Lessons from the Singles Years

Socio-cultural & personal from the dawn of Clown in the NUC

Michael Parkes, Intermission, print on canvas

Socialization themes on this Substack mix personal, social, and geopolitical reflections with a few purposes. There’s an oral history component since my own parenthood made it clear how much the world has changed. And the NUC is criminally underrepresented in what realistic retro info is out there. The urban experience was quite different in significant ways. There are the high-status socialization patterns that are absent from the House of Lies mainstream but applicable anywhere. Even to those not born at the time. And there’s the working through what happened. For my own understanding and – on the chance putting this out there has any reach – for anyone else looking at building organically outside the beast. No delusions of significance, but as the system sputters, these issues get more relevant.

Ellie Moniz, Brown University Van Wickle Gates, matted watercolor print

The return to the NUC after Special Boy College crystallized things the way yo-yoing through stark contrasts does. The world of everyone applies to Wall St. or professional school repelled me, but they were clear paths. It was a choice. The early 90s NUC was a convenient place to regroup, but obviously terminal long-term. Just hadn’t burned enough surplus to really show. [No serious paths apart from the nepotistic teat] was eye-opening. At some point I’d be leaving again once stuff got worked through. The point - awareness of how destructive atomization is for organic culture.

As for the SBC, it proved priceless for personal reasons. Escaping the bubble was an opportunity to implement the lessons of 12 years of ORR socialization without small town baggage. Non-intuitive outlier meant speed learning a very different environment. With the expected hiccups along the way. But I knew how. And once the parameters were clear … the biggest lesson was socialization is systematic and manipulable. It provided the base that made things like Game and the SSH so convincing when exposed to them.

Doing what you want socially, intellectually, physically with a lot of free facilities and resources. The value in creating social opportunities. Road trips, concerts, parties. When to be insane and when to be smooth. Learning the limits of ORR-driven charisma was just as important.

Class and Status

Starting the path to awareness that a) confidence and humility are two sides of the [same self & situational awareness] coin and b) howling failure is fleeting and something new always awaits. Or in the immortal words of Damone: where you are is where it’s at. And more substantially, if you want it, do it. Now. Missing the shot hurts in that tragicomic way. Not pulling the trigger is haunting. All this pointing towards what I consider the fundamental question…

Utkin Evgeniy, The Key to Victory, 2020

How bad do you want it? Gifts aren’t fairly distributed. But that question is open to everyone.

The idea of the self as a work of art began there too, though I lacked the maturity to see it that way. Serious training - mental and physical - that never stopped. Lifting, running sports, martial arts on the physical side. Being blown away by the very concept of critical speculative thought on the mental. The seeds of the Band were planted there. Attendance was infrequent, but reading lists were gold. Jump started the idea of intellectual frame building that’s supported lifelong learning.

And finally, the two most significant vision-epiphanies of my life prior to conversion to Christianity occurred sophomore and junior year. Seeing that what everyone considered socio-cultural meaning was a hollow shell. And that the trajectory - the Macro-Arc - was heading to systemic collapse in what looked like sometime in the 2030s. I may hammer the institutions, but I never regretted the time.

Attributed to Karl Friedrich Schulz, Homecoming, oil on canvas, before 1866

Which is why washing up back home never seemed like “failure”. The externally imposed life path had no future, and at that point there wasn’t a well-defined plan B. Back then, the service-job-to-cost-of-living ratio was more than adequate for my hedonistic needs. So why not take my rebuilt self back to familiar ground and enjoy the decline? Unbeknownst to me, my two closest friends found themselves there in compatible circumstances. Kicking off what I call the Singles Years for want of a better term. Though that scene was too urban.

It does capture the spirit of 20-somethings in the early 90s-late analog grunge era and sums up my Gen X nihilist phase. Hitting my prime while the wheels are coming off. But there was an interesting split visible at the time. Some of us knew we were biding time. For any number of reasons. “Getting on with life” was going to happen some way or another. Once a collapse-resistant path came clear and the moment was right. The others were the first wave systemic casualties that the Fall of the NUC theme has spoken of in general terms. They weren’t going anywhere, geographically or figuratively. And on some subconscious level, they knew it.

