The Crowd

     From an early age I perceived myself as crushingly ordinary, just another face in the crowd.  No distinguishing marks.  The human equivalent of the cookie-cutter suburban tract house I grew up in.

     And that saddened me, for I wanted nothing more than to stand apart, a unique individual to be reckoned with on my own very special terms.

     When all this first occurred to me, the standard way of standing out in my neck of the woods was to shave one's head and sport a Black Flag t-shirt, jeans with the too-long bottoms rolled up, workers' boots and a permanent sneer.  Unfortunately, this mode of dress proved so popular that half the guys in my high school adopted it before I even noticed it.  The punks were just another crowd by then, each of them standing out to fit in.

     Same with the surfing crowd, the preppy crowd, the nerd crowd, the jock crowd, the junkie crowd; I avoided them all in my need to be unique. 

     Then I left Southern California for college in the Northeast, and everything changed.  Rather than avoiding crowds, I found myself thrust into them.  For instance, there were very few Californians at my school, which may explain why the first question so many asked was whether I surfed.  And why that question was so often spoken in strained Spicolian cadences.

     And then there was the whole national origin thing.  I am a mutt, a mélange of different European ethnicities, but of course you wouldn't know that from my last name.  It only reflects the national origin of my father's father's family.  Growing up in a Southern California melting pot amidst representatives of the entire world living and breeding in faceless subdivisions, each having fled an old country and/or the new country's ethnic ghettos for the blank slate of American suburbia, my last name never signified anything other than, well, my last name.

     Until college, that is, when I learned that people of "my" national origin can be expected to eat and drink a certain way, worship the same god in the same way and share other traits and predilections.  "We" even had a social group on campus, one that celebrated "our" culture and looked out for "our" unique needs and occasionally spoke out against stereotypes "we" didn't like.  Not that all the stereotypes were negative, of course.  In fact, on balance, I'd say most were pretty positive.  But they certainly weren't me.

     It was all very disorienting, and disturbing, to someone like me, who wanted to stand out from the crowd, to be seen by others as a unique individual, so I ran from my ethnicities, both my last name ethnicity and the others buried just beneath.

     After college I found my way into a career and acquired a few grey flannel suits and as I started to climb the ladder, rung by rung, I fit in to allow those above me to stand out.  An organization man, one of the crowd, I subsumed myself for a paycheck.  Difference was a luxury I couldn't afford.  On the outside.   But on the inside, I harbored my difference, keeping it to myself.

     As I moved up the ladder and got myself a wife and started a family and moved into a higher grade suburban house in a tract filled with families like ours and continued on my way to  success I started to neglect the difference thing, my life so consumed with living I had no time for its care and feeding.  Or maybe I wasn't so different after all.

     Then came the flight, when everything took off.

     I usually sit in an aisle seat, but a last minute reservation pushed me to the window, and for the first time in I don't know how long I looked out the window as we took off on this gloriously clear day and I saw the thousands of houses laid out in neat orderly patterns below and as I searched for my house I realized the futility of it all, for they all looked identical from up here, and even if I did manage to spot mine, it would just look the same as all the rest, yet another house occupied by yet another face in the crowd.

     And the next day, at a conference of people doing what I do, a meet and greet followed by a sit and eat in the hotel's largest ballroom, maybe a thousand gathered around a hundred tables, I remember thinking, as I stood and surveyed the room, and saw my table replicated across the entire room, each laid out identically, same centerpiece, same food and drink, same people sitting and eating and talking and listening, probably saying variations of the same thing, that the crowd had consumed me. 

     Soon afterwards, I spent the day in an office that overlooked a veteran's cemetery, one of those expanses of endless green lawn dotted at rigidly regular intervals by identical white stones, no distinguishing marks, together impressive, individually sad.

     Is that all there is?, I wondered.  I dusted off my difference desire, dormant for years, and examined myself closely, poking and probing, searching for any differences concealed beneath my average ordinary exterior. 

     I started to write, finding it a most rigorous and methodical procedure for sifting through a life, and I posted some of this writing anonymously for all the world to see, wondering whether my words, shorn of all the EZ group identifiers that buried the real me, such as name, ethnicity, career, income level, political views, car, favorite CDs and football team, would reveal that elusive uniqueness I knew, or hoped, was in there. 

     Over time my writing bored deeply into my psyche, constantly chipping away at it, piece by piece, scutinizing each nugget, tossing aside the common, placing only the choicest pieces on public display, gauging your reaction and noting, with some surprise, that even these choicest bits of difference were, at root, quotidian, containing more than enough commonality for you to identify with them, often very closely, judging by your responses. 

     And this just made me dig deeper for differences, but the deeper I dug, the less difference I found. I ended up discarding most of my words, finding very few made it through my banality filter.  It was all too ordinary.  My project stalled; I'd reached a difference dead-end.

