An I Believe Speech

I believe first and foremost in my own humanity and respect everybody's humanity above any label they have been given. I believe that everybody varies from one another enough to justify a nuanced understanding of how they need support, and how they'd like to experience life and how they can undergo change if they'd like to. I understand I don't have to be loyal to people, especially if they cause you harm, but I also can't see anybody as a problem above and beyond their inherent worth as a person. Not bigger than nature's or the law's worth in them. Your problems are always less than you, and an infinite amount of solutions exist within you. But they will be corrected over time, at a plodding pace, and it turns out your habits are going to mean more than anything. Are you going to be kind? That is the question that sits atop everything. That question sits atop the structure of many other questions, such as, are you going to take care of your body? do you know how to care for your mind? Are you interested in being awake? Can you rest at night? Kindness is determined by both your habits and your ability to tune in with what's important. And this ripens on a vine over time. You more often have feelings like, "I get it!" "Or this is going to happen and I'm going to react this one way, but there will be a next moment and one after that, so just get through it hot stuff." When you can say that to yourself you have gotten a good deal closer to sincere kindness. Not like those people who are just kind because they can't stand being seen in this life as being anything but kind. Well, everybody starts off there, but kindness doesn't end that way. There are never two instances of the same kindness -- it is wholly unique. It is a nutrient that will start to run through people, and age them in ways with all sorts of pleasant variables. how they notice stuff, or how well they sense the needs of other people. It's like when you're a teenager and you first start to notice how much people talk about objects. Sometimes if there is something wrong with them, adults will sit around, for example, a sprinkler watering a sidewalk, and try to attribute some history to it. How this happened, what the intelligence of the guy was, and depending who you're with, make reference to his ethnicity. If it's all guys you would have a better chance of hearing about the ethnicity of said guy who made a very controlled decision to point a thing spraying water on to the cement and in to the gutter for the next 45 minutes. And he said yes and signed off on watering the sidewalk before the city council. Everybody jeered and it made the next day's blogosphere. Maybe you should just take a picture and put it on social media. Hashtag it the best and hope for the viral outrage of six hundred thousand people who could be doing something so much better with their lives at that moment. I mean, we all do it. But kind people do less and less of that kind of stuff. They have nothing to be afraid of and so they go outside. 

Friday night, 11/15--Staying Supple

At the risk of sounding angsty or overly reflective, I have really been hit by the emptiness bug over the past month or so. That feeling of always needing some form of soothing. It's this quality that when people come face to face with it they instinctively recognize it and then feel hesitant of you. My old approaches of dealing with this feeling is an unwritten comic book series. My next life-stage of dealing with the emptiness bug was all of this spiritual perspective, which felt amazing because the ideas were so new to me and you just kind of had to understand the concepts and it would make you feel better. That's when I named and chose the colors for this blog, which I now think looks like total shit. The returns on spiritual perspective can diminish over time. A flimsier approach than I ever suspected. It was a time when "Answers" really seemed like an answer.

But lately, I have been kind of mumbly, doubtful, numb, unsure of myself, uncomfortable seeming, etc. It's not amazing-feeling and good solid routines and habits are just not doing the trick. I don't know how to be so I am just going ahead and not knowing how to be in public. At least it's honest and genuine and so I can take pride in that. And I noticed in conversations I don't really try to tell people "cool facts about me." Which is so nice. I hate when I do that. I hate that I have told so many people about the one time I drank in a camera truck with a famous movie director and make it seem like we were total buds. Hate. And come to think of it, my uncomfortable social behavior perfectly lines up with this other value of mine--that I should never act like I know what the fuck I am doing in life. Like Goethe's insistence that we should all remain an apprentice at life. And that we strive to stay supple. I think I am right in being insecure, showing pain on my face, mumbling, not being able to make simple decisions like where we should go sit in a coffee shop, what to order, and what is an interesting thing to talk about.

But the expectations of your company may boo and hiss at that. Or at best, meet it with indifference. Maybe a grown man should be confident by now? That he should have a feeling of security, even in a critical environment. That one should be an expert or have a specialty at something by now? Well, fuck that. I insist that I am right in not being able to navigate subtextual expectations. I would rather just hold others to the standard of not having them. I want to be a scorned little boy. And sometimes if you insist on staying this way, you get taken aback by an alien sweetness.

Like last night. Friday night, 11/15. Playing by the rules, I set up to meet this girl at a bar for an underwhelming club soda. No charge, dollar tip. The soda-glass giveaway to my no-alcohol ways led to my having to make the justification of why I am happier in life drinking club soda. And I really didn't believe myself at the time and so it sounded apologetic. I looked at other tables, and mind you it was still early and so 90% were laughing and happy at this point and the other 10% were couples. I had full intentions of joining the 10% of unhappy couples if that's what it took to make this feeling go away. And so she hears me talk evasively and then she forgets to ask other questions about me and she had this admittedly amazing dog with her that everyone felt the need to interrupt our conversations to ask about. And then I absorbed an excuse about an early departure and came home and texted an always-kind ex girlfriend because indifference has been feeling intolerable to me lately.  She is always so nice. And I think I might love her. I was telling you about all of those "might" feelings I have been having lately. But she was not on cell phone this night. Checking the screens and my virtual social connections at an increasing pace, feeling the attachment-less mental processes starting to kick in, my practically-brother roommate and I start barking out forlorn tones of voice about the general conditions of being alive.

Cut to us sitting at a French restaurant. Cut to him charming this long-dreadlocked French guy who noted he was in a rock band. Cut to the French guy leaving and coming back out with two truly beautiful women. The kind of women you only want to remain visual input so as not to risk your stolen breath with a personality or something. Cut to social miscues, talks about art, sixteen dollar burgers, talks about loneliness, extremely complex techno-social dynamics and what it might say about the character of people that reject you, and the best lettuce-only five dollar salad you then say is the best salad you ever have. Cut to a hesitation for two men to make meaningful eye contact, but then doing it. Cut to understanding and a feeling of being loved and understood. Cut to the clock, just before midnight.

The ball is ending soon. The bills are being distributed. An extremely-dressed, under-impressed clientelle overwhelms service workers hiding wine glasses in the host booth and then this curly-haired blonde lady walks in and everybody looks and wonders if she is famous. I think it's the rose lipstick. And I wonder if she and her suited man friend have just come from a theater production--that they starred in, and that was set in 1940's L.A. But what I really think is they actually just came from their house. It wasn't worth mentioning. I don't even think my dinner company noticed them, too occupied by a mind fixed on steak fat and cigarette smoke. There was a meal and I devoured all of the grease and fat I possibly could. And the thickest mayonnaise I ever imagined.

Earlier, sitting in our living room, the seedling of a hunger for experience (and a second dinner) had driven us out the door and down the street to a French Restaurant. Hunger had whisked us away. The working men we are, we could go somewhere good. And so we did. My blood felt thick and full and I felt relaxed afterwards. A restaurant, which was maybe a staged experiment in controlling others perceptions of who you are, felt suspended in this viscous mayonnaise-y atmosphere. I floated effortlessly in it and club soda. My old sweater and lazy hoody. Canvas sneakers laying flat among the tapping leather boots. A nice smile and the air of not giving much of a fuck about her appearance got the waitress a 25% tip.

