Category Where Is My Mind

Not Much. But Something.

Dusty 1 Comment

I’ve led a pretty charmed life. Part of me wants to feel bad about that, because I know many people who have had a much rougher time than I have, and it’s not fair; but also, it’s not my fault. I don’t think I take advantage of my advantages and privileges too much — though that doubt tells me I do it to some extent. That’s okay; I’m not perfect and don’t have to be. But with the advantages I’ve had, growing up as a white male American, with middle-upper class parents, blessed with good health and so on, I’ve been able to do pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do, other than the wilder dreams like owning my own island or becoming a space pirate and whatnot. I went to college, graduated basically debt-free, immediately gained middle-class employment as a teacher, which I’ve kept for over twenty years now — and it turns out I’m good at it, too. I have a wonderful marriage and the family of pets and no children that I’ve always wanted. I’ve been able to write a handful of pretty good books, and there will be more to come.

So why do I need help?

Partly it’s that all the privilege in the world, and all the luck, too, doesn’t actually keep me safe from troubles. It certainly shields me from many difficulties that others have to deal with on top of the troubles that I have; but the fact that I have it easier doesn’t mean I have it easy. Stress doesn’t go away just because other people have more stress. Not even if you’re aware that other people have more stress. I suppose I could try to live with more gratitude, keep counting my blessings and focusing on the positive; but when I try that, the problems keep coming back up, no matter how much I turn my focus away from them. In fact, I think that the good luck and the privilege and the blessings I do have make it harder for me to realize that I need help. They certainly make it harder to recognize this fact. Not that I’m bemoaning the white man’s burden, oh isn’t it hard to not be a victim in a world full of victims; I don’t think that about other people nor about myself. But whenever I feel troubled, I tell myself something along the lines of “What the hell are you bitching about? Look at how hard other people have it! You have all the advantages, who are you to complain?!”

But even when that works (And it usually doesn’t, because there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude in the idea that I should feel better because other people are suffering more than me; and also, comparing your life to others’ lives isn’t a good idea no matter who has the better situation), it doesn’t make the problems go away any more than gratitude does. The stress and difficulty and anxiety and sadness are still there.

A lot of it is because of teaching. It’s a stressful job to begin with, which I’ve written about at length and don’t need to rehash here; but realize that the essential task of the job is too abstract to ever feel confident about, yet everyone involved expects tangible results; and that everyone’s life touches or is touched by education, which means EVERYONE has an opinion about it, and that it is genuinely very important; and that my personality is not at all suited to teaching, even though my skills and abilities are — and I think you can see why it’s often troubling for me. I care quite a lot about doing it well; it’s hard for me to do it well; it’s impossible to know if I’m doing it well; a lot of people are watching to make sure I’m doing it well; many people think I am not doing it well, and they let me know. That’s a lot to deal with.

Now add the pandemic.

So I have been suffering. That’s the truth. Not as much as some people, but enough for me to feel it, enough for me to lose sleep, and question everything I should feel confident about (and question everything else twice), and fall occasionally into pretty deep emotional holes. Enough for me to lose my temper too often, over things that should not bother me. Enough for me to lose hope, and to feel like there’s no chance for success or improvement in the future. I won’t say I’ve been depressed, or anxious, because I have had ample experience with other people going through those specific difficulties, and mine are not the same; but a semblance of it, a shadow of it — yes. And frankly, it has sucked.

And at the same time, I hate saying that, hate saying that I’ve been suffering, because it seems to make light of other people who have it worse. But ignoring what I feel would be making light of my feelings, and that’s not fair, either. To some extent I feel some of that “MEN DON’T CRY! BE STRONG!” kind of ethos, but not very hard; I’m not very manly, and never have been, and I don’t give a shit. But I do care about other people, usually more than myself. Because it’s easier to deal with their problems than mine, of course; but that’s another thing that has become clear to me in the last eighteen months, and which helped precipitate this blog: it’s not feeling that way any more. I don’t want to help other people more than myself. I want to help myself.

Without making light of what I’m dealing with, I know that I don’t need a lot. I don’t need medication; my emotional turmoil has never yet been overwhelming. It has never kept me from going forward, from doing what I need to do — though it has sometimes kept me from what I want to do, which is why I haven’t been writing enough in the last year-plus. I am not as sure that I don’t need therapy. I don’t think I do. I admit there is some comparing there, because I know people in therapy, and they have it worse than me, which does make me say to myself, “Come on, you’re not that bad off.” There’s also the fact that I was in therapy for six years when I was a child, and though the experience has faded with the years, I remember that it didn’t seem to help anything other than the psychiatrist’s income. So I don’t think I’m at that point. I want to talk to someone, but I’m too private for that, most of the time.

So here I am. Writing these vague, rambling puddles of thought-drool.

I think it’s helping. It’s hard for me to say; I’m not very good at reading my own emotions. Not sure if that’s another aspect of the “MEN DON’T CRY!” piece of my psyche, or if it is the result of trauma that is more serious than I think it is, or if I’m just emotionally pretty stupid. All possibilities, and I have no idea how I would distinguish between them — which is also how I feel about distinguishing sadness from worry from anger from depression from — I dunno. But like I said, things tend to become more clear for me when I can write about them, so I’m going to keep trying.

Because I need something. Not much. But something.

Starting Something

Dusty 2 Comments

I need something. I’m not sure what.

I need a lot of things, of course, which confuses the issue. I need more money, I need more time, I need more certainty. Definitely the last one, since I’m here hemming and hawing from the first line of this. Maybe that’s the thing I need most.

Okay: as a teacher and a writer, my usual habit (and, arguably, my job) is to take a position with certainty and then invite people to either agree with me or to knock me off it. So let me change gears here, and see if that makes this better.

I need to talk. Which, because I’m an introvert, means I need to write. I think that means I need an audience to read what I write, but thinking of you all doing that immediately makes me feel bad: I don’t want to waste your time reading my maudlin meanderings, especially not when I’m not actually suffering that badly, certainly not compared to other people. I haven’t lost my job, or my home, or any loved ones or friends. Well, no, I lost friends, but only because we stopped talking, not because they’ve died; surely that’s not as bad a loss. And it might have been my fault that I lost them, which means I don’t get to feel sad about it, right?

The point remains that I don’t have any great, soul-rending grief to get off my chest. Which I am grateful for. I also don’t have any particular insight into — well, anything, really; and I’m realizing, right now as I write this, that that’s the problem. I haven’t been writing blogs — or much of anything else — because I don’t have any answers. I have become acutely aware in the last year or so that I don’t have any answers, that I don’t know what’s best or what’s right, that I don’t know how to make things better. I’ve thought about writing posts on things that occur to me, but every time, I run up against this: I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know which direction to point in. I’m like a signpost that’s been knocked down, and now I don’t know which road is which, or where to tell people to go.

But maybe that’s a better place to be, rather than thinking I know the answers. Being humbled is no fun: but there are lots of people who have recommended humility; maybe that’s what I’ve needed.

I don’t know. But I do know that I need to talk, to write. And while I have a journal, it doesn’t feel like enough; writing in it instantly feels like I’m keeping secrets, like I’m hiding things away. Partly because there are secret things that I need to hide away, mistakes and failings that I am not ready or not able to confess; I do write about those in my journal. But that doesn’t help, not at all. And I need help.

This probably sounds more desperate and despondent than I actually am (Though I realize I’ve said that a few times of late, so maybe I’m fooling myself and I actually am pretty despondent); I’ve seen real despair and desperate need, and I’m not at that point. But also, if we don’t look for the help we need before we get to that point, then eventually we all get there. I would rather not, so I’m going to try for the help I need now.

So I’m writing. And I feel bad about it, which is why I’m so apologetic and guilt-ridden. But I am actually confident that I need to do this, while I am deeply uncertain that this is a good thing for anyone else but me. Thus I am going to say this: you don’t need to read this. There are probably not great insights coming at the end. This is not my area of expertise, this whole self-care/therapeutic/wellness world, so I’m not going to be able to give advice, nor offer a catalog of options. I’m doing this for me, because I think I need to. Things make more sense to me when I write about them. Writing feels more honest and more important, more legitimate, maybe, when I write for an audience, even if it is only a theoretical one. So I’m going to write about what I’m feeling and what I’m dealing with. I expect that I will be fumbling around a lot, and sounding mostly like an idiot; I expect that these posts will be rambling and kinda pointless. So I want to warn you away from reading them.

But also, I am hoping that being open and honest about what I’m feeling and what I’m dealing with may be helpful. It’s not a special story; I’m just a regular person going through what I presume are pretty normal feelings. But because of that, it may be a more universal story. It may be easier to relate to. And that may help.

So that’s the reason I’m willing to share this on this blog. I need to, and I can envision an audience that would be glad to hear what I have to say. If that’s not you, that’s okay; I’m pretty used to not having much of an audience for my writing. It’s one of the things that confuses and frustrates me, and just makes it that much harder to move forward. Hopefully, this will help me get past some of that block.

Hopefully, this will make me feel better.

I need something that will.

Okay, Now What?

Dusty Leave a comment

So we won.

The knowledge hasn’t trickled down yet to the sewer underneath the swamp, where Trump lurks, where he festers and spreads like an antibiotic-resistant infection (I wonder if, in classic supervillain style, he unintentionally revealed his secret weakness: what if the only way to defeat him permanently is to inject him with bleach? [NOTE TO THOSE WHO ARE UNFAMILIAR WITH MY WRITING AND PHILOSOPHY: That was ironic; I am a pacifist. Please don’t actually try, or plan, to inject the President with bleach. Not even when he is the ex-President. (NOTE TO THE SECRET SERVICE: I know, I shouldn’t suggest harming the President of the United States. I still think it’s a funny joke, so I’m leaving it. I wouldn’t worry too much about the people who read this trying to actually pull it off. And if they somehow managed it, hey, now you can relax and stop feeling all that conflicted guilt and irritation from trying to preserve the life of a pustulent boil on the ass of America. [NOTE TO THE SUPER-SECRET CABAL WITHIN THE SECRET SERVICE THAT HAS BEEN SECRETLY PLOTTING TO REMOVE TRUMP SO YOU ALL CAN PROTECT SOMEONE YOU ACTUALLY RESPECT AGAIN: Try bleach. (Note to my students and fellow grammar/syntax nerds: this is my favorite part of nesting parentheticals like this:)])]), but it’s true. We won. We got past this hurdle.

So now what?

I’ve been seeing and hearing all kinds of advice about not giving up. Continuing the fight. Now is the time, activists say, to turn that anti-Trump fervor into fervor for new causes, to keep the same energy moving forward into the next fight for change and progress. I heard it on Pod Save the People this week (If you don’t know it, this is a weekly news commentary podcast with a focus on people of color and social justice, very well done and interesting and human — sometimes a leeetle too woke for me, but I still recommend it), I saw it on this Twitter thread shared by a friend on Facebook; I feel like I’ve seen this everywhere. Now, whenever I see something like this, the bottom falls out of my stomach; so I may be noticing this sort of thing more, rather than seeing it a whole lot, but it feels like I’ve seen it a whole lot, and I don’t like it.

