Category: History

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Unreliable narrator

I am an unreliable narrator.

I make no pretense to disinterest. Everything I use to fill the vacuum of this life is done by choice. Consciously or subconsciously, I am neck deep in my interests and biases. So are we all. The difference is my memory. It is eidetic. I can often remember things exactly as they happened. The trick to being unreliable is the interpretation of these events to suit the argument I am making, which may or may not remain consistent. It really depends on the moment. It depends on the audience.

Now for the hard part. Sometimes I am the sole member of this audience. And the cognitive dissonance that occurs during the process of packaging a situation is far more dissonant when the package is for self-consumption. It’s not impossible, clearly. And by what I’ve witnessed, I’m not the only person doing it. You see it in a color-by-numbers, kindergarten-simplicity when the law becomes involved. Statements are taken, snap judgments are made, then all evidence that fits a hypothesis is hoarded, while anything that subverts the accepted idea of “what happened” is summarily dismissed as coincidence or superfluous. In our personal lives, we do this shit on a whole other level. Why? Because we are fighting for our perceived actualization and the definition of our capital-s Self. That is a constant battle waged from cradle to grave, and everything is sacrificed in its effort.

The few individuals who can subvert this compulsion, or rise above it, are pointed to as heroes and anomalies of selfless wonder. Again, I don’t include myself, even remotely, among these beautiful freaks of human nature.

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Perfect

What do you want? Perfect? Perfect shames and mocks you constantly. Should I bother spending half my life learning how to spell words that no one ever uses? Would that be perfect? Would a perfect score on the SATs make me perfect? Dial down a little when you judge me. Full disclosure? I’m almost the opposite of perfect. My brain articulates well. Don’t confuse that with I know what the fuck anything means or what I’m talking about. I’m the same sapient primate that you are.

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Soft-boiled egg

She was slightly taller than me, 76 times better looking, and super age-inappropriate.

“Why do you like me?” I asked.
“I like smart.”

And so this weird thing began. She was smart, too. More street smart than me. Unfortunately, she had earned that. She was a soft-boiled egg—hard outside and soft in the middle.

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The curse of knowing

How do you turn good into bad? How do you make things better when the easy always keep making things worse? Why is bad easier? Why is it bad? Most of us choose it soe of the time. Then we judge. We hate in others what we dislike in ourselves. This life is a crazy thing.

Sentience gave us rule of this world, but it also brought us inescapable suffering. Gazelles don’t fear death even when its neck is in a lion’s mouth. We got understanding. Loss became reality then we got fear. Knowing is fear.

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Turning the dial

I do remember that night. We were on the patio, so you existed in half light. Coffee. SoCo. Late-night Austin. So beautiful and sad you were. You knew what your part was. I asked who you stayed with when you went home to Beaumont. “I don’t want to talk about that.” The internet churns. I already knew. I saw the pictures. I swallowed my tongue, and we laughed at Greg Giraldo. The implosion wasnʻt fast, but it was quick.

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Ambition kills

You don’t know me like I was. The me when I was corporate. It’s why I was always welcome and always rehired through my myriad proclivities. You never understood my value, and it’s why you wrongfully think I have no ambition. I am loyal. I am political to a fault. In that world, I only knew resilience and survival. I ate people I didn’t like or who I thought were unhelpful. I would sabotage your bungee cord and return your smile when you jumped. I’m much, much softer now. There are still teeth in my mouth and bile in my gut.

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Letter to someone

It’s weird, all these things I curated to a greatness in my mid-teens have come around to be the defining characteristics in haute couture. You might know the story of how I went to undergraduate Tacoma with nothing but a box of ill-fitting sweaters, two pairs of size-44 Levis 501s (that I squeezed into so I wouldn’t have to buy a bigger pair), and 500 LPs ranging from Kiss to Depeche Mode to Iron Maiden to Nina Simone to Queen to Rocky Horror to Miles Davis to the Escape From New York Soundtrack. I didn’t even pack a turntable and wouldn’t have one for my first three months in school. I carried all of those albums into a future I had no idea what would bring; they were how I defined a pretty big part of myself. And in just 12 months, I would trade all of those albums at the Jelly’s on Pensacola for the promise of about 40 “permanent” compact discs.

The lament I have for that moment is not financial. There are far greater “what—ifs” that would have resulted in far higher values lost or found. At best, those albums might fetch five figures if the collection remained intact, and mostly undamaged (highly unlikely). I lost more selling Apple stock too early (I still made a lot, not life-changing a lot). But that makes for a good story. This one always feels like a blow long lost could-have-been. Those albums were me. And I traded them all in for the illusion of a new permanence. I rebuilt that CD collection even larger, and the mp3 collection larger still. But I’ve never had something in my personal space like those discs.

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The salt

This is how you fall when it’s inevitable. Falling when you stumble is so predictable. The shoestring. The inevitable. Falling when you know you’re falling.

Brush off the arms pulling you perpendicular to the ground. “Brush off” has more intent than what happened. Shrug off is a better choice of words. Ignore the whispers. Ignore the screams. Ignore the blood. Blood coagulated. Coagulated. It made the effort to stop. This is not that. This is, I don’t know.

Wake up to a dog licking your knee because it (your knee, not the dog) was still bleeding. He liked the salt. (I type that, and I suddenly find it very funny.) He liked the salt. Not table salt. Not sodium chloride. We iodize it because, by itself, it is not enough. This is all a metaphor.

 

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Spleen

I think my spleen hurts. I’m not quite sure where my spleen is, left side,  I’m pretty sure, that’s why I’m not 100% on the diagnosis. I fell when I was drunk a few years back; it’s not like my pee is orange or has blood in it.

I used to tell people that my family dies of things they put in their mouth, mostly cigarettes, but sometimes too much food or alcohol (once it was an ice pick through the mouth into the carotid, but I don’t think that counts in the spirit I intended). I don’t smoke. And for a long time now, I don’t drink. Mine would be the first spleen casualty, though I’m pretty sure you can live without your spleen if it’s removed before its rupture causes peritonitis or, more likely, exsanguination. I’m sure there have been times when my liver could have been happier with me. I cross the street carefully.

People want to die fast. While sleeping if possible. There will never be a DNR order on my charts. I want to live forever by any means necessary. Dulce et decorum es pro dignitas morti. Bullshit. I see no nobility in giving up. My personal black eternity happened for at least 13.6 billion years before me, and I’m not looking forward to going back.

On the other hand, even if you believe in all that rah! rah! Christian stuff, living forever seems like it might get boring. I get tired after an hour of sex or seven hours at Disneyland and I love both of those.