Saturday Dusk

Through Technorati I find I'm linked from a blog in what looks to me like Portuguese. No idea who or why. Probably at random but why does one do that? I don't mind, of course. Far too egotistical to mind any attention that isn't actually hostile.

I don't believe in egotism but I am egotistical. Why wouldn't I be? I'm male, a Leo, and terrifically insecure.

I do believe in egoism, to the extent that I believe in anything. I also believe I just wrote and deleted a bunch of off the cuff text on the subject. Who the hell wants to read my amateur philosophy at this time of day?

So anyway, mention in the preceding post’s comments of Lovecraft and his classic story At The Mountains of Madness led me to discover that a movie script is under development and ultimately to a self-categorization that is of course not news to anyone who knows me but sort of worth mentioning anyway, though I’d be hard-pressed to say why. I don’t know about anyone else but I proceed through life from a sort of default outlook that doesn’t quite match the person whose life I lead, and though that life is of a man with a family he loves and a house he always fusses with and a career whose arc will fill a major portion of his legacy, my outlook is still, mostly subconsciously and mostly under the surface, that of a teenager cutting high school. Despite all the action items and commitments and production that everyone within my comprehension right now naturally expects me to be motivated towards, all I really want to do is find a cozy comfortable atmosphere and write stuff. Right now, it would be stuff inspired by the story and movie mentioned above. Another day it would be something else –- regional amateur detective stuff, or regional-historical, or off-beat travel writing, whatever ... whatever it was I dicked around with when I was cutting high school.

I cut high school a lot. I kept careful records of my attendance so that each semester would end with my absences being just under the allowed limits which, being the mid 1970s, were quite generous. I spent a lot of that cut time at the local public library, some of it with my unfortunate girlfriend (meant in both senses of the term), and a little of it wandering around the campus of UC Berkeley that was just blocks away. Thirty plus years later, I still want to cut class and go wander and find a spot as I used to do where lines of energy and environment converge to a point, and align my mind with them and see what is produced. Sometimes it is words, sometimes it is music, sometimes it is merely peace. But whatever it is, it beats the hell out of any high school class assignment, or lab experiment or design review or presentation for staff.

Music? Yeah, this is the sort of nerd I was: Sometimes in class, instead of taking notes I’d write music for brass quintet. Had the blank music paper and everything. Did it in ink. It was uninteresting stuff, mostly derivative of Bach (probably because he created such beauty out of mathematical structure), with odd harmonies thrown in because I liked the way they sounded. But I had little formal training in theory and they came out the musical equivalent of a short story written by a kid who’s read nothing but a few tales by Jack London. Now, of course, I wish not so much that I had kept those particular efforts but that I had kept at them, and thrown caution to the wind and studied music without regard for career prospects. But this paragraph is a spur road that ends in the trees, so let’s go back to the main line.

I know there’s nothing unique in a man who proceeds with a self-image an order of magnitude or two less responsible than the persona he presents the world. Probably there is more uniqueness in a man who does not. But I don’t really know, because most of the time I am surrounded by hundreds of men (and many women, though to say “dozens” would be an exaggeration, my work being an engineering environment which, for reasons I can’t fathom, does not attract females in equal number as males) diligently pursuing the objectives of their jobs and careers. So far as I know, it wouldn’t occur to a single one of them to want to be doing something else – and also so far as I know, every single one of them does want to be doing something else. The truth is somewhere in between, of course, with career success following those who more successfully draw the line and make themselves most effective at what they are actually doing. I imagine many people would say that the ability to do that is simply a sign of maturity.

Which raises the question: Why would I still be a teenager? I should say “teenager” in quotes, of course, because I’m very much not teenagerish in a lot of ways, and I don’t just mean the weird gray hairs that grow out the tops of my ears. Maybe it’s not my inner teenager but my inner homeless person calling, I don’t know. The inner marginally-employable creative type, anyway, who works in a video store and spends his life writing and playing guitar and writing some more –- and I guess it’s conceited of me to think that such people are also stuck in their teenage years, only perhaps more then me at a practical level and correspondingly less so at an emotional level –- the person who has remained (childishly) free of responsibility to anyone but himself ... and that’s a ball he can drop whenever he likes. What if, instead of throwing to second for the out, he just lets it lie and looks over the outfield fence and watches patterns form and merge as the breeze moves the leaves in the trees? What if?

Someone, I forget who, was describing the failure of her marriage, and the difficulty of her husband’s childhood (drunken abusive father etc.), and said the counselor had said that oftentimes people who grow up in dysfunctional households remain teenagers emotionally for their entire lives. Stuck, in other words, in a stage of life they never successfully completed. That certainly described her ex-husband (their son, on the other hand, who had both the experience of having a close family while young and the experience of witnessing his father’s self-destruction, was mature beyond his years, and understood exactly that his father was stuck in an emotional state he himself had long passed). This being stuck in teenagerdom, if it applies to me, would not apply because of abuse of any kind. But it’s less evil twin, the benign neglect of divorced parents distracted by their own lives, is undeniable. It is impossible not to draw connections, but very swiftly I have to stop that train and point out (to myself if to no one else) that there’s only good in analyzing the past if it helps you design the future. To drive your life, and not be driven by some vague sense of helpless inevitability, is the worthy path. That much is clear to me and since that leads to speculation of how I should be driving my life and avoid being driven by the fallout of circumstance, I am led, believe it or not, right back to the original question but turned sideways. Rather than, why do I want to go be an artist and drop all this materialist conventionality, I should be asking, why am I not doing just that?

Well, the short term answers of course are a) that I’d much rather ensure my kids’ passage through college, b) I want a chance at a decent retirement (whether I get it or not, better to have tried), and c) Lovecraftian stories and movie scripts are pretty lightweight fare upon which to make decisions –- and it's much better, as some Hobbit must have said, to make decisions on a full stomach.

You know, I'm going to have to stop with that, because I'm not sure I know what it means. I feel like I've drawn three quarters of the circle here. Probably if I let it percolate another day I'll have the rest of it but, you know, naah.