Because I don’t think I can do that. I am spent. I am drained. If somebody wants me to turn my anti-Trump energy towards a new focus, the bad news is that I don’t have any of it left. The good news is that I am quite willing to move to the next focus, the next fight. I don’t believe this is the end of the issue; the victory we’ve won is incredibly important, like saving the country important — but it’s not the last victory we need to win. I get that. I am with that. I am onboard.

I just don’t have it in me to fight. Not right now. I feel bad about it, but that is the truth. I’m close to my edge. I have of late had bouts of depression and despondency that I have never experienced in my life before now. I struggle with things that should be easy, my patience is gone, I can’t sleep, I’m not writing or reading much right now. Pretty much everything is wrong.

Not everything: my wife is still my perfect partner, and I love her deliriously. My pets are delightful. My friends are fun and supportive. All these things bring me at least some joy, every day and every week and every month. And though it doesn’t necessarily bring me joy, I do have a job and a reliable income, which gives me a sense of security that millions of people — billions of people — are lacking. I am grateful for all of those things. But still, pretty much everything else is wrong, and so:

I need to stop fighting.

I recognize that it is a privilege that I can talk about not fighting; because my life and my freedom is not at risk. It is somewhat at risk because we are living through a pandemic and the situation is deteriorating; I am at a bit higher risk than some because I work for a school that insists on staying open and having students and teachers in person in the classroom every day. But also, I am healthy and I have insurance — and I am not wedded either to glorified ignorance nor superstition, so I listen to the warnings and take reasonable precautions — so the risk is as minimal as I can make it. It’s easier for me to step back from fighting for police reform or environmental action or to protect reproductive rights than it is for people who are at risk from those dangers.

That makes me feel bad, that I can allow myself to step back from the fight while others can’t: but that guilt doesn’t give me the energy or the wherewithal or the resources to fight. It just makes me feel bad, which adds to my current emotional burden.

(And if anyone reading this is thinking, “Pssh, get out of your feelings, Snowflake” — I mean, considering my writing and position and my probable audience, it seems very unlikely that anyone is; but I think there may be some people who still subscribe to the image of men hitching up their gunbelts and soldiering on, because I still think that, a lot of the time — let’s recognize that all the strong silent men of the past drank and smoked themselves to death by age 65. So let’s be clear about what actually works and what we think sounds like it should work, maybe, but really doesn’t. “Sucking it up” is fine when you’ve stubbed your toe. Sucking up your looming despair just makes everything worse.)

I don’t mean to whine (And again, my probable audience probably doesn’t see this as whining, but I watched Westerns when I was a kid, so I feel the need to address this) because I also realize that there are people who are having a much harder time with the same issues I’m having right now, the stress and anxiety and depression, which for others is compounded by other and greater dangers and problems, problems that I don’t have. I want to do two things: I want to be honest about how I feel, as that is the healthiest thing for me to do for myself; and I want to let other people who may feel the same way know that they are not alone.

If you are exhausted, you are not alone.

If you want to join the fight, to keep fighting, to do the right as you see the right, you are not alone.

But if you just can’t do it right now, you are not alone.

So that’s where I am. I want to do a lot of things. I want to write to politicians and urge them to do the right thing. I want to join organizations and show up and participate — and I suspect that my writing skills could actually prove an asset to those fighting for the causes I believe in. I don’t want to join phone banks or knock on doors or fundraise, but I want to want to do those things, and if things were different I’d do them whether I really wanted to or not. I want to donate lots and lots of money to lots and lots of causes.

But instead, I’m going to stop fighting. I’m going to take care of myself.

It sounds stupid to me (Again, trying to be honest, and I grew up watching Westerns, and also wonderfully chauvinistic and hypermasculine shows like Buck Rodgers or The A-Team — and, yes, The Dukes of Hazzard, too) because I don’t fit into a category of people who have problems and need care. I’m a healthy straight white American male with an upper-middle class upbringing: I should be fine. I’m afraid to take care of myself, too, because there are others who rely on me, and it feels to me like I can’t take time for myself without leaving them hanging, and I don’t want to do that: it feels like I’m compounding my — what, my negligence? My dereliction of duty? What is it when a teacher doesn’t take care of his students, when a husband doesn’t take care of his wife, when a pet-papa doesn’t take care of his sweet little 60-pound Boxer-mix princess? When a liberal/progressive doesn’t take part in the fight for social justice and a functioning democracy? It’s my sin, right? My wrongdoing? After all, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. If you’re not part of the problem then you’re part of the solution. All those memes about the German people allowing the rise of the Nazi Reich, the passage in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” when he talks about how the listless superficial support of white liberals is a greater danger than the vigorous opposition of white racists; how can I stop fighting in the face of all that? How can I do nothing right now? However tired I am, surely there is something else I can do? However upset I am, however anxious and depressed, surely there is something I can do? And people are full of advice: if you can’t march in protest, then join a phone bank, write letters, donate donate donate. Take action. Don’t lose the momentum. Don’t stop.

Enough. I must stop listening to these idiotic voices in my head telling me to ignore how I feel and press on forever. They are not telling me the truth. They are not the voices that matter to me, not the people who I care about and who care about me; all of those people tell me to take care of myself, to take it easy, to not put myself under too much stress. Another moment of honest truth: my wife tells me this all the time, and my friend and fellow teacher Lisa; but they are the only ones because I never talk about how I feel to anyone else. Anyone asks me how my day is, and I say it’s — fine. Doing good, I say. Sometimes, with my students, with my parents, I will share that I am not in truth doing that great, but I also immediately get angry and defensive about it, or I breeze right through and change the subject, and don’t allow anyone else to sympathize with me or tell me that it’s okay to not be okay. It is also true that my parents make me feel bad for feeling bad, and my students respond to my sorrow with their own sorrows rather than sympathy for mine; when they do that I feel the need to sympathize with their sorrows, which is hard and draining, and just makes me feel more hopeless and helpless, and also bad for feeling that way; so there’s not a whole lot of impetus to be honest about my current state, most of the time. So I’m usually not. But I want to be, and that’s why I’m doing this, and ignoring the discomfort I feel in writing an entire blog this long about how I don’t feel very good right now.

I don’t feel very good right now, and that’s why I’m writing this, and why I’m not writing much of anything else. That’s the truth.

Here are some other truths:

I spend too much time on social media, particularly arguing on social media. I shouldn’t do it, because the people I’m arguing with are never going to change their minds because of anything I say. I do think there is value in pushing back against ignorant or dangerous or harmful ideas; and I recognize there is some audience reading those arguments on social media who may be more thoughtful and may get something out of my arguments more than my actual opponent will; but it is draining. I spend time on social media because it feels easy and it feels like relaxation — I see memes and laugh, I see videos of cute animals and smile, I see that my friends share my likes and dislikes, my passions and skepticisms, and I feel connected — but I spend a fair amount of that time trawling for arguments, and then continuously going back and arguing again and again and again. I suspect I do this because I am not doing other and more important things, but it’s not a replacement for good and useful action: it’s a waste of time and my limited resources, and a source of unnecessary and unproductive frustration. So I need to stop. That’s the truth.

Being a high school teacher is both very stressful and draining, and also very important; it feels like a copout to say I don’t spend more time fighting for the causes I want to fight for because I spend all my time fighting to make my students less ignorant, but it’s also true: it is a fight, and I fight it hard, every day. They don’t like to read, they don’t like to write, they don’t want to do work, they don’t know how to relate to and understand other people; every day I try to help them do all of those things better, and also understand why they should do all those things, and I try to find reasons that are specific and personal to them. All of that takes energy and passion, and hope and determination, and confidence and faith that what I am doing is the right thing. Meanwhile my school and my society seem bound and determined to tell me that it is not the right thing, determined to get in the way of my and my students’ success: and so I have to fight them, too, have to keep them from shifting my priorities and effort away from what matters, have to avoid the pitfalls and traps they set for me, have to discern when they are genuinely trying to help and when they are just trying to look good at the expense of the real work. All of that takes effort, too. I spend that effort every day.

I think it is vitally important that we recognize that none of us have it easy: that all of us are fighting in our own lives for our own success, every day; taking on other causes is already dipping into our reserves, taking from our reservoir of strength and hope and resolve what may not be there to take for much longer.

We all fight in our own ways, and with our own capacities. I will not be joining phone banks or door-knocking because I am an introvert, and what’s worse, I’m an introvert in an extrovert’s job, so I have to use up all of my socializing energy just to get through my day. If I was still a janitor (And I frequently ask myself why I am not still a janitor — but the reason is because what I do now is important) then maybe I could participate more; but I’m not. If I was an extrovert then I would be happy to go out and talk to people about causes I believe in; but I’m not. If I was rich I would give all kinds of money away; but good grief, I am most assuredly not. And many if not most of the people out there who tell me, who tell us, to fight and keep fighting are not in situations like mine. They may, as I said, be closer to the issues, in more danger because of the problems than I am in; but that doesn’t mean they have jobs as hard as mine is, or proclivities as unsuited to organizing and rallying as mine are. Wishing it was different, or even just pondering what it would be like if it were different, is a waste of time and energy: this is the situation. This is the truth. I’m not lying to myself, and it’s not a dodge or a copout: I am an introvert, and I work very hard at being a teacher, and I am tired. And I need to take care of myself, no matter how stupid or guilty it might make me feel to say that, because if I use up everything I have, if I fail, if I fall: then — and only then — will I be letting down those I love, and those who love me.

And my sweet little 60-pound Boxer mix princess needs her daddy.

So what’s next?

You need to think about what’s next. Think seriously, think truthfully. Think what needs to be done, yes — but also think about what you need, and what you are capable of. If you are ready to start the next round, then get in there and start fighting, keep fighting. If you have to pause to take a deep breath, then do it: breathe as deeply as you can. Keep breathing. If you have to take a few hours for a meal and a glass of wine and a bath and a nap, then do all of that. And do it again next week. If you need a few days for a vacation, or for a retreat and a rest, then do that. If you don’t know what you need or how long you need — and in my case, I do not; part of my struggle with this is that this struggle is new to me, has never been like this, has never been this hard before, and so I do not know what to do, I do not have a ready answer for what is really wrong with me or how to deal with it — then don’t try to decide in advance what you need or how long it will take to take care of yourself. Just take care of yourself until you feel better. Just do that.

Take care of yourself. For me. And I will take care of myself. For you.

Be well.

I don’t know what this means.

Dusty 2 Comments

When I was six, I was walking through the woods on my grandparents’ property in Washington, and I stepped on a yellowjacket nest. I remember the sensation as my foot came down: pushing through the humus of dried leaves, a moment of resistance, and then I crunched through what I thought was solid ground, and fell lower than I thought I should have, on that foot. That’s when I heard the buzzing: z z z ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz It hit a fast crescendo and then lowered to a purposeful, ominous hum, as if I had prodded a sleeper who did not want to wake and who growled resistance at me.

