The Importance of Being Burnished

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Other piece I wrote recently:

• A piece in Tone Madison comparing modern life in Madison to the 1937 version depicted in Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety

• An instant coffee taste test and tested round up of sauté pans over at Serious Eats

Let It Settle.

The Replacements’ “Bastards of Young” starts out with a ringing guitar motif before Paul Westerberg screams and the entire band comes in. The instrumental lasts another bar or so before the first lyric drops:

Only, of course, that’s wrong. What he actually says is “on the ladder of success you can take a step and miss the whole first rung.” I’m sure Paul’s actual version feels truer to Paul, as the Mats’ rise to stardom was consistently plagued by internal conflict and substance abuse that kept four made good dipshits from Minneapolis from being all-out Top 40 rock stars. It’s a hyperbolic line for an album released on the Warner Brothers distributed Sire Records, however, because the Replacements were at least halfway up the ladder at that point. Or at least it would seem so to other people.

I’ve always preferred my misheard version. It’s less concrete, more figurative, and painfully more accurate to any lived experience I have. It’s hard to describe the melancholy of a lateral success—failure is heart wrenching, outright success is exhilarating, and most of the time you thread the needle back and forth between the two your entire life. The constant up and down can be jarring, but the movement is motivational. Maybe it slipped past you, but the next time around you’re not going to miss that brass ring. With a lateral success, you’re not even on the right carousel.

It’s rare that life ever works out exactly the way you hope it did, and the best most of us can hope for is middling success. Middling success is distinctly different than a lateral success. Middling success is halfway up the ladder. It’s going for the gusto without ever getting it. Lateral success is crueler: you wanted to be a TV writer but you’re now successfully leading a creative team at an ad firm. Your art doesn’t sell but you make a living illustrating wedding invitations. Lateral success is yearning without struggling: middling success is both. It’s releasing Tim and still scrounging to make a comfortable living while wanting your singles to get better airplay.

Pursuing any creative project puts you directly into the oncoming path of middling success. The moment you begin to try is the moment you’ve invested energy and emotion into the thing you want to produce. There’s no telling whether people are going to like it or not, but unless you’re part of the top 5% of recognizable artists in the world, there’s one definitive guarantee: you’re going to find middling success. It’s going to be out in the world, it’s going to have some level of recognition, and it’s never going to be as well-beloved as you would hope it to be.

The world of lateral success isn’t much better. Maybe your bills are paid on time, maybe you were able to turn a hobby into a career. But you’re still left wondering a big fat what if. There’s some sort of creative energy that’s redirected inward, and give it enough time, it’ll recirculate until it’s banging on your chest to be let out. And then what? Another Replacements song comes to mind:

It’s hard to get out of that headspace. What would actual success look and feel like? There’s always more money to be earned, more fans to collect, more album copies to move. Maybe there’s no end to the ladder of success. But maybe it might slowly kill you if you never try to take that first step.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.