On Becoming Yesterday's Actors

On Becoming Yesterday’s Actors

Tennison Long

Also by the author:

Glorious Verve

When We Ran The Master Plan

Of Tribe & Empire

Long Hand Publications

www.tennisonlong.com

Copyright © 2020 by Tennison Long

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: ********

Cover design by Ean Clevenger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

for my father…

The 911 tip was so outrageous the dispatchers disregarded it as a prank. The caller claimed that two dozen people had committed suicide at the pool of a rehab center in the unincorporated part of the city. Three hours later law enforcement descended on the sprawling compound in a wealthy neighborhood to discover what was indeed a macabre scene. Doesn't look like any survivors, we need to call homicide, dispatchers heard the first responders through their body cam audio. Crime scene investigators totalled 26 bodies. Fourteen men and twelve women ranging in age from 38 to 50. It was initially reported as the largest mass suicide in American history until the media were fact-checked with the Heaven’s Gate event of the late 1990s. Without the typical precision of a religious cult-like organization this suicide appeared to be different. The bodies looked good, healthy, dressed in expensive athleisure wear and bikinis. There were no tokens or medallions of superstition or other relics to behold while transitioning to the afterlife. It was as if it could have been accidental or something impromptu. There was talk of a group message via video left behind to explain the suddenness of their act, but the authorities would not confirm nor deny the existence of any such digital manifesto. Notepads and diaries were sealed in big paper bags and carried off the property with white gloves. Leaked stories on the internet seemed rushed and fantastic with elaborate explanations of some death cult and the appearance of wiki bios of each person seemed premature. Like anything else this newsworthy there was the reality that we may never know the truth. A divorced mom pushing forty who just celebrated losing 100 pounds. A father of three who left corporate success to reclaim his artistic roots. A single female who on her fiftieth birthday had a nervous breakdown in a supermarket parking lot. The leader of the group was not your typical bug-eyed charismatic frontman, and this is what mystified the investigators. If this group of Generation Xers--and that was their only unifying connection--was seeking out a more exalted state what was it and why? There was not much known about the group as their digital footprint was minimal and this only added to the intrigue. Were there more involved? Were there those who backed out last minute? There wasn't any of the typical cultivated androgyny of other death cults, in fact these people looked good. When the media published their driver’s license photos and old social media pictures it didn’t look like them. The people that died that day were in shape, had structure to their faces, smooth skin and glowing complexions. There did not appear to be any ritual or ceremony of graduation marking some doomsday event. They did all drink something. What looked like craft cocktails that were likely laced with a sedative like phenobarbital. Perhaps it was what is known as dexing, or robotripping. A cocktail of Robitussin, with its key ingredient of DXM mixed with something keto-friendly like vodka or gin and a resulting high comparable to combining mild acid with weed. In the early stages of the buzz you begin to act like a hallucinating robot who has blown a fuse. Your serotonin system is frazzled and you become engulfed with dread. Then lights out. Initial photos from the scene, if they were to be believed, looked like a causal happy hour with the party goers collapsed into random positions on the ground and pool furniture. It would be many news cycles before the toxicology reports would be released and there was concern that this story would never be followed up. The strangest and most curious aspect of the scene was not the dead bodies but the compound’s lack of electronic devices. No computers, no tablets, no cell phones, no televisions, no gaming consoles.

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In keeping with its title, the final novel by Tennison Long, who passed away before its publication, On Becoming Yesterday’s Actors suggests a scanning of the narrator’s mind, an apocalyptic and Luddite Generation Xer who sifts through his life via varying digressions, while encompassing the differences of more recent generations through personal memories and the fate of those who become caught up in societal neurotic atrocities. There is an interspersing of documentary with fictional material: news articles, psycho analysis, classified documents, and meta-observations of his private surroundings.

Intergenerational strife is nothing more than an orgy of forgetfulness, each visage carrying a narrative that is merely a facade for emptiness, with yesterday’s actors more of a victim mindset than that of victor. The author, as an adapter of semiotics, recognized that much of society can be decoded, and relied on his readers to create their own meanings from his work. Regardless of his intentions, the words he chose to use are ever shifting, fluid, and open to interpretation or critique.