Then the stings started. One, two, three, each more painful than the last, the infuriated insects stitched their revenge up my leg as I stood, frozen, suddenly unsure of the ground beneath me — was it more hollow still? Would I fall through again? — obeying my training that told me to stand still when bees landed on me because they didn’t want to sting me, after all.

But these weren’t bees: they were yellowjackets. And they wanted to sting me. Understandable, really, since I had just destroyed their house and maybe crushed some of their family members; but that didn’t make me feel good about the fiery needles jabbing into me.

Fortunately my mother was there, and having grown up on that place named for her family, she was familiar with the sound of angry bees and yellowjackets: and she realized this was not a good time to just stand still. She scooped me up and ran. Of course I realize now that she was running to get us both away from the yelllowjackets, but at the time, I was suddenly sure that she was running me back to the house because I was going to die: my father is allergic to bee stings, and even at that age, I knew the potential danger of those tiny packets of venom which I could feel throbbing in my shin — and maybe moving up through my bloodstream? Was this the end?

It was not. It was about to be my first encounter with witch hazel (a name that still feels mysterious and alchemical to me), the rapid soothing of the burning stings, a cookie or two to soothe my burning tears, and the disappointing reckoning of a mere six stings, none higher than my knee. Not enough damage for a good I-stepped-on-a-beehive story, though it’s a damn good indication of my mother’s reflexes and quick thinking.

 

That moment of stepping down onto, and then falling through the ground and into a sudden attack: that’s what 2020 feels like to me. The hollowness of the hive beneath me, incapable of holding me up, echoed in the middle of me as I realized what was going to happen, a hollowness that seemed to swell and expand even as it grew more empty and dark and cold, as if my fear were a black hole inside, swallowing more and more and growing larger with each terrified thought that fell into it: that’s what I feel like inside, right now, and for the last six months. It’s a much slower process, this time, lasting months instead of seconds; but I feel very much as though my reaction is identical: I am frozen, panicked, trying to figure out what to do and coming up with no good ideas, just standing and watching as the danger swirls up around me.

At the same time: I am not just the kid walking through the woods, this time. I’m the yelllowjackets. The hollowness inside me is the hive, and the shell around that emptiness is too weak, and can’t hold up the weight of the world that is stepping on me. And as everything going on around me crushes through me and into me, I lash out, angrily — maybe understandable, but really, useless  — and I sting, and I bite, and I attack. I have never been so short-tempered, so cranky, so bitter, so apt to strike, so apt to sting with my words and my tongue, as this year. I hate it. I can’t stop it. I can’t: I don’t have the strength. That’s what was hollowed out of me. And I can’t just set myself and bear up under the weight: because the hollowness is under my feet, too, and I am being stung even as I am stinging.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just standing here. I have been for what feels like forever.

And I’m so tired.

And this time, my mother can’t scoop me up and run me back to the house for the twin magics of herbal remedies and baked goods.

This time, I might just get stung to death.

 

Probably not. I’m aware that as high as the number of Covid-19 cases is, it’s still only a fraction of the population, and that while my state is not handling the pandemic well, I am taking reasonable precautions that should keep me safe; I will most likely come out of this with an unremarkable tally of suffering. I do not mind, this time. I would very much prefer a half-dozen stings, no permanent scars, no need for a doctor. Just some soothing liquid and a cookie or two.

But I’m not just standing still with my foot in the danger zone; I’m still walking forward through the woods. In fact, since school starts tomorrow and goes to in-person classes in four weeks, I may be stepping onto the hive, and then continuing on into it, like walking down into a hive the size of a subway tunnel, with yellowjackets the size of Shelob. (At the same time: those goddamn hobbits are coming into my home, fumbling and ripping through my webs, and they are goddamn well going to pay for it. Nasssty little hobbitses.)

What precautions do I take then, as I move deeper and deeper into this hive pit? My school is trying to stay on top of things, having offered fully online learning as an option, instituting new protocols — social distancing, mandatory* masks, sanitizing spray to be applied every two hours**, fever checks on arrival — intended to prevent the spread of the disease. I don’t know how well it’s all going to work, though; and I have no idea what to do about that. I can’t quit. If I raise too great a stink, they’ll fire me. I guess I just have to stand there. Maybe the small things hovering around me don’t want to sting me, this time.

*Mandatory here means just what it does everywhere: masks are required until someone raises a loud enough political objection, and/or presents a doctor’s note. Then, not. Hope the virus takes doctor’s notes, too. 

**Said sanitation to be applied by me, every two hours, in between classes. On a side note, the spray requires four minutes to take full effect. Time between classes is four minutes. Hope the virus will wait out in the hall.

The danger, though, is not what is haunting me. Perhaps it should be, but the thing that is building a growing ball of hollow darkness inside me, the thing that makes me feel as if my next step will land on an equally hollow surface that will drop me through and out of the world, while at the same time the weight on top of me punches through my thin outer layer and into the hollow within, is this:

I am tired.

The hollowness inside me is not just fear. It is exhaustion. I am so very, very tired. Tired from fighting, tired from standing watch, tired from holding up others as well as myself. I’m tired of watching the pandemic grow, and watching my country wallowing in ignorance and selfishness like a pig in shit — just as filthy and twice as proud of ourselves — as we deny science, and raise alarms for problems that aren’t real, pointing to imaginary dangers that somehow block out of our sight the very real danger of this virus. I am so tired of being angry about it. I am so tired of fighting with people who smugly ignore every fact and every reasonable thought because it doesn’t make them feel safe, or worse, it doesn’t make them feel strong and fearless. Saying they’re not afraid of Covid, that makes them feel strong and fearless.

It’s as if when my mother rushed to scoop me up out of the yellowjacket hive, I had pushed her down, spit on her (Because the people who think this way are some of the rudest, most inconsiderate, most contemptuous hooligans I’ve ever interacted with. And I teach high school.), and then stood with fists on hips, chin jutted, nostrils flaring, and said, “Don’t you tell me where I can stand, I’m an American. You run if you want to, you and all the other sheep!”

While the yellowjackets swarmed around me.

And of course it’s not only the virus. I am so very tired of racism. I am tired of being ashamed of what people who look like me have done to people who feel like me for centuries. I am tired of confronting the same angry, willful ignorance about the protests or about opposition to police violence. At the same time, I am tired of being treated like the people I look like by the people I feel like — and I am tired of knowing that I have no right to complain about any treatment I may suffer, because my world has been built to prop me up, and whatever I may have to go through pales in comparison to the ordeals of those who are less pale than I. I hate that people tell me I have no right to speak my opinion, to take a stand; that all I can do is get out of the way and let better people take what they have been denied for centuries, because people who look like me oppressed them, which has enabled me to become everything that I am — all of it tainted by centuries of crimes against humanity. Not my own gifts and efforts, but my privilege, I am told, is why I am who I am and can do what I can do: and that means I don’t deserve what I have, and using that privilege to try to help solve the problem earns me a sort of sly sneer from those who know that my actions on behalf of the cause are just white guilt, and really, I am still the enemy,still perpetuating the problem if I do anything other than get out of the way.

That’s how it feels. It’s maybe not true that people working for social justice think that way of me, but — that’s how it feels. Of course, maybe that’s just my white guilt talking. And my white privilege thinking that I should be the one to speak up and fight for the cause: because that means I am centering whiteness in a movement that is not intended for the benefit or the recognition of white people or white suffering. It’s so easy to fall into the same patterns that have existed unrecognized throughout my life; how can I tell what is genuine and what is instilled in me by institutions of oppression and privilege? Is everything about me broken and wrong because of the world I grew up in? Is there nothing that is me? No, I want to say; I am good, I am worthwhile, I want to help and I am capable of helping. It is not right that I get pushed aside and marginalized, stereotyped, included in sweeping generalizations, based only on my skin color, my nationality, my gender —

And how pathetic do I sound saying those words.

I’m so bloody tired of irony.

I want to help, is the problem. I don’t want to be like those ignorant yahoos I fight with. I don’t want to be selfish.

But so many people need so much help.

I can do a lot of it. I am happy to do a lot of it: happy to support my family, my friends, those who rely on me. They are struggling, too, because this year has not only been hard for the pandemic and the riots: it’s hard financially, and crippling politically, and my family has had a series of tribulations fall on us like Biblical plagues, one after another and each worse than the last, mostly medical and due to my parents’ generation reaching the stage of life where things go badly. And of course, I can’t do anything. I can’t go help them because I might infect them, and that would kill them — and that would kill me. I worry about them double, because I realize that, on top of everything else, the pizza delivery man might give them Covid-19, and then I wouldn’t be able to visit them in the hospital while they coughed their life away.

And I can’t talk about this, can’t complain about this: because everyone else has it harder than me. Everyone. It’s not just white privilege, not just male privilege; I am healthy, and have remained fully employed, at a job where I am respected and well-liked, and I am generally well-balanced emotionally. I’m not well-balanced this year, of course, but since I started off having an easier time than most, and we’ve all gone down together, I still have more of my head above water than others do who were half-drowning before 2020. So I have no right at all to complain, and if I open my mouth to do it, the response I get back (the response I should get back) is something along the lines of, “Yes, I know, I’m going through that too — and a dozen things that are worse.”

Part of me can’t stand myself, right now, for complaining that I have it too easy in life to complain. And normally, the fact that I do have it easier than most would keep me from complaining because it would keep me from suffering. And even when I do suffer, I don’t have such troubles that I need to vent, need to talk them out. Normally I don’t need much support.

But this year is not normal.

I need to vent. It helps, you see, even if you don’t see how it could possibly help, even if you don’t know why it helps, talking about your feelings helps. I need that help. I need to say how I feel, even if how I feel is gauche or insufficiently woke. (“See that? That’s white sensitivity right there. He needs to grow a thicker skin, learn to deal with being told what he’s doing wrong. It’s just that he’s never been criticized much before, not in this society built for people like him.” Yes. I know it. But this is still how I feel.) Because people need my support, and so long as I am this tired, and feel these hollows under my ribs and under my feet, I can’t give them what they need.

This is what I need: I need to talk. I need to write. I haven’t wanted to do it, not for months now, for all the reasons I’ve been talking about here. There is too much, and I need to figure out what the hell I’m really feeling; I hate to ramble and blunder and sound like I don’t know what the hell I’m getting at. But one of the difficult Catch-22s of being a writer is that writing is exactly how I figure out what I’m feeling; I usually don’t know what I’m getting at when I start writing, I just get there when I get there, and I have a pretty good idea of when to stop. I have no doubt that this blog is irritating and confusing for people who read it. I expect you, too, are short-tempered, unable and unwilling to put out a whole lot of effort helping someone else deal with their shit when you’re sitting there with both hands full of your own.

I’m sure you’re tired too.

It feels strange to write this, because it makes me feel better, and so maybe I want to share that; but I don’t want to be a bother, don’t want to be a burden.

