Failing on Failing

 Sometimes a day is just forcing yourself to take the next step for ten hours. This writing feels like that already.  It is a discipline to do it when you don’t desire the action.  It is then that resolve and dedication to the concept is explored.

I almost didn’t write today.  I thought about how I might feel and what I might have to write tomorrow. And that, then gave me a nugget to write around today.  And since I had that topic, the topic of failure, I couldn’t weasel out of writing today.

Failure is something that happens to everyone at some point.  This concept, for example, is failing now.  I don’t have anything insightful to say about failure.  I have feared failure my whole life.  I had a number of early childhood successes, at least in my mind, and when I did have to face failure, I created a built in excuse:  I could have done it, but I didn’t want to.  I could have spent more time, or effort, or attention and been a success.  

At 42, have I dissuaded myself of that self-protective delusion that I am not unsuccessful at things, but I am an unmanifest success?  I think so, and I think that writing this shows that might be true.  If I had failed, it would have been because I made the choice to do something despite a real suspicion that I will eventually fail.  But maybe I am just lying to me, I trust me so easily.  I will fail and make the excuse that this moment, when I wrote when I didn’t want to, is proof that I could have easily succeeded if I chose to act like I am now.

But it is a choice, not at state of being.  Success and failure are just made up categories.  

And that concept petered out well short of the one page goal.

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Being honest makes you vulnerable.  In a social ecosystem where people amass social capital like dragons do gold, keeping some secrets secreted away is only a rational act of self preservation.  But it is the honesty that we all need.

Communication requires vulnerability.  You must open yourself to the risk of attack to allow new information into your cognitive space.  We see the benefit in small, discrete relationships, but never with the whole of our world.  We need to communicate to be vulnerable and be vulnerable to be honest.  Without limit, without concern.  But it is an all or nothing prospect.  

Does that mean something?

You

 You wake up heavy.  You wake up, your limbs lumber crashing down.  You wake up at first slowly and then with a start.  You wake up thirsty.  You wake up with the taste of thirst thick on your tongue.  You wake up cold.  You wake up stiff.  You wake up and think you are home.  You wake up and are not.

It is hard to talk with a mouth so dry, your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth.  You slide it forward, past your teeth, you feel the film on them. You open your mouth, try to produce saliva, bring your mouth back to something resembling a mouth.   Your eyes open and you look out of your skull into a room that isn’t yours.  It may not even be a room.  It is black forever in every direction.  You can see yourself from some sourceless illumination’s generosity.  You seem you.  The dimensions you know, your limbs loosening up, becoming more you every moment.

You are you, but nothing else seems to be.  Below you is a black floor, above you a black ceiling.  You try to call out, say anything, but your mouth is too dry.  You move forward, one, two steps.  The light follows you, the blackness that stretches in every direction is unchanging. You turn, your view doesn’t change.  You walk further, you walk faster, you jog, you run, you fall, you flail, you panic.  You are you in a light and around you is darkness.  You lash out.  You cry.  Your eyes are as dry as your mouth.  You sob.  You still.  You can’t understand.  You fall asleep.

The darkness persists.

You wake up happy.  You wake up forgetting the darkness.  You wake up remembering home.  You wake up and remember the darkness and you regret waking up.  You consider the darkness.  How far does it go?  Does it go on forever?  Upon pondering the darkness, you suddenly realize there is no ceiling, it is just more darkness extending.  You panic when you realize there is no floor.  It is darkness.  You stand on darkness, you move through darkness.  You alone seem real.  You close your eyes and there is darkness.  Is it inside you too?  You panic.  You grasp at the last feelings of hope.

You wake up.  You don’t remember falling asleep.  You remember the darkness.  You know the darkness will be there when you open your eyes.  You wake up sore, your shoulders, your neck.  You rub your neck.  You remember your mouth.  You remember it is dry, was dry, has been dry since your arrived.  You forgot your mouth used to be different yesterday.  You forgot to remember how it used to be.  

You remember your neck hurt.  You realize you can’t look down, can’t lift your arms far enough up to see them.  You are you but you can no longer look at yourself.  Is this a trick of the darkness?  Each moment more frantic, you can not see your hands, your feet, your belly or nipples.  You touch each part, you feel each contact.  You move, but you are unobserved.  

