Stand Up Act 10
Some people stick by the words in line with the idea of everything you need to know you learn in kindergarten. Be nice to each other. Don't drop your pants in public. Share. Be quiet and listen when the time is right. Take time to make things. Take naps. I don't know what the whole NY Times best seller's list was, but you get the point. Coming to grips with the fact that I will probably never dunk a basketball has brought me an up to date version of that book. In no particular order:
Everyone gets old and dies and the best you can do is be a little worse than your worst the day before. That's right. At some point your body stops growing and starts failing. Bit by bit. Part by part. Sure, you may beat the odds and be one of the few freakish human beings that cannot be destroyed through attrition and must be struck down with sudden and violent illness or circumstance. The chances are very good that you are not. Once you hit your mid thirties, that's pretty much it. The next decade or so, you may hold serve or at least keep even with your physical abilities the day prior, but it all ends in a gutter. If you haven't dunked a basketball by now, you probably never will without a trampoline or other marvel of engineering.
You can't be whatever you want to be. You can be a version of what you want to be. You can be somewhere in the ballpark of what you wanted to be. You cannot be whatever you want to be. Well you can be whatever you want to be inside your head. That is absolutely attainable. However, you may wake up inside a very welcoming dormitory environment where breakfast always comes at 8:30 and bed time is 9 sharp and a guy keeps pounding his head against the wall loud enough to interrupt your 500 piece puzzling and your pants have no pockets and the shower always smells a little bit off. You can't be whatever you want to be. There are always outliers in great numbers because it's a perceptual lens. Think of the planet as an aircraft carrier. There are, I dunno, 150 pilots. There are always 150 or so pilots. There are 6000 other people doing all of the other stuff to make sure it doesn't crash or sink and feed the people that help the people that help the people that feed the people that help other people make sure it doesnt crash or sink so that the people that fly the planes and fix the planes can fly and fix things and make sure it doesn't get blow'd up. Chances are really good, if you're born on that carrier, you're not going to be flying anything unless you steal it or are a pilot's kid or pilot's friend's kid. If you aren't born with the genetic ingredients to Chia pet out into a frame capable of dunking, guess what? That's right, you can work your ass off and add 6" to your vertical leap, but your wingspan and height have already conspired to make sure the best you'll achieve is a left handed layup with your finger tips grazing the rim.
Allow your passions to lead to your goals. Your goals cannot kick start your passion. That element of life is a one way valve. You may not be able to dunk, but you do enjoy the game. If you like to play with smash and grab abandon, get good at it. Embrace it. Set your goal to being the best slasher in the neighborhood. Cut defenses to ribbons and bounce off the low block to grab rebounds because your game will never be above the rim... doesn't mean it can't be wicked fast. When you set goals apart from your passions, your hearts never in it. Doing things because you want to do them and doing things because you cannot not do them are too very different things. There is an "I think I can" gray area muddled in there. A little bit of chicken and egg, what came first, questioning, but for the larger part, save your mind the wear and tear. Gravity will still be gravity tomorrow, and last I heard, the ability to go from zero to "don't blink" is pretty rare in itself.
The list goes on, but you get the point. Along those lines, I was considering going back to trying to rip out a poem every day. Just one. There's the whole idea that you have to dig through the trash and start tossing things off of the top of the stack to get down to what you really want to weave and work with. The thought behind it is that every time, every instance, that ends with the idea of "hey, I should write that down" is the lattice of your brain adding a new bit of graph that gets buried and grown in and grown over with the events and experiences that come after it. And then you hit another branching point where you say to no one in particular "I should write that down".
By the time you actually get to the point of sitting down, all is forgotten. Not really forgotten. Buried. Grab a shovel You've got two choices. Try to hammer and chisel all the way back to the fly in the center of the glacier, or sample and blast it apart, while mapping and scaling and measuring and cataloging it.
Eventually you may get all the way back to the granule of the thing you thought you should write down. Nothing along the way will be known or preserved or brought into consideration to cut the journey or work shorter the next time around. If you slice it up and hold it up to inspection and hang the samples on slides along the route, you've not only achieved the point of origin- you've possibly stumbled upon data for further examination and perhaps other points of interest that must be investigated before the entire land mass melts into the polar seas of your own consciousness.
Scary as hell, the prospect, no? Oh yes. In years of your decaying brain you've lost so much. It's alright though. Breath easy. Release your testicles back out of your stomach and unclench your pelvises. It's never too late to start getting some exercise and start tagging the fauna living inside your head.