Both frames lent themselves to hedonistic abandon. Idle and truly nihilistic hedonisms. Hence the fellowship. But one was tinged with the exultant aroma of free choice. The other with the desperate stank of despair.

For younger readers, this was very different from the meth-and-opioid riddled brownfield challenging the NUC now. Boomers in their 30s and 40s beneath a stability-inducing blanket of silents and greatests created the illusion of social health. And it can’t be understated just how much unstated social convention controls behavior. Decades of official atavism, freak empowerment, and shrinking prospects destroyed sociability along with standards of living. Clown World intensifying.

Earlier posts noted the historical anomaly of delayed adulthood against the pre-Clown ghost run.

This is sociologically underrated. Given organic freedom, organic culture always arises. Including hierarchies. The world was fake and getting faker, but as noted in the Band’s Dazed and Cofused posts, the socialization was truly organic. There was a germ of truth in the Pedowood “slacker” archetype. That without the clear paths, the old success-based social status stops being universal. But when living is cheap, alt culture begets alt sociability.

Feral childhood extended into an grown-up playground. Parties, girls, sports, road trips, weights, bars, camping, the pool hall, concerts, etc. Substance abuse was endemic, but benign by modern standards. For perspective, “tweaking” didn’t exist as a word. Nor did “twerking” for that matter. Fights were weekend constants, but no one ever seemed to get critically injured or spend more than a night in the can. Nihilistic hedonism filtered through deeply imprinted socio-cultural lines. Lines blurred or erased now while most of the social contexts no longer exist.

Debbie Criswell, Halloween House Party, acrylic on canvas, 2015

This was the stark contrast with SBC. There, the centralized and atomized version of sustainable life was the norm. Status was more Wall Street than Singles but that was the city. Not the NUC. On the small stage, chicks dug crazy-cool. A fine line, but high status is rare in any socio-culture. And feeding my remade self back into that world made the project real. While having an unapologetically awesome time that still pulls the occasional smile.

Eugène Fichel, The Craftsman’s Wages, 1878, oil on canvas, private collection

It’s supposed to be satirical, but he’s getting a bag of real silver for the project. There will always be elites. The issue is the acceptable life paths for everyone else. And also for younger readers. More “programs” were never the answer to anything. The problem is obvious in hindsight - gradual destruction of an integrated, layered, sustainable organic culture. Early to late Clown. Followed by a ghastly trio.

1. Orchestrated disappearance of clear pathways to acceptable life for almost everyone. See recent posts.

2. Creeping sorathic atavism. Atavism as the psycho-social drive to destruction of order as an end-in-itself and sorathic as the metaphysical. Socio-cultures are “arbitrary” as in man-made. But that’s irrelevant to [necessary for human health]. Any non-toxic society needs some sort of structure. The beast do as thou wilt, no norms, standards, or order gave us the real pandemic: shambling uselessness.

3. Checks for doing nothing. So long as the beast will pay the shamblingly useless to shamble uselessly, expect more of the same. Simplistic, but it’s kind of hard to maintain [addicted to fentanyl] as a societal value when the preliminary choice is work or starve. Of course, that means letting useless eaters starve if they won’t do something. Pick up trash on the highway. It’s the form, not the content.

Together, the solution appears in the negative space. Clear organic paths and required conformity to a pro-social order without dysgenic incentives. This has always been known. That the opposite is policy indicates intentionality. Now try and imagine how superimposing beast “programs'“ fixes … anything. Understand the need for self-direction has never been greater. But the competition had never been worse. That doesn’t make up for it. It’s not fair. But human basics are human. How bad do you want it? Take your shot when it’s there. Seriously consider yourself a work of art. And what that means to you.

That’s enough for an intro explanation. The next post on the theme will consider some specific observations related to the reasons in the first paragraph.

John Seerey-Lester, After the Party, oil on panel