If I remember it correctly, what I experienced was carefree fun. If I were to be a fully confident American male I'd go to lots of school and wear smarter clothes and eventually design a prescription pill to produce exactly this effect. Once in Miami, in fact, I did this harbor tour on a boat and one of the houses you could see from the boat was owned by the man who patented Viagra. His backyard had rare palm trees imported from Africa. His backyard, fully under the hot sun and with no physical shelters in sight, was climate controlled (?!) -- always adjusted to 72 degrees. That is a man truly wearing the man's man's rose lipstick. But nevermind that. My blood is thick and heart full and I'm feeling two steps removed from rose lipstick. Not wearing it. Not wanting it. Instead, going home to sleep. But not a dreaming kind of sleep. I felt like I had everything there and so I just slept till morning.

Surveilable Psycho Bubbles

I am starting to place more value on my concerns. I interpret this as a rising sense of being worth it. Moreover, being as honest and observational as possible about my reactions to unwelcome events breeds more authentic, self-generated information rather than the self-limiting attitudes that come from suppressing my feelings and behaving the way I think I'm "supposed to." This deeper embrace of what I am feeling doesn't include expressing the emotion in an unchecked way, but allows for a more nuanced form of neutral acknowledgment spiked with pungent understanding and sweet fondness. The good news is that when there is too much self-generated information to know what to do with, self-generated systems occur to organize it, and this feels something like personal agency. When these motors hum it feels like independence and freedom.

I can also now see internal pain as a way to test and expand my capacity to accept who I am as a man making a go at a challenging, responsible, and productive life. And what is the best container to hold me in that context of trying at life? Certainly not a self-judging mind attempting to coerce its own abstractions by stuffing loose threads within its walls. I see the possibility of a bigger container to occupy. One in which I have space to walk and run and sing and dance. To do everything. And to let what is loose and not understood spill over. In this space I become able to love more of just about all of me. And what I don't love, the container holds that too. Gone are the days of intending to, or hoping someday, that I can "learn to love myself and so love others." How many times have we been told to do this? Here are the days of gaining respect and love for somebody who consistently tries in spite of self-judgement. A man who takes actions in a place where defiance and acceptance converges. Because even atonal compositions harmonize in their own novel way.

The consequence of gaining self respect is that my emotions are starting to feel easier to regulate. At best, I can be swept up by natural life's tendency toward self-correction. By law, chaos begets order. And I can allow this reorganizing stasis to occur internally, and even be enchanted by what's taking place. But even at my worst, I know from past experience that the harsh self-talk isn't nearly as true or interesting as a person who has shown that he can fall, get up, and try again. The man who knows that, at least so far, storms always blow through. The echoes of harsh self-talk resemble the entire person I once was in a shadowy form. Merely an insubstantial entity not really in touch with what is needed to settle in and fill up with the stuff of life. The entity is no longer me now, but a small voice within. I have a deep appreciation for that turn of events in my life. I want to hug the small voice and let it stay in the guest room till it gets back on its feet. I once stayed in that very guest room too.

I also feel empowered as a person who possesses the ability to transform emotions into energy and insight for myself and other people. I can sense a deeper core of universal needs in people and I want to get warmer. My conversations with others about their struggles becomes like a big game of "Hotter, Hotter...Colder, Colder." What gets me closer to the prize and how can I hone the intuition that takes me there? I want to find what's hidden for the benefit of me and for you. Seeing my pains with purpose makes me less likely to resist my own feelings, and being on this mission with other people's struggles helps me be less under the spell of my anxious chatter's inevitable destination of confusion. The data of my mental comments is an unconscious sea of irrational evaluations, reactions, and thoughts, seen through fogged up goggles. I become the lost captain trying navigate what he deep down senses is an unnavigable situation.

The more empowering option here, that of purpose, helps me see a way off the water and back home. It helps me see that peace can be had even when circumstances don't feel resolved. The layer of purpose and acceptance to any of life's events lies underneath, always. And the knowledge that I can always rest my weary self there--solidly so, inspires an invaluable confidence in enduring hardship. This knowledge helps neutralize the overwhelm. It opens up all sorts of possibilities for my spiritual life. It tells me that I can continue my path in understanding how to operate from my heart more than my head. It connects me in a deeply satisfying way. Assuring me that I can meet everyone, anywhere, even when nobody but me is here.

I have a lot of fortunate concerns right now. I love that I have visions and interests in goals and crankiness and sweetness simultaneously. The cup feels very full of juice with added bitters and sugars and muddled up everything. This is in line with what I want out my adult life. A concoction of everything.

yes, and...

We don't give up on our dreams, no. but we've seen enough to see what's happened before, to those who un-tether their life lines and aim for the sky. they float away, gradually deflating into disappointment. they may have purchased a lie. Sold in every corner of their Mama and Papa's belief in them. In america and on the pictures, and in the schools. the lie of our own brilliance, not yours. they do it and float on and not know where they are, but maybe by a sound coming off a speaker or a phrase a teacher spoke. A teacher they now feel ambivalence for. Go and float to what you thought of you, yesterday. They float take some wounds, leaking out an essential air. Picking at well-intended scabs, thin-skin hardens, callous over "these times" so unfair. because faith's not there, healing not here. And I'll tell you why, it's because on this flight there is no fucking way to steer. So whimper out, sink in soft whines, but at too high a distance to touch back down--to reconsider. Some can touch again. Guilt can bring you back. Joy. Sin, resolve of goodness. Some other girl did it when you couldn't decide. Or simply, decimated pride. Nobody knows the how, nobody can re-sing the song that commences inside. Some get gifted the want to play along. To ante up and discover the value of responsibility. The lucky ones have babies. Or hurt too deep. The lucky ones get left with no choice in the matter. Get the anime, elan vital, the verve, with sparks and all. How's it come? All things considered, what makes Johnny run? Lips no longer serviceable. I mean, here we stand got two feet rough ground steady eyes, deep-focused. Limited for sure, but still can take us pretty far. Not knowing how far. Not knowing where to. But once we get there, we know we'll be able to see further. No longer sorting through used copies of the "Myth of the Straight Line." Here we stand, considering the vast burden of others. Here we wander, seeing the stars in the sky, and maybe sometimes feeling so close to them. Underneath this tasteful backdrop--not too dark, but never too hot. Just sufficiently bright. Warmed by the life those stars sent, and warmed by that same thing they gave our friends. We don't give up, no. we walk. we run. and we walk when we get tired again. we don't fly though, never no. because we don't wanna miss out like before. I mean, the dreams might even be close too, yet we don't feel like sleeping anymore. Many are good and we are not them by design.

In-dig-nance

RW Emerson on change in an individual, as pulled from Robert D. Richardson's biography _Emerson: The : Mind on Fire_:

"'Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered," [Emerson] says. 'There is a crack in everything'; we face not only opportunity but 'this running sea of circumstance. [Change occurs]
in proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions (changes) are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, in most men, an indurated heterogenous fabric of many dates and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be no enlargement, and the man of today scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of a man in time, a putting off of dead circumstance day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day."