The true names of the witnesses mentioned in this book have been given only to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They may be publicly identified one day but not now and here. Scenes have been reconstructed from memories. Sometimes the memory was merely a fragment but rebuilt as a narrative from an internal monologue of events at the time. There is always distortion but without the temptation to project the narrator in a better light. Some names have been changed.

It is appropo that any mention of addiction within the musings of a full articulation of a so-called American novel, with its genesis in Romantic and European literature, be told from the world capital of addiction, America, the coddled home for the most severe set of addicts of the last two generations.

Arriving a few decades into a postmodern surrounding that lacked originality which was once promised, through scanty invention and notional scepticism, even threats that the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but trickery, or a new artifice for the unfamiliar cosmology of cyber this and that. One can feed on the past as some kind of data bank but reality is already played out, like it has all been experienced at some point before now and lives on in loops. The information superhighway brings about amnesia when it comes to the mythology of self and those who are in the know or left on a darkened onramp. An engendered and commodified reality that has been based on the sales pitch of non-reality, for your personal distinction and significance in a cyber sea of anonymity, brought to you like a Benetton advertisement, the united colors of mixed race beautiful people because in this reality everyone is brighter and the implication, or connotation, is that of a collective exhaled hallelujah.

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Digital operates on a base number 2 system versus a decimal base 10 system. In this binary is on and off. The magnetized 1 is the on, while the off switch is the 2, which is absent of magnetization. This digitized binarism is nothing more than a mechanical theory for communication. A cultural model for better understanding of one another. Words allow for thinking. Thinking allows for output, which produces interaction, which can lead to relationships. In the absence of human relations the void can be filled with objects of nature, such as totemism, a universal representation of indigenous people in North America and Australia. These totems represent a code chain of lowly vegetable status, to animals then to the most heightened, the gods. And the glue that binds it is kinship within tribe.

Plot is the ordering of events which make up the story, or a series of interconnected micro-occurrences that have specific purposes. In this there is the establishment of connections, suggested causation and the revelation of character through action. It can be broken down to a five-part pyramid, beginning with exposition, then the rising action to a climax, then falling action, to culminate in a finale. Between the exposition and rising action there is complication. And before the finale there is resolution. Exposition sets the scene by introducing the character(s) while providing background a description, then inciting incident, or complication, as a lone event that sets off the major conflict. During the story there is rising action which brings about an excitement within the story. The climax happens when there is the highest sense of tension, then with the resulting falling action the reader knows the story will end soon. Key problems and conflicts are quickly wrapped up and resolved by the main character (or, sometimes, someone else solves it for them). The finale is the opposite of the exposition with any remaining mysteries being explained off by the author. If there is to be a follow up--or any future possibilities--like a sequel (or prequel), then the author will leave his/her reader pondering on the theme. Progressive plot is a chronological structure which sets up the conflict then follows with rising action onto climax. Episodic plot is a series of rising actions to climax, then to an ending before a new rising action to climax. This can be sequenced several times before a grand finale. Parallel plot has two (or several) characters who are experiencing separate but related storylines that will merge at the end. Each segment pushes the plot forward with the occasional overlapping of scenes, culminating with the characters connecting at the end (examples of this could be disaster stories or the aftermath of a single car accident). Flashback plotlines provide for a structure that conveys information and clues about something that occurred earlier, this allows for the story to begin mid-action to then have the story unfold, and the background to be filled in throughout the story. Flashbacks and sidebar reporting may happen to consume the reader’s time or provide for relief from the main action. This is the attempted structure of On Becoming Yesterday’s Actors and although it appears to be experimental it has been carefully curated.

