Your Dreams Get Decided by People You Don’t Like
Your Dreams Get Decided by People You Don’t Like
A look at shiny prizes, failures of imagination, and what my schemes and fantasies say about schemes and fantasies.
I just applied for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s something I do in the years when I publish a book. It’s $75 to enter. And I doubt it’s $75 well spent.
The book I entered this year is a nakedly self-published volume of 900 aphorisms, with 50 pages of essays about what I hope to achieve with it. The only category that seemed to fit was nonfiction, where it will compete against weighty works on the subjects most people agree matter most this year, which have been reviewed in the Times and the Journal, and discussed on NPR.
Statistically my odds of winning are about 230 to 1, or just slightly better than betting a nine-leg parlay. But it’s not a lottery, exactly. Not all entries have an equal chance to win. And going by the history of the category, it doesn’t seem like I Forget Just This Good Said Thing is their cup of tea. Then again, nothing ever happened until it did. Or to put it another way, hey, you never know.
Dollar and dream
“All you need is a dollar and a dream,” is the old lotto tagline. I have my own feelings about state-sponsored lotto - the entity that can deprive you of your property, freedom and even your life probably shouldn’t operate a gambling operation on the side.
But the tagline, like many of the best taglines, takes something that sounds true and bends it in the surface of a lie. The lie is that a dollar and a dream is what it takes to get rich. First off, the odds against winning are staggering. Secondly, at least a large plurality of the people who regularly purchase lotto tickets have had what we euphemistically call dreams beaten out of them by failure, boredom, indifference and worse. They may have lost the imagination and emotional energy to even properly fantasize. They buy the tickets out of boredom, habit and despair.
As proof, I’d point to the huge proportion of lotto winners who squander their big jackpot on more gambling, and not the “dreams” we imagine them having.
The truth of the slogan is “You all need a dollar to dream.” This is an insult. But it’s likely how a croupier feels about his customers. They’re fools. They have everything they need to know better than to step up to the wheel of chance. But they lack imagination, and they need to dream so badly that they’re willing to empty their pockets for the privilege.
No one dreams of winning the lottery, exactly. It’s just the last plausible happy thought after every other fantasy has been strangled in its crib.
Awards
The Pulitzer Prize isn’t my dream so much as a failure of my imagination. A big prize is the most plausible route to escaping the many very real financial limitations of my life within the next twelve months. It’s a low-wattage fantasy.
There’s more to it than money, though. Winning an award is a common fantasy for writers. If we ignore all the insecurities and megalomanias of authors, and stick to practical concerns, an award proves the quality and the value of the author’s work.
But that part of the fantasy crumbles under scrutiny. The power of an award is that it proves the quality and value of your work - specifically to people who couldn’t be arsed to read it in the first place. They laughed at me and now their kids will have to read it for homework! It’s more of a revenge fantasy than a success fantasy. As fantasies go, it’s enough to make me question my fantasies.
The more I thought about it, the more amazed I became that that became my goal. But here we are, in the online portal.
Previous gutters
Late in the Covid lockdowns, I got into NFTs. My wife and I had just had a second kid, and needed more money, and there was no existing creative endeavor that could seem to provide it. All I can say is that my imagination failed in this odd way. And some blend of isolation, steady cryptocurrency-article freelance gigs, and wishful thinking led me to NFTs.
I created NFTs. I had a crypto wallet and a metamask and paid gas fees and linked them to GIFs incorporating lines from poems and collage-like video. I wrote to Jaron Lanier and all my friends about a new marketplace where the non-fungible doubles of every physical object and abstract concept would trade on real-time exchanges.
My vision would all be supported by the infallibility of the blockchain and fueled by mankind’s obsession with ownership in a world where that absolute was all-too diluted by death and taxes. Maybe NFTs were a bad idea, but so was social media, and it’s successfully gutted the minds of millions taken over a previously unfathomable swath of the global economy.
Like lotto, my NFT phase was a failure of imagination, fueled by a loss of faith in my fellow human beings. Sorry about that. My bad.
You never know
The next big lotto tagline was “Hey, you never know.” Some say that the dollar-and-a-dream motto was too limiting. The states wanted to let people they were free to spend more than just a dollar on lottery tickets. In a world where all the certainties have been piled up against you in a nearly airtight configuration, you might open the aperture of possibility with just one more dollar spent.
