Musings About A Life…
So, I find myself at home, the decisive distinctive crisp sharp cold is unavoidable and can no longer be ignored। It smells like snow as we say।My thoughts turn to women, and the various lust-mances that are going on in my head and out of it as well.
My school work and the horror of regular tests, quizzes and the looming exams are a tremendous impediment to a life of lollygagging leisure masqueraded as hard busy work। Accountable all over the bloody place, with commitments made that some are just waiting for you to not meet. No in this new era of life in really rural Maine, I must keep showing up, doing what I say or close to it, and slowly trying to build a credible life of sorts.
The majority of my time is spent wasting time। I procrastinate and stumble around doing surprisingly not much of anything but looking or seeming to be extraordinarily busy. Not sure when or how or even why I learned the traits of the penultimate bureaucrat, but I am a pro at looking busy while I am in fact doing and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
It is not as if I am trading work pretence while I pursue some project or cause of worth or interest to others। No, I have lofty dreams like we all do, but I just don't want to do any heavy lifting, in fact if I could manage it, I'd prefer not to do any lifting or for that matter any tiresome chores. I want and aspire to and sometimes feel I am a writer. But after a paragraph or two, well I know where this is going sort of. But I really don't have the inclination or interest or drive to follow through. It is as if work as defined by tasks compiled and consistently built up in a general direction for a general result for the benefit of myself for which someone is willing to pay cold hard cash; well it's an anathema to me.
I wouldn't pay me, hell I am a lazy f^*k. I always fall short of the mark, whether mine or others, so naturally anyone who counts on me for anything will ultimately be disappointed.
My only innovation of late is to tell people in advance especially people just met, that I will indubitably fail them sooner or later. In other words stick around at your own risk. Can't blame me when I do f^*k up. Rather an ingenious twist this one.
Like saying no to a woman, near revolutionary in the day to day goings on of my ho-hum existence.
Most ex's hate me because I deceived them somehow one way or another. I made out-rage-ous claims.
“I'll love you forever. I will never lie to you. I will never fail you. I will always do everything I said I would. I'll be faithful to you no matter what. My love is unconditional.” And many, too many other ridiculous promises, protestations and false misleading statements and outright lies, many about who I was or what I was capable of doing; for them.
Sort of like huge fluffs of bull-shit made to look like spun sugar or cotton candy. Brown and stinky for sure but somehow not disgusting like the raw product. The artful packaging of nothing but the mundane and ugly into something at best intriguing at worse seemingly interesting and promising.
This is a skill for which though done with massive élan and fanfare, actually is doomed repeatedly to produce nothing of substance and certainly nothing enduring. A stage front in real life can only have the intended effect for the duration one can suspend the belief in a sort of faith like hope that things will somehow turn out all right.
This barker skill and sleight of mind will sooner or later fail and then in the cold hard light of day or even the dimness of a long dark night, will cause others to become aware slowly or suddenly, that they have been fooled and lied to. The results are uniformly predictable.
For whatever reason I have always found it easier to make up a grand and convoluted story about who I was, what I did than actually be someone who cumulatively created by slow steady plodding a life that was made by one's consistent attention to the non-flashy details of daily life in these United States in the post-democratic era.
The era of “Irrational Rationality”.
Some people can lie about and to themselves and untold others and seemingly get away with it। The key words are ‘get away’. Anything you are getting away with is obviously not real or made substantial. Others will get caught and repeatedly so. The difference is I believe awareness. It’s one thing to lie if deception is all you know. Quite another if you are lying and you know lying is not good or right no matter what the reason. If you decided to terrorise the terrorist and do so no matter what the cost. And you are aware, then you cannot. If you have even an inkling that something is wrong yet you do it, well this is the difference. Awareness is a tricky thing and it changes everything. I do know the difference though I have spent most my life denying it or hiding from it. Damn it!
So just being myself and not hiding or pretending to be anything else or more or different or whatever, well it makes sense. Albeit belatedly. I am soon to be fifty seven years old, and only in the past year have I actually held down anything remotely what many would call a job. Something for which you must make a real effort from time to time at; the end result of which causes someone or some entity to pay out with cold hard cash. The further arrival of which is dependent on more work and effort to do that which is required. I understand the rhythm and logic of it all now.
I still find though that being a procrastinators and fantasist and creating who you are and pretending to be something and someone both interesting and creative is far more enjoyable than actually doing something interesting and creating. For not having anything to show for one’s efforts has two benefits:
One is that is hard for someone to criticise nothing than something.