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In recent years the phenomenon of erotomania hitherto relegated to a more dubious labeling of stalker or the act of stalking, has taken on a mediated focus in the glimmer of this most exotic psychotic syndrome, with an additional attention from the workplace and law enforcement community. Even politicians have taken up the cause. With the advent of the internet, stalking is no longer confined to a quiet devotion for celebrities, as it has become mainstream and an everyday occurrence. High drama exists in the playbook, and the mind of the stalker is certainly a case study for any armchair psychologist. Pop culture has embraced it as the quintessential form of expressing lust and desire in a deadened romantic world. Its growth has multiplied with the arrival of the world wide web and the ubiquity of electronic surveillance. Other forms of online crime have overtaken the collective analog old world curiosities of previously non-pursued lovebirds by the lovesick and love forlorn. Regardless, it has become an evolving syndrome that further burgeons within the digitalscape. Whether the rejection is perceived as real has the potential to be a critical blow to the stalker. They may now feel like the victim, the one being toyed with, and as their fear of abandonment flares up so does their obsession, resulting in a preoccupation that blurs the line between fiction and fact. A heightened sense of entitlement feeds the fantasy and any holes in the story are filled with made up details. Since they lack normal coping skills they cannot recognize the boundaries of others, resulting in the logic that if they are suffering so should everyone else. Power plays of guilting will be deployed as well as the invention of emergencies in order to elicit sympathy, and to prolong contact they will make empty promises or play on your insecurities. They will control their own agenda through twisting your words and saying things like after all that I have done for you.

Manifestos are loosely explained as a public declaration, or object lesson, that can range in any subject matter and convey ephemeral or avant-garde ideation, or more carefully detailed rhetoric. What may have started as a way for warmongering princes and kings to vent, the manifesto now is consumed as free-flowing thought or something more complex and engineered with deliberate pulls at absurdity or emotional triggers. In the ambition of the manifesto’s author is the outward manifestation of his/her thoughts which can demand the impossible from the reader in its unpredictability. There is often talk of technology and future, much is aligned with advertisement and the pulls of devices and techniques to ply your attention to where it should not be taken. There is a sort of rebirth for the manifesto with the onslaught of new media and the platforms for its deliverance. It has become possible to get a wider audience, and a guarantee that it will be read, even if by the authorities posthumously. There can be a charming quality to the genre as the humanistic approach, with all of its authenticity, is a refreshing reminder of unironic anthologies in an ever-ironic time. Manifestos should have that mind-blown quality to them, with nothing left off the paper. Almost as if it is your literary life’s work that you started composing shortly after first learning how to write in kindergarten. The longer they are, the exponentially crazier they can become, but when trying to blow minds brevity is difficult and art is messy. An engaging narrative of fiction dressed as fact, or vice versa, brings about comfort in the flippant ghost story of how in our narcissism we push our aesthetic ideal through to death. In this magic we sling our hopes toward the sky while grounded in the mud of our hidden lives.

This manifesto was published as the platform of a single individual, first exclusively in English, later in French and Spanish. Its publication placed the author under threat of Fatwa from the Islamic State (IS). Originally a series of interconnected notes or ordinary thinking, it then traversed through the insurrection of the Cause, and after the mention of being banned for radical thinking it was reintroduced in a longer format. Before it could arrive in its current manifestation it had to go through stages of obscurity and of mild resurrection, then back to a struggled status where it laid in perpetual dormancy. But when it began to make sense within the context of the current state of society is when it recovered enough to exist in its current form, that of semi-autobiography. The very events and vicissitudes of the Struggle of Man, be it through external forces or from internal monologues that range from disgust to victory, it could be argued that the insufficiency of society is better for this Opus of Understanding, bringing new clarity and light to the forefront once again. When it was written it wasn’t considered a political hit piece or other form of indictment against society and her ills. It was reporting and nothing more. On one hand, it could be understood that the writing had the potential to bring about a utopian system through the adherence of the suggestions and a deeper dive into the more untouchable topics of a weakened society. Social grievances were muted by an easily triggered class, and nobody was powerful enough to make the necessary changes. Each historical epoch garners a mention of some work like this, the blending of an intellectual and political mind for concern and dissolution to what does not work within the context of tribal culture or identity politics, and other potential consequences of a coddled nation who is no longer able to fend for herself. This work has the potential to become a historical document and therefore should not be altered.

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As actors we must be susceptible to how we appear to others, how we come off through their cinematic lenses. Within the onset of childhood there was a mirroring effect of that one-on-one with our parents, that permitted us to see ourselves as more than wonderful and worthwhile before the up-creep of shame or lack of worth that settles from the inevitable dysfunction that arrives unannounced on the shores of adolescence. Those that repeat the behaviors--like acting out sexually--are simply attempting to re-experience a semblance of love. In the later years with a projected sense of being on film, of having those ghost eyes bestowed upon your every move, you push away the image of being damaged goods and in this process your self-image overtakes your self-esteem and any hope of recovery lags behind the show you are putting on for those within your close proximity.