     Forced to reevaluate, I stepped back and looked at myself and my project, this time with the clearest of clear eyes, and what I saw was an average ordinary everyday person, a stereotypical human, nothing more, just a face in the crowd, same as it ever was, same as it always would be, my difference just a conceit, a talisman warding off my own humanity.  And my project, devoted to unearthing and displaying my uniqueness for all to see, a fool's errand.  Or a sham. 

     So I'm letting it go, receding back into the crowd, dropping the extraordinary, settling for the ordinary. 

     And now, for the first time, I feel ready to write fiction.

Comments

[R J Keefe]

No one will ever find uniqueness by using the common currency of language.

I don't know what "difference" means to you. I've followed this blog largely to find out, so it's frustrating to have the thing come to an end without an answer. But I do know that you are the one of the most unusual men I have ever come across. Perhaps it's just your candor. But your particular mix of contradictions - almost everything that you say about being just like everybody else is contradicted by earlier entries on say, writing about a fake past at an early age, and having problems at dancing school somewhat later (just two that come to mind) - is yours and yours alone. There are thousands of other people who share each one of your characteristics, but no one, I think, who has them all to the same degree.
There are no stereotypical people. There are only people too poor and deprived to make anything of themselves. You're not one of them - that's for sure.

If I thought that you were abandoning the search for self because you'd hit on the enlightening idea that our differences are not important, but just there; if I thought that you were giving up the search because you understood it to be fueled by vanity, I'd say - fine. If I saw the real happiness and delight that marked your account of a recent week in New York - fine.

Of course - and this thought has crossed my mnind several times - it may be that you have indeed been writing fiction.

Whatever it has been, you're good at it.

[stephenesque]

Somebody already wrote "Everyman" - several hundred years ago. Meanwhile "Searchblog" is also back from a brief break.

[puddleglum]

If you are indeed discontinuing this blog my heart is saddened. Thank you for the laughs and sobs.

Something that has amazed me from an early age is the desire for people to feel different. It is not that comforting of a thing, and the desire to feel so if often akin to the "grass is greener" longing.

I am young, but have seen many people strip their lives of all "easy identifiers" to see who they really are, to find their differences. We are all composites of these things, while not being any of them. When we strip them from ourselves in an attempt to "find ourselves" we seem to be taking down all the clues to finding who we are. They are our fingerprints left behind to give us clues.

People desire difference for themselves. But those that in their difference, realize they are the same as everyone else. It is very frustrating to be seen as different and most just want to fit in and be viewed as normal...ordinary.

Primary colors are the most ordinary of the colors. The basic, the shared, the most common, the least unigue. Yet they manage to be the brighest and the most brillant. The search for new colors must start from the originals. Perhaps you have reached your basic colors, and can now start painting your own picture. If you do not have the bland, blank canvas, the picture cannot be painted. Bland is not bad, ordinary is not a death sentence..it is rather a spring board into life!

I hope that perhaps you'll consider posting a little of your fiction?

[DarkoV]

What great book was ever written by a happy person? I'm glad that you've shaken off the temporary coat of happiness! I'm glad that Peggy Lee is lodged back there somewhere, lounging on a piano, blowing smoke and singing "Is that all there is?".

Writing fiction? I honestly thought you had been all this time. Seriously. The Shroud of Turin's mystery has nothing on you.

Just keep dancing...

[Outer Life]

I don't plan to discontinue Outer Life. The focus might shift away from me. Or I might prove incapable of thinking outside myself. We'll see.

[Bill]

We are all alike in that we have many things in common. The exterior of my condo looks just like the exterior of every other condo in my plat. Yet I consider myself unique. Not by being the best at anything, though I am good at quite a few, but by being the particular combination of interests, ideas, and ways of doing things that I am. I consider every human as unique,though some resemble each other more than others do. It is not our houses, cars, clothes, or any material possessions or situation that determines our uniqueness (save extreme examples such as political position or star status in a profession) but what is inside ourselves.

What you have posted on your blog so far shows you to be extremely unique in your particular view and take on events that occur to many other people. That we as readers find commonallity in what you write does not negate its uniqueness. You have the ability to capture what we may have experienced in a similar yet different way but cannot present for anyone else to know about.

Based on what you have written so far, your career as a fiction writer should be quite successful. You have a gift for description that evokes images and creates genuine emotion in the reader.

Good Luck.

[Searchie]

Sounds like a fledgling Paul Auster, if you ask me. But with a twist. Always with a twist.

[MindSpin]

Hmmm. You partake of everything universal, but you are anything but ordinary. A writer's extraordinary emerges in the seeing, in the rendering that reveals the only apparently ordinary in ways we have not apprehended it before, in the interplay of vantage points and perspectives, in the precision of particularities and the unfolding of a scene or a character or a revelation, and in a certain poignant music to be heard in the cadences of sentences and turns of phrase. When you make ordinary eyes see with extraordinary clarity and words dance to meaning, you have given a gift that I, for one, am loath to part with. I hope you'll keep posting whatever wants to be written here on Outer Life. I am always eager to see where your next post will take us. I am simultaneously excited about your next venture, into fiction. Your posts have transcended pedestrian blogging; they are small works of art, rehearsals for something more.