Category: Writing

Some days there are really no words for things I am thinking.  You just got to avoid trying to go see through the mullion and instead push on through the transom to get anywhere outside of my vexed mind.  But when you get those two together, well, you got yourself an understanding of a mighty strong window into the inner workings of my mind.  Simple, eh?

I keep catching myself, at some level, on the various ideas and thoughts that some fine folks seem to think prudent to share with me.  More, I find certain questions and restrictions we seem to place on life in general, at a minimum quizzical, if not down right absurd.  I am not too much into labels excepts when they are expedient.  But I begin to resist with a near apoplectic fit when they get attached to people.  I appreciate we all do it from time to time in an effort to provide some reductionist rigidity to our modest improvisation on what we hope is a well-thought idea.  “I am an American.”  “I am male.”  “I am an artist.”  I get it.  We all have a need driven by our ego to assert ourselves and provide meaning for those moments when we feel our edges slipping and oozing back into the infinitely undefinable expanse of reality.  We pile up labels to shore up the encroaching infinities that threaten to drown us, we no more than dust smotes.  Labels are shield and battle cry, we desperate to provide demarcation between our sense of worth in a universe of nameless indifference: we never label anything not worth labeling, only the “worthy” things in our lives get a name even if it just a mullion.

But then we go and label our needs and wants, attaching labels to people and ascribe to them their cut and line of their make.  As I find myself stumbling, albeit resolutely, back into a world where I entertain the smallest of chances of finding a person to date that I come to face a veritable laundry list of requirements that both parties must satisfy.  “I need a Christian.”  “I need a confident person.”  “I want to meet a go-getter and maker-of-their-destinies-kind-of-person.”  We use labels to line and quarter our quarry, to dog and corral them into pens where we can then brand them and lay claim to them.  But we lose the essence of a thing when we do this.  We get nothing more than a label both hollow in form and empty of substance; no attribution or label is ever more than that: words.

When it comes to meeting people, when it comes to trying to understand a person, no words will ever really help us.  No amount of pat psychology or simple rules of half-plus-7 rules can provide clarity for whether a person meets our needs and provides a meaningful compliment to our lives.  I give you that it may be expedient and it may be practical, but there are there no mathematics or statistical probabilities with convenient variables for us to throw into some equation for us to crunch out an answer, a label saying “this is the person for me.”  In the end, labels, like rules, block and sublimate reality into nothingness.  Labels, at some fundamental level, are ultimately woefully disrespectful of an individual’s right to live in the dignity of their own light without the shadow of our labels covering them over.

This week saw me shed some ten pounds in under twenty-four hours.  Without nary a fever or otherwise symptom my innards basically completely shutdown.  It may be obvious but it was not the most pleasant twenty-four hours I have spent at home.  And even some three days later I am still wobbly on my feet as I replenish myself on rice, bananas and live-culture yogurt.  Yumsers.  All this time staying near to the home facilities, as it were, gave me a lot of time to myself.  Actually, it gave me a lot of time period.  Maybe even too much time for this über-introvert.

What did I discover?  Not much really.  At least, no great revelations.  I wish I had something more poignant to write about.  I wish even more I had something deeper to admit to cogitating upon; I do not.  I merely sat and saw time slip past me.  I imagine it is the lack of calories and lack of exercise but these past days have been wrapped under white linens bedecked with a trine of pewter-heavy candlesticks: trouble, fear and ironically soothe; my only guest Time.  In its eminent presence so manifest I felt more my place best on a silver platter being served than serving as host.

Time is not to be mastered.  Even when we try to marginalize it as a “resource”, we can neither refine it or store it or do anything with it other than spend it as quickly as we receive it.  Without it our world of causality falls apart and we return to the eternal, timelessness of an existence so many believe they want but I suspect would be driven mad upon achieving.  Time is maybe one true tonic against the insanity of godliness.  Time flows past us till we become the weary, the worn.  The well-lived?  For some this process can eat us out, husk and whole.  For others it seems to not diminish but instead fill us with a life’s memories, not mere ghosts to haunt and taunt but truly spirits who bring with them the merry whispers of yester laughs.  I wish I knew tomorrow or Tomorrow but I do not.  I do know that I am now some halfway through my life.  And so writ, I wonder how I shall see the coming years: as hollow or hallow?

I am a person used to rules, a person comfortable with creating and living by rules both real and perceived.  Since my childhood I have created a large collection of rules, even collections of collections or systems of rules as it were, to describe not only how the world around me operated but also to set in order how I should operate within this world.  I felt, even adamantly believed blindly, that Teutonic discipline and principled self were absolute and necessarily required to operate successfully in the world.  The weirder and stranger my world became the more I tried to delve these hidden rules, rules that everyone but me seemed to understand intuitively.  If asked I swore that I was the last person not in a secret club, a club that had a seemingly infinite number of secret hand signals to which I was not privy to no matter how much I asked, begged, or scrutinized.  Everything, and I mean everything, became an abstraction back to some level of invariance which could then be encapsulated as a rule.  As I grew up I had complete systems of rules I used in order to operate within the word and no more specifically than for my interactions with other human beings.  Whenever things did not work as anticipated per these set of rules I assumed the deficit lay within myself; a more sane and rational human being might have first suspected that those pesky underlying rules themselves were to blame.

In the past couple of years I have realized that much (all?) of my general loneliness, unease and unhappiness are directly correlated both to the rigidity by which I applied these rules and to these rules’ impoverished nature to describe, anticipate or predict the very subtle, even sublime, nature that is the human experience.  As fallout to my last divorce I finally acknowledged my own hand in my downfall, deciding not to be further victim to my ineptitude and so started to leverage the very analytical skills I had honed to craft this byzantine maze of conditional if-thens as a means to dismantle them.  In areas such as work, career and my personal life I decided to remove all the rules and replaced them with the simplified, even rarefied and most basic first-order question:  Am I happy?  And based on this the rule is a straight-forward set of conditions: If I am not happy then I change my behavior; and, if I am happy then continue my current behavior.  I am not sure I can make it simpler than that.  The only place that hereto now I have not challenged is the realm of personal relationships.  Till now.

I recognize now that whereas I used rules to provide a means to engage with others, at least with respect to day to day relationships, I used rules in more intimate settings to protect myself from myself and even going as far to protect others from me — two divorces have tended to batter my self-confidence in these matters.  But I also recognize that in order to grow, mature and further deepen my happiness I need to allow people into my life in a more than cursory manner.  As a very good friend said after a long evening: “Ward, fuck all these rules.  Give people a chance to love you.”  It was the proverbial boot-camp kick in the ass I needed.  Frankly, I acknowledge that I fundamentally, even principally, need to trust myself to know what is best for myself irrespective of rules that either I, others or even society may impose.  In some ways this is an embarrassingly scary proposition both to undertake and to admit.  Scary in that I have no means of a priori predicting what the right thing is to do in any situation.  I am flying by the seat of my pants deciding what to do next based on the current moment.  It is embarrassing that has taken me this long to grasp how simply things really are.  I appreciate I will make mistakes.  Crash and burn even. And more so I appreciate that as a consequence of this newest undertaking I will put myself in a position of vulnerability where no rule or principle, no matter how canonized, can be used to shield me from my own decisions.

Here is to rules: fuck ’em.

My only proviso to this newly adopted response of “fuck ’em” to rules, at least in the domain of relationships, is the adoption of the contra-positive corollary, or “don’t fuck ’em” rule, best exampled by John Waters who said, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”