And it’d be a pretty lethal one, since we’re all trying to “get over it” rather than realizing it’s a temptation.
I don’t hate Wisconsin, it’s just a place, but when I go there, a bell jar of memory-feeling cups over me like a jelly jar on a flapping moth. The feeling is Insecure. After an initial “Wa!”, I resent the glass like a moron, flipping off my own reflection(s).
Someone told me the Pride post was really about Hubris. I’d like to think he’s right. If I could switch from a basically Calvinist worldview to a Hellenic one, I’d get my wings clipped right there on the spot of a crime rather having it hanging over myhead, and when I die I’d go to Hades, which by most accounts isn’t much more unpleasant than a basement apartment. But since I even named one of my dogs Tulip, I think my orthodoxy bent is a given at this point.
Party game: Quick you’re about to die and you’ve got one last sentence, what is it? (“I’m sorry.”)
I don’t mean insecurity like ‘am I pretty?’ insecure. I mean Insecure: the world is threatening and my being in it at all might be a mistake.
Prideful Rant: When I got the “are these your kids?” line at a KFC, it hit a nerve that keeps getting hit lately, and that overlapped with my habitual allergy to Wisconsin, and I couldn’t really sort it all out until I got back here. It happens allll the time, mostly with strangers who have no idea that I’m “one of them”. And on the flipside, the ‘woman between 35-45’ category bobs to the surface as one for analysis and usually some sort of condemnation. It’s a favorite topic of disc jockeys. It might include extended commentaries of Katie Curic’s boyfriend or speculation about the capability of Demi’s ovaries or Cameron’s recouping athleticism in the face of rejection or or bla bla bla. Every time something like this comes stumbling out of someone’s mouth who knows me, they kind of swallow it back last second, or more often they respond to my “HEY! No age-hate!” with “O god you’re not like that, you look like 25 or something.”
First of all, that is not true. I look exactly like myself. Being assessed favorably in a context that assumes my cohort is one of loitering sexuality inside of physical wrecks is not really a compliment. If you doubt me, well let’s reverse it - I’ll compliment you for not seeming as young as you actually are, and you 20-somethings tell me if this works: “You have thoughts about something other than yourself sometimes!” “You’re hardly prone to premature ejaculation at all!” “You’re skin’s usually clear!” See how that doesn’t really add up to unqualified praise, since it implies that your cohort is a set of self-absorbed sexually incompetent puss balls?
Also, I don’t look 25 because I know what I actually look like. At 25, you have no idea what you look like, frankly. Add on what you have planned and what you have not planned, a kid or two or none, a marriage (or two or none), a career (or three or none), a parent’s decline (or two) inevitably, some gains and a fistful of losses etc., press fast forward through 10 years, and THAT is what you actually look like. If you doubt me, crack out a picture of your mother before and after YOURSELF. See what I mean?
And I know what the biggest missteps of my young adulthood have been. They were all false ideas, mistakes on the inside of me that became reflected in my deeds and works. To do or fail to do what you ought not or you ought be getting done – you’re probably making your biggest mistakes right now at this very moment, doing or not-doing, cleaving to the wrong thing, throwing away what you’ll miss, etc. and you won’t know what the mistakes are for another decade.
Pray for a sense of humor.
(armscrossy) I defend my right, and by extension my category’s right, to be humanly “viable”, and stress tested besides where y’all might not hold up so great. And pictures don’t capture much besides, not who smells good and who doesn’t, let alone who is a dumbass and who isn’t. Who is miserable and likes it that way. Who is cruel behind closed doors. Who would say anything to get their way. Who makes themselves bigger by making others smaller. Who could be in pain on someone else’s behalf and who couldn’t. Who loves their mother and who doesn’t. Who can love another person more than they do being right. Who can love another person at all. Who is gentle, who is not. Who can feel simple delight and who cannot. Who is full of shit and doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even suspect it. The line that divides isn’t “too oldish” vs. “still youngish”, it’s thinking vs. not, trying vs. not, trying harder vs. not, (and funny vs. not). A good rule of thumb: We should probably all worry less about our age, and worry more that we might be measly humorless faithless feckless assholes, eh?
blablabla bla bla bloatbla blabla
The problem with that rant (besides the Pride) is that I could care less any which way about much of that, really. It obscures what is actually weighing on my mind. When I got home, out of sorts, slept funny on couches and tired and solitary and all my screws loose, to collect myself I ran and cleaned and did this:
This, if you can do it for 5-10 seconds, challenges the body. If you can do it any longer than that, it begins to hit the right nerve, the one in your mind. You press your chest open to the sky and bare your throat. The instructors say when they walk you through it, “Allow vulnerability. Go further. Look at what is directly behind you. Allow vulnerability.” I think of specific people. I leak sadness (weeping is a common response to that particular position). I could not have done that 10 years ago. Or even 3 years ago. X used to say, furious, that I was like a sheath, offering no resistance to a blade and thus un-stab-able. I can feel the first stab and then see lips moving and hear no sound; the assault will blow through me like a dust bunny through an empty room.
Being an empty room is hardly an achievement, whether it has kept me ‘secure’ or not.
Does anyone else feel like we’re supposed to be winning certain battles, accomplishing a set of things, and when we win them then we’ll be able to go “home”, to be “there”, to arrive, to relax and look backwards and forwards without fear and with equal contentment?
I’m not there yet. I’m still going up the hill. I need more time than most people do. I Am Alive, which still stuns me often, as if I’m new to it. I run so I can feel that and get used to it again every day [not to have a good ass, which is built too close to the sidewalk no matter what I do anyway]. I know I’m alive because I’m in a body. It’s a good body, healthy, I’m deeply grateful for it because I cannot think straight when I’m sick. And it is wearing out slowly, which is a merciful thing because I’m slow and sometimes unwise. Writerly, I need time to Revise. Multiple revisions. That I’m Running behind Schedule! is the nerve that’s getting hit. But that idea is just another damn jelly jar.
Grapes of Wrath – Tell me all the Things I wasn’t