That quote I very half-understand feels very deep. I have been told to surrender to life's terms a lot these past few years. Every day forever. I highly value this concept. Let's just say...to my friends, yes those friends....I totally get it, alright? I get happy I got to where I did and got to surrender at the tender young (but old enough) age of 28. Once I stopped fighting, everything happened for me. I was sick on a whole bunch of things I wasn't capable of understanding and yet still fighting like I understood them. I still don't think I understand a whole lot, but I understand what Emerson is talking about...in "Self-Reliance," in "History," and in "Nature." In "Love," and "Friendship" and "Circles." Certainly, if we have access to anything that is solely ours it might be the shaft of light that shines in and out of our inner-core upon our experience. How that light changes, extends into our environment, and how to use it are what I think about. I feel lately that it is merely those who insist on the simple fact that yes, I do have light and it is uniquely mine, who are able to forge a path based on that poetic, over-soul, unique sensibility, etc. etc.-thingy Emerson loves and that I just can't give up on. Can't surrender my desire to. And its insistence to be expressed, to OTHERS, drives me and frustrates me and separates me and makes me feel down and jubilant and so stupid-smart you wouldn't believe. The drive for the expression trumps all right now. Hungry lonely....Hmmm, that is interesting, what do I have to say about it? Insight to gain from it? I don't know why it doesn't feel real and the part of me that is what I'm supposed to be worries me, but the experience is beautiful too. There is always the logical worry. And just as I was taught, it's best to operate when under the impression that you have something to lose. Right? This is why it feels ok. I declare nothing. I have nothing, which isn't to say I don't have anything--but sacrificing more and more makes one think about these things. It starts to make one think that, well, whatever's lost, I am just OK. My light is OK. And something surely can be gained. Attachment to outcomes certainly bears less and less reason as it goes, and one starts to suspect, "...life may be much easier and more simple than we make it out to be." And that, "The way of life is wonderful. It is by abandonment." (RWE, naturally.)

I don't even know anything well enough yet, or any non-material things' actual application and value to life, but this little light that took glow and saw its capabilities upon a commencement of a more courageous angle on life is all that can afford to matter right now. And the state of the glow often feels like life and death. Not just to keep the glow, but to glow upon the glow, and to show the glow. To feel its warmth, to build upon. I am very protective of it. And the only real fear is not having it within me. I feel as though life cannot reject me, if it is within. It is ok to fear then--it is ok to fear the unified Universe, and to revere Her too. Hence the fear, and the drive. Sometimes I exist in connection with it for a few days at a time and those days dance. Mostly I think how to foster my light and how it shines upon my plot of land. How to nest it and nuzzle it, and most importantly, how NOT to bemoan it, and so it becomes the impetus for all this change.

Reading Emerson lately has given me a lot of renewed vigor in fighting for the change. Welcoming it, and loving it. Because it has wanted to stop for awhile now. Not stop as much as even out and plateau. My transformation, almost an entity of its own by now, was sitting in the in between place. Confused, doubtful and tempted to slow. That my wild passions (don't let exteriors fool) should be surrendered and refined. That the "society" man should take root and the youth shall fall away. But no! Instead I shaved my beard to feel like a kid again. I went swimming and started to feel timid and curious and natural in that state again. And then there's the wonder. And the refusal to figure out, but instead to ask more. Why? Why? Why? Why? Oh.....But why?

A theme of late, besides I do NOT want your advice, is that I feel like my own spurned lover fighting hard to get me back. This is odd, a bit romantic, and self-centered, yes. But it is true. I felt myself not being genuine. I felt all my hot-centers sprouting uncomfortably from my head again when they were slip-sliding around in my heart just a few months ago. I'm thinking so much about being good enough or not--my mind tends to generate the same N-O with that one. I know what I have and what to own up to. None of it is material. But, hell, any criminal, Republican, suburbanite, or yuppie can have material things. It doesn't take much interesting to get things, so why for me then? What my thing, I declared in a happy daze, was--was an aim for sincerity. And still is. I need to aim for heart or I'm doomed to indecision and confusion. Fear has gibbered and mowed and here is the crack in me. Look at it. Opportunity. Summer of 2011 has been the summer when many of my imagined circumstantial fears came perfectly true. They weren't big, but scary movies being played out in front of my own pitted and powerless guts. Not only was I fine in the aftermath, it is turning out I am exponentially the better for it. I really mean that. It just doesn't mean there's not friction still. That there is thing called emotional tolerance--and feeling that I get to learn right now. That because they are feelings does not mean I shall feel bad about having them. That I have feelings, there is this blessing attached, and not a curse of shame. Of course I want to live my life like a man in love, at his highest point when in union with beyond-human things AND know how it will turn out--take a little insurance out that I'm banking on the right thing. But I can also just have heart, and see about it, feeling my way through outcomes with an appetite, and hitting a sleep every night feeling decent about my effort. There is nothing like the good feeling of effort. What a romantic, actualizeable, and hard-fought notion of living day to day, eh?

Well, in the present I am a bit lonely and restless and a young man healthier than ever--vital in body, fragile in mind, gentle in spirit, and so the possibility is real for this. It is not something to declare surrender to. To give up on. I surrender my mind about this. My need for outcomes. My past. But I want to have a very direct experience, moving forward, with my God-given instincts. I know I can still fight, and I can learn for the next fight. The instincts are not bad. It's just that THOSE are the things that need refinement, change, experience and missteps, and self-forgiveness. Those will send me spinning into a life I can bring my light to. And apply the type of effort and attitude that feels really good. And if I can believe that even though life often stays hard for a while, the specific issues of the present will change, will get easier. I believe this and so yes, count me in. I really had to be reminded that the context of right now it a season-- and seasons pass. And new things come. They will be hard too but they will be different. Life's not easy, and come to think of it, I don't know if I want one that is.

I wish that I could put somebody in my eyes for a day and explain to them how full and rich it feels sometimes, especially in these vague ways of how I am forming my relationship with the Universe. The transition of past state to new one is when I feel most enthusiastic. And when I grow. Then people might stop wondering and saying things like, I need to do it this way. It is complex. At times I do need a lot of guidance. But my beauty comes in flashes and disappears, and that is my work right now. I have been able to catch the star a few times here and there. Draw it out, name it, and build upon my general impressions of how to cultivate and tune my perceptions in to the rushing and natural speed of Life. And to glow. But not enough now not yet. More work. More sight. More sounds. Heart wide-open and exposed...faith it will weather fine and find more room to fill. It will. Because I am looking at the target and not the arrow.

"In the hour of vision, there is nothing that can be called gratitude, nor properly joy." I surrender to you big dreams, restlessness, and oversight. I will be dissatisfied and indignant until something says when because I am human. I am not satisfied by no other than the coming of the Lord. At least until a few more chips fall. Or my eyes or knees start to go. The heart can only gain acceptance certain ways--not by words, not by force. The gift of this all just still feels WAY TOO big to even out and settle.

Notes from state-comissioned job interview class

How come the expectation for "when our dreams come true" is that it is the reality conforming to our dreams and not our dreams changing for the reality? Why bemoan the death of what never felt good? Or at least in-reach, with anything but phantom fingertips? If we could all understand the process of engineering our dreams based on an amusement and affection for experience, wouldn't that help a lot? The seeds of dreams usually die and the disenfranchised many shirk and shrink, but don't we along the way forget the circumstances those dreams came from? Maybe a time you'd look back on, and think, man, I was so foolish then. But the dreams still demand water and the disenfranchised adult humans are always talking about revolution--the kind whose seed is anger. The disenfranchised has also felt like my imagination, which once was my entire idea of myself, and that might be sick and withering. More likely it is still undefined, or redefining itself. The first question of a job interview generally goes something like, "Tell me about yourself." See, I am a human being and I DO have needs, yes I do. That's one thing that I am today. A man that can now say that. Know me, here and now, and shame please kindly exit. I steal too, like the following thought from Emerson: To simply know thyself falls short--Revere Thyself! That is about me. The fading sound of disenfranchisement is a welcome relief. It gives me a feeling of digging in to life, rather than standing at its boundaries, hoping for someone to notice me. Life sometimes even looks fun under the florescent lights, I think. These are the thoughts of a truly daring creature. The other wallflower whistling in the dark was the dude who imagined what he'd say when somebody cared to know, and what was thought to say is sharpened and lovely, but nobody ever asked except one or two. What ended up being said always came out in crazy nonsensical waves of poorly executed big-word strings, lip trembles, and looks of am-i-good-enough?Answer-me! expectations. I think they tended to get the idea that I still may not know who I am very well. (Back to the interview.) Well, I am sure now who I am. I am that I don't know who I am. With a mind to Revere what I am. And as Mr. Head with the droopy neck, the instructor who can't emphasize enough how to definitively end your remarks, would say: "That is the answer."

