by j-a
April 2011
I am a character in someone else's dream. My life is not my own. Here, in this other place, inside this other head, I am someone else. Royce and Kim are not my brother and his wife. Their sons are not named Roy, Ray, and Randy. Someone dreamed up all that stuff and promptly forgot all of it. I seem to be the only one who remembers it all. I am the only one who remembers the psychological scripts. Characters deviate significantly from the real-world counterparts. How can I communicate this so that you will understand? I am not proficient at the courtroom drama you all call human life. First, the visions; no, not those visions; those are different. I have an ideal life I live that has not yet been fully realized. Storage containers for all projects line the walls of all of the rooms. Most of them aren't in place yet; most of them don't even yet exist. Curtains hang in front of storage areas that look a bit odd. "Pay no attention to that junk behind the curtains." My house is maze of aisles down the center of each room. Except for the "living" areas, where function trumps organization: The kitchen. The bedroom. Though those are succumbing also. Shelves line the walls where space is at a premium. I covet James Earl Jones' character's flat in Field of Dreams. I have an entire room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: books I've written for my own benefit (i.e., shelf-displayable ego); books I've written for public consumption; but all but a few of the books were written by others. The center of that room is where I keep my drum kit. I drum. To relieve the anxiety. Mindless activity helps a lot. Do not misunderstand me when I express my current discontent. I like the way I live; it's only when I imagine how you might feel... Not like me. You are different, which I believe to justify my own separate nature, as Joachin: He's out on the frontier now. People say there's no frontier left, that the frontier is now gone; but they're wrong. There is still a frontier of the mind, and he is on it. [And there's the "final frontier" of course; but he doesn't count that territory. Not just yet. Humans, as ordinary (i.e., "strange, half-crazy") people, are not capable of venturing out there just yet. Right now only the quite rigidly sane, by definition, are allowed to tag along.] Although you can find small sections of it in odd places, dark spots of large cities or far out of the way rural areas, for the most part it exists, not in physical locations, but within individual psyches. This is not to define it as limited to a strictly individual phenomenon however. This frontier is expansive, stretching out across inner space(s), joining the psychologies of otherwise disparate characters together. Its inhabitants appear to live in the here-and-now; but only just. You know them when you see them: the long-haired rebel biker hippie on the subway who looks like he's been Star-Trek transported from the early seventies; the crazy cat lady who lives down the street; etc. You know these people because you're one of them, in disguise perhaps, but their images resonate within you. You may never say a word to any of them, but you're not afraid of them like the "normal" people are. You understand them because you share an internal frontier with them, a non-place that spans all current time and space, tucked haphazardly into the folds of everyday experience. You might also share their living space on the street or in large apartment complexes. Joachin does not. He wouldn't ever want to go that far. He has his own place, his own space in physical if not psychological existence. And yet his little piece of property is one of the physical places where this frontier manifests itself, a wilderness enclave disguised as a (slightly less than normal-looking) single suburban plot. But, as far as land "ownership" goes he considers this: When we think of "our" land, the country and its government, we tend to conflate them with each other and also with the idea of the nation, from sea to shining sea, our country right or wrong. It's all one big enterprise that "we" all engage in together, an idea of unity out of diversity of people and place; and trapped inside this conflation is the idea that the whole of it is owned by all of us together. But that is a convenient illusion; nevertheless, the idea is so prevalent that we assume without ever consciously thinking about it that it's true; or, less obviously, we believe, unconsciously since the conflation is mostly unconscious, that it all belongs to the government and its various sub-governments, which is, after all, according to our ideal, nothing more than the sum total of all the people. But that tacit assumption is just not true. You can look at your own land and think of it in any unconscious or conscious way you choose; but Joachin's land is his own. He worked hard for the money to buy it. The government owns not the least little bit of it. And this land is his frontier. This little bit of wilderness is his own country, with its national borders, its natural resources, and its own peculiar cultural identity. He does pay taxes on this land to the government, but that means nothing. He pays this extortion because if he does not the government will come and throw him off the land he owns and maybe even jail him if he chooses to resist its strong-arm tactics. He does not recognize the government's authority when it extorts money from him, but he does recognize its power. We have all been told while growing up that might does not make right, and this is a perfect example of that idea. Joachin recognizes no social contract that gives anyone the right to take his money or his land when he would rather choose that they not have it. But he's neither a stupid nor so much of an idealistic person. He knows how to stay out