You wake up.  Were you asleep?  The darkness behind your eyes or in front of them, they seem the same now.  Before now, yesterday, or maybe last week, your body began to fade.  You couldn’t feel your toes, you reach down and you find you can’t move them either.  It moved up.  Slowly, your hips and groin, your stomach, your chest.  Your fingers went next, and your arms were the last bit to fall away.

How long now since you couldn’t feel your dry mouth.  Have you blinked in days?  How would you know?  The darkness inside is the same as the darkness outside.  What is there left of you?  Does inside have any meaning?  Is the darkness your see with your eyes, if you still have eyes, different from the darkness you see when they are closed?

You wake up.  You are you.  There is darkness, but you are you.  What are you?  Not body or eyes or movement or your parched mouth.  But you are.  You know that.

You wake up, or you fall asleep.

You open your eyes, or you close them.

You see darkness.  You know yourself.

You surrender hope.  You surrender life.  You surrender yourself.

You imagine the most brilliant flash of light.

Random thoughts

 The challenge today is to figure out how to write when I don’t want to write.  Any other time, I would write today off (nach), but I am really trying to commit to this discipline.  Sometimes I try to imagine the unimaginable.  Everyone disbelieved disaster until they realized this time was different.  That moment must be awful, when you catch yourself celebrating a near miss and suddenly realize you didn’t make it, no one will ever hear the story.

Anguish is overwhelming, by its very nature it drowns all competitors, it washes away every other feeling and firm notion.  After anguish, everything seems possible.  It may be we would yearn for a season of anguish and the spring that would follow.  So the price we must pay for anguish is more than we can hope to collect, a moment of total loss.  Anguish only follows when we willingly release our grip on something we once treasured above all else.  

The most damaging and hard to refute attribute of the left is a hostility to beauty.  The left is for more inclusion, more accommodation to a wider variety of people access to a life worth living.  But the more inclusive, the discordant, the more variable in chaotic malstroms.  The most beautiful, the left would argue, is one that is inclusive of the flawed.  That those allowances made, those inefficient aesthetics do not reduce the beauty but increase our understanding of beauty itself.

I am so tempted to delete the previous paragraph, because it failed to say what I wanted to say.  What I said came off as othering, as propagating the very language I use to covey the beauty I imagine can’t help but further the very exclusion from beauty that I seek to deconstruct.  

I’m never going to win in a negotiation with myself.

Now what does it say about me that I wouldn’t say you always win when negotiation  with yourself?  That a negotiation requires giving up something and that means, in this situation, you end up without something you wanted and with something you didn’t want.  Even in winning, you are in a worse position than before.  Now you have exerted the effort to work against yourself in the construction of a binary that may not be relevant.  The only way to win is not to play.

I don’t think the left should reject the construction of bio-leninishm.  We should lean into it.  If the right are better at meme formation, which they are, but at the expense of a nimble approach, then we should surrender this battle to set up for better performance next time.  Embrace the ugly and reject the whole concept of beauty and make the ones who want to exclude people explain their actions. 

Road Trip (Part One)

 Hundreds of miles of road were ahead of him.  Nick paused, hand on the driver’s side door handle, the morning sun had just started to flirt with the horizon and bring red and orange up around the edges.  He hadn’t slept well, nervous energy invaded his mind every time rest approached.  The paus was, in his mind, the last chance to veer off of this trajectory.  Letting go would mean allowing his fear to rule; opening the door, getting in, starting the car, shifting into drive: these were the first steps on a path he suspected to follow a difficult route.  

The downtown skyline was quickly receding in the rear view mirror before he allowed himself to unclench.  Traffic was light this early in the day and the comforting rhythm of the pavement under tire helped him relax.  The cascade of city exits faded into the understandable regularity of the suburbs and then to the trickle of the great rural expanse.  By now his roommates would have noticed he was gone, two months rent in cash and a quick note to ease their transition, along with the vast majority of his possessions.  By now his parents probably read the email he sent before packing up his laptop.  He imagined his phone, now turned off and packed in his bag, filling up with messages of concern.

Voicemails from his mother.  She would be confused and concerned.  Although she had released him to independence and adulthood when he left for college, she still harbored that perverse maternal hope that he would return to the nest.  His father might text, if the email address he had was even still good.  They hadn’t spoken since his sister’s wedding nearly 18 months ago and were situated to have that state continue indefinitely.  Charles and Eric, his roommates, had probably reached out, they’d started the year as acquaintances but a solid friendship had developed.  Assorted friends.  More as hours of silence turned into days, eventually weeks.  