The second; well you can change direction, method or even type on the fly.
Today’s hard working technician can become tomorrow’s theoretical physicist. Next week, one can become the sole photographer for the spring edition of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. And a month later, one can become Victoria’s Secret oneself. The secret of course wryly enjoyed by oneself and one’s own mind, is that of course one is not Victoria, but in the ‘it’s sort of true vein of thought’ I do have a secret.
So, inevitably when the annoying unfriendly arrival of truth and fact and reality honed into whatever the gossamer lacy bullshitty fantasy well it is to be expected that disillusionment followed. As night into day, and day into night.
But telling someone that you are nothing more than a poseur and novice at life, that everything you do you do because you don’t really know what you are doing, and further telling them you will fail them, you will let them down, you will lie to them and deceive them, and saying this all upfront, well it’s almost like discovering the emotional version of polio or small pox vaccine. What used to destroy and disappoint, well it is now been forthrightly stated. Like the cigarette pack warnings. You are warning them and protecting yourself from blow back.
If you don’t lie or mislead or state that you will lie and mislead in the future you are making your future self immune from blame and consequence.
The added benefit is that with such low expectations when on that odd rare occasion you actually do something accomplish something or achieve something, well it is a miracle and praise descends from one and all.
So now on the cusp of my 57th year, I am preparing to continue with my slow low expectation programme for life and living. If no one expects you to even know how to play baseball, imaging how surprised and delighted they are if you actually even hit a ball.
In my old life management programme, I pretended to be a home-run hitter. Never just a player but a home-run hitter. Well unless you hit a home run every time at bat, well you are just another ball player who on occasion has been known to hit one out of the park.
Doomed to failure and disappointment this particular life programme of mine.
My solution to the obvious flaws in the basic fundamental plan was to bolt whenever anyone noticed or made comment or stated the obvious truth. ‘Hey you don’t even play ball and no one has ever seen you hit one out of the park.’ And once one calls out the truth, well it is but a matter of time before the entire programme and whatever have been attached to or built on the deception du jour comes crashing in on itself.
So your wife and/or family or lover or whatever who have bought into whatever it was you were selling, once there is someone crying out and stating the obvious, well they cannot afford to look any more foolish than they already do. So even if they were willing or complicit. No one likes to look like a fool. Easier to deny, ditch and depart to admit you might have been a co-captain of the good ship la-la.
See, I used to believe that if someone was a thief or simply wanted too much for too little or nothing, if they were culpable by dint of being equally lazy and dishonest well, then I was not such a bad person.
I was just delivering what was desired. In fact it does not work that way. For anyone being susceptible to a poseur, a con man, or a time-thief is of course at the core the same kind of lazy; but it is in fact worse.
For people such as that are not capable of maintaining let alone conjuring up and maintaining some form of elaborate ruse for life-doing, they are mere spectators.
This is why they will hate you the most and the strongest and with the heartless degree of cold-hearted scorn and loathing.
Now, I am not at all sure my new discovery of pre-emptive truth telling and going about dealing with people on a one-to-one basis delivering on small or tiny expectations, but doing so on an ongoing regular fashion is the complete antidote to my prior art form.
There are strange side effects of this sort of thing. Being truthful and consistent in the tiny does not require like physics a whole new vocabulary and methodology to explain or function. No, if you simply do something bone dull and in no-way thrilling or amazing; say show up on a regular basis at a time mutually agreed upon in similar place and continue to do so, you will develop in another the belief you can be counted on.
And the less you make a point of this fact, the more appreciated your simply showing up becomes.
You are now being truthfully portrayed for doing something positive yet for the most part quite painless, show up and do nothing in particular as opposed to not show and do nothing in particular.
You see the diabolical cleverness. It is not so much you are being a different person or becoming something other that who and what you always were.
By making the slight alteration to a life programme that has been a consistent massive failure across-the-board, costing pain and causing suffering for just about everyone involved. Whole lives filled only with the rancid taste of deception and the horrid pain of betrayal for every participant.
Looking back at a long and endless line of bodies made less because they wanted so desperately to believe. And taking advantage seemed such a harmless thing to do. It was never malicious or planned with malice of aforethought. All those tasty rationalisations that made ‘doing the easy’ and taking the lazy path was well so easy. Or so it seemed.