Which is also how everyone else feels, too.

So I’m just going to say it. If what I’m saying is wrong, please feel free to correct me; but first, I need to say it. Actually, I take that back: if you have something you want to say about something I’m doing wrong, put a pin in it. We’ll circle back around to it later. For now, I just need to talk about how I feel. And I won’t ask people to listen to me, because I know you’re all struggling, too — but it would mean a lot if you did.

We all need help. We all need support. We need to ask for it for ourselves. Just asking makes us feel better: because it validates how we feel. Being willing to ask for help, from those whom you are willing to give help to, shows that you consider yourself as important as they are, as worth helping as they are. It shows them that they are not a burden on you, that they can help even as they ask for help for themselves. And everyone feels better when they can help.

I need help. I’m standing on unsteady ground, in a country that is tearing itself apart, and I’m about to go back to work where I will be surrounded (Virtually, for the most part, but still) by students — who all desperately need all the help they can get.

That’s what made me actually open this post and start writing. That’s really what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of the virus, afraid of what’s going to happen in thousands of schools across the country to hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students; but what scares me right now is the knowledge that those students will come to me, and they will need me. They will need me to listen to them, to understand them, to take them seriously, to help them. They are bottomless abysses of need, just like I was at their age, as we all are in that terrible time of adolescence. They will need me even more now, because their world is on fire, too.

I don’t know how much I will have to give them.

I’m so very tired.

I’m just standing here: hoping I don’t get stung.

Can someone please pick me up and run me away from the swarm?

Or if not that — can I have some witch hazel and maybe a cookie or two?

Thanks.

Why?

Dusty Leave a comment

The one question I ask more than any other is: Why?

I’ve done this to my students so much they get sick of me. “Why do you think that? Why do you think the author thinks that? Why does that evidence show what you think it does? Why do you think this is important?” I can keep going for an entire class period, really. And one of my favorite responses is when they try to turn it around on me, and start asking me “Why” over and over again: partly because I can usually answer the question for as long as they want to keep asking it (Well, almost: when they’re doing it to be perverse and mess with me, they ask “Why” without listening to the answers, and they’ll just keep asking it, and snickering, for as long as I let them, so I’ll cut it off after four or five repetitions. But if they’re actually listening, I’ll keep talking. Actually, that’s true all the time, and not just in my classroom.), which pleases the obnoxious competitive side of me, and partly because when they ask me “Why,” and I tell them my reasons — I often have the answer already in hand, especially if they’re questioning something like “Why are we reading this”; and when I don’t have the answer in hand, I can usually think quick enough, and speak confusingly enough (I just came across the word “obscurantist” to describe someone who intentionally obfuscates the meaning of things, and I aspire to it), to answer the question several times in a row — it helps me to figure out my reasons. I think best when I am putting thoughts into words; if I just try to think, without speaking or writing what I am thinking, I am too easily distracted by too many thoughts: what I’m doing right then, or seeing or hearing or feeling;  what I have to do, what I should be doing instead of whatever I’m doing, and so on.

I ask this question so much, and appreciate the answers no matter where or who they come from, because I like thinking about why. I think reasons are mysterious, and mystifying. I think we have them for almost everything we do, but we hardly ever know what our own reasons are. Think about that: it’s not that our actions are meaningless or purposeless; it’s that we have some fundamental disconnect between the determination of those meanings and purposes, and the actions themselves. Why is there this disconnect? Maybe because the same is true of the world around us: there are reasons and purposes for everything. There are reasons why trees exist, why the sky is blue, why scratching your back is satisfying; and purposes for electric fans and floors and nose hair. Sometimes one, either a reason or a purpose, exists without the other; sometimes they are one and the same: the reason something exists is to achieve a purpose. But  — and this is the important point — we don’t usually know what those reasons and purposes are. I mean, I sort of know why trees exist, but what about the tree outside my window? Was that one planted when my neighborhood was built? Or was it here before, and they chose not to tear it down when they built these houses? If it happened naturally, why did that tree thrive when other seedlings perished? If it was planned by the developer, why was that species of tree chosen? If it was planted as a seedling, why was that particular seedling picked out of all the others?

These reasons exist; but we don’t, and usually can’t (and maybe shouldn’t) know them. It’s maybe different with purposes, because we can deduce them pretty specifically based on evidence and logic: the tree across the way, if it was planted by a person with a purpose, is placed  to cast shade on a house, and it is an evergreen so it doesn’t drop leaves that need to be raked; I don’t know much about trees, but if we say it’s a pine, or a spruce, then maybe that would tell us if it was picked because it was cheap, or because it would grow fast, or because it would thrive in the Tucson heat. And so on. We mostly know what people want, and what they need, so we can sort of reverse engineer a lot of their choices, figure out the purpose of things that said humans have built or manipulated.

I’ve maybe made a distinction (and maybe lost it already) that doesn’t work well, in talking about reasons and purposes as if they are different things. I’m thinking of a reason as an explanation of how something came to be, the cause and effect that describes its origins; a purpose is here the justifications for a thing that exists, the goals behind the choices that led to its creation. A purpose, of course, requires a will and consciousness to make choices and have goals, and then the ability to cause something to be created. The reason for something can be just that purpose, especially if we think about things that exist as including simple actions: I made coffee this morning because I wanted to drink it. Then we can get into the reasons why coffee exists and why it came to be the thing I wanted to drink. And then, maybe I have larger purposes for wanting to drink coffee, things like wanting energy and focus, wanting to get things done that may require caffeine; if it’s something simple like “I like coffee and how it makes me feel” then I would argue there’s not a purpose for that coffee, but there is a reason.

I would also like to point out that my reasons for drinking coffee, my purposes if I have those, are probably not very interesting. Honestly, it’s a trio of reasons, only one of them purposeful: one, I don’t sleep well and am usually tired in the mornings, but I have to get up early because I have to walk my dogs before it gets hot, so I need caffeine to counteract my tiredness (Also I’m addicted to it, so I need coffee to keep myself from going through withdrawal, and to satisfy my psychological craving); two, I like the taste of coffee and am pleased by my reputation as a coffee drinker; three, I want to use my morning time to accomplish things, and coffee helps me do that. None of those are terribly interesting — though also, even those mundane things, when we get into the honest reasons and purposes, can lead to interesting conversations: why do I like my reputation as a coffee drinker? What does that mean to me? Why don’t I sleep well, and why do I use caffeine to deal with that, instead of solving the issues that ruin my rest?

See what can come of asking Why?

With human beings, I would argue that there are reasons why we exist, both as a species and as individuals, but not necessarily purpose. (I will note that people who believe in a God who created us think that there is a purpose for our existence — though again, we may not know that purpose. I’m not going to argue either way on that one. Not now, at least.)  What’s fascinating and unique about us as a species, because we are the only animal that can reason, is that we can find or create our own purpose, and thus redefine ourselves and our very existence. That’s amazing: that we can change who and what we are, by changing our Why. By turning reasons into purposes. And then past that, taking up something that was created for one purpose, or even no purpose, and finding a new purpose for it, one that serves our own goals regardless of whether or not that thing still serves its original purpose. What’s even more amazing is that we can take bad and terrible and evil things, and turn them into good things, or at least the causes of good things, by finding a positive purpose even in our suffering. As a minor example, I read constantly and ravenously when I was a child, because I was shy and awkward and therefore lonely and bored; books saved me from all of that. But now that I am a writer and an English teacher, that childhood spent reading has been turned to a valuable purpose. Two, really, because I have different purposes in those two pursuits, my vocation and my avocation. Though sometimes they serve the same purpose: because of course our purposes change, especially with those actions which we do continuously, repeatedly, and also always affirmatively: every day I go to work, I choose to continue teaching, and I have to choose, over and over again, how I will teach. As with my writing.

I have found that knowing why I teach, why I write, makes those choices easier. And that’s why I want to ask that question, and why I want to discuss it with my students and with my readers: so that they — you — can make choices as well, and achieve your purposes while helping me achieve mine. I forget my reasons sometimes, and lose them sometimes, and that makes it harder to keep choosing to do the same things. I wanted to be a successful novelist by the time I was 25; didn’t even come close. I realized that was actually a pretty dumb purpose for writing, because of the essentially randomly chosen age deadline, so moving past that reason wasn’t too hard. But twenty years later, I’m still not a famous novelist; (Notice how I changed that term, from “successful” to “famous?” I didn’t, not when I wrote these sentences; but I decided to add something, and looked back to see where the best place was to add it, and I realized what I did. This is also, I think, how we get confused about our purposes –or maybe it represents that confusion, that I haven’t defined well what “success” means, that I didn’t do that when I was 25. And maybe that’s why it didn’t happen, or at least why it didn’t hurt me much when it didn’t happen.)  and I’ve also realized, in learning more about what life is like for people who are successful and famous novelists, that maybe I don’t want to be that.

That’s fine. But then, why do I write? Why should I write?

On some level I have a reason now: I am a word guy, as I said; I think best when I put thoughts into words and sentences. And there are plenty of explanations for why I am this way, some interesting, some not. But I think we are not defined by our reasons. We are defined by our purposes. (Unless we don’t have a purpose, in which case we are defined by our reasons.)

So what’s my purpose? Why do I do what I do?

This piece actually started as  some kind of explanation for a thing I’ve started doing: I’ve started reading philosophy. Well, I guess I didn’t start; I’ve been reading philosophy for a very long time. Starting, I guess, with Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which I read in high school; I took a couple of philosophy classes in college, and I’ve been reading Bertrand Russell for quite a while, mostly because Ray Bradbury mentioned him in Fahrenheit 451, which I’ve read so many times that I got curious about who this Russell guy was — and then when my wife and I lived in Oregon, we made regular trips to Portland to go to Powell’s City of Books, I used to go wander through the FIVE FLOORS THAT COVER A FULL CITY BLOCK in search of things to buy and read, and Russell’s books of essays were short, and cheap. And interesting.

But I haven’t ever read philosophy purposefully: it’s interesting, and sometimes useful, but mostly I have had reasons but no definite goal with it. A couple of years ago, I started reading philosophy for a purpose, but I didn’t like the purpose, so I didn’t keep it up; the purpose was reinvigorated once or twice more, but never sustained the pursuit, so I kept dropping it.

I guess I’m looking for a sustainable purpose now. I’ve found another tool to help me with reading philosophy, because unlike Bertrand Russell, who was an amazing wordsmith, most philosophers are actually crappy writers. Well, I don’t know if it’s “most,” but it definitely seems a trend. I got a general philosophy book from my local Tucson used book store (Bookman’s, and they’re great — but they’re no Powell’s. I miss Powell’s.) and the writing is awful. But I found a podcast that explains the basics of philosophy, and it is both extremely easy to follow and understand, and also interesting–and, I’ve found, thought-provoking. So that makes me want to keep reading philosophy, and even read more; every episode I listen to makes me want to read more philosophy, because the show (It’s Philosophize This, with Stephen West) covers a new philosopher every episode, and so I keep adding to the list of books I want to read.