Speaking of things living inside the mind, I've been up late a lot of days thinking about whether or not I should pursue a mate. You know the whole mating thing. The whole pairing off with other people to raise other littler people to become good big people to raise more little people to become good big people or horrible little terrors. That whole thing. I don't want to do it to raise other little people. Let's get that out of the way first. Maybe. I think I would either be a great father or a horrible father, but there's no gray in there. Trust me. I've been over the idea drunk, sober, high, smashed, apotheotic, grounded, slippy, glowing, based, depressed, you name it. It's going to go one way or another and frankly I don't care to flip a coin everyday hoping I raise someone who doesn't want to kill me every day of its waking life until I do actually die. That shit is terrifying.
I want to do it for a companion. A second voice, because the angel and devil on my shoulders like to play dress up so sometimes I glance over and there's a teddy bear and a bowling pin on the other side or a pacman and a doily. What the hell, indeed.
I don't hate company. This is how it all boiled down; I'll give you the most obvious that occurred to me last first.
While browsing reviews of Tinder and Grinder, I realized that my apartment, though of a healthy square footage, is laid out like one giant room with a side room (full of weight lifting equipment.... it's essentially a regularly used gym so that I don't have to pay to go to one). I have enough space to house one person. Exactly one person. Trying to pack another person into this space will lead to a violent civil war, ultimately. I don't live alone. I'm in my apartment with me and the rest of the machinations and defects and words and whispers and screams and general artifacta of my minds functioning. It's a packed house already. Where am I supposed to go to escape if the side room is occupied and I can't go outdoors?
The second thing is there must be sex. If you live with me, we have to fuck eventually or someone has to go. Not immediately, but eventually. If we don't have sex, that's fine, but you'd better be prepared for gratuitous nudity because I cannot stand clothing. I hate clothes. Once they've served their function it's time to discard them. They're uncomfortable. If I'm wearing something, I probably had to. If it's something I enjoy wearing it's because if you're going to wear clothes, you may as well wear something you can have fun wearing or need to wear to bring happiness to the act of dressing my pretty innards.
I didn't live to the ripe old age of 30 to hear "don't touch me there" "it's four o'clock in the morning" "I'm tired" "I just ate lunch" "I want to shower first". I don't care. You can use me when you want to as well. It's a two way street. I damn sure am not going to catch flak for masturbating at midnight when they've turned in early.
I don't care if it's bad sex or the kind of sex you tell your friends about when I'm not around where you know I think I rocked the house, but really I fizzed about as pleasantly as having an ashtray dumped on your tongue, getting to wash it off, and finding grit behind your molars the next morning. It's gotta be there. I am a contact person. When I know I can't touch you, things get weird. Things get real weird. Ever found a sheet of a paper folded in half six times inside your purse? Ever found three razor blades in your wallet? Ever found your jacket on the same hook except literally inside out? Ever found everything that could possibly be unplugged unplugged? Ever found everything you brought over laid out to the level of where your hands might swing as you picked up an item and progressed onward toward the door? Ever found your car keys behind your head when you woke up?
The point is this: I realized I don't own enough space to support two people to the point where one person can disappear from the other person's engagement and forget for a time that they are now part of the other person they are living with and dive into their own engagements. I'd have to add a floor at best and another two rooms at the least so that I or they would not know exactly where to find me, because knowing exactly where someone is hiding is the same as having them immediately present. You need only to recite the incantation to summon them. There has to be some mystery and trial and error to at least give them a chance to relocate and make it interesting.
The other point is that I own enough stuff to support exactly one person. There are enough chairs to support one person and an occasional party. There are enough dishes and cups and utensils to support one person who makes their own meals and washes their own dishes. Enough bedding for one. Enough closet space for one. Enough food and fridge space for one. Enough toiletries for one. Just a matter of fact.
Not that there's been no effort to expand the coffers. There has been. Through the strain and the strife and the good and bad times, the covering radar is still only big enough to account for the airspace over a single atoll. Above and beyond that controlled airspace, all bets are off. Everyone and everything flying in or out is at its own risk. There simply is no room in the budget for fighter escorts and first response marines and a space program and, hell, the DPW is backlogged by years, not months or days. Years. Bringing someone else into the equivalent of District 9 is not going to end well for anyone who doesn't live somewhere near or lesser than there already. This may be an open hoodrat invitation. It's not.
Recognizing where my passions are, we can make this work. I gotta acquire more space at some point if I want another human being around or, adding another human being, there will very quickly be just one. We can work out the details after the acres. Plus it'll be good to have places to bury things and plant growing things to just walk out on my porch and sit down and peer across the field and say to no one in particular "I remember when that tree was a foot tall," kick my feet up on a flat basketball , take a little sip of gin and apple juice, scrawl some notes, and tsk tsk at online dating messages I still receive, setting aside the gems to tell you when dinner rolls around and we play two handed hearts to see who sets the menu and who does the cooking that night.