Thinking of his phone, Nick realized things were going to be different, really different.  If things work out the way they are supposed to, he would not hear or see those messages.  He will be living life as the citizens of his old life grow more frantic as the days of silence turn into weeks.  Will they look for him?

He was striking out on his own in a way that required a clean break.  They may think of him as a missing person, offer a reward.  They might post pleas to social media, asking anyone with information to reach out, even if they don’t know anything to please share to boost the signal.  Or maybe not.  They could calmly accept his message.  He was headed off to live a different life and he may reach out someday, but for now he sought privacy.  They may wish him well and trust him.  They may move beyond him and quickly grow a hide of indifference to the man that used to be their son, their friend, their peer.

Five hours, give or take, on the road and the gas tank was much closer to empty than full.  The exit he was approaching looked desolate but he thought he saw the sign of a gas station on the horizon a few miles to the south.  He decided to take a chance.  The tableau the emerged was a sad one.  A service station that was barely surviving on the very edge of highway viability, pickups for sale in front of what used to be a mechanic’s bay and pay at the pump wasn’t even an option.

Opening the door, he was almost surprised to not hear the cliche doorbell jingle that these places always had in movies.  Instead, the small store was not big enough for the woman behind the counter to not see the door and everything else.

“Hi, hon.”  It was comforting to Nick that she was as expected.  Mid 60s, voice raspy from a lifetime of smoking, she had a vibe that was equal parts disinterest and a cultivated customer service politeness.  

“Hi, I need gas.  Please tell me you take cards.”  Nick took a step toward the formica countertop, but she waved him off.

“Yeah.  Go pump your gas and then come in and pay.”  She smiled in that trusting way that you can’t in the city.  He was on his honor not to drive off and it made him feel safe, more relaxed then he had in weeks.  Had he seen her writing his licence plate number down on her yellow notepad he might not have imagined this oasis and nearly as idyllic.

Back outside and waiting as the slowest pump groaned through its work he took in the day.  The ascendant sun was warm but the bare trees and fallow fields were a reminder that winter had not come to an end that long ago.  A hawk, or maybe an eagle, he never knew much about birds, flew high over the horizon.  A rusted van rumbled by on the road, headed toward the interstate.  Not even half full and the mechanism seemed to be slowing down.

Nick didn’t plan on being here.  Six months ago, he was finalizing the internship for this summer, looking forward to when life would really start.  He’d grown up somewhere a lot like this, more like here than here was, honestly.  Farm town, thirty miles from nowhere, where everyone knew him and his parents and his grandparents.  He’d been a good student and a good athlete, but he would have excelled anyway because most of his teachers and coaches remembered how good his dad was.  In a town like that, everyone had a place. He excelled, some rebelled.  Eventually, they settled in or they left.  Nick spent the first eighteen years of his life very comfortable in his role, in his town.  He went off to college fully expecting to be back home in 4 years.

The ka-klunk of the pump turning off startled him out of his reflection.  Back inside he grabbed a cola and candy bar before finally approaching the counter.  Barb, she introduced herself, made small talk as she hunted and pecked on the register.  She used to work at the cafe in town until it closed down, she’s been here about 5 years.  “Don’t see too many young people anymore.  Where you headed?”

“Arkansas.” Nick answered.

“Long drive.  You be safe.”  Nick thanked her and began toward the door, it stuck a bit and he leaned in to pull a bit harder.  He stopped himself, he thought about telling Barb more about his plans.  

“I--” He stopped himself.  His credit card, he could be tracked and she could be questioned.  Paranoid, perhaps, but he had been good so far.  Barb held eye contact, waiting.  For him it felt nearly as long as the trip so far, but it was only seconds.  “Bathroom?”

“Round back, hon.  Haven’t been back there in a while.  Hope it’s presentable.”  Barb laughed coming around the counter.  She followed him out, sitting down on an upturned planter and lighting a cigarette.  

Nick tossed his groceries in the car and disappeared around back.  He hadn’t been to a gas station with an outdoor bathroom in years, but he remembered them being more plentiful when he was younger.  There was the door, green against the white walls, “Toilet” scrawled on in marker.  He stood in front of the door, pausing again.  It could be his defining trait, his caution, his need to consider all options before action, but today it seemed to be almost overtaking him.  He imagined this was his destination, that he could step through this door into a new life.  His heart began to race, his breath coming harder, he pulled himself together and opened the door.