It’s a big list now. And, I’m afraid, it will be a hard list to get through. Hard to get through even one of those books, probably.

So is it worth doing? It’s a lot of time and energy I’m looking to dedicate to this. At this point, my reason for doing this is mostly — curiosity. And that’s probably not enough of a reason.

I tried  to explain my reasons to my wife the other day, and she pointed out that the reason I was giving, which I mostly made up on the spot, really just trying to figure out why I was doing it by putting it into words — it was a bad reason. I came to my blog here intending to work out a better reason why I want to do this difficult thing, why I want to spend my time on it; instead I have now been talking about why I want to ask why, for better than 2000 words.

(I hated those commercials, by the way. Even when they were first on, before I had read any philosophy or ever really thought about Why in any serious way. Why ask why? You just fucking asked it in the question, goddammit. Stupid Bud Dry. What the hell kind of product is that, anyway. Stupid name. Stupid beer.)

But you know what? I think that is the answer. I think that’s the reason, and the purpose, for reading philosophy. Because I love to ask why. Because I want to know why. And maybe the best way to figure out why, all my whys is — philosophy.

I’ll let you know what I figure out.

Losing Spoons

Dusty 6 Comments

Sorry I haven’t been posting regularly. See, writing a blog, even a short one about happy things, costs me some number of productivity spoons; and I find that I have fewer productivity spoons left to me these days.

(By the way: if you’re not aware of spoon theory, here’s a visual. Read more here.)

This has been a shift for me, because I don’t normally run out of spoons. Well, I do, but I have a lot to spend, most days. I spend a lot of them at work, but I can still usually do a few things in the evening; I can go to the gym; I can go to the grocery store and make dinner; I can sometimes do a task for school, like set up a lesson for the next day. I can almost always get something written even on a school night, if it’s not one of the times in the school year when I’m burnt and exhausted and hate everything. And on the weekends, I can usually spend the entire time working, on grading, or chores, or my writing.

Life’s a lot easier when you don’t have a chronic disease or the weight of mental health concerns.

But my usual easy productivity has not been with me for the last month. Now I have to count my spoons.

It’s remarkable, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I really thought I would be able to do extra things: I thought I would be able to get extra writing done, since I don’t have to spend as much time at work; I thought I would be able to provide extra emotional support to my friends and family — and my students. The first week or two I was throwing around offers to help in any way I could; I suppose I’m lucky that nobody really took me up on it, because if I had had to spend my energy doing extra tasks for others, I’m not sure what I would have had to drop. I was angry with myself for the first couple of weeks: why was I so tired? And if I was so tired, why wasn’t I sleeping? Why wasn’t I getting more things done?

It didn’t really dawn on me at first that the answers were in some of the questions, and all I had to do was put the pieces together: I am tired because I’m not sleeping, and because everything I do — everything — is harder. I’m not sleeping for the same reason that everything is harder: because I am constantly afraid, constantly anxious, constantly trying to find something to do to solve the problem — and constantly aware that I cannot solve this problem. And of course, the more I worry, the less I sleep, and then I have less energy to do things, including worry, but worrying is never the thing I let go of in order to do other stuff: I worry first, and then whatever energy I have left over goes to my job and my daily tasks. I spend more energy getting mad at myself for not getting more done during the day, and because I’m tired and on edge, and I struggle with my temper, I am constantly getting mad at anything and everything around me. And then I feel bad because my family has to walk on eggshells around me so that I don’t snap at them. And there’s some more energy spent, and even less accomplished.

I get it now, I understand; I’m still not dealing with it well, though. I still get angry with myself for not doing more. It’s weird: somehow I still feel pressure to use this extra free time before it runs out, like I find myself thinking that I should do more writing or record more podcasts before the quarantine is over and I have to start going out and doing things more. Like this is a vacation.

But that’s not what this is. This is a natural disaster.

I’ve been through a few of those: a hurricane and more than one blizzard in Massachusetts; a wildfire in California; a flood in Oregon. None of them on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or Maria, or the Loma Prieta or Northridge earthquakes. But they were bad enough to show me what a natural disaster feels like: you watch things fall apart that you had always counted on; you watch danger arise from a direction and in a way that you never expected; you watch that danger come for you, or for those you love: and there’s nothing you can do. Except realize what you are about to lose. And realize you have no idea what to do if and when you lose it, how you will get it back, how you will live without it.

That’s what this is. Covid-19 has taken away things we never expected to lose, and we are in danger of losing even more, if we haven’t already lost everything. And I am aware of how lucky I am to be able to say that I have not lost everything. I see people on social media who have, and I can’t — no, I was going to say I can’t imagine what that would feel like; but I can imagine. That’s a lot of what I do during the day. I imagine what I could lose, and how it would feel, and what I would do about it. And every time I think about, what if I lose someone I love, or what if I lose my job and my home, I realize: there’s nothing I could do about it. I assume I’d adapt and survive, I assume I’d be able to ask for and receive some help; but I don’t know. I just don’t know. I know I couldn’t fix the problem, couldn’t recover the loss. I know I’d be devastated. I don’t know how I’d deal with it. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to. I worry about all of it.

That’s why I can’t get much writing done. Not even happy little blogs: because it turns out that I need to feel happy before I can post happy things; or at least, I need to be close enough to happy to recognize what would be a good happy thing to post. I can write things that  I’m not actually feeling in the moment, but when I try to think up a good topic, or when I try to pick a good link to share, if I’m feeling down or exhausted or angry or afraid, nothing seems like a good idea. Which I also get mad at myself for, by the way. So that’s fun.

This is what it feels like to have to count your spoons. To have a chronic illness, or a mental health condition like anxiety or depression. It feels like nothing works right. And I suspect that you always feel like it’s your fault, like if you could only deal with it better, be smarter, more thoughtful and aware and organized, then everything would be better. Though maybe people who deal with this all the time are smarter about it than I am, maybe they know that they can’t blame themselves for something that’s outside of their control. All I know is that that thought doesn’t help me. Knowing that I can’t do anything about it doesn’t keep me from worrying about it. About anything. Knowing that it’s not my fault doesn’t keep me from getting angry at myself.

I even have that little annoying thing that clearly isn’t the main issue, but keeps popping up and irritating me, because it’s kind of a pain and it’s clearly connected to the larger problems, so when the little irritation pops into my consciousness, it makes me think of the bigger issues, which sets me on edge; at the same time, I can’t believe I also have to deal with that little fucking thing that just won’t go away. I have eczema, you see. On my hands. They itch. And then the skin dries out, and splits, and hurts. And itches more. It’s made worse by repeated hand washing, and by stress, so. Fucking annoying. I feel bad bitching about it, because people are dealing with things that are a thousand times worse, but that only makes it more irritating, because goddammit, my hands itch, and maybe I should be Zen enough to rise above it, but I can’t, and I feel lame and I wish I could just make it stop but I can’t control anything but I can still worry about it.

And around and around we go. Using up our spoons. And getting nothing done.

This wasn’t even the blog I was going to write; I was going to write about my students. And part of me thinks I should add that right here, right now, make the point I was actually going to make; but you know what? I don’t want to spend the spoons. I need to call my dad, and I want to maybe record a chapter of the book I’m reading to my students for their distance learning English class. So I think I will stop here, and write about my students tomorrow. Or maybe the next day.

I’m grateful, honestly, that I’ve had this experience, because I think I get it now, what it is like to have to count your spoons. I’ve been able to sympathize with the people I know who have to do it, but I could never empathize. Now I think I can. But I also realize: if this disaster, and the weight of the worry that I’ve been carrying around for a month now, have reduced my formerly unlimited number of spoons to some number I have to count: what has it done to people who had to count their spoons in the first place?

And the scariest thing of all is: what if this doesn’t stop? I mean, that’s what it’s like to have a chronic illness: you have to recognize that the situation will, or at least may, be permanent. You’ll always have to count your spoons, forever. I  won’t have to face that, at least not with the current pandemic; it may take a year for things to get back to normal-ish, but there will be a vaccine, and things will improve; I don’t know how long the economic damage will last, but I know it won’t be forever. But for some people, the changes  wrought by this disaster will be permanent. And maybe they will be for me, too. Or if that doesn’t happen with this disaster, maybe it will happen with a future one. At some point, I will have to face and deal with a permanent loss, a reduction in my capacities and abilities, a change in my life, that will never get better. And then another one, and then another one.

I think, between now and then, and using what I have learned and what I am going through now, I have to learn to accept that loss, that reduction, that change, and keep going forward with what I have left to me. I’m sure I can do it; I know everybody does. We deal with loss for as long as we live. I hope I am learning how. I hope the learning helps.

tHIS mORNING

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This morning I am so tired I can’t even think straight.

I feel like I am swimming through pudding: I can move, but everything is slower and takes more effort. And I have absolutely no strength, as if all of my bones and muscles have been replaced by down pillows, and the only thing that lets me move is momentum and weight: I need to pause and set myself before I do anything, like I’m rolling myself to the top of a hill, pausing at the edge, and then — down I go. And then when I do it, since I’m still moving through pudding, I do it so slowly that my mind actually wanders in the middle of it — mostly just to say, “Man, I’m tired.” I’m drinking coffee, and I think the exhaustion beast that is prowling and growling and slouching around inside of me is laughing at the caffeine. Laughing at it. It’s like throwing water balloons at a five-alarm fire. Poor useless coffee.

It doesn’t feel terrible, actually. It feels like I’m just a little bit drunk, or just a little bit high. I think I probably should not drive at the moment. But I don’t plan to. Nor operate heavy machinery.

Nor lift up a heavy topic like the Second Amendment. Sorry about that. I did start to write about it last night, and hit a snag that I need to think about: my utter lack of respect for Antonin Scalia. See, Scalia wrote the 5-4 majority opinion in the D.C. v. Heller case, which is the one that establishes the individual right to own firearms under the Second Amendment, and the second I see that (though I do agree in some ways, as I’ll get into it when it doesn’t take me a couple of seconds to remember where the “c” key is) I just think, “Well, of course that’s bullshit, it’s Scalia.” But that’s not fair, because even partisan bastards like the former “Justice” are sometimes right in their thinking. So there are things I need to think about regarding the Second Amendment before I write about it, and this is not a good morning to start.

So instead, I’ll just see how much coffee I can mainline, see if I can wake up at least enough to do my job (Which first means I need to wake up enough to get to my job. And remember where my job is.), and then I’ll try to take another crack at the big issue tonight and write about it tomorrow morning. It may have to wait for a weekend, though. I hope the people reading this don’t mind a few posts about nonsense; I don’t have a lot else in me right now. Goosefeathers and pudding.

And this song. Which is a perfect song.

 

This Morning

Dusty 1 Comment

This morning I realized that giving up doesn’t hurt any less than fighting.

This morning I realized that I’ve been giving up.