It is a bad feeling for people to have an encounter with me not really knowing anything about me upon leaving. This happens in all parts of my life and always has. At best I have been mysterious and an intrigue--generally, closed off, reserved, reticent, aloof, and/or painfully shy. Mystery is better left to personal thought I'm starting to conclude. And maybe the intimate trust of only a few. A special few who are not exempt from interviewing too--they must jump through my hoops, be there in distress and invite me to theirs. Be patient when I am clearly sniffing the wrong paths out and demanding that I don't give up. Be both reasonable and faithful--which, mind you, are not contradicting states. It just takes time to establish both things in one relationship. These few friends, family members, and loved ones get to see my Mystery and I get to seek theirs. And the rest, I'm starting to surrender to the fact that I need a straight(best foot)forward version of me too. Because this me has needs that must be met. Else I run the risk of withering into something I couldn't stand to be. A heel. A waste of space, except to an old acquaintance--Shame. I keep finding myself bound by my human bones. But off somewhere else. Trying to justify the space they are taking, rather than working with the space they are occupying. Assumedly, my torso will soon be filling out a chair in somebody's office and they will have something I do need and I can either ramble about how to justify my space there in that moment (the only thing I know how to do right now) or I can look them in the eye and tell them how I will make them money and show up on time and get along well with others. Which I feel confident I can do--for some odd reason it just seems more important to justify myself first. Um, the bones beat the mind, best three out of always. My mind says too much to listen to. The simple laws of behavior and habit may feel like mine to follow, but in truth they are my master. Because human behavior is actually Nature's. So, it spawns a lot of conventions--something Mr. Head with the droopy neck knows all about. Sit knees forward, hands gently folded into one another. No crossing of anything, ever. Only say sir. Not ma'am. Never tell them you have kids. If you do a pre-screen on the phone, then shave if you shave. Put on a suit. No talking beyond thirty seconds. We don't listen beyond thirty seconds. It just takes a slight bit of resistance to show me how I suffer for the assumption that conventions do not apply to me. Mr. Head knows how the scenario of a job interview applies to everybody (which is now me, too).

So while we are here, in the interview class, here are some of my Notes:
--Don't always tell everything to anyone, especially lovers and employers.
--There's always time, just panic doesn't tell you so.
--Clear gestures of goodwill and equality among people always goes appreciated.
--Calm, sane, reasonable, and curious interactions are lovely.
--Questions, ears too.
--They size you up, size 'em back. No contempt, no competition.
--Just ask and listen. Just answer and value what you say. Then shut up.
--The positives are short. The negatives, only if they must come up, have a story. Dive in and tell it.
--Don't empty your heart out in the whole of what is said, so as to make sure you have a little blood left on reserve. Blood to use and travel by. Blood, the carrier of life.
--Mr. Head, with the droopy neck, knows more than me.

It feels better this way. Taking notes. I noticed everyone in that class really hard. We all have "barriers" in getting steady employment, they say. They say it like they mean everyone, even those with jobs, but us in this room, well it really seems like we do and maybe they mean just us. Only about one of us knows what these barriers are. Mr. Head, with the droopy neck. He is an orphan of a veteran, we found out today as he ran through the state application with himself as a stand-in applicant. His qualifications to teach us, so far as I could tell, was the he had a job. We didn't. Most everything else for Mr. Head was "NA." It was very important he said that when writing NA on the state application that we didn't write "N.A." or "N/A" or "Not Applicable." And why? Because it says to. And just as Mr. Head was about to blurt out the holy grail answer about what to say when this thing that happened to me once came up...a man's hand shot up, "What if you just got out of prison?" Distraction. Dammit. But hat's how the scenario applied to him. The answer for all of us, said Mr. Head: Always tell the story. Don't be afraid. Give the negative answers the long way, which he went on to do. The positives, the short way. Great. Got it.

And so of our deeper exploration into employment barriers, which now were starting to take the proportions of what it was that was keeping us from being part of the human race, we finally get told in a mercy-cold way, that it is OK. We are loved anyway. But I'll tell you what, it's eternally delightful and amusing to watch us try and become. Just like the girl, whose drained expression hints that all of her energies required to feign an interest have transferred into her Cricket-mashing fingers, well, just like her shirt says in multi-colored font: "Every Damn Day!" We all be funny asking funny things every damn day. Just trying to become every damn day. Because what's funny is we don't know that we are being empowered there. Into taxpayers? "That is the answer." Into humans? Well, that depends. At least for today, each of one of us there, well our dreams ain't true. But there is power to be had somewhere. Once a little listen is had. I am convinced of this and today I for one am listening.

There was an example given by the teacher about the interview before the interview, small talk pre-questions like in the lobby of an imaginary interview: "What's your favorite kind of dog?" the ever-esteemed bi-monthly check collector might ask. Know your answer, own it, and don't say something like Rottweiler or Poodle. No powder keg breeds. Certainly those four walls aren't a space for controversy. And while being regaled with a story about how Mr. Head with the droopy neck actually came to like poodles after his wife insisted on getting one, a very literal Asian man raised his hand. He confessed he knew nothing of dogs and would have no idea how to answer that question. So what should he say? The reply, "The answer is Labrador. Say a Lab."
"But I don't know what that is, and so what would I have said in that case."
"Well now you do know. Look up Labrador Retriever on the computer. Everybody likes them. The answer is Labrador. See for yourself." The student scribbles down the answer in his spiral. That is how the scenario applies to him.

Me, see I know how to ask questions. All prideful, nervous, young and healthy, placed high in all the assessment exams. Troubled past. In image I may have them right where I want them. Walking potential with a new-found interest in the actual. I'm jobless. I'm too mental and emotionally volatile to be self-supporting. I'm congenial and ashamed. Submissive but still full of pride. I know this all and am still at a severe advantage over the room full of people with an entire history of eating under a roof every day. Cause they old. Because today's companies have said so. Mr. Head, himself, acknowledged it. But I'm sitting there (again, I'm there) in my working prime broke smart deep unsure trying to grow MY plot of land in this life and I raise my hand and say something to the effect of: "What about answering when they ask about my weaknesses? What do I say then." On the way home driving I laughed out loud thinking back on this. I was trying to think about it from Mr. Head's head. Glaring the weaknesses be, fool. That's how that scenario applies to me.