As a sentiment, you never know is hard to argue with. Every day, I see people dressed up for work, commuting early in the morning, forcing smiles onto their faces in the office. I read essays and short stories that are well thought out and carefully edited. This is real effort.
No one knows what will come of these efforts. But they put themselves in a position where something good might happen, according to a delicate balance of what they know, and what they imagine, because hey, you never know.
Cool places
Between the age of twenty and thirty-six, I lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a place defined by imagination and the failure of imagination.
At the time, it was a cheap place to live. It was ugly in a different way than it’s ugly now. The housing stock was dilapidated, and either crumbling brick or warped wood-frame apartment houses covered in vinyl siding. It didn’t fit into the imaginations of people with money. It was hard for people in Murray Hill to imagine living there, or to imagine why anyone would want to.
There were artists, because the place was ugly and cheap, and because they had imaginations. But across the bridge, another neighborhood was making something else imaginable. SoHo, another previously gritty artists’ enclave, was becoming the most desirable and expensive neighborhood in the city.
As Williamsburg became more desirable, desire did the work of imagination. Luxury condominiums are not the fruit of an active imagination. As the neighborhood became more imaginable to more people, it became another spawning pool for once-and-future suburbanites in their 3-to-7-year city experience.
The unimaginative are numerous, and they pay retail. And I failed to imagine what that might mean for me. I failed to imagine how their lack of imagination would weigh on me. I’d become habituated enough to the neighborhood that I lost the ability to imagine living elsewhere. Eventually, I was priced out, and misfortune did the work of imagination.
The promotion
In my many day jobs, I’ve had times when a boss has dangled a promotion before my nose. I’m no shrinking violet, and I’ll rise to the bait. I’ve been irate when passed over and gratified when elevated. But something in me always said why do you want this? even as I pursued it.
Award-winning…
Back in 2023, I finally did win a few awards. My novel Pharoni won the Silver Award Winner for Science Fiction in the Reader Views Annual Literary Awards. And a short film I wrote and made with some close friends, The 6th Finger of Tommy the Goose, won the Outstanding Achievement Award for Mockumentary and Docucomedy Shorts at the IndieX Film Fest.
One of the awards even offered its winners a glass-and-brass trophy, for the low price of $375.00. Not exactly EGOT territory. But I’d gotten what I wanted. I could say I was an award-winning so-and-so in my professional bio.
But what would that do? Would it explain or excuse my interruption of someone’s day? Would it legitimize the private and idiosyncratic visions I wished to share in my art? Would it hold open the shutter of attention for the one extra second necessary to reach someone?
Wanting an award would assume that the person I wanted to reach with my work was someone who would be impressed by awards. It assumed that my decades of artistic exploration and experimentation could only be legitimized by a foil sticker or a lucite statue. It assumed that my audience consisted of people awaiting some kind of official sanction to watch or read my work.
I wouldn’t loudly support any of these assumptions. At best, they represent some of my most cynical conclusions about the world. So what the fuck was I doing?
A charted course
The things I’ve wanted are a sundry lot. There were noble impulses and mysterious intuitions, momentary victories, followed by opportunistic grasping and pratfalls. The failures of imagination are numerous - the day jobs, the sitcom pilots, the prizes applied for, the dodgy schemes embraced for a chance at catching a break.
I’ll accuse the notion of even having a dream, even having a plan. Aren’t they just what people cook up after everything worked out well enough?
Sometimes, my life seems like a stumble in the dark, with biography, strategy and cosmology narrated over it according to my mood. The story is a retroactive rationalization for the victor or the vanquished I am in that moment.
Open ended
I’ve listed just a few of the times that the objects of my desire have made nonsense of my motivations and my ability to formulate a strategy. They’ve made a fool of me. But desire is one of the few things that offers to make sense of time.
To have seen gorgeous things and seen the foolishness of them is to have seen quite a lot. And maybe the fool who persists in his folly will be made wise, as the poet said. I guess we’ll see.
Selected bibliography
The 6th Finger of Tommy the Goose (free, no ads)
William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (paperback, digital text, digital with original illustrations)