This morning I realized that the world is a mouth, and we are all being chewed into a thin paste so we can be swallowed: some of us are soft and plump, full of juice and flavor, and we burst easily and quickly; and some of us are hard as nuts, would crack the tooth of the world if it bit down too hard and so it grinds at us and grinds at us and grinds at us and grrrrrrrrrrriiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnddsssssss at us until we, too, are reduced to little more than dry powder: and then down the hatch we go.

This morning I realized that the world-mouth metaphor is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t go anywhere useful; like I could get into meat, and have some of us be tender and chewy and some of us be tough as gristle — but if in the end we all get chewed and all get swallowed, what’s the point? Do I say that we have to enjoy our time in the mouth, getting chewed up, getting destroyed? It would be fun to try to talk about flavors mixing, and maybe those tough nuts can bathe in the juice of the soft plump fruits — but that’s either too gross, or too intimate. Bathing in someone else’s juices is either sex or murder, and neither is empowering. Or actually maybe both are empowering.

This morning I realized that not every thought, not every idea, needs to be pursued — but the ones that go somewhere need to be nurtured and loved, and even the ones that don’t work out should be sat with for a little while, because they may then get added to one of the better ones.

This morning I realized that I haven’t been writing, and I’ve missed it. I’ve missed me.

This morning I realized that fucking Candy Crush repeats fucking levels, and that my dream of living out the meme I saw and conquering every level and thus beating the game is a stupid one; that I should spend that time writing instead. That even if I can’t find it in me to continue working on my enormous book project, and I can’t craft a single clear idea into one crystalline pillar of perfection before I even start writing a blog, I SHOULD WRITE ANYWAY. And I should post my thoughts.

This morning I realized that I probably haven’t lost my audience, at least not completely, but I’ve let them down– I’ve let you down. And I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have given up. I shouldn’t have laid down.

This morning I realized that I can write short things that are worth writing, and therefore worth reading.

This morning, I came back to myself.

This morning, I stood up. I fought. I wrote.

This morning I decided to do it again tomorrow morning.

Love

Dusty 2 Comments

A student of mine wrote an essay defining “love.” Actually, a number of my students wrote essays defining “love,” because my assignment was to give a concrete definition of an abstract term, and “love” is a term I suggested as a possibility, and which a number of them felt like they had a reasonable grasp on and good cause to want to define. I don’t think most of them did a great job on it, though, for one simple reason: they’ve never been in love. I have – I am – and because of that, I believe that I have a better understanding of love than anyone who has never felt something like what I feel. I’ve always been one of those people who argues against the casual use of the word “love,” always been annoyed by my teenaged students yelling “I love you!” to their friends, often grumbled to myself – generally out loud, though not loudly – “No, you don’t,” when I hear one of them do that. I have always wanted “love” to be a word we reserved for the strongest connections, the most meaningful bonds. I still think that, and so after reading so many essays explaining that love could be used in any circumstance to describe anything at all pleasant, which was the prevailing view, I wanted to write my own to try to clarify what they all are getting wrong, and what I am getting right when I hold my wife in my arms and tell her, “I love you.”

I’ll tell you, though: this one student – one of my best, one of the brightest young people I’ve taught in 20 years – made me think harder about this. Because she said, “If words were seasonings, love would be garlic. Fits well in almost any dish, easily peppered in, improves whatever its included in.” And, well – I love that. I love this, too:

I don’t know if I’ve gone one day since I started speaking without saying the word “love.” If it is able to be overused, I overused it. I still do. I hang up the phone “I love you!” regardless of who I’m calling. I sign professional emails with it. I yell it at random strangers when I try to compliment them. When people who I hardly know share any opinion with me, I usually sum up my feelings towards them with: “Dude! I love you!” I use the word so much because it’s a great word. It means exactly what I’m trying to say. And what I’m usually trying to say is: “this thing or person or idea makes me feel happy and good.” That takes too long to say when someone my age on the street is wearing a Bikini Kill shirt and walking by me and I want them to know that i also like Bikini Kill but I can’t muster up a coherent statement. “I love you (or your shirt, or your outfit or that thing you’re holding)” works just fine. Perfectly non-specific. Perfectly over-intimate.

 

It felt very much like she was speaking directly to this prejudice of mine against the casual overuse of “love,” but in this opening paragraph, and in the rest of the essay, I was confronted with a simple fact: I overuse “love,” too. Because love is not just what I say to my wife; love is also what I say when I think about Cheez-Its, or coffee, or Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I say it when I see something that makes me feel happy and good. And that makes me a hypocrite.

Now, I don’t really mind being a hypocrite, if by “hypocrite” we mean someone who changes their standards from day to day. This is how my students frequently use the word; they apply it to, for instance, parents who partied in their youth and then tell their kids they shouldn’t party in theirs. (This is a new meaning of the word, I think, and a bad one; if what we mean by “hypocrite” is what I understand the word to really mean, that is someone who betrays their own standard while still holding other people to it, a liar who castigates people for lying, a thief who punishes thieves, then I do not want to be that thing.) Another sentiment I love, this one from Ralph Waldo Emerson, is:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

People can change. We can learn new things, we can have new ideas, and if those ideas contradict everything we said today, then so be it. This applies to the current subject of love in two ways: one, my understanding of love can change – and change frequently, and then change back again – and two, the meaning of the word “love” can change as society’s general understanding of the word changes. And that is also fine: I don’t feel the need to have one and only one understanding of the word “love.” The meaning of the word doesn’t have to be consistent; it can change according to the circumstances. Context changes the meaning of many words, as it changes the connotations and associations; that’s what makes language so beautiful and so complex. It’s kind of why I still have a job.

I can be inconsistent in my understanding of “love.” It can change according to the circumstances. And within that, there can still be a right and wrong meaning of the word, because someone could use the wrong meaning in the wrong context. So I can happily tell my wife I love her and only her, and then shout to a crowd that I love Ralph Waldo Emerson, and then throw dirty looks at students who say “Goodbye, I love you!” to their friends – but only if I can be clear in my understanding of these three contexts, and say that my students are misusing it in theirs.

Spoiler: they’re probably not. I am writing this to show myself why I am wrong, much more than I mean to show my students why they are wrong. But they’re wrong, too, and I’m right; I’ll get to that.

My instinct is that there are two feelings here. They are two different feelings, though related; we use the same word for them, though perhaps we shouldn’t. This is where language gets tangled (Which is better, tanguage? Or langled? Mmmmmm – neither.), and though that tanguage (See? That’s awful.), that langling (That’s not better! SO WHY DO I KEEP DOING IT! Because I love portmanteaus, that’s why. Love ’em.), means I still have a job, it’s not worth the pain it causes. This is my objection to English as a language: it has so many words, and so many shades of meaning for those words, and because the meanings of words can change according to context, we can’t all agree on what the words mean; because of that, I think, we avoid the words that are ambiguous, or the ones that are complex. We lose the nuances of our language, and force each other to create and learn new meanings of old words, instead. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s a problem with English exclusively, but I know that English could avoid most of these issues if we’d just take advantage of what English can offer, and that is: many, many words.

Look up “love” in a thesaurus. Mine has multiple columns of synonyms for love because love falls into at least four categories, desire, courtesy, affection, and favorite; and that’s not including God’s love, make love, love affair, and love of country, each of which has its own entry, as well. Even the Great Democratizer Google offers these:

love

/ləv

noun

an intense feeling of deep affection.

synonyms: deep affection, fondness, tenderness, warmth, intimacy, attachment, endearment;

devotion, adoration, doting, idolization, worship;

passion, ardor, desire, lust, yearning, infatuation, besottedness

compassion, care, caring, regard, solicitude, concern, friendliness, friendship, kindness, charity, goodwill, sympathy, kindliness, altruism, unselfishness, philanthropy, benevolence, fellow feeling, humanity

relationship, love affair, romance, liaison, affair of the heart, amour
   

*   a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone.

synonyms: become infatuated with, give/lose one’s heart to;

fall for, be bowled over by, be swept off one’s feet by, develop a crush on

infatuated with, besotted with, enamored of, smitten with, consumed with desire for;

captivated by, bewitched by, enthralled by, entranced by, moonstruck by;

devoted to, doting on;

informal mad/crazy/nuts/wild about

 

If we could just use these words, and agree on specific words in specific situations, and not change them all the damn time, then this would all be solved: I adore my dogs, I am besotted with my wife – my inamorata – I am devoted to my mother, I care for my students, I am wild about Cheez-Its. See how easy that is?

But nooooooo, no, that’s too many words to remember, and too many meanings to negotiate and agree on. We’d rather use one word for every one of those feelings, and then try to figure out what someone means when they say “I love you.”

That’s actually where my concern lies, with regards to how my students use the word, with how my bright essayist defined it:

The proper definition of love is supremely vague and exists on a spectrum. Love can be intense or delicate, long-lived or fleeting, romantic or platonic, emotional or physical. It is possible to love so many things in so many ways and for so many reasons, that it’s stupid and almost impossible to pinpoint the specifics. It thrives when left as a nebulous idea or concept. It doesn’t hurt anyone to love things. Why force someone to determine if something is worthy of the title of love? I think it can and should be thrown around as much as possible. It doesn’t need boundaries.

 

I agree with this; love can be all of these things. I don’t agree that the inconstant, ever-changing nature of love means that it’s “stupid and almost impossible to pinpoint the specifics.” I believe it is quite important: because there is one situation, and only one, where saying “love” and meaning it, and knowing that you mean it, and ensuring that the one who hears you say it knows that you mean it, is absolutely necessary. That is romance.

When I tell my wife that I love her, I mean something different than what I mean when I say it to anyone else, in any other situation whatsoever. This relationship is unlike every other connection I have in my life: this one, and only this one, is unique. I love my mother just like I love my father; I love my students (some of them) just like I love my coworkers (some of them); I love my dog Samwise just like I love my dog Roxie. I love Cheez-Its like I love Boston creme doughnuts.

But I love my wife like nobody else.

I want to explain, because this is the root of this essay, of this discussion for me; this is why I don’t like it when people use the word “love” for something other than what I feel for my wife. But at the same time, I don’t want to explain, because the life we have together is ours and nobody else’s, and I don’t want to share. Let me see if I can thread this needle at least a little bit.

I trust my wife. Completely, and absolutely. There is no one else to whom I would share as much as I share with her. I can’t say I share everything, as there are some parts of me that can’t ever be expressed, as there are with every human being; but everything that I can share, is hers. No question, no doubt. She is the only person whom I would trust to do anything as well if not better than I can. That’s not meant to sound arrogant, there are lots and lots and LOTS of things that I can’t do well; but the things I can do well, I want to do myself so that I can be sure they will be done the way I think they should be done, the way I can do them. Call me a control freak, if you will; it’s not true for everything, but it is true with, say, my teaching. I’d trust my wife to teach my class over anyone else, as much as my fellow English teachers (And more than some of them), even though she’s not an English teacher: I know that she could do it, and do it well. I’d trust her with my paperwork, with filling out, say, arrest forms or hospital forms. I’d trust her with my medical decisions, I’d trust her with my legacy, I’d trust her with my life. It’s not only the big things, either: I’d trust her to take care of our pets, to lock up the house when we leave on vacation, to drive – which she does better than I do, anyway. When I trust her to do something, I don’t worry about it, I don’t have to double check: I know that she did it right, at least as rightly as I could do it.

