While you’re living your life it seems likes chaos and things are just being thrown at you like a spaceship in the asteroid belt. You know where you are. You know what you’re trying to do. But everything just keeps coming at you in a random fashion. In hindsight, you can connect the dots of choices you made in that field. Some crashed you into rocks. Some were brilliant real-time choices that no one else could have pulled off. And there were mistakes everyone would have made, and ones only you did. If you keep repeating those, you’ll never get out. And if you’re smart and lucky you do. Either way, each choice is connected. And the asteroid belt isn’t random, it just appears to be. It exists under the same physical principles that you do. Those laws are immutable (until you get really small, but we’ll save quantum theory for another metaphor). They don’t change, you do. One way or the other you do.
Non-quantum chaos
The thing about chaos (in the non-quantum realm), the beautiful thing? Is that it’s fair. Once you introduce order, trouble occurs. The universe is binary. Every problem can be solved with yes or no. Until you cannot say yes, or you cannot say no. People try to have control. They try to introduce order. Order is a construct. And trying to introduce it only brings the pain of it not happening.
The rime of the modern mariner
The idea of being abandoned is so painful to me that I resist it even when I am running in the opposite direction of my abandonment. I couldn’t feel the shackles fall from my neck, ankles, and wrists. I could only hear, “Now go!” But I was already running and, like a dog on a choke chain, continued to repeatedly asphyxiate myself as I reached the end of my line.
“Now go!” sets me free. I bristled because I didn’t get to say, “I’m leaving.” Petulant, foolish, little boy that I am. I didn’t see that you were pushing me off the Amistad and back toward the shore of life, back to the world. Like the Ancient Mariner, I had been the lot in a craps game between Death and Life-in-Death, and having been won by the latter, it had become the only life I knew or expected. That was not, is not, and shall not ever be a life.
I feel like a snake that’s just molted and am completely grossed out by the shell I’ve left behind. Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling me to fuck myself and die. Isn’t that ironic? That is where I found my life.
Why you growl?
I only feel bad when the sound goes down. I can see the next eight, silent hours. Silence from the outside. The inside is never quite less than a muffled growl. I see myself in some parallel universe, or even this one. Explaining to my pragmatic, European girlfriend what I mean by muffled growl.
“Why you growl? You mad?”
“No.”
“You mad at me?”
“No. The opposite.”
“Then why you growl?”
The short answer is, “I don’t know.” The longer answer that might take a few jumps over our language barrier requires a certain nuance with English, i.e.,”Why aren’t you growling?”
Growling is guttural and seems monstrous. There are examples across every culture when a noise means more than an articulated cry. I don’t want the next eight hours to be silent in any way.
It wasnʻt fast, but it was quick
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.
Affectations
I think the only thing that works with you is affectations. I know how you feel and I know how I feel. But I also know that screams to no one are probably more effective. And perhaps my screaming isn’t for you anyway. The night is sort of used to being deaf and dumb. I scream into my pillow and feel the spit gather and pool. I type in ALL CAPS, then time your metronomic response.
But now, when I can’t help but think about you–his smile in that picture when I know he fucks you later that night; that second betrayal–the part of my torso, the call of my heart is exploding with whatever chemicals say, “Fuck that.” I go to the next thought about why I hate you, or maybe I eat this surge in my chest this once. And I’m not quite sure what I would do if you were in actual arms reach. Would I reach for you?
That ferrous taste when there’s blood in your mouth lets you know something rusted. That chewing on your cheek in angst wasn’t all in vain, there were consequences. Part of me still loves you and that part wants you to know that smell.
You ask sometimes what I am thinking. I think you say it to fill the empty space of quiet; I’m sure you are not particularly interested in the answer. The verb “to think” does not have the required nuance I need to explain to you my real-time interpretation of what I see and hear at any given moment.
More a kind of darkness
I’ve asked myself what it is, and I guess it’s more a kind of darkness. There was enough distraction when I was younger and preoccupied in the establishment of a life, that I was able to ignore it, with situational exceptions. Other proclivities like sex and alcohol sometimes made it feel like there wasn’t even anything to worry about. What I’ve come to learn is that unhealthy sexual shenanigans (if they even exist; I vacillate), or alcohol, or sometimes drugs, were not in and of themselves the disease, but were, in fact, the telling symptoms of something far more dangerous that was just waiting for me with its gangrenous soul, and cold, cold heart. But, oh so pretty to look at.
