Arbitrage

By Arian Berisha 

“The pain is completely buried under jargon: post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll betcha if we would’ve still been calling it shell shock some of those Vietnam veterans might’ve gotten the attention they needed at the time.” – George Carlin

And like soft language, Carlin’s comedy had changed as a function of time. From the coy yet acerbic character creation and performance found in his specials back in ’67, Carlin had gotten wise but old. I refrain from using the variants "wiser" and "older" because they’re dishonest; in Carlin’s words, “It sounds like it might even last a little longer.” My reasons to refrain also accompany the idea that he’s, at the moment of writing this, dead.

Dead people are often anachronistic agents. They don’t have the capacity to reinvent themselves. As in the case of Carlin, there wasn’t much to reinvent. The function that he identified remains applicable as it was three years ago during the pandemic. I watched his specials on the internet when time was predominantly qualitative and hard to track. The crowd’s roars emanated from the speaker, which acted as a simple recall to an identifiable time that’s passed, with relevance that remains anchored in the meshed present.

The simulated roars reverberating in the old apartment I lived in reminded me that I was alone. Inevitably, those vibrations of sound dampened until what was once waves of noise degraded into thermal energy that blended into ambient temperature. An undetectable energy footprint was the byproduct of the decay of laughter, now contributing to the collective unconsciousness found in the vibrations of random particles in the room. 

My laughter, dance, movement, and existence had meshed into the greater ambiance of the apartment. Such actions won't be immediately apparent to the new tenants who arrive. They too, however, will transform the ambiance with their own song and chatter. In this way, Carlin reinvents himself without needing to exist at all.

There are a lot of platitudes recycled when inventing a personality, often arising from the need to define who one is and what one wishes to become. The quarantine had left me with a creative license with the sole intent of becoming the arbiter of my life. I first saw life as some Wittgenstein game, where the language I employed would influence the reality around me. In comes Baudrillard years later forcing me to surrender my notion of reality. As per this function of time, an increased supply of creativity is often met with increased demands stemming from necessity. Balancing creation and obligation in this way leaves no room for arbitrage.

I learned that word through my finance coursework this year. Arbitrage refers to the simultaneous purchase and sale of assets to profit from tiny differences in the asset’s pricing. In retrospect, that was precisely what I aimed at doing. The asset in question? Creativity. It was my license to purpose and freedom against monotony and life’s taxing forces. I wanted to manipulate my mental market to afford it in excess. And for that, I would need a regenerative force that did not stem from responsibility, duty, or harder realities in life.

Appreciation was the answer. Like a jester in the king’s court, finding joy in spiting royal politics and embracing absurdity, appreciating all that life offers, good and bad, helped me find purpose. Only then, in the conscious appreciativeness of life, and its tests, did I ever begin to exist. Finally shedding its corporeal skin, the missing variable to Carlin’s equation made itself apparent. Or was it there the whole time? I was never one to read questions carefully on an exam anyway. 

*Rankine’s writing in “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” parallels a lot of experiences of those who suffered through the pandemic. In this piece, I wanted to create an epilogue to Rankine’s writing, implicitly using the theme of loneliness as a backdrop in trying to discover oneself in a time in which one could afford to pause from life’s barrage of sorrow. Appreciation, emerging from a lifeless vacuum in the face of hardship, is a counterintuitive device to combat negative portrayals of absurdity from the perspective of those left lonely and offering them closure.