(Exceptions: I write better than she does. And she doesn’t really do the dishes right. Mmmmmm – that’s it. She could do anything else for me, if she wished.)

Along with that complete trust comes understanding. Because we have shared so much with each other, and experienced so much together, I know exactly how she thinks. I went to get a snack while she was reading this (It’s about her and us, so she gets veto power), and as I was coming back to my office, I thought, “She’s going to get hung up on that dishes comment.” As soon as she heard me coming down the hall, she called out, “What do you mean, I don’t do the dishes right?” This is not a first: we frequently find ourselves having the same thought, and though we don’t finish each other’s sentences, it’s only because we don’t interrupt each other. We don’t think the same way: she’s more liberal, more spiritual, and has a better sense of propriety (One of my most frequent questions to her is, “Too much? Does that joke go too far?” She frequently says, “A little.” And I take it out.), but I understand how she thinks, and she understands how I think. As well as anyone can understand anyone, that is.

My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. I don’t mean that her features are flawless or perfect – whatever the hell that means – because they’re not; simply that the feeling that one gets when one looks at something beautiful, the feeling of calm joy, a warm spread of soothing happiness and a desire to lose time in looking at it: that’s what I feel when I look at her. Watching her expression is the best: the slow smile, the way her eyes widen when she sees something interesting, the way they focus like lasers when she is working on something. It’s beautiful. I could watch her all day, forever. I’ve never seen another woman whom I could watch the same way. Partly, yes, because it would be creepy; my wife may think I’m creepy when I stare at her, but she lets me do it, anyway, without calling me out, without making me feel uncomfortable – without tearing down that warm calm that comes with looking at beauty. It’s that allowance, that permission to enjoy her, that is part of this; her walls are – not gone, but lower, or farther back, with me than they are with anyone else. That’s part of the privilege of love. Part of the honor of it is how I try to be worthy of that permission, of that trust.

Along with that – and not to get too graphic – my wife is the sexiest woman in the world. All the feelings of attraction and excitement, different and more intense and more fleeting and more addictive than the feelings that come with looking at beauty: I get all of those from being around my wife. Nobody else has ever, or could ever, have the same overwhelming effect on me so often, so immediately; all it takes is one glance in just the right way, and nothing else exists. Only she has that power over me. And it is a power, make no mistake: whatever I may want to say to hedge this topic, to moralize it, to objectify and reduce the feeling of sexual attraction, and the feelings of ecstasy, of connection, and of bliss that come with sex, the truth is, whether I can explain it or not, whether it needs explanation or not, sex is as powerful a part of love as any other.

It’s not necessary: I will say that. My relationship with my wife, our connection, our affection, our trust; none of that is built on sex, none of it relies on sex. I could not imagine, however, having the same relationship with her while having a sexual relationship with someone else. I don’t see how that would work. We could still be friends, even the best of friends; but she would not be my love. I know there are people who have polyamorous relationships, and I have to assume they care for their partners, and are excited by their partners, in the same way as I and my wife; but I can’t understand it. Suffice it to say that if everyone could share all parts of the relationship together, I can at least see how it could work; if people have separate intimate relationships in common, as in my understanding (based exclusively on televised fiction, which is why I don’t pretend to have an answer here) of religious polygamy, where a husband moves from wife to wife to wife on different nights – I can’t see that as the same kind of love that I have with my wife.

But then, I don’t think anyone else on Earth has the same kind of love that I have with my wife: I am unique, and she is unique, and thus what we have together is unique. So on some level, there is no word for what I feel for her, or at least no word that anyone else could ever know or understand or use. It is essentially uncommunicable.

Dang. Maybe my student was right. Maybe there is no point in defining love.

No: I still think it matters. My love for my wife is this way because it has grown and strengthened and become more for better than twenty years. When we met, when we started dating, and when we fell in love, there were all the same flaws and problems that other people have; maybe not as many, maybe not as serious, as there are for some relationships – after all, we stayed together – but love becomes unique and undefinable; I don’t think it starts that way. I think the feeling is, at first, recognizable, similar to what each of us had felt for other people in the past, similar to what other people feel in those circumstances. Knowing that, recognizing it, is what allowed us to first say to each other, “I love you,” and mean it. And I think it’s important that people recognize that phrase, and mean it when they say it, as something distinct from what people mean when they shout “I love you!” as they drive by the McDonald’s where their friends are at work. Because in a romantic situation, when someone says, “I love you,” and the other person says, “I love you too! You’re my best friend!” then there is at least a potential for serious and terrible heartbreak. There are countless dramatic moments in books, films, TV shows, based on this precise miscommunication, because it is one we can understand, relate to, maybe remember. That is the problem with using the exact same word for both very different feelings. And they are different feelings: I will use the phrase “romantic love” to separate them, but that doesn’t work in the moment, because you can’t say “I love you romantically” and mean it. When you tell someone that you love them in the way that I say it to my wife, then the word cannot be qualified and modified: it has to be everything, all in one, because that’s what the word represents: that’s the love I mean when I say it to her. Everything. All that I am, and all that I have, with her, forever. That’s love.

 

When I was thinking about this essay, I had an idea that I would end up defining two different meanings of the word “love:” one for the happy warm feelings that my student speaks of – call it the garlic love, in her honor – and one for the feelings I share with my wife, which I cannot truly express, not with all my words. I even had the idea that the garlic love, the one I feel for pirates or warm socks or the music of Weird Al Yankovic – and believe me, I do not discount and do not demean that love; I love that love – could be distinguished as the one that allows people to extend the word the way they do on social media, by adding more “e’s” at the end of it – “I LOVEEEEEEEE that movie!” I freely admit that bugs the crap out of me: because IT’S A SILENT LETTER! What the hell does it mean when you say it more, a long pause? But I also admit, just as freely, that this is my humbuggishness talking, that I have no grounds to be annoyed by that; I understand that people are trying to intensify the word within the limitations of the medium: you can’t do bold or italic or oversized font in a Tweet. You can repeat the word – “I love love love that movie” – but that’s neither better nor worse. In both cases, it’s clear communication of intensified feeling, and it does it the same way, by dedicating more characters to the idea.

I can distinguish that from what I feel for my wife, however, because when I tell her I love her, I don’t ever extend it. I don’t ever say, “I LOOOOOOOVVVVVEEEEE you!” I don’t say “I LOVE LOVE LOVE you!” But I would do either of those things – okay, not the second one, which strikes me as insincere, though again, no real reason for that, just prejudice and humbuggishness, the same as how I hate it when people use the word “impactful” – if I was trying to express how I feel about Weird Al. I LOOOOOOVVVVEEE Weird Al.

I love my wife.

Two different feelings, two different terms, even if they are sort of spelled the same. Even if they do both have the same positive, happy-making, basic feeling underlying them. And if I had my druthers, I’d insist that people distinguish: when they talk to their friends about their favorite breakfast cereals, they use the extendable one: maybe spell it “loveee” to be clear. When they talk about the person they want to kiss, they use only “love.” Spelled, and said, the right way.

But there’s no point in trying to do that. Language doesn’t change because people think others are using it wrong; language changes with people’s whims, with fashions, with the ease and quickness of flipping a switch, but never because people say that word there is the wrong word. I suppose I could try to make it unfashionable to use the word “love” in a casual context, but people want to say it. They want to express feelings, want to be open, and they want to be positive. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If saying “I love you” makes two friends happy, then who the hell am I to step in and say, “Actually, that’s not love; you should say you are fond of each other.” I mean, I can be a prick sometimes, but I’m not that bad. And while I said above that I wished we would take advantage of the richness of the language – and I still wish that, all the time and in many contexts – I could never say to my wife, with a straight face, “I am besotted with you.” (Note: I tried. Didn’t work.)

I think it’s okay, though. Because context changes meaning. So what we need to be aware of is the context we are creating when we use the word “love.” When we want to use it differently, when you’ve just been saying, “Man, I love Buffalo wings!” and you have the sudden urge to tell your date, “I love you,” don’t do it one after the other. (Though do picture that, just for a minute. “Man, I love Buffalo wings! I love you, sweetie!” Don’t even give the guy a pause; picture him licking sauce off of his fingers the whole time he says this. Nice.) Change the context. Surround the declarations of romantic everything-love with a situation that expresses what you mean: and if you want to clearly show the difference between uses of the word, then make sure the contexts are different.

What I really want to say, I suppose, is that love is a perfect thing for me. I don’t want to rename it. I also don’t want to keep it from having a name, from saying it is indefinable and indescribable, because I don’t want to keep other people from it – I want other people to feel what I feel. I think it has made me a better person, and given me a better life, than I could possibly have had without it. My wife is my everything, and she has given me – everything. If other people could know what I mean, this would be a better, happier world. But while my love is unique, my experience is not, because I know there are other people who have an everything love as much as I do. They have understood everything I have said here. (I hope.) That common experience is what allows us to communicate at all; and here, it allows us to understand what I mean by the word “love.” But even for those who don’t know, who haven’t felt, what I know and feel, and thus don’t quite know what I mean by “love,” at least understand this: when you say it, make sure the other person understands just what you mean.

I would love that.

Winning and Losing and Fighting

Dusty 1 Comment

I wrote this last night.

I just want to say that I have nothing to say.

My fiction has not had the appeal that I always hoped it would; I’m not sure if it’s more because my writing is boring and overly wordy, or because people have largely given up reading, or some combination of the two. But the point is that the ideas I come up with, which I think will get people to buy and read and talk about my books, don’t make any of those things happen.

I’ve also come to realize that, in almost all areas of life that I wish to write about, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I understand teaching well, and to some extent I understand writing and literature, but even there, I realize that I have only one of many perspectives on what I do, and I don’t think I have any real proof that my opinions are correct. I have suspicions that the same urge we all have to confirm and conform and support one another is the real reason why people tell me I teach well and write well.

This means  that I think there  is little reason for me to share my ideas. Those ideas are probably wrong, after all, and not well-written enough to be worth contributing just for the sake of  the eloquent prose and powerful rhetoric. I mostly just babble online, and the books show it. My essays show it. My audience shows it. My continued — shall we be generous and call it a “lack of success” rather than an abject failure? — lack of success shows it. I don’t know that I’ve ever convinced anyone of anything. I suppose I’ve been entertaining, though not on any scale that makes it worth doing.

So since I don’t know facts, and I don’t write lyrical prose, why would I say anything at all? Any time I think about picking a position and going for it, I think that doing so for the sake of fulfilling my urge to write creates an atmosphere of contentious disagreement, and if it’s not a strongly held conviction, then it feels like disagreement for an audience. Back to entertainment, and doing nothing good for my country — which I do love, by the way. But that’s not interesting. I don’t do that because nothing’s going to change my audience’s mind, so nothing I say is going to have any impact on the world. Et voila.