But when I see how it applies to everybody, my dreams look different. And I will be working then. And soon. This truth feels ok. And easy. And I have a deep affection for it. I woke up and didn't expect the day to unfold quite like this day. And I can say that for most. When I write and think carefully, there is redemption. When I don't, there is not. I am angry. I want revolution. I am gifted everything in this life and I can seek redemption or not. Break down the barriers if you must, but one thing that me and the State of Texas and Mr. Head can all agree on is that I am a dislocated seeker. And that's OK. For now. There was this man sitting next to me, I daresay about 18 years late on the matter of cell phone etiquette, who interrupted class by answering his phone and what we could hear instead of the teacher's voice for a minute was, "I am at the Work Center. I am at an interview class with the job force, and I guess we are learning how to do interviews better," etc. etc. I love these moments in public when somebody answers their phone and starts explaining everything that is around them. You start to listen carefully and feel a heightened importance in playing a role in the scene being described for an off-stage stranger. This is a scenario invented by modern times. Something that didn't used to happen eighteen years ago. It takes on the amount of meaning that you want to put into it. In that class it wasn't just me feeling important. I saw some nodding, all hyper aware that yes(!) we are at the Workforce and we are getting tips on interviews and maybe we do need to get better. Together. Revere Ourselves! This is how the scenario applies to us! Tempted again, I was, by one of these meta-moments of comedic imaginings--the brilliance of all the workings under the florescent light--my current mantra at once reminded me of and deflected my revelations: Do Not Go Off Somewhere Else! In a humbled state of self-love and present for the State of Texas employment services, it felt like a splash of water on this drying summer seed. Next time I can speak to who I am maybe. Clearly. And then shut up. And to have hope in a drought? The truly daring creature proceeds.

To Insist on the Ordinary: Chapter 22 of _The Pale King_

I don't know if it is the best thing I've ever read, but there are only a handful of things I have put down and felt "that was the best thing I have ever read." And today, reading Chapter 22 of _The Pale King_, was one of them. I have never been sad that a single chapter in the middle of a book ended before, until today. And I don't know quite yet if the nameless character is going to make an appearance outside of the 98 page chapter, and it doesn't really matter. It's its own thing, and reads as if it is coming from a very detailed case study in, say, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_. I mean, that may be a really biased comparison for a William James fanatic such as myself, but in my defense, James is referenced. He shows up in the story when one of his essays is quoted on a transparency sheet by the tax accounting lector that brings about the character's great change. The quote, dealing with the heretofore ignored proposal James made in the early 1900s for a "moral equivalency of war," in which people of drafting age, rather than be eligible for an entity that purports imperialism and destruction, are selected for a morally positive service program that would serve to improve communities domestically and abroad. I read this proposal a year ago with great enthusiasm, wishing for some sort of alternate life path in which I was directed toward a task out of college or high school that embedded somehow some sense of appreciation and duty in my thick (I'll say it again) thick noggin.

On further thought, I realized how many would write this off to be such a waste of the "get ahead" years. What we, as either diligent or lazy students with the same degree, "have worked so hard for." The chance to hit the big-boy/girl workforce and start forcing our lion's will on this stupidly structured civilization. Stupid until I got there. Before WE did, though when I said WE I'm sure I meant I again. What a colossal disappointment when my release upon the world did not go down as such. In all honesty, I would have felt it highway robbery had my right to choose what I did at this age been taken (which was wander the depths of disappointing employment opportunities), and so foreign would have been the concept of something that could impart a sense of responsibility and duty. How little did I want experience in doing something good for communities outside of a profit or prestige motive. And also, how miserable was I. The James quote, shown to a class full of would-be accountants whom the lector proceeds to call the real kind of heroes, is attributed with just the word James at the end. The narrator confuses the name for some sort of biblical guy, and little does he know that such a program would have gone such a long way toward righting his fuzzy dilemma of unintentional nihilism. I mean, it wasn't so much him not wanting to know how to go about personal fulfillment and actualization of a mature life, it's more a matter of not having a clue how that looks. And as a reaction, the only thing he knew was how to shrink back in to what he knew. More college lifestyle bullshit. Joining in on the escape parade, who adults and peers alike, all seem to agree now that that's what college is FOR. As if college has now become this pricey Amish rumspringa more so than a place for higher learning. Gross.

The story's delivery never goes outside the boundaries of the narrator's subjectivity, giving it an engaging and almost too-easy disclosure for us readers. The experience of this man is effortlessly transmitted. For a while I was imagining the situational set up as an interview for an article, maybe a counseling appointment given DFW's past tendencies, then maybe a testimonial as props for working at the IRS--and then the story became too vivid to care much about it. It felt like a spoon-fed, but still stimulating, documentary, in the way of Chris Smith's _The Collapse_ or an Errol Morris piece. Simply a person talking at a camera with no impediment from outside forces. We hear exactly what the subject thinks and feels. It can be so convincing. The tale is a look back on the past, and so is an air-tight construction of relevant circumstances and details. There are no shooting-from-the-hip kinds of meanings based on the messy unfolding of people interacting. The outcomes and meanings are given straight. They exist well before, and the story is clearly working towards them. It is deliberate in trying to put a solution on this, well, slight issue that I feel so deep as a young adult. This thing that is finally starting to clear up and look manageable. The solution to work. How can one work and not grow into something he doesn't imagine he'll like? How does repetition of task provide fulfillment for the "unlucky" of those condemned to the ordinary life? How in the fuck are all the expectations and imaginings of the fantasizing college kid engrossed in the finer things (whether unsustainable partying and eating out, or speculating days away on Lord Byron and Darwin), who naturally tends to think this is what moving out from home looks like, to be reconciled with bottom lines produced from rigid structure and task? Lots of effort revolving around respect for the one thing we all have learned to have a basic disrespect for--money. You give me a humanities student who doesn't tell you otherwise about the cause of all ills. It's the easy place to go.

It may be a middle-class dilemma--so not boo-hoo in the same way as starvation or genocide, but by god it is real. Sure, many of the kids at my particularly expensive school could afford to maintain such a lifestyle out of school--work the internship, grease the family wheels, and receive parental direction on how to stay in their particular echelon of society. Some actually got responsibility early on. Then there was the type like me--huge amounts of sacrifice on the family's part, a sort of idea that it would lead to something that would "work itself out," and a child who just didn't see how life applied to him because he could write smart essays about Dusan Makavejev or something. The rest go to grad school, where the bad news awaits them a few years later. I say it reminds me of Smith and Morris' films, specifically, because it walks the devoted path of the portrait of a person who responds oddly to living a most ordinary and utilitarian professional life. Something that over my privileged film-watching years, seemed like the most amazing subject to me. The serious artistic approach in finding creativity, joy, and happiness in the ordinary realm. It seemed downright exotic. Finding magic outside of the bright lights. It's more comfortable to feel IRS agents don't have amazing stories, isn't it? Like our heads would explode if we could investigate in detail every story behind every man sitting in every cubicle. My little radical self wanted to go THERE. My actual self got beaten in the head with the actual playing out of the struggles in middle-class existence. Like imagining the shiny scales and fire breathing and the grand size of the dragon, and then physically stumbling upon it one day. How pretty the details of the beast didn't seem to come to mind when confronted with it. Nonetheless, I stuck with the art of guys like Chris Smith, Morris, Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, some others, and they have been extremely helpful tools in showing me how to appreciate much that is rich about a life when all the rules apply. I have started to sink in and look it in the eyes and then surrender to it and now I like people and small gestures and keeping a house clean and cooking cheap and showing up for responsibilities and some days my whole life DANCES--and it struggles too.