A Disciple of Writing

 After a lifetime of fancying myself a writer, today I start the discipline of writing.  I am going to hold myself to writing at least one page a day.  It can be anything, but it will be on this template and it will at least have a single word on the second page.  Each one will be posted to a blog and the good ones will be worked on and the bad ones will be left behind.  I am trying to think of it as a survival of the fittest for my ideas, and I need a robust and diverse population to find and pluck out the truly good ideas.

We, as thinking and perceiving creatures, have to make a lot of assumptions about the world.  I assume water will be wet if I touch it.  I take that for granted and I don’t have to touch every lake to confirm it isn’t a very convincing, though completely solid, simulacrum of a liquid.  Some assumptions are very nearly inborn and some come with time.  Often enough, our assumptions are right enough that we go on living; I assume that food at the store is properly labeled, I don’t have each package chemically analyzed.

But what if I was wrong to trust that assumption?  Counterfactual: Diet Coke paid off someone somewhere and ten percent of their bottles are just filled with whatever is around.  If that’s the case, I don’t seem to be any worse off for it.  If I become aware of that information, I can make different decisions going forward.  If I had a history of intermittent gastrointestinal distress, perhaps I now have a lead of a cause to something with the unknown variable that seemed completely random.  

Three years ago, I got married.  Lovel, my partner, is a dude.  So am I.  (1)  Saying that in 2021 as if it was some sort of revelation or plot point and that feeling so fake speaks to the progress we have made as a society, despite what the Trump years may have made us think.  Gay marriage moved from a taboo ratings grabber on TV in the 90s to the wedge issue in the nation is 2004 to, among the vast, vast majority of the nation, a non-issue.  (2).  By 2018, when we sent out our wedding invitations, quite a few went out to people that I had grown up hearing react to the very notion of gay people with literal disgust.  

A small part of my mind worried there would be a large contingent of people from my past that might send well wishes, but would prefer not to attend a same-sex wedding.  Part of me was afraid that, despite the fact that I had come out to them twenty years prior and they had met Lovel, when the rubber met the road, when it really mattered, they would wish us well but just couldn’t participate.  

Now, imagine a scientist running the famed double slit experiment (3), the particle is fired and hits the detector and there is a wave pattern.  Next, the scientist runs it again, but this time they intervene at some point to measure the speed or position of that particle.  Now, this measured particle hits the detector at one spot.  The act of measurement changed the outcome, forced the probabilities to have a definition and not the undefined properties they had without measurement.

There is a whole pop mythos around this concept of quantum effects.  A guru telling you that you can will any outcome, that the world is set by your intention, that you can direct that particle to the one spot you want it.  But we know, good reader, that we have to interact with something to observe it.  Example, we have to bounce a photon off it that we can interpret when it gets back to our eye or the most technical equipment.  Observing it has as much physical reality as pushing someone over midrace; no matter how quickly that runner recovers, neither one will let you know how the race would have ended without the intervention.

I trusted that my guests would attend my wedding and the vast majority did, it confirmed the change I expected from the historical state.  But it also disrupted things.  For some, it was their first same-sex wedding.  The state of acceptance was mushy, unsure, the readings were all over the map, but the observation that was the wedding was certain, you were there or you were not.  The ones who the detector registered on the right side got a party and those who didn’t were out living their lives.

So all of that is to say that I am trying to develop a discipline of writing to create that intervention and see where I am on my way through the race.  I want to be a person that writes every day and for too long I have waited for the person to emerge.  I need to take a measurement and commit to a trajectory.  I need to do the writing to be the writer, that is the measured particle, it is going to be different, but it’s going to be something.  I’ll never be a writer without provably writing something, and the discipline of writing something for the sake of writing will make me the writer I want to be.

This puts me solidly on page two, so I am going to wrap this up.  This is posted somewhere, so there might be an audience.  If so, welcome and I think it will get better from here.

(1) I probably identify more precisely as a mostly masculine presenting genderqueer/non-binary.  Develop later.

(2) The continual fall back of the culture war should be ignored and attention spent on the reactionary wave coming behind them.  Develop later.

(3) Look it up, not my main point.