So, I wonder if starting with simply not doing what one used to can really bring on such extraordinary changes?
If one starts by saying, I will no doubt fail and disappoint and otherwise seem less than what you perceive right this moment. Is telling the truth not speaking with fake humility, but rather reporting a known fact based on long experience. Can this actually prevent people being hurt, upset or angry? Is saying what you know is almost certain to occur but saying it beforehand, does this really have an alchemy that can turn the gold of expectation into the mundane steel of everyday reality? Is telling a lover that you need time to clean up old messes the right honourable thing to do, even if she is unhappy with this right now?
Could it really be? The secret to life is truth. About one-self. One’s true self. One’s inner self. That who you are, as your are, is in fact what you should be?
Well, how bloody ironic. Fifty-seven years on this planet, traveled the majority every corner and many of the nooks and most crannies few ever see, a decent large single slice of what exists of the blue globe I live on.
Spent most of my precious time capital and others cash capital, trying to pretend I was not me.
Infuriating almost everyone along the way, because I could promise the stars and make them – and I might add myself – believe in some impossible dream or glittering fantasy or unbridled glorious future time where it would all be ever so much better.
Eventually when they either realised the dream would not, could not, come true; that their glorious future was not to be, could not be. Or sometimes when I just lost interest in keeping everyone happy in the dream, growing weary from pretending about something I knew would never become true or real, life collapsed or so it seemed.
How many times has my world collapsed in on itself? I can only say that it has been one-hundred percent consistent for my entire life. It has never failed. I have never failed to disappoint those for whom I cared or was addicted to for whatever the reason.
I cannot imagine myself of 20-years ago being able to understand this simple concept of delivering value to others in the form of unvarnished simple acts. People do not expect miracles unless you proclaim you will deliver miracles.
The myself of 20-years ago would have been horrified by what would be perceived as being dull living a bland existence devoid of ‘so-called’ action. Because the me of 20-years ago did not know the difference between chaos and rhythm and that even chaos has a rhythm. BO-RING!
I mistook allowing life to happen to me as living an exciting life.
I missed the true beauty because I was only looking for the spectacular. Ironic that I see my strengths today not as any grand delusion or fantastic wish about tomorrow; no today my strength is deriving from what is.
Not what may or could possibly be.
So finally to my belief as an 11-year old. “I am a writer I am going to be a writer”. Greeted with hilarity. I have spent a life-time trying to escape that moment of humiliation. I thought that it was telling the truth reporting the truth was why I was being laughed at. The irony of it all is not lost on me today.
A writer is someone who in advance tells people, I am now going to tell you a story. Some of it may in fact be true some may not. It is story-telling an ancient art form. Do not confuse the story-telling with the story-teller.
That is exactly what I did though. Since I thought it was what I wanted to do people were laughing at. I was supposed to follow a script. I also was supposed to be better and more because of an obscure number attached to the letters IQ. My attempts to overwhelm the feeling of humiliation instead drove me to turning my dream into a progressive night-mare. In retrospect all I wanted was someone to say, “he you. You are ok. Just the way you are. If that is your dream well go for it. We love you no matter what.” And the people, who truly loved me, pushed me and held back praise for fear of spoiling me. From this terrible misunderstanding I carved out my direction for endless years to come. I believed only stunning achievement could ever result in an ‘atta-boy’. I could not feel the silent support and thought love could only be purchased with currency or sudden fame. Because everyone thought I knew more than I did and I sure was never going to admit how little I actually did understand and know, the dynamic was launched and the propellant was ignited. Don’t ever show how much you really need others and admit how scared you are, just keep-on keeping pretending.
I saw no difference between the planks of the Anti-war podium in Washington Square in the spring on ’68 and the stage of the Rising Star. Both gave me a ‘high’ – an audience applause and approval. I could not distinguish between the two. Swaying a crowd made me feel alive. I’d say whatever it took, to get the applause, the laughter. There was no difference for me. Life however is not made from brief interludes on stage. I never knew this and if someone did explain it to me, I suppose I just did not understand.
To be interesting and different and stand out required the extensive effort of travel. I traveled to be interesting not because I was interested. I explored the world from the safety spot of the observer. Occasionally someone would perceive the truth. A wife told me once, ‘to be a writer does not mean you have to go everywhere do everything’. A stunning observation and one that almost crashed through my ‘running self’.