The chapter goes into great detail at what is called the "priming" experiences that a now lucid ex-waistoid (an aimless young male in the woe-is-me throes of a consumption-based life in the 70's America Midwest) goes through to build up to the religious experience. The results of said experience, I think, is the boy's motivation to wrestle himself to a middle-ground state of mind, and to plunge into the call of duty at the IRS recruitment center based on an overwhelming sense of needing purpose and utility in his life. True surrender leading to leaving himself behind. The onslaught of clarity comes after the narrator accidentally stumbles into an Advanced Tax final review at something like the third or fourth college he has wandered in and out of up to this point in his life. After going through some recent family trauma, he is starting to, um, let's just say, wonder about life rather than passively accept the insipid existence of not knowing what in the hell the point is. His ears are open for something different. I say um, because it is a dreadful kind of wonder. Heavy angst. Ugly awareness and recognition of a life with eyes for no meaning. He heretofore behaves as a boy who is not trying to be anything because he doesn't want to be, but his life choices make it clear that he is sort of still trying to be something that resembles what he thinks he is supposed to be. Mostly these things are revealed by his consumer choices. Unfortunately for him, just a tinge of the bigger perspective creeps in. The perspective is somewhat artificially induced as well. Picking up on an oddball drug of choice, his new-mind is developed over a period of time in which he starts popping an upper called Obetrol, that heightens not only his senses in what he's doing, but causes a "doubling" effect that allows him to be aware of what he is actually doing and what the "world" sees him doing. Maybe that "world" is like a judgmental father or surveillance camera, maybe it is like a loving God that is helping him wake up and use his life. It is hard to say, but the awareness starts to work the character toward an inability to remain comfortable with the waistoid kinds of things he keeps on doing. He knows he pisses off his dad, concerns his mother, is old friends of shame, is often not comfortable in his own skin, etc., but as he gets older, an intolerance for this starts to seep into his psyche. He basically starts to know that the dread is the result of his own making. It is him that is being lazy and not putting a strong foot forward. And he can less and less adopt the "funny and cool" coping mechanism his peers use to justify said shitty behavior. The awareness is slow, insidious, and habit-forming. It doesn't exactly help him immediately, but more traps him deeper into angst. Rather than change his behavior, it feeds guilt and shame. It is good to discover that a life with no responsibility or purpose does not feel good, right? And that pissing off people does not either? And that instead of being an incredibly boring sell-out, that his dad has honor and is an interesting man? And that there are flaws in his mother's unconditional defense of his shortcomings? Slowly seeping "nopes" start to infiltrate his rationalizations, and it doesn't feel good.

It is infuriating because it unfolds so accurately to those in the throes of an existence with inexhaustible options for comfort and quick-fix sustenance. Naivte gets unraveled, and fuck, now what? The new awareness makes the only solace he had stop working. The spiral-down starts to bottom out when, after given-up on weekday after weekday on the couch, slouching with a spinning soccer ball and taking in soap-operas, he finally hears "You are watching 'As The World Turns'" in a new and more literal meaning--the truly haunting one. And not even on his drug of choice, which would normally have helped him really hear "You are watching 'As the World Turns.'" But instead, it's this transitioning and aware person hearing it. It is sober--in the serious sense of the word. Like one who may have done psychedelics a handful of times, then recognizes the nature of their ceiling, and merely draws on a relevant tripping insight from the past rather than taking more to get "the answer." The alternative being that fifty year old dude popping tabs of E or windowpane and looking to "feel new ways, man." It's like these adult reflections appeared before him, and said to the slightly younger him: "Really think about this, which one of us do you really want to be?" And one of the adult images looked basically like a healthy him and the other one was bald with a pony-tail.

The story seemingly gets told five or six years after said religious experience, and there is a firm "that was then" tone to it, and an inferred "now it's all better." So what happened then? All the details of his whole existence to this point are reduced to become the dreadful and funny and necessary ingredients for the thing that would that day make his life make sense--the phenomenal event. The narrator persists in mentioning the small moments at which the awareness of his ugly behaviors take root. They are small thoughts, such as Mom and Dad worked really hard for that table and I didn't respect its condition. Dad was the dolt who always read books--wait, that is kind of interesting. Looking back, these are the thoughts that have come to carry the most gravity after his decision to join the Service. That one moment of decision led to a clarity of actualizing himself away from the unconcerned version of him--growing up up and away. The building of awareness is not anything the character felt he had any control of over the time, and perhaps it would have been more pleasant not to have them, but again, that damn adult guy in the mirror shows up, and asks, "But come on now, which one of us do you REALLY want to be?" Up to now he had known somewhat practical short-term solutions to a sense of dread. They resemble small annoyances like justifying why to be miffed at a guy he lived with, who really just did the same types of things, or wearing fashionable clothing with little thought of he liked them. The little things end in grand ideas of a desperate "How do I be?" so such persnickety bullshit doesn't surface again. He goes and buys suits. He cares less about finding comfort or making excuses than just making sure his modest goals somehow happen. His views of life up to the decision are called out for what they are--insufficient. His new views are realistic and accompanied by a feeling of satiation.

An interesting point is that his actions don't seem to be motivated by getting laid or making money as much as they are by just not knowing what else to do. There is little purpose. It's not like a dilemma of sexual repression or what some other behavioral cogno-whathaveyou might try to sell. The real vice is the path of the least immediate resistance. Or fear of leaving what is safe. There is no talk about his desires for women, or impressing them by being cool or fitting in. Just a guy trying to feel ok by matching his surroundings, and half-assing how to be what he has a tiny idea about what he's supposed to be. And picking up a few pony tricks along the way. The residue of this way of life builds and builds and builds into an eventual bundle of cells he cannot stand. My stomach spent most of the reading in the pits--like I was finally coming to terms with how naive and grossly inaccurate my twenties were. What I remember from them is feeling really smart for the first half of them--like, all the time. But in a really foggy way. Later, like failure was an understatement. Like a shame factory. I tasted remorse most weekends, and kept trying to pretend away from it. I acted emotionally disturbed, but goddammit, I was right to be. Like it was a moral obligation because society was so fucked up. But I was actually very afraid that I was not special or distinct from all of the other film students sold a lie on how extra special they were. I was unable to accept middle terms, so acting out became the easiest (actually only) path of remaining special. Thus the priming of the middle-class privileged boy goes and goes and goes...Described early on in the chapter as the life of a kleenex, blowing around in the wind, and saying to itself, "Where shall I go today?"

Our narrator has that last bit of caring in him and uses it. I feel like it is the kind of caring rarely called on, but that we all have programmed into us. When he listens to the substitute tax lector, who is described as the first person he could see an authentic value of authority in, he becomes willing to change his game up. The next week he finds in the paper that the IRS is recruiting, goes there with resolve, he stays up all night studying its material, traverses a blizzard to get to the dingy recruitment center again, and finds himself as the lone survivor from the previous day's orientation that bothered to show up for the rest of his life. That what possibility of ordinary heroism he witnessed at the lecture surely had HAPPENED, and there was no unknowing it, and that life can be all forward from here. He makes an actual decision based on a supernatural sense of a power and purpose that he values himself enough to apply effort to, and so fills his life with what it is missing. He works as a consistent and mature person. He gets perspective. And he gets to tell about it.

DFW is so deft at honestly exploring all of the most intricate and private crannies of the modern mental experience. So heavy and so light our brains tend to be, back and forth. Very little in the medium range, which would allow one to, for instance, sit at a desk and examine tax returns all day. What our brains say can seem so silly out loud, but only once we start interacting with each other and doing our daily tasks. The thoughts in the moment can burn so heated and heavy, and dress just like the truth. They burn us up and cripple some of us, and keep people in bed or send them toward obsessions for means of checking out. DFW more than once said fiction felt like the closest thing to not being alone. He really brought that concerted purpose to his writing--seemingly, as the main objective of his task as a novelist. That it could be the closest and truest way to understand how we, each to ourselves and all alike, can think and as a result, behave. And so much of life is thinking and not telling. But then acting kind of funny. Needing courage to do the logical or sane thing, but being drawn instead to the crazy one. I know it to be true that the false power of my mental idiocy can be so quickly deflated and relieved when somebody honestly shares the same thought that I felt crazy for thinking. DFW takes a needle to all these ideas we get that blow up like balloons and fill our head. Full of air, and taking up way too much room. He also provides a viable--albeit slightly dissapointing--solution, which is the middle-ground.

