kingtycoon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kingtycoon) wrote2018-08-20 08:28 am
kingtycoon) wrote2018-08-20 08:28 am
Darkness
In life there are lenses where your existence seems to focus down and to be This One Thing – this thing that’s who you are, in that time & this thing can seem to be passing or brief, but for someone you know, this is who you will be.
I’m writing this out on the stoop out front – they stopped us being allowed to smoke inside the building so I smoke on the stoop out front. I live next to the stoop- right by the front door anyhow, so It’s basically my porch. Agatha yells at me inside to look at something she’s doing in Overwatch and I can glance inside.
But to the people who live here with me – I’m the avuncular townie-life with some secrets of Cleveland living to share. Or the middle-aged smoker (that too) who knows the movements of the adorable neighborhood skunk. There’s my other neighbors- those who ride the bus too – Lisa the womens’ studies professor & Grace the pathology grad student. The kids across the hall – tall skinny dudes who seem to be carribean and smoke a lot of grass and fear dogs. Somewhere there’s the dickhead who loves really inaccessible local (?) rap music at top volume in his car between 3 and 5.
Right – that perspective of the outsider and the quick totemic identities we hang on each other – there’s that. But more and more I’m seeing myself through that lens too. You think back to things you once did or used to do all the time – you thought of yourself as that person – who wore a suit exclusively, who danced relentlessly, or who was an aggrieved single father, who was just looking for some ray of hope after a sound defeat. Urban adventurer, suburban nerd – all the things that were that are just veneers. And you hope that ther’s a depth beneath each of these- - that substrate of Self that is you – the part of you that is the continuation & fruition of these selves – who makes these selves form a story.
I’m not sure I really think that anymore.
When Agatha told me that she was probably only going to date girls – that she was in her words: “pretty gay” – that kind of fucked with me & my perspective. I struggled with that too – why is this sad for me? I thought this – why is this a problem? And I figured out why. I put it together. You’re a parent, you think of your own kid’s wide horizon – unburdened, that’s how I see a kid, my kid – she’s got options. More to the point, options I don’t have – anymore at least. And she tells you that she’s actually got fewer than you thought – that whole species of opportunities are now excised. I start to see life as this – a gradual, irrevocable narrowing of possibilities until, I suppose there’s really just one thing that can be done and that’s when you must die – because that’s the only thing that can be done & it owes to all of your preceding decisions. My father quit smoking, and so he lived longer and lived long enough to have his mind go and his body betray him. My Uncle didn’t quit smoking and died young-ish in his 60’s with a yong wife in a house he built himself.
I’m thinking on this, on the idea that the chapters of your life aren’t wide expanses of possibility & blank pages, but shortening passages recounting a long decline in dwindling detail.
Which means… A lot I guess. It means preparation & planning are important, in a way that isn’t naturally part of my consideration, in a way that requires me to put away a lot of what I’d regard as my innate substrate – my underlying identity. I’ve got to think, not of what I want to do now, but what I want to be able to do & when.
Part of this has a strangely paralytic quality – that you can’t know what the outcomes of doing a thing are & so you prefer to do nothing at all. That nothing at all could provide the peaceful catharsis?
I think that’s derived form loss. From missing a mask or self or totemic identity you used to have – a bygone variant that you really enjoyed or didn’t want to lose – but which was lost, by action or inaction. So that doing nothing at all, or attempting not to becomes the agreeable alternative to seeking accomplishments.
Anyhow, my mom pressured me into coming to visit her & my dad & I had to spend the morning getting pretty drunk to be able to face it. The old man was shocked to see me & kept laughing about how I am bald. After a while he forgot who I was again & then laughed just cause it's funny to him that a person is bald. Me and Agatha practiced throwing rocks and were pegging the fence & he was startled and told us we shouldn't.
Mom made this big production about dessert and it was ice-cream & strawberries. I thought maybe she put strawberry leaves in it a little because I kept getting these bitter tastes. But at the end, when the old man only played in his bowl for a while and wouldn't eat it I was ready to take it away & let him be but she said he must eat it because she conceals his medicine in it (like he's a dog) and he must eat it. I put together that probably she put his medicine in the one that I ate - and that's the cause of the bitter tastes. I got kind of drunk when I went to see them but not enough.