The other aspect is that writing like everything else of value is the result of small steps taken regularly in unspectacular setting with unremarkable moments collecting themselves by effort and revision into a well-done finished product. In retrospect it was the fear I could not write at all that insured I never tried. The idea I could be good at anything other than something to be laughed at or pitied simply never entered my mind. So, I pretended and quite truthfully I was a good pretender. I looked the part and acted it as well.
And when I found myself in real-life situations I found I could be both heroic and a coward. This discovery was to remain a deep secret. Somehow I missed in all my beloved reading the fact I had more in common with other people than I had not in common with them. Everyone is capable of both moments of seeming heroics and other moments of seeming cowardice. Then I tried to pretend to be rather than just be. I maintained this arrogant hubris in the face of endless failure. Afraid of life but more afraid that anyone might discover and uncover I was just like everyone else. This fear of similarity was connected to my desperation to not feel the feelings associated with humiliation. To be laughed at was the only compass point on the map, I knew I did not want to be at near or close to. So my life was a re-action to the fear of the fear of being laughed at. Like the awkward child who by dint of being new, and because he arrived at school not in a bus like all the others but alone in the huge limousine was treated different and differently. Dodge ball would be a horror, to be the only one not chosen by the ‘winners’ or the ‘losers’. Anything that meant judgment or acceptance or approval of others was to be avoided. Most of all feeling what I was feeling was something that had to be altered by whatever means. Booze, drugs and lust-mances masquerading as heroic love stories. I never went after the women I really wanted; I only went after the women I knew would no say no.
See the theme. Risk little or nothing. Avoid anything that might cause pain. Stand apart. And always no matter how crowded the room or intense the romance, ‘alone again, naturally’. And oh so lonely.
The extraordinary thing belatedly discovered – I have ample experiences to fill endless books and narrations. Most recent of my awareness is that writing is work and humdrum work at that. And I am extraordinarily lazy. I have learned recently how to trick myself into working by doing something that I do not regard as work. I enjoy corresponding with my many correspondents. My letters are reports from the front lines of my life. Increasingly honest and occasionally quite accurate. In this way, I am compiling a collection of writings that I can winnow down into tales that are becoming a part of a book within a book about the person writing the book. There are three concurrent levels. Three different styles. Three different kinds of writing – all under one roof. Tales from Europa, Maine.
It is exquisitely painful to work at my writing. Only the happenstance of serendipity that finds me a writer of a monthly tech tip column has taught me the benefit of collected works. If you try to write a book from scratch with no plan, no goal and without thought, what you get is what you deserve. Endless unending thoughts and beginnings without any pattern rhyme or reason. Learning when I see a simple monthly collection. That the body of work is growing. I have something to show. And transferring that into eMail story telling is my sneaky way of tricking myself to a weekly commitment of writing and building a story from beginning to end. It has hard difficult and at times when I think about it scary as hell. But this sleight of mind trick is allowing me 46 years from when I was aware of my truth to actually follow through.
The things I care about and ‘work at’ regularly and with some consistency are things I would like to accomplish. Not thing I must accomplish in order to be.
I have realised I may not be a writer, at least not the writer of my youthful fantasy. I may never be.
I am no longer tied to this as a definition of who I am.
The reason I loath liars and hypocrites today is because they remind me of what I used to be.
Ouch. Truth hurts. It also releases me and as the saying goes, ‘sets me free’. Neither as good as or and bad as – portrayed by myself or others. Just another tiny part of humanity. Going through life at the shared pace, day to day. A part of something.
I have family and friend’s who loved me when I did not even like myself, providing me the ultimate ‘atta-boy’. They inspire me to do just a little bit more. Not to earn their approval or love, but because it is the right thing to do.
Life is the small collected collection of small steps and tiny completed tasks. Helping others by helping myself first.
And while people may go oooh, ahhh at some single spectacular event or activity. That is not what really matters. What people want from me is exactly what I want from them. Consistency and trying to be little by slowly better more today than yesterday.
I thought being a star a home run hitter was what life was about. How wrong I was. Unrealistic expectations endlessly unmet. Betraying everyone, including myself.
Life is today, now what needs to be done, the only question: what is the next right thing?
You cannot be humiliated if you are comfortable with yourself.
So, I stopped running from the fear of the fear of being humiliated। And now I am as a dear friend would say ‘a plodder’ steady slow but moving in the right direction. No idea of a destination.
Am I a writer? Stay tuned; we can find out together...
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