WHAT FREUD GOT RIGHT

The following passage is excerpted from Andy Nowicki’s collection of essays, Ruminations of a Low-Status Male, Volume 1, now available on Kindle and in paperback.

by Andy Nowicki

For me, an essential part of growing up was realizing and accepting that I wasn’t, and could never be, my father.

ALL WAS WELL... UNTIL IT WASN'T

(The following passage is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's latest book Notes Before Death: Three Essays, now available on Amazon.com in paperback and on Kindle.)

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I have long harbored a conspicuous suspicion that I ought never to have come into existence in the first place.

Not that I ever had any say over the matter, of course. At least, I have no memory of an ante-existent “existence” where I can recall giving the expectant authorities the go-ahead to have me incarnated in a fleshly vessel and bundled away to this earthly inferno within which we all now languish.

AN EYESORE IN THE ARCHITECTURE

                                                               

(The following passage is an excerpt from Andy Nowicki's latest book Notes Before Death: Three Essays, now available on Amazon.com in paperback and on Kindle.)

As has been extensively recorded elsewhere, things turned sour for me at roughly the time of my initiation into puberty. It was at this juncture that I came to recognize that my previous impression of being at ease in the world had perhaps always been mistaken. Indeed, having become self-aware, I now saw that my very presence, when I dwelt with others, seemed to have the effect of making those others uncomfortable. Increasingly, in fact, the distressing notion came over me that people would be much more at ease with one another if I weren’t around to muck up the works. My existence in itself seemed to be an inconvenience which caused them irritation and annoyance.

"IT FOLLOWS": MONSTERS FROM THE ID

by Andy Nowicki

It Follows, a brilliant new horror film by director David Robert Mitchell, has a curious distinction: it may be the most “sex-negative” movie ever made.

Self-aware yet irony-free, bathed in atmospheric dread, It Follows treads a careful course between the “slasher” films of the 70s and 80s, its most superficially obvious forebears, and the distancing, overtly “post-modern” spoofy self-referentialism embraced by Wes Craven’s Scream series. In the final analysis, however, It Follows belongs with a more elegant breed of cinematic pedigree, deserving to be considered among classics like Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, eerie films in which the source of the terror is never finally understood in an intellectual sense, but is rendered so primordially palpable on an emotional level that it haunts the viewer for days afterwards.

"EVERYDAY" INNOCENCE

Buddy Holly: a nerdy knight of faith.

by Andy Nowicki

A corrupt age views innocence as an essential absence; that is to say, as a state of being “not guilty.” Since all ages are corrupt, to varying degrees, we never quite apprehend innocence for what it truly is: a positive presence.

Philosophy, after all, teaches that man’s telos is the Good; if this is so, then the condition of innocence can’t simply be dismissively consigned to the silly naivety of childhood, while “knowledge” and “wisdom” get to be associated with an individual’s embracing of the corruption that invariably attends maturity, thus demonstrating his complicity with that which spoils his innocence.

In truth innocence is wisdom, and corruption is folly, NOT the other way around.

SEXUALIZATION AND ASSHOLISHNESS

Sexualization and assholia: bosom buddies?

                         

by Andy Nowicki

(The following is an excerpt from "Welcome Back Chaos," Andy Nowicki's upcoming memoir/manifesto.)

At the age of 12, I still clung to my own innocence with a desperate tenacity. Still, I knew on some level that it was a lost cause. During the summer of 1983, as a rising seventh grader, I recall one incident at the neighborhood pool which somehow put things in a queasy sort of perspective.

Earlier in the day, my friend and I had taken in the summer popcorn flick WarGames—featuring young, mop-topped Matthew Broderick and stern, middle-aged, mustachioed Dabney Coleman—in which a cocky teenage genius manages to hack into a national security computer system, and in so doing nearly sets off World War III. The movie, with its fantastic premise, appealed to our still-childlike sense of wonder, while also tapping into a certain budding anxiety, wherein adolescence is synonymous with chaos and catastrophe.