of the way of bullies, especially that biggest bully of all, the Government of the United States of Amerika. Out here on the frontier, people do not accept the Central Scrutinizer's authority. And we never will, because, as it insinuates itself into our domain, we simply move farther out--or in, depending upon your point of view; because, in any case, the perception is not true: The new frontier people have transcended the dichotomy of in and out (as well as many other dichotomies). We reject government's authority over us. We are frontier people because we wander out away from the settlements it dominates and controls. We make our own settlement in/out here, at a place it cannot quite reach, because its long arms are not quite so long as you might believe them to be. You think we're strange and half-crazy? Well, duh. We believe it's a better way to be than to go walking around uncomfortably all day with those great big goddamn government sticks up our asses. Speak softly around us lest you spook us and we disappear into the woods-work, which is the home Joachin most often identify with when he alternatively believes he's living in a more or less conventional kind of place where normal rules of order and organization apply, most of the time: Joachin has been looking for over three weeks for a pair of scissors that he'd misplaced. They were good scissors, for the price, $1 at Big Lots, so he bought two pair, and put one pair in the kitchen to use for cooking related tasks, and he'd been using the second pair outside for gardening. But a few weeks ago he saw them sitting, along with a more costly but of lesser quality pair of gardening scissors, on the sidebar next to the door where he keeps all of his small gardening implements, and he decided that they didn't deserve to be abused by the weather outside, that they should go into the kitchen with the other pair. But (and here's the point) he forgot all about that, and so he looked everywhere for them, having no idea where they had gone, imagining that maybe he accidentally threw them out with garbage, like maybe they were sitting on the counter above the trash can and accidentally got knocked into it, or that he had them in his hand when he was carrying something else to the garbage and he threw them out with that other stuff, because he's caught himself doing just that several times before, and who knows how many other times he didn't catch himself, who knows how many missing items (it seems to happen too often) disappeared in just that way instead of having succumbed to the one in many-trillions chance of having quantum-leaped into another dimension? So he gave up trying to find the scissors, like he's giving up trying to find his best pair of reading glasses and any number of things, writing them off; and then, yesterday, he happens to glance up at the window above the kitchen sink at a bird that charges the glass numerous times each day--not the same bird as last year, nor the same window; that was a cardinal at the office window, this one is a robin--and there they are, the scissors, hanging from the little handle that cranks open the window. All of that rationale for why he put them there came flooding back into his brain, which maybe is becoming more like that of the bird outside as each year passes. So, happy that he found his scissors, he turns his attention (what's left of it) back to cooking. He pours the corn meal batter he prepared over the ground turkey leftovers from yesterday and he puts it in the microwave, sets the time at six minutes, and he washes some dishes while he waits. When the microwave signals him with its beeps, he checks the cornbread only to discover that it is not yet nearly done. He cooks it for two more minutes, and then two more, and then two more! What is going on here? The last time he made this meal, it took six minutes. After what seems like it is way too long, he finally has an almost done cornbread and is too hungry to continue trying to cook it, so he douses it with ketchup and eats it like it is. Not the best meal he's ever had. Why, when the last time it took six minutes, did it take three times as long this time? It's a mystery. Today, he thinks again about the scissors while cooking his dinner, and the answer pops into his feeble brain: The last time he made the meal, he used white flour, not corn meal. Duh. He wants to know the reason why he does these kinds of things. It's not enough to say to himself, "Oh, it's just the Asperger's. Maybe it is just that, but he doesn't know. He thinks we assign a reason to a behavior and are content to leave it at that, when there are probably a whole lot more reasons besides that one we assign that contributed to the behavior in question, reasons that we don't know of or that we don't want to know of. We choose a reason because we want a simple answer, and we leave the truth, if we ever could know it, the whole truth, to fend for itself. We're a rationalizing species. We make our truth up as we go along and never mind the facts, especially if they are not so convenient or easy to discern. We even choose beliefs that are not anywhere near to the truth because we like those ideas better, or we like less ideas that are closer to the truth. We filter our reasons to suit ourselves. You want the truth? Forget it. You can't handle the truth. And he's not so sure that he can either. But he likes the truth he finds alternatively better than he likes the one he usually thinks he's living, he likes better the one where he is someone else, a dream character in a dream that is not his own. Because, whatever the case, many times he cannot possibly be the person who is dreaming these dreams, they're so foreign, they've just got to be someone else's (and occasionally he even thinks this about what he believes to be his own "real" life): I'm