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This book is not about Generation X or the Boomers or Millennials but there is a need to understand them, in order to see how they differ in thought and symbolism, with self-focus as a newer concept in the larger scope of humanity and the navigation of individualism into uncharted territory. Loose language with bigger imagery with words like introspection or growth even abstraction. The blame game labeling of each generation that they are complacent with unfulfilled potential. The shedding of New Age remakings by the hippies and the counter-culturalists while searching for the inner-childhood. Generational tics of buzzwords and bantering mantras of life hacks and groupthink have nothing on the individual’s private unswayed thinking. Not all of it is about fundamentalism to the generational cause. You can solo navigate within the frameworkings of the hallmarks of virtue or guage the barometers of what constitutes a meaningful life. For Gen X there was a well-calculated fusing of the moment and one’s self. When finding the experience of seeking to be an end in itself. So that fulfillment can be derived from manifesting inventions of individualism, versus the running theme of group reliance. What the Boomers couldn’t swallow was left for the Xers to wholly ingest.

For Generation X identification to occur there must be a sense of insignificance, something inherently within but also as part of the context of generations that preceded, and those who will follow. A fractious group (X) that moves forward without unearthing an exalted past for the sake of revival, as any coming of age rollout is a mere approximation thinkpiece spotlighting how close we had gotten to the cliff. And the narrative always ran counter so there was no need to revisit it, as you are not a legacy maker in waiting. Beyond the mythology that yours was a generation of protagonists who saved the 21st century is the mainstreamed hushed rally cry to opt-out. Ambivalence is your art form and when done well dismisses your successors to curbside recycling without explaining yourself.

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You may see nothing of your life reproduced on these pages because of paranoia or your troubled hyperreality, however there may be blissful content to be found in this work, something that can reflect back at you with a mirror theory that you will find what you want in the representation of your own realism. A doctrine for adequate truths when reality has become, for the sake of discussion here, simply obsolete. Your emotional infrastructure outstripped and now a variant for future possibilities.

Acting can be the best vehicle for learning how to live. As an actor you get to become other people, affording you the opportunity to better coexist with others. You make less judgements of others because you retain a lasting empathy for those you have portrayed. You carry on their pain and perspectives as you become more human. You depart from the provincial and become a world citizen, as you become better at compromise. Once you are warmed up and have established the fundamental principles of performing you are ready to take on the relationship with the script. Within the confines of rehearsal you are allowed the procedural questions of what if and the calmness of a newly found joy and wonderment.

The soft-core aesthetic of suggestive poses, the positioning of a thigh in a provocative manner, or cleavage under certain lights, may include levels of undressing or seductive facial expressions including half-closed eyes or parted lips with a fixed gaze toward the camera while the backside is arched to emphasize breasts and buttocks, something from a bygone pin-up era now presented as the embodiment of control, power and whimsical seduction as intimacy is redefined.

There is freedom within, there is freedom without, try to catch the deluge in a paper cup. There’s a battle ahead, many battles are lost, but you’ll never see the end of the road while you’re travelling with me...Crowded House

VIII.

MISTRUST

VERSUS

TRUST

Babies demonstrate levels of trust through the depth of their sleep or ease of bowel movement, maternal provisions as mutual regulation that balances out discomfort which is brought upon in the homeostasis of birth. With time comes familiarity, repetition and the willingness--with some encouragement and comfort of routine--to let the mother out of their sight, to run counter to predictability. The resulting sameness builds the foundation for ego identity, and the anticipation for correlated imagery and sensations that bring about the predictability of life. A constant testing of the inside and the outside world is done through a prototypical tendency to assure comfort by withdrawal and the habitual behavior used to recover from sensing the physical reality and social meanings, this being the origin of projections and introjection as defense mechanism from the certainty of inner harm. Yielding to testimony and reason in the common crises of faith, trust and love, and those irrational viewpoints toward the enemies in our midst, the woke adversaries that are aligned to somehow take us down. These enduring patterns are rooted in the nuclear family and its patterning of mistrust, taking task to the ego and any remaining questions of derived demonstrations of love or madness. The psychic life results in an inner division of a paradise forfeited by a bloodletting of nostalgia, with the mantra that all that is abandoned will revisit you throughout life. There is a continual sense of our youth that comes to us in our adult years as tooling for maintaining normalcy or an actuality that begets a youthful fervor. Religion can best play a touchstone role in surrendering to a greater good, or the manifestation of an actual provider, in this case some other adult who is your parent by proxy. Praise is exemplified through prayer or fear or fantasy or the complete giving in to the emotional instability of your subject, a comforting codependency that relaxes you because now your emotions do not belong to you. Tribes create their own magical narratives to somehow make sense of the supernatural and the appeasing through self-mutilation or prayer or other form of sacrifice. This layered atonement seeks out vague deeds that can restore a sense of wholeness, or godliness, that battles the maternal matrix of kindness and reverence.

