The joy, utility, and duty of shooting the shit
cheers
In this piece, I use shooting the shit to mean both “talking about nothing” and “talking about something”. I just want you to know that I know that I did that. Basically, I did it because the line between two is extremely fuzzy, especially if you’re approaching a conversation openly; “something” often emerges from “nothing”. (Besides, mostly what I’m talking about is just talking.) I invite the reader to delineate the two and let me know where the line falls.
I love shooting the shit.
That might sound dumb on its face. Who doesn’t like to shoot the shit? Who doesn’t want to grab a pint after work and hate on the boss? Who doesn’t want sit with a coffee on the porch and talk about nothing for hours at a time? You can walk the dog with your buddies, you can lie on the beach, you can do your minimum-wage labor, and you can shoot the shit all the while. You can shoot the shit with your neighbor, with you lover, with your coworker, with your grandma, with a stranger on the bus. Shooting the shit is everywhere, and it’s for everyone. And that’s part of why I love it so passionately. It’s the fiber of our social fabric. It’s the tie that binds.
Over the past year or so I’ve become fixated on shooting the shit for another reason, though, and that’s this: shooting the shit is generative. When you’re shooting the shit about heavy topics, you can do some really powerful thinking. Two public intellectuals who are near and dear to my heart, Clementine Morrigan and Jay LeSoleil, are what got me started on this fixation. They have a podcast called “Fucking Cancelled” that offers a generous and hopeful vision of a better left (“a podcast about what the left is like, what to do about it, and what it’ll be like once we’ve done it”). It’s information-dense in the best way. Morrigan and LeSoleil take very seriously the responsibility of disciplined thinking, and that’s precious and rare, especially in the podcast realm. Morrigan and LeSoleil are long-term partners, and that’s evident in the show. The ideas they put forth are the kind that are generated over the course of many long walks, ideas that are formed between two minds who deeply trust each other. The trust shines through in the playfulness that laces the Serious Thinking, and it invites the listener to participate more fully. (They even have an episode called “Socialist Dreams: We Have A World To Win” that explicitly asks the listener to think as big as possible, which I find incredibly endearing as I find it productive.) The timbre of Morrigan and LeSoleil’s conversation is familiar: it’s the timbre of conversations I’ve had on long walks and over beers with my own beloved partners-in-thought. It’s the timbre of people who love thinking as much as they love each other. But here’s the thing—the ideas Clementine and Jay have formulated are good. Hearing their lovingly-generated ideas presented in such an openhearted way is what gave me a renewed fervor for shooting the shit with my loved ones. What Clementine and Jay do on the show is several steps more polished than shooting the shit, but it’s clear where their thoughts started. It’s part of what gave me permission to start this glorified blog.
I distinguish shooting the shit from discussion or dialogue. Shooting the shit about ideas with trusted minds means that the idea-speak is casual and genuine; there’s no flexing or posturing, or indeed even structure, except that of social norms; structure can come later. The conversation is interspersed with personal details that you would never bring to discussion in the lecture hall or public forum. It’s talking to someone you know personally, and whose judgments you trust. It takes as long as it needs to, and sometimes that means many hours-long conversations over months or years. It’s integrated into your life, because it’s something you do with the people with whom you live your everyday life. It’s not constrained to a special room or an appointed hour, unless you and your interlocutor want it to be. It encompasses complex abstractions with staying power and fledgling thoughts that go on to die. It can be filled with “wait, but”s and “yes, and”s. It can be arguing, it can be laughing, it can be both. It’s shooting the shit. It can be whatever you want. It’s yours.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really have access to formal academic spaces anymore. Shooting the shit has been the most useful and nourishing intellectual practice I’ve taken on in my adult life. Reading academic books is all well and good, but Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò only does so much good rattling around inside your head, without anything or anyone to bounce him off. (That’s a random example; his Elite Capture just happens to be something I’m reading. Highly recommend.) If you’re not in school, you can’t do the reading and then bring your thinking back to seminar the next week. But you can shoot the shit.1 You can find a friend who matches your energy and talk to him about Táíwò’s “in the room” device for as long as you need to. You can develop a theory of slash-they-ification of the discourse with your fellow grumpy no-longer-18-to-24 gay friend over the course of pride month. You can chew on what a collapse-proof future for education could look like. You can read Maggie Nelson and get mad without showing it off or tamping it down; your friend can help you figure out WHY you are so mad, without the condescending professorial bent you might find in the classroom.
Shooting the shit is something that no one can take away from you. If you care about something, you can shoot the shit about it. You should shoot the shit about it. When you meet someone else’s mind while you break bread with them, you never know what might emerge. Whatever it is, it’ll be bigger than and different from whatever your mind could have made on its own. Sometimes another mind can reveal something new about what you’re holding in your own mind. We need that. We especially need that from outside the academy. The academy doesn’t have a monopoly on rigorous thinking, and we can’t forget that; we can’t let them forget that. In a time when the future of the academy in the United States is in question anyway, it’s all the more crucial that critical thought be democratized. I don’t do imperatives very often, but I’ll leave you with a few: Care about something. Think hard about what you care about. Get a beer with your friends. Shoot the shit every damn day.
you can also write a little essay about it, hence this newsletter.