Kalani Perry v5.6

So I can sit here full of rage. Or I can put the fire out. The last time I was fat was at the Jose Cuervo in 1991 in Boulder with Kep and assorted hot girls. I had tweed, multi-colored board shorts with a thread unraveling to my left knee. It’s funny what you remember.
A voice from the pretty crowd said, “Sit down, fat ass.” Quiet calls for calm and respect mocked in four syllables. Da da da DUH. And I was embarrassed. I made pretend I saw who said it. I feigned anger.

Two months of steeped fear later. I lost all the weight. Then I lost more. And I was pretty like your supposed to be. Happy is a long-term find. It doesn’t just land in your hand because you did what you were supposed to. It’s a ghost whispering at sunset fleeting. It is a smile clenched. It is never again and probably never was. It wins six nights in a row on Jeopardy. Hollow.

Yes, you understand pain. But its different. You were born beautiful. You hurt because people don’t act like you expect. I hurt because they are what they are.

 

I am an unreliable narrator.

I make no pretense of 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.

“I tread a troubled track, my odds are stacked, and I’ll go back to black.”

By coincidence, I’m wearing all black today and Spotify chose that song and I think to myself, “I can’t believe that Amy Winehouse has been dead for more than 15 years now.” And I know I’m lucky that I didn’t die the same way, in fact, in that same timeframe. I got out.

But life, as it most certainly is prone to do, keeps happening. The pressure of similitude never ends, and I’ve come to know that it never will. That perhaps this is the very definition of life. Pleasure is fleeting, and for the most part, so is pain. The difficulty arises, especially for someone with my mentality, because every day is essentially the same day. (And this is the perfect, perhaps only, time I am to quote Janis, “It’s all the same fucking day, man.”)

That seems to be one common thread in the trail of dead. Boredom. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. This leads to belief in the mantra that “It’s better to burn out, than fade away.” Is it? I’m not looking to burn out. I’m not exactly fond of the notion of fading away either, but if that’s all we have, then why waste it?

Texas Hold ’em is a good metaphor for life. It’s not a coincidence that the same people are always at the final table because it’s a skill game. You hold two cards, but you’re still subject to a flop, a turn, and that oh-so-deep river. Assess what you have–do the math. If it’s right, look at the flop, hope for the best when you make the turn, and pray the river doesn’t drown you. That’s about the best you can do.