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Weak perceptual acuity is the deadened ability to understand nonverbal cues. This is best exemplified in the misconstruing of behavior from love objects. As with any simulation on a delusional plane, where there is romantic attachment there is no longer meaning. Or the confusion when misinterpreting social friendliness for a sexual invitation. This is most heightened in those already vulnerable, where psychotic functioning is constantly testing reality. In these compromised social customs, there is a lack of alignment with the culture that surrounds the subject. Due to impairments in the feedback looping, they are unable to comprehend social reinforcement and as a result they trade empathy for perceptual inaccuracy.

A consensual hallucination of cyberspace applies to any space generated by the multisensory experiment of otherworldly realities which take control of your main senses and hijack the thoughts of those participating. An artificial landscape where strangers can talk, shop, make plans, chase dopamine, and be dominated by the disembodying experience, and it is within this cyber realm that corporations garner more control than government and the most augmented experience is out-of-body. In the short years since the mid 1990s on-line enthusiasm has spawned a computer/device dominant non-culture with every citizen carrying on their person a high-def camera, both video and still, with an expected burden and ability to document their every move. The interest in new media has allowed for the increasing trend of publishing videos and photos of sexual performances by ordinary people in private spaces. Sex tapes and do-it-yourself porn have allowed for a new avenue to celebrity. The ambient voyeurism quality of the internet allows for different versions of reality, and within this differing versions of the truth when it comes to the emancipation afforded from self-expression. New gendered power relations pull away from the concept of being surveilled to a more comfortable position under a watchful gaze, where the subjects possess more informal social control.

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On his deathbed. Those words that catch attention like the flame to kindling, that there is something more we should know. This secret past cannot be lost with the exodus of my soul from this mortal’s shell, then the pleading that whatever confession that was to come was unnecessary, shhhh, try and relax, it will all be okay soon enough.

The tapping of the eucalyptus branch from the wind against the aluminum siding outside the bedroom a metronome aural reminder that you were still alive and with the slowing of your heartbeat the hope for a syncing attainment to the rhythms, that breeze somehow inviting you into her folds. This confession may involve a major unsolved crime or some hidden fortune or whatnot, as the warm tingling in your crotch region wanes as the fentanyl has permanently mainlined your lower half. It’s like forgotten states, when we talk of the mainland versus the Hawaiian isles. She is out there and she is a pretty destination but she seems further still and as if she has sunk into the ocean for the next several millennia, until her volcano gods can somehow muster the energy to deliver future islands.

Before you learned about your affliction you thought it normal to be so shut down in the company of others, that the real extroverts had something figured out and the lower-level life adjusters had best play by these rules of ill-forgotten attempts at gain. It wasn't until the group sessions that you learned you were not nearly as damaged as those everyday lives full of hidden pain and sputtering trauma. How could someone’s codependence run so deep that they had to mute their stereo at stop lights to not infringe upon the personal space of the person in the adjacent car. With some time you realize whatever you do really is not going to be good enough so your level of excellence is a very low bar of just getting by, of looking into the mirror and knowing that the face staring back at you is the world’s physical manifestation of the disgust that you feel when any thought of your ego surfaces, or when you compare yourself to others. Those that always win and are good looking and have no problem meeting new people. Internally there is an ebbing storm of equal parts disgust and bewilderment for what kind of twisted MFer you have become.

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Misogyny was most alive in 1970s punk, and a revelry in transgression for how men could communicate in newly unchained ways, with nuances toward privately-apocalyptic behavior, while personal anarchy