roaming through the woods along Washington Blvd. with a guy, my buddy, who looks like Darius Rucker. I don't know what we're doing, but it's something important, something secretive, something to do with, maybe, gathering evidence against a corporation or the government; spy-like stuff. We come up to a city complex of office buildings that feels like at the same time both a commercial area, such as inner city department stores, and official government buildings. Outside one of the buildings we meet my girlfriend, who looks like Laura Kightlinger, who works in some minor government employee job, and we get on a bus, heading for Monroeville. [Non-transition break.] We're heading for Monroeville, not via any normal route from Washington Blvd., but via Unity Trestle Rd. On the bus, for no reason, Darius gets up and gets off, without a word. I'm talking to my girlfriend and a friend of hers that we met on the bus, so I don't notice Darius' departure until he's just getting off the bus. We wonder why he left. I think that maybe he saw something along the road relating to what we had been doing earlier in the woods and went to investigate. Then, a little bit later, I say something that pisses off my girlfriend and she gets up and leaves also. I stay, talking to her friend. My girlfriend is a tall girl, maybe 5-10. She doesn't look so big because she's thin. She has the slightest bit of bohemianism about her that belies her otherwise typical social appearance. This other girl has none of that look, so I think that she is not at all attractive, except in the usual cookie-cutter way that mainstream girls try to make themselves into because they think that's what everyone else thinks attractive is. She's short, about 5-4, thin, as thin as my girlfriend though less obviously since she's shorter, and she's blond. My girlfriend has black hair. Both girls wear their hair short. We talk about my girlfriend as I wonder if she's now my ex, and along those lines I begin to wonder if maybe I should try to hook up with this girl instead. Although I don't find her very attractive in the "ethereal" way that I found the other girl, still, she's female and she's not bad, although she is a bit of a typically mindless social copy, whereas my girlfriend is a bit of an intellectual type. I ask the girl where this bus is going. Previously, I was just tagging along with my girlfriend, oblivious to our destination. But when this girl tells me we're going to Monroeville, I complain that I'm not going to be able to get home very easily because there are no buses from there; and it's too late to get off this bus, which is now in Center, too far to walk home. So I go along with her, thinking maybe I can call Darius to get my car and come and pick me up. But, as we get to talking and as my idea about hooking up with this girl solidifies, we decide (she suggests, based upon my subtle lead) that I could accompanying her on her shopping trip and take the bus back to her house with her and maybe her father or brother could drive me home. [There's a bit of a semi-paradox here: I am a teenager, maybe eighteen or nineteen. And this girl is sixteen. My girlfriend seems older than her (and must be even older than I am perhaps, in order to be working as a government employee), but the implication is that she's the same age as her friend; in a sense they are (like) schoolmates.] I ask this girl why she doesn't drive, and she tells me that her father won't allow it. This is the first time that I understand how young she might be. She shops and I tag along, and she becomes a bit taken with me (which was my whole intent). After it becomes obvious (conscious) to her what is happening to her, how she is becoming inordinately attracted to me, she asks me, "What about ____." I tell her that I assume we've broken up. We end up in her room at her parents' house. She tells me to wait outside behind the bushes while she goes in. She points out the window to her room and tells me that when I see her light come on, I should climb up there. But, she warns me that I'm not going to have sex with her. She makes sure I understand that beforehand. After we had gotten off the bus, on our walk to her house, we had stopped to kiss several times; but she indicates while we are hidden in her backyard that that was all I was going to get. When her light comes on, I climb up over the porch roof and into her bedroom. We crawl into her bed. Cut to the next day, around noon: My face is between her legs, teasing her clitoris with my tongue. We hear her mother's voice in the hall and the vacuum on the hall carpet. She hides me under her blankets. I complain that her mother will notice me there. She says no, she won't. She's oblivious. Enter mother, vacuuming. She tells the girl she should be getting up, it's past noon. She says she just wants to lie there for a little while longer. While she's talking, I slip my finger into her, which causes her to gasp, which she disguises with a yawn. Her mother asks her if she feels all right. Yeah, she replies. She feels great. Mother leaves. Two young brothers come into room and discover my foot sticking out the bottom of the covers. They yank on it. I stick my head out and put my finger to my lips. I whisper, "Just our secret." They nod agreement and exit. I realize that the girl looks and acts a little bit like the older sister in Sixteen Candles (except that she's a bit more personable; although she's still a "socialite" and a bit vapid, she's rather adorable and I've grown increasingly attracted to her). Enter Bo-hunk fianceé. She dismisses him, tells him to go away and come back later in the day. He's very understanding, but he doubles back when he remembers something her forgot to tell her. She had been standing up on the bed with her hands on the high bedstead at its foot, having