I guess my misguided attempts to always live in full color at high speed with no filter, and in possession of a ferocious, single-minded intensity I sometimes used as a means to those ends, my life became double-edged, semi-charmed, and, more and more, self-destructive. But I can also say that I’ve been to more cities than I can count on Trip Advisor (500+), know more about the subtle nuances of the human condition than I had previously thought was possible, felt deeper feelings (good and bad) than anyone I know not suffering with a serious mental illness, and been in situations that I know most people will never see, want to visit, or even believe exist. (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a random house or hotel room at three in the morning with some random Mary Magdalene’s, contemplating what to do next and thinking to myself, “How in the fuck did I end up at this moment, in this place, watching what I’m watching? What’s my play here?”) But everything bad that happened was happening too often to be a coincidence. Is still happening in some respects.
When the darkness finally rose above, it came swifter and stayed longer than I thought was possible, and consequently damaged and collaterally damaged much more than I could pretend not to care about; everything in its reach got and gets caught in its velvet web.
The argument can be made that my experiences have helped make me the person that I am. And for the most part that’s a good thing. I love madly, forgive quickly, feel empathy deeply, laugh hard when I’m happy or sad, make others laugh and smile, and easily make real connections with people. But there’s an opposite side to that same coin that doesn’t sound like charisma, though it has as its source the same dark energy. I catch myself crying spontaneously at almost nothing, hurt intensely with an emotional paralysis, wander the streets lost and lonely, and strike back hard with words when I feel that I’ve been damaged intentionally. Yet I know that I don’t do evil things because I’m not inherently evil. I take action that looks evil not with premeditation, but by following the paths of least resistance and instant gratification, without regard for any consequences, good or bad, until they happen.
Someone I love dearly spoke of me once to another person I loved dearly (when I wasn’t there) saying to her, “He’s super smart, kind and engaging when he’s in the mood, and seductive as he wants to be. But there is a dark side.” At the time I was mad at that spilled, heretical revelation. But it’s difficult, disingenuous, and ultimately pointless to speak anger to truth.
Three women
I started writing this story about eighteen years ago. I don’t remember the exact day. It wasn’t hot, and I was in Texas, so my best guess is April. That really isn’t important, except to demonstrate how my mind works. I have a very smart, very loyal, very untrained puppy running the control board.
OK, Texas. So I’m walking in the parking lot of my apartment that abuts a weirdly verdant part of the hot place. The Greenbelt. I’m not sure if that’s one word. I’m walking with who I thought I loved. Of course, her name. I remember where she went to high school. I remember how she lost her virginity. I’m not telling secrets. That’s not the point, except it is, to show you how my mind works. I know the concept of the unreliable narrator. There is a school for this stuff. I am digressing.
We’re walking in the parking lot that circles around the apartments I lived in at the time. And the idea comes to me. She put her hand in mine, interlocking fingers. Again, an unnecessary detail, but it was the impetus. My life is defined by women, or my relation to them. Or how my mind relates to them.
Self-report
You say what you think, how you want things to be, but you are what you do. Visa, Google, OpenAI all know you better than you know yourself. They are not hindered by defense mechanisms; their currency is data. And though data can be used to lie, in its raw form, it never does. It just is what it is. You can trust with 100% certainty that self-reporting will contain inaccuracies. It might get close if the reporter doesn’t know about, doesn’t care about, or is not actively involved in any agenda affected by this data. Otherwise, you can’t trust it. I trust your credit card, monthly statement. I trust your search history implicitly. Not the one you didn’t have a chance to curate. The ones Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et al. took without asking. (Technically, they asked, or you couldn’t have joined. But who reads that fine print?)
Words and being human
The trouble with belief is that it’s a lie. Your senses lie. There is a whole spectrum in all five senses, and yours is in the middle. You can’t see what a housefly can see. You can’t smell what a dog smells. You can’t hold your breath like a dolphin. Then why be human? That fraction of our brain that makes us sentient. The small part that gives us speech. Or makes the abstract scribbling of lines make sense as words.
I want noise. I want percussion.
I’ve had almost as many conversations about why words are important as there are words to explain why.
But words are more important than most things. They are what make us human.