DFW often insisted that he was just a guy. Seemingly, he felt that our commonalities bear a greater importance in this life than our uniqueness. This is not exactly great news for somebody who had been told he was such such such such a GENIUS most of his adulthood. I read somewhere that he would respond to this by saying, "I did the reading." One of my favorite things that William James said was, "There is very little difference between one person and another, but what little there is, is very important." I can see the value in his love of differences. It is the spice of people, and of life. I also think that a modern American, especially in the form of a late 70's suburban Chicago kid dressed in shoddy jeans and untied Timberlands, that goes to college and drinks on school nights and rips a bong in front of the tv and leaves fast food cup rings on his parent's storied furniture, is a common experience that results from us youth being in love with how special we are--and frankly, kind of taught to feel that way. Concern for others does not apply to the specials. The narrator, on the other hand, has an annoying tic that keeps track of the amount of words spoken in any given conversation. This is only part of the weird package of traits that is what he claims makes him maybe one in ten thousand people who fits the profile of a perfect IRS worker. In other words, the anomalies lead him to the gates of a common fulfillment in a human life. Don't we all just want to feel like a completely perfect fit in our jobs and in our lives? I envy his job. I envy the way he feels about his duty and his existence. But I can too--the empowerment is that we ALL can be happy working at our own IRS. Be as it may, it was the IRS where his efforts were needed, and it relieved the internal suffering of trying to process and be the person he thought he was supposed to be. He executed a version of him he wanted to be. The narrator acts as a powerful profile for how we spend so much effort trying to conform to an environment without knowing any better, how much we hurt over it, and then how our natural differences hold so much the key in finding common joys--in what we need to find some peace in our existence. In this case--straight-up Viktor Frankl-style--it's Meaning and Purpose. Something unusual leading to the very humble parameters human men and women are programmed to want and need and experience. A religious experience. A phenomenon of the ordinary. I want this, but that won't do a damn thing. Breaking wide open (ouch) and listening deep will help. Per the advice of the mystic poet Kabir, "Do Not Go Off Somewhere Else!" What is in front of one's face are the only things to work with.

A good novelist, and I think at times DFW can be great, is unusually receptive. It can really hurt to be so receptive and sensitive. After all, we are creatures--cruel, self-serving, and survival-ensuring. But receptivity that turns to honesty and then articulation, that is just the thing that I felt so healed by when a meddling, confused, angry, repressed make-up of misdirection. I happened across a few nice books in high school, and this devotion to letters, and later films and music, built from a foundation of healing and feeling understood. The impulse for creativity I now have come to believe, is to turn this great relief of being understood around on its heels and to seek to understand for others. That would be my only good reason to write, I think. The novelist, as a receptor who is honest about what is going on and precise and funny and sad in explaining it, is needed to update and refresh the same human problems in a way that can heal our feelings of being alone in our heads. DFW is speaking MY truth...I'm grateful for that. "Does the world really need another writer?" I often ask myself. By this definition, yes, it needs plenty.

I do severely want THIS one back though. It's so hard for me not to get sad about his death. It's easy for me to look at my own past experiences of needing to check out all the time, and to others I've known as the living-dead or as even more successful at self-eradication, and see that our actions were those of a person made sick on the habit of being afraid and checking out. Of feeling fucking tired of not having a purpose, being useful, and those who gave in to the temptation of just taking control and making it stop. Sometimes that feeling becomes the last page of a life and sometimes not. Sometimes people who walk around every moment wanting it to stop grow a bigger pair of balls on that particular day, and then it just is over. These are the gritty and practical details about a certain kind of suicide--I feel it's an authentic perspective.

DFW though I don't know. He was so useful to somebody like me, and many others. The ideas are sound and spot on. He was one of the few high profile writers aiming for sincerity and a thoughtful and sane understanding of it all. I don't know anything what it is like to be him, his age, successful. But it is like his "genius" show-offy prose and ideas were always the mess in his head that he felt the pressure to express for his happy admirers. I connect with his most plain writing. The way he weaves ideas and details and thought processes in and out of this chapter, building momentum with a huge range of emotions that leaves me to feel like I now know a whole clan of people living a familiar life to mine, makes me INSIST that he saw how life works with clarity. This is the sort of piece that is not achieved by effortless gift, but by good writerly craftsmanship and careful thought. Real dirty hands kind of writing. I'm sure it was very hard to write. But not the kind you feel guilty and insufficient for after completing. The genius part of him must have felt it was shit. He was surely loved by his fans and people. But that kind of love I wish he'd found was of the unconditional sort--the kind of regular value and love that everybody is granted just for being created as a human being. I guess when you're in the shit, you don't think too much of your value though. I feel like many going through the frustrations of mental illness (which tends to exert its own will after a while), are completely able to understand what is going with them on an intellectual level. The knowledge is just not enough. It takes something more than knowing, and some don't get to feel the wonder of how that "more" thing feels. He was a gift equal to any other man or woman, and at his best as an author, was open to being an unusually articulate normal person. All the words bouncing around must have hurt a lot. I imagine it hurt to be so receptive and sensitive. But in the end, all of his suffering helped me feel less alone. I must insist that there is worth in that. To call him a genius maybe feeds the DFW that was trying to be an idea of what he was supposed to be, and I'm sure on a daily basis felt real career pressure to be that guy. After all, that fucking million dollars he got read "GENIUS" on the top of the check. DFW's unusual assets as a person are certainly acknowledged and appreciated by me, but to call him just another guy is where all the powers of him being able to connect to me and other readers are.

Healthy-mindedness, I insist, relies on an awareness of and a belief in the magic of the every day things--few young Americans would identify those things as what they want. A real joy of growing up the past few years has been discovering that there is magic to the simple experiences of life again. Some I know have fallen in love with riding bikes again. Some like to lay on the lawn and feel the grass and to go swimming. Those that have had kids live the little discoveries again, and often. But you can see when it happens for people growing out of post-adolescence. It's not the little ragin' boy in a man's body who still likes to make waves, but a deeper more middle of the path solution. It can be really beautiful to watch the contentment make its way back into our bones after a tumultuous young adulthood--and words (or at least mine) kind of fall short in describing that. Let's just say that the joys are enough to do the repetitive tasks, rigid structures, tax paying, tired all the time, bottom line, security-stressing, hooey. DFW writes like he understood the relief of being so secure in the discoveries of adulthood. He seems to be saying that the destinations on the human map are the same age-old concepts. So how come he could never wrest the peace out of his own life? Is that what made him so smart about it on the page, is that he still struggled with the questions to give insight to the rest of us? When we make such major discoveries about our lives we tend to move forward and let the explanation float away. He was looking deep into it in his mid-forties. The questions don't help though, so I'll stop there.

Intentions: The Long Way

I spend a lot of my efforts doing secret things. I get great insight from said secret things. It has remained a problem in my writing life what to take and what to give of these insights--which I believe are valuable and useful. One who is gifted with the desire to write must command authorship of his own experience. On the other hand, one whose wellness depends much on keeping my business with others straight demands respecting such. What to give? What to take? How to be in my own five senses and heart and brain without using up that which feeds me. That, I think is my dilemma. But wanting to maintain complete privacy is really based on the assumption that others give a shit. And my bet is the only way anyone does is if I articulate it in such a way that it relates to their lives. Welcome to the congenital writer's strange loop, but the issue I think goes wider.