taken this pose to keep him out of the room and unable to discover me down between the bed and the wall. After he leaves, I get up on the bed, pull down the bottoms of her babydoll pajamas, and enter her from behind, and I'm just finishing coming inside her when the guy re-enters the room. He flies into a rage when he sees what I'm doing and he pulls out a triangle [!] (of the draftsman variety) with sharpened edges, as if it were some kind of Ninja weapon. He attacks me, but I am well trained and I toss him out the window onto the porch roof and he rolls off onto the lawn. Cut to a few days later: My girlfriend shows up at my house. She's sorry she got mad at me. I don't know whether I want her back or not. But I decide that, as nice as it had been with the other girl, I like this one a lot better; not sexually, but she's a much more interesting person. She confesses that, after she got off the bus, she spent the next night with Darius. I tell her I already know that. I tell her that Darius called me before that and asked me if it was okay. She got a little bit pissed at that, not that Darius called me, but that I said okay; but she got over it quickly enough. I don't tell her about the other girl. Cut to a few weeks later: Darius ends up with that other girl because her fiancée dumped her because he said she was a slut; and we all become best friends again (except for the Bo-hunk ex-fianceé, of course). Well, maybe not quite as best friends as before, because the girl and I never told either of them about us. We share that secret between only us--oh, and with her younger brothers, of course. One day the others might find out. I'm not sure that Bo-hunk incident will remain a secret for too long. And my girlfriend will get pissed about it; but she'll get over it again, I'm sure. If not, then Darius is going to have to watch out, because I really did like the sex with his new girlfriend, and I'm not too sure I'm going to call him up to ask his permission. That makes him a better man than I am. Or somebody, because whoever that guy was in that dream, it sure wasn't Joachin; or rather, it was, but he was someone else.
George crossed the street, late last night, at eleven, and knocked on the screen door. As Joachin looked, frozen, toward the open front door, George announced himself to him, probably because, by the look on his face, George understood that Joachin could not see him in the dark beyond the dirty screen mesh that reflected and diffused the room light. By way of apology for coming over so late, George says that he knows Joachin is a night owl like himself. Joachin went out on the porch into the still warm night to talk to George.
George tells Joachin how someone has been texting his wife with messages about how she could do a whole lot better than him, how she should leave him and hook up instead with the unnamed texter, how he is such a loser without a steady job and she deserves so much better. Joachin recognizes immediately that George is testing him to see if Joachin is the mysterious text stalker. George doesn't come right out and accuse Joachin, but Joachin can see what he's up to. Why else would he come over so late to tell him all of this?
Joachin is a whole lot more subtle than George is. He questions George as to who he thinks the texter is. George says he has no idea (an obvious lie; he does have an idea, even though it's an erroneous one). Joachin convinces him with his demeanor and subtext that he doesn't even have a cell phone, mere hints because coming right out and stating such would too obviously reveal that Joachin know exactly what George is up to and why he's up to it and Joachin wants to continue to appear, at least tio himself, as if he is totally oblivious to the game George's wife is playing (though a somewhat dangerous game, to sure, because George has characterized his wife as being paranoid by the ordeal she is going through, considering the stalking to be a frightening experience; yet it is nevertheless a game, in the Bernian sense of the term).
So Joachin convinces George that he is not the stalker, that he has no idea about what is going on, neither concerning the text messages (which he actually doesn't) nor concerning her psychology, which he understands more and more of each time she engages in one of these little bouts with her husband, whom she uses in his unwitting gregariousness to communicate her instinctual "availability" to Joachin.
George ends their little tête-à-tête by saying, "I trust you, Jack." He says it twice, repeating himself a few minutes later, intent upon making sure Joachin understands, Joachin quesses, when George doesn't acknowledge his earlier comment. Joachin doesn't acknowledge the second comment either. In fact, he seldom acknowledges any comment directed at him. He automatically assumes that commenters understand that he heard them twice the first time.
Over the next few days, George's confidences rattle around inside Joachin's brain like nuts and bolts inside an empty oatmeal box. If he trusts Joachin, what is it exactly that he trusts him about? Obviously, that he won't chase after and steal his wife away from him. "I mean," Joachin thinks, "is that something he should even be revealing to me, that he feels that I am capable of doing that?" Joachin feels like George should be trusting his wife instead. But, Joachin guesses, lacking that trust, George turns to him and trusts that he will not act upon what she communicates to him, however obliquely, that she wants him to do. Joachin is sure that she doesn't come right out and state it to George in this way; but he gets the message. Somebody is texting her to encourage her to leave her husband, and she assumes that Joachin is the one who's doing it, because that's what she secretly wants, even though it scares the shit out of her.