I have felt the urge to write. I don’t do well with not writing. I wanted to write tonight, about an argument that would be worth having. I thought about writing about Trump, but what I’ve seen for the past two years has shown  me that people, whether they agree or disagree  with Trump, will bend over backwards to show how they will never, ever, EVER, change their loyalty, no matter how many reasons they find to do exactly that. On both sides, too: if I were to write an essay praising Trump for what he has done well — engaging with North Korea and Kim Jong Un, maintaining the strong economy, even things like renegotiating NAFTA and getting NATO members to pay their fair share of the defense spending for the alliance — I’d get lectured on what he’s done that’s terrible (Too long a list to include). If I focused on the Naughty list, I’d get these things put forward as reasons why he’s done all the right things, and a dozen other angry disagreements about why I’m wrong and an unAmerican libtard. I don’t know that anyone would consider the points I’d raise, not least because I don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about.

If I stay away from politics, which would be fine with me, then what do I write about? Teaching? Ugh; talk about beating a dead horse. I don’t think I’ll ever again have an interesting or informative story about teaching that I haven’t already told. So what, then? My dogs? They’re lovely, but I don’t know anything about them other than what I observe, all of which has already been observed by anyone with dogs.  Talking about my family is taboo, especially if I were to try to air the dirty laundry that would make those stories interesting. I could try to write fiction — I am trying, still — but then we come right back to that whole “Your writing sucks and is boring” theory I’m operating with.

Again: I’m not trying to garner sympathy or affirmations. I’m trying to explain why I haven’t been writing, so that other people who are feeling like they don’t have anything to say that’s worth hearing can understand how I got to feel this way. I don’t know if it started with the failures of my fiction career (which are not shocking, as fiction writing is a damn hard business to break into) or if it came with my recent understanding that I am often wrong in my political views, that many of them come from my party loyalty rather than my own rational thought, and that plenty of my ideas are based on prejudice rather than reason. (That also is not a knock against myself: that is a description of how 99.9999% of us act about our own political views, which are generally wrong if not simply irrational. Though this is my own opinion, and as such is highly suspect, as it is based on little or no evidence, like all of my political opinions.)

I’m not sure what my point is. I was trying to write something more in line with my absurd argumentative holiday, but I couldn’t settle on a topic, and then I couldn’t get it going; I suspected that it was because this idea, that I am not fit to write and that my opinions are not worth being written, has permeated my thoughts more and more lately. It is possible I’m being too hard on myself. If so, I’m not sure how to fix it. Maybe if I can share my honest feelings and thoughts — and that, too, is difficult, as my honest opinions and thoughts are exactly what got me into trouble some years ago — then it will help me move past them.

Though I don’t know if there’s anything worth saying on the other side of these doubts, either.

I really don’t know much of anything.

I posted it, and then twenty minutes later, I took it down. I decided people didn’t really need to see my despondency, and while I said in there that I was trying to be honest so people could understand how I felt and how I got to be that way, that wasn’t really my intent; I was sad, and I was frustrated, and I was trying to write something. Anything.

It had already had some effect, though, because I know there are people who get email alerts from this blog which contain the posts, so it went out to those people, at least, and some of them might have read it. And it had some effect on me: by the end of writing this, I was thoroughly depressed, and by the time I went to bed, I was worse. I woke up at 2am thinking about this post, and about my life and my writing; it took me two hours to get back to sleep, and now here I am, first thing in the morning, writing this, rather than doing my usual check of Twitter and Facebook while I eat breakfast.

Here’s the thing: this is not true. I am not a bad writer. I am not a failure. I am not a fool. It’s true that I’m not an expert in the things that I write about, but I am damn good at research, at critical thinking, at deciding what facts to include and what to discard, and how to show a logical path of reasoning to a conclusion. That means I can write a good essay, which is pretty much all I write on this blog, apart from the book reviews (which are also good, I think). There’s nothing wrong and a lot right with my attempts to speak to truth in writing. I don’t have to already know the incontrovertible truth before I do that. In fact, there’s a reason for me not to know everything when I start writing: part of my intent is, as I claimed to be doing here, to show my thought process; I can’t do that as well if the thoughts are already done and set. Besides, even when I really am struggling to find an answer, that still doesn’t mean I can’t write an essay, and a good essay: because the word “essay” comes from the French for “attempt.” That’s what it is, and that’s what I do, and I do it well. Most of the time, I know that. As much as I know anything.

So what happened last night, that left me oozing melancholy onto this blog (My poor blog: you’ve taken so much from me, with never a word of complaint. Thank you for that.), is simply that I set myself an impossible goal. I picked a battle that I could not win, because I didn’t think it through before I started fighting. (There’s a reason I’m using war metaphors, instead of, say, “I set out on a journey I couldn’t complete because I didn’t know the destination, or the path.” That would work too, and if that makes more sense for you to describe a creative endeavor, then think of that, instead.) I decided that I had to write something last night. Had to be done on November 5th. No other option. I decided it in the late evening, around 7:00 or so, and by 8:00, I had — no ideas at all. I did an eminently stupid thing, which was to look on Twitter for possible inspiration; I honestly can’t think of a less inspiring place for genuine thoughts — unless  it’s  Facebook, where I also looked for ideas.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. I started writing something political, but I’ve had a lot of trouble determining my political stance lately — or maybe it’s my perspective — and so I question every potentially political statement I try to make. Happened last night, and I swiftly gave up on writing about politics. (Though that’s why it has a prominent place in the deluge above. That and I do think writing has the potential to make change, and politics is the thing in our society that needs the most changing, I think. Actually, maybe I’m wrong. You know, I’ve never really written about prejudice or hate. Hmm.)

That’s when I gave up. Surrendered. Decided I had nothing to write last night, and therefore, I had failed. And thus, in a stubborn attempt to write something, I wrote about my failure. But I didn’t do it well, which is why I took it down, and why I’m writing this now.

I did fail last night. But only because I was impatient. I created an artificial deadline for myself, and then collapsed when I couldn’t meet it. I think now (this is what I thought about between 2am and 4am) that this tendency to make up imaginary deadlines is a common practice, and not only for creatives; I think a lot of us do it a lot of the time. I have to be married with kids by 30 or 35. I have to have my dream job by 25. I have to be a millionaire by 40, or retired by 55. We pick essentially random points in the future, and we center our sights on it — and charge.

And miss.

On some level there’s nothing wrong with artificial deadlines like this, because it does keep us moving. It keeps us from putting today off for tomorrow, especially when today is the deadline. That’s a good thing, because despite what my students say, there is actually nothing at all good about procrastination. It’s understandable, but it’s never good. My students say they work better under pressure, but honestly, the pressure always comes from within: either you make the thing a priority, or you don’t, and if you do, there’s pressure to do it, and if you don’t, there’s not. Invented deadlines can be a way to convince your underbrain, that lazy lizardy bastard, that this thing is a priority NOW. There are plenty of times when I’ve sat down to write, telling myself I needed to find something to write about — and I have found something, and I’ve written, and it’s been fine, and I’ve won. Most of Damnation Kane was written that way, to be frank, especially the first book. I decided it was going to be a serial, I decided it was going to have a chapter published every Saturday by noon, and so every Saturday morning, I sat down and wrote a chapter.

The problem is what I did wrong last night: sometimes you pick a bad deadline, or a bad goal, and then when you miss it, you feel like a failure. Last night I shouldn’t have been writing. It was Monday: Monday’s a bad day to write. I should have been listening to music and grading vocabulary sentences. It was my own fault that I felt like a failure, because I didn’t create a way for me to succeed. I lost the battle with myself, with my writing, because I didn’t think enough about my strategy, about my plan of attack or my objectives, and so I didn’t win.

Why am I talking about writing like it’s a war? Because today is Election Day. And just as we set imaginary deadlines for ourselves in creative endeavors, so we do in politics, as well.

We’re going to be hearing a lot today about how this is the moment, this is the chance, this is the make or break, do or die, last hope for everything we believe in. I heard on the radio yesterday that today’s election will determine if this is Trump’s America, or not. I had the same reaction to that that I’m currently having to my own bullshit (That was what I was trying to write about last night before I gave up on politics), which is: that’s fucking nonsense.

So let me be clear. Today is a battle. Last night was a battle for me. Neither last night for me, nor today for this country, is the end of the war. I didn’t write something useful last night; here I am, less than twelve hours later, writing something I am much more pleased with (Though it still may not be a victory. It probably never is, which is where the military metaphor fails. I used it to make the analogy to politics, is all.). If this election goes badly — and I mean that, in all sincerity, for people of any and all political positions, because this election, like all of our politics right now, is so supercharged and combative that any result is going to be heartbreaking for one side or the other, if not both — the most important thing in the world to realize and remember is: there is another election in two years. (We should also remember that politics is not all of life, but that’s a different subject.)

The truth is this: the struggle never ends. Never. We win small battles, we lose small battles — usually only when we surrender, especially when the battle’s with ourselves — but we always keep fighting. The victories that progressives have had in the last fifty years have built up the fighting spirit on the conservative side, and that gave us the current situation; that situation is now building up the fighting spirit on the progressive side. That’s maybe even the way it has to be. It’s almost physics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and so the pendulum swings, and then swings back, and the farther it goes in one direction, the harder and faster the return swing is going to be. There’s nothing — nothing — that can happen that will end the swinging of the pendulum, other than the death of all humanity. (Which is a fair possibility, of course, and the one that should probably have the most urgency to it, because those deadlines aren’t so artificial.) If Trump was actually Hitler (He’s not) and he took over the country in a fascist dictatorship, then there would be a rebellion, there would be a war, there would be an overthrow. The struggle would continue, and eventually, it would move the other way. There would be untold suffering in the meantime, and I don’t mean to say the struggle doesn’t matter, therefore: what doesn’t matter is the deadlines.

In a creative endeavor like my writing, there is no end. I’ll never be such a great writer that I don’t feel the need to get better. I’ll never write a work so fantastic that I’ll never want to write something even more fantastic. I will at some point write something that I can’t beat, but I’ll always want to. I will want to keep writing until I die, whether I am successful or not, whether I achieve what I want to achieve when I want to achieve it, or not. The struggle — the journey — will always go on.

Last night I decided there was an end to the fight, at least in the immediate sense. And I picked the wrong end, and I failed. I am going to try not to make that mistake again; when it’s a bad night for writing, I just won’t write, even if I told myself that I would. My ambitions have to bend to reality, not the other way around.

Let’s all try to remember that today, okay? Today may be a chance to achieve what we want to achieve. And it may not be the right time yet. Maybe things have to get a little worse before they get better — whatever you think “worse” or “better” means for this country. But today is not the end. Tomorrow we will still have to fight, even if we win today.

Tomorrow I’ll still want to write. Today, I won.

Now I’m going to go vote, and hope. And stay ready.