason to be mean.”
His statement really strikes me, and I resolve to think about it more later. It is now later. After the move, I go down to the snack shack by the water to get a bowl of chowder to go with my sandwich. I learn that there are wild chickens living in the marina. Here’s one that jumped out from the bushes by my car and started plucking up all the strawberries someone had dropped in the parking lot.
It is now much much later. I am working on my new habit: writing/blogging at night in bars. Tonight it’s the shipping container on B, where the drag show has just wrapped up. I’m outside catching some whiffs of fresh town air as the Friday night dance party spills out the door. This probably wouldn’t be Miguel’s scene but I believe he would groove with the positive energy. His aspiration is to start a Peruvian catering business. He has that warmth and caretaking energy about him, looking after his daughters, people, with his cooking. “No point cooking if I’m not cooking for others,” he says. He learned to cook from his dad.
Which brings me back to kindness as the absence of meanness, malevolence. Hannah Arendt: evil is a banal emptiness, an absence of individual responsibility, an absence of the person, in place of which the faceless totalitarian system takes over with its levers of bureaucracy, its daisy chain of command vanishing to infinity.
I can see all that, but in today’s toxic media fueled streams of dysfunctional negativity, it’s worth considering the fulsome fullness of evil, its excessiveness and all the wasted collective effort required to keep it going. I think of the obsessive meme calling and garbage dumping around the Heard-Depp trial, for example. All the work that goes into shoveling more shit onto the shit pile, which is really nothing more than a game of one upmanship and self protectiveness. Assuming that the world is out to get get you, the logical paranoid reaction is to strike at it first, to scramble up to the top of the food chain at the expense of the weak, the scapegoats.
In Miguel’s formulation, you need a reason to be mean. Fear and paranoia are certainly reasons enough.
Absent that, what? Some unadorned security blanket of a person, the ferocious skin of a lion draped around the shoulders of the individual. To be unafraid of being alone or ridiculed.
Or to follow the line of thought of another Michael, Montaigne of France, if outcomes are largely out of human control and left to the whims of Fortune, then not much is lost by taking the most direct route of action of being merciful and decent.
The outcomes may not be assured, but at the very least one can be assured of proceeding with a clear heart and mind.
Recalling now what a friend once said about the secret to his favorite band’s longevity and generosity of output, both in their own work and the work of other artists sponsored/supported by them: that they operated from a core ethos of kindness.
Postscript:
Rereading the above, I’m struck by the yawning gap between the deep thoughts I believed I had formulated in my brain and the actuality of the words typed out on this screen. No doubt this was the outcome of punching out letters on my phone amid plumes of smoke rising from the spliff just lit up behind me, as the grave, gentle, beautiful face of the maternal queen named The Dove gazed upon her circle of acolytes assembled on the sidewalk in various motions of bump-and-grind, rhythmic swaying, and awkward tentative shuffling to the high-decibel canon of Janet Jackson broadcast outwards to the street. I counted myself among the latter set, many of whom like me cradled phones in hand as if to express the universal ambivalence of the introvert at the party. I felt a discomfiting affinity with them, as well as with the street person who moved between the patio tables, eagerly gulping up other people’s half-finished drinks, and the two nerdy lesbians from Europe who would be spotted walking their bicycles up the sidewalk later on. Hardly the ideal scene conducive to deep thoughts. But I think what I meant to say is quite simple: Malevolence takes a lot of effort & cultivation, and is entropic. Kindness, on the other hand, proceeds from a sliver of innocence, and its energy is self-replenishing. A sliver of innocence protected by layers of seasoned worldly knowledge & experience, but innocent nevertheless at its core.
DARK LITERATURE 