Came home and tried to think of anything else at all.
I’m writing this out on the stoop out front – they stopped us being allowed to smoke inside the building so I smoke on the stoop out front. I live next to the stoop- right by the front door anyhow, so It’s basically my porch. Agatha yells at me inside to look at something she’s doing in Overwatch and I can glance inside.
But to the people who live here with me – I’m the avuncular townie-life with some secrets of Cleveland living to share. Or the middle-aged smoker (that too) who knows the movements of the adorable neighborhood skunk. There’s my other neighbors- those who ride the bus too – Lisa the womens’ studies professor & Grace the pathology grad student. The kids across the hall – tall skinny dudes who seem to be carribean and smoke a lot of grass and fear dogs. Somewhere there’s the dickhead who loves really inaccessible local (?) rap music at top volume in his car between 3 and 5.
Right – that perspective of the outsider and the quick totemic identities we hang on each other – there’s that. But more and more I’m seeing myself through that lens too. You think back to things you once did or used to do all the time – you thought of yourself as that person – who wore a suit exclusively, who danced relentlessly, or who was an aggrieved single father, who was just looking for some ray of hope after a sound defeat. Urban adventurer, suburban nerd – all the things that were that are just veneers. And you hope that ther’s a depth beneath each of these- - that substrate of Self that is you – the part of you that is the continuation & fruition of these selves – who makes these selves form a story.
I’m not sure I really think that anymore.
When Agatha told me that she was probably only going to date girls – that she was in her words: “pretty gay” – that kind of fucked with me & my perspective. I struggled with that too – why is this sad for me? I thought this – why is this a problem? And I figured out why. I put it together. You’re a parent, you think of your own kid’s wide horizon – unburdened, that’s how I see a kid, my kid – she’s got options. More to the point, options I don’t have – anymore at least. And she tells you that she’s actually got fewer than you thought – that whole species of opportunities are now excised. I start to see life as this – a gradual, irrevocable narrowing of possibilities until, I suppose there’s really just one thing that can be done and that’s when you must die – because that’s the only thing that can be done & it owes to all of your preceding decisions. My father quit smoking, and so he lived longer and lived long enough to have his mind go and his body betray him. My Uncle didn’t quit smoking and died young-ish in his 60’s with a yong wife in a house he built himself.
I’m thinking on this, on the idea that the chapters of your life aren’t wide expanses of possibility & blank pages, but shortening passages recounting a long decline in dwindling detail.
Which means… A lot I guess. It means preparation & planning are important, in a way that isn’t naturally part of my consideration, in a way that requires me to put away a lot of what I’d regard as my innate substrate – my underlying identity. I’ve got to think, not of what I want to do now, but what I want to be able to do & when.
Part of this has a strangely paralytic quality – that you can’t know what the outcomes of doing a thing are & so you prefer to do nothing at all. That nothing at all could provide the peaceful catharsis?
I think that’s derived form loss. From missing a mask or self or totemic identity you used to have – a bygone variant that you really enjoyed or didn’t want to lose – but which was lost, by action or inaction. So that doing nothing at all, or attempting not to becomes the agreeable alternative to seeking accomplishments.
Anyhow, my mom pressured me into coming to visit her & my dad & I had to spend the morning getting pretty drunk to be able to face it. The old man was shocked to see me & kept laughing about how I am bald. After a while he forgot who I was again & then laughed just cause it's funny to him that a person is bald. Me and Agatha practiced throwing rocks and were pegging the fence & he was startled and told us we shouldn't.
Mom made this big production about dessert and it was ice-cream & strawberries. I thought maybe she put strawberry leaves in it a little because I kept getting these bitter tastes. But at the end, when the old man only played in his bowl for a while and wouldn't eat it I was ready to take it away & let him be but she said he must eat it because she conceals his medicine in it (like he's a dog) and he must eat it. I put together that probably she put his medicine in the one that I ate - and that's the cause of the bitter tastes. I got kind of drunk when I went to see them but not enough.
Came home and tried to think of anything else at all.