Caterwauling

It’s a good day today, no particular reason, we’re only filtered light, chemical reactions.

I saw Stephen on the weekend, I know 3 Stephens, all spelled Step Hen, which I know they all found agitating when I mentioned it, funny how little phrases can bring up whole histories of frustratedly listening to infantile abuse. Stephen is here for a while, it’s nice when people return and you find yourself closer to them than before. I do believe certain people suit certain aspects of one’s life, although I don’t do it consciously I’ve noticed that I’m often looking for something rather specific in the people around me, typically something I’m missing or don’t have an outlet for, I like people who are different to me. Really, most of my personality can be traced back to a few instances, a few moments and conversations.

I didn’t want to include this, because it’s terribly private, but, it’d be hypocritical for me to leave it out.

After Fiona died, one of the conversations we had, from the short time I knew her, would circle in my head for days at a time, she told me she believed that every relationship you have serves a purpose, but more than that there is a reason two people come together in any type of relationship, that a person can sense that there’s something important about that person, almost like a spark of energy she said, inviting you to them, but she finished by saying that eventually once you’ve found what it is you needed to learn and they did too, it’s important to look outwards again, to start searching again, that it’s best to let go of that relationship now so that both of you can look outwards with a clear heart. I told her I thought that was sad, that it feels too matter-of-fact, where is the room for love in that theory? Who cares if there is nothing left to learn, if you love them you’ll want them in your life. She said, two things, first that love is more often than not a word used to manipulate others, and regardless of that, she doesn’t think it’s sad, she compared it to the end of a book, it’s not a sense of loss and sadness it’s a sense of completion.

She was, she was such a beautiful person to borrow a phrase, so much more intelligent than I was, much more mature too, that conversation probably more than anything else affected me the most after she died, it was that conversation that made me realise that she was emotionally and intellectually on a different level to me, and that I didn’t have the skill, the talent, the knowledge whatever you want to call it, to have been able to give her the words that would’ve made a difference. Now, today, I honestly think I could have changed things, but, that’s sort of illegitimate, because I am the way I am because of her, this girl I knew for a few weeks, I’ve helped people step away from suicide since, that is the power I wanted back then, more than anything else that’s what I wanted, which leads me back to Stephen, he said, be the change you want to see in the world, Ghandi’s words. It’s interesting to me because, I knew him when I knew Fiona, in fact he borrowed my bicycle one day to go and watch the sun rise at the beach, he was a sad person back then, he laughed a lot and was sincere and kind but there was a definite sadness about him, both his parents were dying from cancer, and we were teenagers, there is very little you can do with that information as a teenager, a terrible frustration.

Incidentally I was also thinking the other day, when is a criticism of a person no longer legitimate? When they change? What if they don’t change, but that aspect of their personality isn’t drawn out anymore, no longer expressed? An acquaintance from QLD called Simon frustrated me something terrible years ago now, but is it fair for me to still be wary of him? People change, grow, etc, it’s a perpetual and gradual thing I think, it’s really very rare you meet someone who has stopped altogether, you don’t tend to meet people like that I suppose, since they’re not out there anymore.

I know it is self involved and all that but the reality is we all are and that’s how you develop, but it’s interesting observing thoughts you’ve had yourself articulated by others in other ways, seeing what it means to them and how it’s enacted in their lives, where it fits in their general approach and how much weight they lend it. Stephen thinks it’s important to stick to the middle road as he puts it, not a pejorative in his mind, but just being balanced, but he makes a rather charming distinction between fundamental approaches, he says you can boil it down to two, fear or love, do you live in fear or in love, ignorance or understanding, empathy or neglect, obviously it’s extremely simplistic, but as best I can tell that is the point, it’s intended as a point of simplification because you can’t colour those two aspects with extraneous complications, you can easily discern which one it is even when reviewing a matter with dozens of layers. He put it to me simply, do you love people or fear people?

You have to want to love don’t you? I mean, even if you didn’t know that as emotions go it is next to Godliness, even if it wasn’t a satisfaction that simply can’t be matched, no one in their right mind could want to take the fearful approach. Fear, in this sense, fundamentally implies either a sense of separation to the object or a lack of familiarity/control, it’s hard to be afraid of something you understand. At least if you fear it after understanding it you’re more likely to do so for the right reasons, or legitimate reasons anyway, each individual I think knows this inwardly, when you really try to love and you still end up feeling fear there isn’t that sense of possessing undeserved discrimination, often it’s manifested more as a healthy respect than anything approaching outright terror.

So, in that sense, I love you all. I’ll admit, saying that isn’t simple for me, I find it a bit awkward and embarrassing to say, but letting go of silly concerns like that is a good thing. It’s a bit like learning how to dance or sing in front of others, it’s not easy, and you tend to think more about it being taken as negative rather than positive, but it is enjoyable and liberating when you let go of the vanity and find happiness in trusting everyone around you to see you in a kind light, once you’ve finished wailing out the ballad that is, sadly though the practice doesn’t necessarily make you any better at it. But still, there’s a charm to the sort of person who pushes through a whole song, caterwauling all the while, I know some people like that.

My friend Brent, is, to use the most fitting description I can think of, an attention whore, he revels in it, properly revels in it, that is not the person I am at all, I dislike attention really, I’ve always found quiet sincerity to be effective, instead of boisterous charm, I know this makes me sound a bit matter-of-fact but a contributing reason to spending time with Brent was simply to learn how to deal with more than a dozen people staring at me in public, usually incredulously, you know, guilt by association. When he decides to do a Commando Roll past a family blocking the way at Ikea, I know no matter what I do I’ll be given the same treatment he is, what was interesting in myself though was that it developed for me a general rule of thumb which is, if you’re going to get in trouble for something anyway, you might as well

enjoy it, so I commando roll along with him.

Don’t get me wrong, we both use each other in a sense, I don’t think it’s a negative thing just terribly honest. For instance, Brent’s favourite game in the world, he has told me, is to push me past my comfort zone, he finds me to be amusingly middle class, and see’s himself as something of a free spirit of the working class. The first time I ever took my car off road, a car which wasn’t designed to do so mind you, I was with him, we were in country NSW driving up a mountain using a Fire Trail, back then I didn’t know what a Fire Trail was, there were a number of fallen branches on the path of varying size, the car could get over them with a bit of difficulty due to it being front wheel drive and the tyres tread being poor in those conditions, but that was manageable, the real trouble was reversing over them which the car flatly refused to do because I couldn’t get enough traction, eventually we came to a ditch filled with water, again there was no way to reverse back where we came because of the branches so we had to go forward, the ditch itself was at an absurdly acute angle which made me doubt we could get through it based solely on the shape alone, totally aside from the fact that it was water filled and very muddy.

At this point Brent turned to me and said "Do you see all the fallen leaves and pine needles on the track? That means no one has used this road since the end of Autumn." So, on that beautiful Spring Day, I found myself in a car, off road, half way up a mountain, unable to go back the way I came, no phone reception, a deep muddy pit in front of me, and the new-found knowledge that I was wrong to have trusted Brent, that in actuality he had no idea where we were going and worse still, he was deliberately sabotaging our journey. In the seat next to me, was Brent laughing hysterically, absolutely enraptured by the situation.

Brent is one of the very few people in the world who finds catastrophe, even the potential for catastrophe, amusing.

Again it’s one of those, surprise bits of development, I realised that if I can love Brent, whose idea of a good time is watching me suffer, I can love most anyone. And were I to tell him this, the first thing he would do is take credit for it, acting as though these years of suffering through ruination and his continual sabotage were merely guises used to help me on my journey to inner peace. Because he’s fun like that…