What really becomes prescient is the mind games us computer user's identities have been wrestling with over the past few years. Who am I on the Internet? What's different about me if you see me in person? Which way do you know me better? Am I truly on a clearer road to becoming my thoughts and feelings in this realm, or should I be judged solely on how that idiot that listens to his thoughts and feelings behaves? (That one is not rhetorical. The answer's the latter). And why in the hell am I somewhere in my little brain, keeping track of what this very vague memory of a person from high school or college is doing on a daily basis, through photos, preferences, and musings? Sure your babies are cute--I just REALLY don't know how to apply that to my life right now. The problem exists such, that I probably know people way better than I should before I meet them eye to eye. I have relationships with people largely based on words, and when I see them I wonder why they don't fly from balconies with magical passions, or conversely, fill my ear with inane observations but instead are kind. Or that I think arrogantly about their terrible judgement because they update frequently their life-consumption patterns, in a different way (though I'd insist STUPIDLY), than I would. There is a mental separation from people here and this causes me anxiety in public encounters with people. Sometimes sadness and despair, even. I looked at your profile in secret, stranger, what do you know about me? Do you even care to know enough about me? You must be healthy in your curiosity and not creepy like me. I don't walk up to a person and say something like, a musing about debt collectors and how it relates to public health insurance options, or wax nostalgia about an early nineties hit song as people go ahead and give the thumbs up. Some people actually do that in person. I don't. I fantasize about sneaking in some of my Emerson bio for useable material, and awkwardly say "Hello. I'm good, thanks." Even if I think you're really really pretty or cool.

There is also, on the other hand, a great familiarity that comes with the Internet. I am privy to a much LARGER number of people's daily thoughts and struggles. Going through normal-life things with those in my circle, somehow makes the pleasure and pains of life seem more familiar. I get this disturbing sense sometimes that there are weekly themes, like a special episode of whatever sitcom I grew up learning lessons from. This week, death. Next week, love. Job getting or why not to lie. What's funny and topical. Maybe then taxes and maybe death again. Standing afar, the themes are comfortingly repetitive and feel something like this adult life I have only begun to sign up for and live. I am growing into both an acceptance and efforts to overcome a pain threshold about settling into my given flesh and brain and making it work OK for me in THIS life. The writing helps. I danced the other day. In public, too. And jumped straight in the water at Barton Springs, instead of easing my way in. And wasn't scared to assert myself to an aggressive statement made about me. And own up to my mistakes without ensuing guilt or shame. Progress. But there are those that think to get things, and those that think about them. It became very clear to me which one I was when I tried to sell door-to-door for two days last summer and started telling people the jig of the deal--and that I could totally understand why this product wasn't a good decision for them. Not because I'm a good guy. I just think I have this awful self-awareness of what is going on. I needed to leave that door, feeling ok about myself after disturbing their peace. But, I really really needed to make to make some money. Still couldn't. I did go home and journal though. And there's this everlasting hunch, which I have tried to kill many a times dismissing it as the "writer's bug," that says this part of me that thinks about things could help. In fact, I have evidence that it does.

So I am trying to take ownership and a more active participation in this Internet game. How I express myself on it in a real way--and simply what I get out of it. I think more people should. I think people are starting to, as it matures. I think it is quite a contemporary thing to do, in fact. Obviously there is something I want out of the Web, beyond being able to look up any song I could possibly think of on YouTube, or stream the same movies with a click that I used to think were mythical because I'd have to hunt the Denver Public Library for them, and once literally take apart a video and repair it, so I could see it. There IS the possibility for a much higher quality, more eccentric, and mindful path of information gathering out here. People are hacking new paths every day. And getting to journal about it too.

I have been writing in good portions over the past two years, and mainly in a confessional style. In the Emersonian sense, there has been a true attempt on my part to seek the Universal in the most private. A true attempt to get meaning from some suffering I have gone through. The suffering may not inspire envy, but certainly provides perspective. This means in the writing I make myself vulnerable to lying, making shallow judgements, and then looking deep into my heart of hearts about what it means to be people ok. I use the words joy, hope, elation, despair, and desperation a lot. I aggrandize ordinary things, and minimize serious shit. All for truth. I am not afraid of drinking the strong coffee and quoting the Old Testament, but also can't process how to have a proper daily routine in my life. When I get uncomfortable I come out of it with poetry. Ugh. Some of it feels decent too, though I still have this overwhelming suspicion it is wimpy and way out of it's time--like, some real Victorian-valued nonsense. But, it's kind of truly how I feel, rather than the hip hop lyricist I wish I was--a little taller and all that jazz. It's a fruitful life right now, and my impression of what the culture values, the entire medium of the Web, and just in general the "times" prevented me from expressing myself in a public forum. But one must eventually dare, because it hurts too much not to. What I started to notice in my journals, was though they were a good exercise and a way to put me in touch with my feelings, they were absolutely not written just for me. I was secretly conspiring in my heart of hearts to revise them, prepare them, and show them.

And social networking be damned, as even I couldn't take my insights seriously in that format. "I am the fruits of hope and wellness, but I must not keep and devour them. Only ripen, preserve, and spread sweet on that which has dried up and lost its intended zest." This FB post lasted forty minutes on my page today, sandwiched in between, bless my "friends," a link about glow-in-the-dark pork and Roswell conspiracy theories. And then there are the angry liberals. The guys that like to take pictures of their food. And the people that are just checking in, here and there and here...again? I have colorful friends, yes, who use FB appropriately. I have always tended to not use things appropriately. And the result was something like a lot of anticipation anxiety of different sects of people in my life, reacting in my head, this way or that, about this genuine, albeit said in a grandiose fashion, thought that came directly as a result of my Tuesday afternoon. And as always, the most random folks on my friends list popped in my head. What in God's name will they make of THAT??? And then the people I hope see it too. Waiting for little red numbers to activate in the corner of my screen...What? I am a thirty damn year old man. What? What a mess. For a writer, who should only be writing for his subject's sake, this is an utter mess. Hence the take down. Hence the finally getting around to making a blog.

Here's the advantage of a blog. This blog has one reader, and it is the imagined reader I think of while I am writing. The reader of this blog is always my true friend. That discerns my ideas in a reasonable way. That empowers me to reveal my thoughts to the best of my ability and forgives me when I make mistakes along the way. This reader wants my success. This is a space I own that must be sought out. If it is read by zero actual people, I’m still going to write it. If it is a million, I am still going to write it the same way. I am not going to be swayed except by the breeze of my own experience--or the heavy winds, as they may be. Strength, as relating to trees, bends as a defense against breaking. So this blog insists on the radical stance of trusting myself completely and not others’ suggestions to it. Networking and expanding readership never comes at the expense of changing the content. I will share about my life in thought. I will reveal my story in candid and embarrassing bits. I will reveal what I can. Sometimes humbly, sometimes full of myself, but always with an aim to interest the reader. I will talk plainly to a deep-thinking, generous, engaged, and tolerant reader who cares what I have to say. It is not magic nor does it think it can heal others in their struggles. But based on all the healing I have gotten out of the written word in my life, it will have a mind to. There will be an attempt to give, and to see, and maybe make someone laugh or cry or go AHA! It is MINE. ALL are welcome. None of this sincerity, fervor, and nakedness may make sense in a personal blog (just what the world needs another of, I know), but I'm gonna try it on. I can begin to see this vision now taking shape….I want to start today and tomorrow and the next day.