Plausibly Rational Responsibilities

A long time ago, I suffered a watershed dilemma.  Does it matter, really, to spend your time trying to become a good guy?  Is kindness in any measure befitting for anyone?  Is it weakness, is it fair, is it even practical?

 

Every once in a while, I have trouble.  Not any great deal of trouble, but I find myself contemplating—perhaps this doesn’t matter.  The people around me don’t seem to care.  After all, that’s the fundamental problem with being overly nice.  Once you start behaving normally, others perceive you as acting the asshole.  This behavioral theory of relativity, while understandable, hardly comes in handy for anyone who acts in extremes.  You understand?  People are animals, and we haven’t developed so much that meaningless self-sacrifice won’t fly in the face of nature, and this will disturb every aspect of personal equilibrium we need to function.  For us, and everyone around us.

 

Now, please, don’t misunderstand me.  I know how this appears; self-pitying, selfish.  I know, I know.  Someone once told me that where the sun kisses the horizon, it sets the land ablaze.  Where these words touch me, a fire has burnt for an incredibly long time.  I’m afraid…what if this conflagration runs its course, leaving me a pile of burnt out ashes?  Scatter me to the wind, I suppose.

 

I’ve lost an ability to understand these people around me.  You know what?  We fear what we don’t understand, and we stay away from what we fear.  This recurring wish to remove myself from the people around me sounds odd—I’m not truly a loner.  I do like the transcendent aspects of many of the lives around me.  The emotions, the thought-processes, the way our tendencies, intricacies, and preferences manifest themselves in our daily lives.  I begin to find, however, that the end-result of all these instinctual behaviors in these people doesn’t appeal to me.  I begin to find people hateful.

 

This place, these people…try to understand…I don’t mean to act arrogantly.  I don’t.  I don’t believe myself arrogant at all.  I just wish I could find some way to relate to the assholes, insecure idiots, and fucking douche-bags around me, and how perfectly pathetically predictable they are.  These stupid games they play will comprise their lives in their entirety—and I don’t think that anyone really ever bothers to remember that.  Every chance we casually forego will never live again, and we don’t even take a second out of our pedantic lives to mourn their ignominious passing.

 

How the flicking streetlamp casts that stylish man’s shadow.  How the house smells for weeks after pumpkins come into season.  How she appears, like a benevolent, smiling wraith out of the first snows, toboggan in hand.  The way her scarf wildly laughs in the winds of early December…it enraptures.  It fills me with an absolutely ineffable feeling that rises off of me and sinks deeper into me…until I’m not really quite sure about what’s going on, and I can’t tell where the world inside of me ends and the world outside of me begins.  I don’t know why that should perplex anyone.  These things happen once…all these moments happen once.

 

I often think of myself as an old cloak.  Once solid white wool, it frayed, accrued holes, gained a unique character to its own detriment.  I patch each hole patiently, keeping the whole of it intact.  I make sure it remains functional and in its original form.  One day, in the process of repairing this mangled, ancient garment, I paused with needle in hand.  I realized—none of the white remained.  Just patches sewn to patches, thread-lines zigzagging pell-mell every which way.  Oil stains, food stains, booze stains.  In the darkness, I cast the same silhouette—however, when that light flickers tentatively on, it’s a completely different coat.  Mottled and frayed, each day does a little more to puncture the makeshift clothes I wear to protect me from the elements.

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I see them everyday, you know.  Kindred souls, you might say, although “cellmates” might be more appropriate.  Like the bodies they’ve been given and cultured just can’t contain everything that’s inside, and sometimes they sense something trying to escape.  Some poor animal that has managed to overcome its natural predilection towards survival, and instead has opted for altruism.  You know what I’m saying?  They breathe heavier…they sigh a lot.  Almost as if breathing has become a labor, or maybe it’s an attempt to expel whatever benevolent spirits chafe at their confinement.  It’s…it’s really confusing.  I don’t possess the words for it…I don’t really think the English language can embody the growing discontent and thrumming appreciation grappling each other somewhere in my ribcage.  You get it?

 

I hope you do.  Because this isn’t easy.  I like to think that an eastern language could contain it…like some Hindu guru could sit me down and explain it to me flawlessly in Hindi, his tongue flitting over the rolling syllables of massive words.  I’ve always felt strangely akin to Hinduism…I’m not really sure why.  They say easterners tend to put much more of an emphasis on spirituality…on introspection.  I think the propensity of Westerners to ignore the roiling incertitude that constantly leaves them befuddled, bewildered…I think it might be the most harmful habit we’ve taken for ourselves, and now foolishly uphold it as realism, as emotional strength, as an ability to live effectively in the real world.  Well, who gives two shits about the real world?  I don’t.  I can’t think of a place more uncaring and cruel than the real world, and wouldn’t caring just lend it credibility?  It’s so damned arbitrary in its ability to reduce a species of rational thought to animals in desperate search of essentials.  More money, more sex, more pleasure, more everything.  Well, live with it.  Be fucking happy for a half a minute before you haven’t half a minute left to count your millions.  Figure something out and take it to heart, and don’t pretend for half a goddamn second that there’s anything better than…anything even close to…anything even remotely comparable to it… to love and to be loved.  Do you get that?  Are you listening?  Are you sick and tired of hearing it, feeling it hackneyed and too idealistic?  Get it…to love and to be loved.  In the words of a certain singer/songwriter, let’s just hope that it’s enough.

They all think they deserve more.  Why?  What did they do?  I don’t deserve more; sometimes I get the irritating inkling that perhaps I’ve gotten far more than I deserve.  Is that being too hard on myself?  Don’t just laugh and say “of course.”  Think about it—I didn’t do anything.  We didn’t do anything.  One day in our dimmest memory we became aware.  I didn’t do shit.  The age of three, an entire year spanning from 1988 until 1989, consists of booted feet on a roughly graveled alleyway on the way to a neighborhood friend’s house.  That’s it…that’s all I’ve got.  I have an overall impression of 20 years of my life, and a rapidly fading sense of how the past year has…well…passed.  Always on the way, we’re always on the way, we’ve lost the way, we’ve found our way, we’re in desperate need of a way that satisfies both us and the world.  Is it possible?  Plausible?  Rational?  Responsible?  Reconcile it and move on.  Christ…

 

Geez Louise, Babies and Genitalmen…I get so worked up even thinking of it…even countenancing it for a split-second split in half.  This day resembles nothing so much as a solemn, stoic, stumbling funeral procession on its way to a fresh cold grave.

 

Every once in a while, sometimes often, sometimes not…I greet existence with something a little more uplifting.  With a sense of wonder, a pride in privilege…but it waxes and wanes.  Sometimes everything radiates an intrinsic goodness I can’t ignore and find myself transfixed by…sometimes my wan smile can’t com

e close to hiding my general disappointment for everything around me.  I get the feeling…though I can’t claim any sort of certainty…that that’s how it is.  All the time, and for most everyone.  I need something, someone, somewhere, for some time and always for the most inexact reasons…and that’s the closest I can approach certitude with any bit of honesty.  Plausibility.  Rationality.  Responsibility.