In Support of More Grime
In a washed world, maybe we could use some more pizazz???
A few buddies and I, while sitting in a brewery, were talking about breweries the other day. And how, as 3 cis-dudes who love our hoppy IPA’s, we can go to basically any city in the PNW with 10,000 or more people and find a place where we immediately feel at home. Five panel hats, wicker light fixtures, black top counters, a minimum of 3 IPA varieties. Woven within the observation were a few pressing questions… What’s with the monotony? Why is everything so cookie cutter? Where’s the idiosyncrasy? Why’s it all so washed, man?
Lately I’ve been obsessing over that word: washed. I’m not sure I’m using it correctly. I’m not sure it’s the most PC. But I have found that the image and definition I’ve evoked for it, strikes a chord, consistently.
Next example… go to any town over, say, 40,000 people. You’ll find a high-ceilinged coffee shop. Fancy espresso bar. White walls. Clean modern furniture. Single origin blends. All the same, even if all different. Oddly, the independent coffee house has mono-cultured so heftily across the board, that they are, in their washed “independence,” consistently all the same. Hundreds of independently owned stores with independent personalities birthing them into existence have cookie-cuttered so drastically that they have yielded the same patterned predictability that a chain like Starbucks offers their customers. What??? Where’s the weird owner / worker PIZAZZ?!?!
Another instance of hyper-washing: Hanging with liberal friends, as a liberal, I, for whatever reason, have a tendency to check off all the notes and prefacing before I actually give myself permission to embody how and what my emotional center feels. WITH MY CLOSEST FRIENDS I’LL DO THIS. As I do, I catch myself doing it, and I feel ridiculous. Talking to some of my best buds, people who I know and trust and have literally farted in front of, I’ll say something to the effect of,
“Well, as a straight white male, I think it’s important to point out a tendency for my _____ blind spot.” My echo chamber can occasionally reward this behavior that is so unabashedly algorithmic. So washed. Are the opinions I then share really mine or just words building up points of “acceptable perception” within my social sphere??
But conservatives, y’all ain’t scathed either. The insular echo chamber that comes with complaining about something like non-gendered bathrooms is the most inane waist of time; and, I’d posit, something that 98.5% of you who complain don’t actually care about. Non-gendered bathrooms rule! For one, I wanna be able to rip that close-friends-fart-only and not have to make mirror eye contact with the random dude that heard it. Two, your houses bathroom, the place (I would guess) that you have felt most comfortable taking a dump for the entirety of your life, has always been non-gendered. And three, LIBERTY, right?! Getting mad about something like non-gendered bathrooms is another echo-chambered way of not actually living into your perspective and opinions and, instead, letting pervasive washedness tell you how and what to believe.
Washedness, at its core, is compromising personality for familiarity. Authenticity for safety. Free-flowing, dynamic river for algae ridden, toxic waste water pond.
It is likely tempting to see my observations of washedness as just me falling victim to the pervasive cynical mindset of our 21st century, western world situation. Cynicism, after all, being the pandemic seeping into souls and psyches of all ages. Replacing possibility with rugged dismissal and angst.
But! No!
Washedness and it’s unyielding infection rate, I posit, is actually the byproduct of that very cynicism slowly but surely becoming the brick, concrete, timber, etc erecting our infrastructure, personalities, and day to day modus operandi. To display, unabashedly, your weird and quirky preference in your shop, brewery, worldview, is to risk the cynic naysaying. So, as a safety mechanism, culture has mono-cultured and each-chambered to a point of no risk because the cynic and his man child, complainy energy, has forced all bubbles of personality to burst and melt into assimilation. Why run toward your joy when a cynic can naysay it? Be washed instead. Except that… cynics are pathetic.
Any old donkey can tear down a barn, friends. To build a barn though? That requires a special donkey.
Cynicism will eventually kill any and all joy tied to being human. It will assimilate and condition people into patterns of zero risk. And, with no risk, there will be no vitality or life force to the things we do and the world we occupy.
There will be a few different types of patterns depending on one’s ideological camp. Cynicisms endgame is uploading people’s consciousnesses into a few different worlds where all can be safe and the same and the washed world of the familiar can simply become baseline reality.
But…
You could buy local art, hit up a dive bar between breweries, and find a few people you trust enough to process what actually might want to flow out of you that might not be what you should say.
First, buying local art. Within a 25 mile radius of wherever you are sitting right now, likely over at least 100 people are trying as best they can to take emotion, notions beyond ego, and weave it into the material. Their humanness doing that may not always perfectly align with the ideological tenants or specific frame of mind of your humanness, but a willingness to seek this out creates a looser bind on how we perceive what is “correct,” makes it more human. Makes it more dynamic. Also, art that is maybe not as sleek, maybe a bit more crunchy and dirty, is art that’s inherently not washed. Both literally and figuratively!
The dive bar may not be as sexy as the brewery. But sitting at its bar is two-toothed Tommy. He worked at the old steel plant and will tell you about it if you let him. And I bet you might even laugh together. And, maybe, that dirt and grimed bar top (that hasn’t been WASHED in some time) with those wild and wacky stories may just serve as a reminder that we’re going to FUCKING DIE one day and the latest IPA is not as alluring as two-toothed Tommy’s real, pulse ridden, humanness.
You may find, when full-fledge speaking your mind or listening with no preconceived need to preface, you’re actually way more full of love and understanding than your prefacing wants to make you appear. It’s amazing how good humans are at our core when we break down the walls of how goodness is supposed to look in our mono-cultured, washed spheres.
Early on in my youth and young manhood, I thought the minimalist inclined people I met were the coolest. Turns out, I think they’re often the most scared. I’m scared too. We’re all scared. Scared to actually wear our full preference and personality on our sleeves. And to hide away from our being scared is easier than ever. We just fold into assimilation and unquestioned patterns. We wash it clean. Make it digestible. Make it all look the same based on how same is supposed to look. But sometimes rather than apologizing, I need to just swear. Sometimes rather than assimilating I need to press. Sometimes rather than prefacing I need to just listen.