As it turned out (Joachin found out weeks later from George when he talked to him in his side yard about the pumpkins he accidentally grew when he roto-tilled old jack-o-lanterns into his garden last year) that it was George's sister who sent the messages, "as a joke," George said. But it seems that the motivation may have been just a little bit more serious, maybe something like George's wife having revealed to her her attraction to Joachin and the sister acting, half-seriously, to prompt some kind of reaction.
Women do that sort of thing to/for each other all the time.
Summer is ramping up in the wings. Joachin can feel it preparing its manic antics in little skits like this one, getting ready for a great performance to come. But he will misjudge the nature of it, thinking, in his typical way, that it will belong to others and not to his own self. That's an advantage of presage provided by the hindsight of procrastination (i.e., allowing his journals to go unprocessed for three months and then backtracking to catch them up):
Routine, when extended out for a long time, turns into boredom. That's maybe not so true for some people; it's not so true for Joachin. He doesn't keep a good routine; but he tries to. Maybe if he were better at it... On the other hand, he never seems to get bored. Quite the contrary. When life upsets his semi-routine, he can become rather disturbed. This spring was one of the worst of these kinds of experiences. It sort of sneaked up on him. He knew it was coming, but he'd been doing his very best to ignore it all for so long that habit preventing him from breaking through the inertia to take a proactive tact.1 After all, he did "retire" (quite early) seventeen years ago, so that he shouldn't have to be worrying about all this shit now, right? Wrong.
Joachin is now officially retired [This is a flashforward to July]. He finally got all of the requisite paperwork and interviews done. But it was not without a whole lot of internal travail. He never knows (and he's explained this before many times) if he's done an adequate job of explaining his anxiety, if he's managed to convey how serious it seems to him or if he's only come across as a whining dweeb; and he has the feeling, looking both back and ahead (back to the ostensible time period of this journal and ahead from its POV to the relief of the conclusion several months from "now") that he's not going to do too good a job this time either. But let's get into this past more fully and see how it turns out (on "paper"; it's already turned out in fact):
Re-entering this world after having been away can seem traumatic, like Arnold dropping naked into the past. It's not really traumatic, not in that way, not like dropping into a concrete alley might be, so that, if you're not a macho hardbody or an unaffected, well-constructed robot, you could hurt yourself, not in any way traumatic at all actually, that's an exaggeration, a metaphor maybe, it only seems like that--well, now that Joachin thinks about it, maybe, just a little bit traumatic, maybe a better word for it might be disturbing, more psychological than physical, though there is that physical component also, most of the time not terribly debilitating, or even painful at all beyond what might be called a basic, persistent soreness that exists always and is only slightly accentuated by the transition; but the psychological factors, ah, that's where the trauma, if there is any, comes into play.
Continually stirring it all up, day after day, after night after night, the psychology, in order to catch a brief glimpse of past truth that is so easily disregarded, especially in the moment, but in memory as well, takes its toll, which is always most apparent upon re-entry, when the contrast is most profound. The first reaction, even when everything here in this world is going so well, but very especially when it is not, is to think, or sometimes even say aloud, "No. I do not want to be here," even when the conditions there in whichever other place you were are so noxious that you would rather not have remained there either. This is the tipping point, the high and low point of experience, both, where insights present themselves as raw truth and must be captured immediately by some kind of permanent method or else they'll start to dissolve away and be lost again, perhaps this time forever.
Being retired, whether offically or merely de facto, gives one lots of time to ruminate over past incidents that went by too fast to become assimilated into the psychology as lessons learned. Joachin thinks he better, now, get to learning, before it's too late. Lewis Grizzard used to tell a story about a deeply religious man who got caught in a flood, one of those standard three-part format jokes where the guy is on the first floor of his house, then the second, and finally the roof; and at each stage of the rising flood waters, rescuers come to save him, but he declines each time, saying that his God will save him. But he isn't saved and drowns instead. He shows up at Heaven's gate where he meets Saint Peter, whom he chastises. Pointing out that he has been a faithful Christian all his life and has never done a bad thing that he wasn't immediately repentant for, he asks why he wasn't saved when he petitioned God. Saint Peter says, "We sent you two row boats and a helicopter. What more did you want?"
Last month, Joachin petitioned his [whatever, not a god so much as the wisdom of his unconscious self (maybe)] to help him with what at the time seemed like a significant problem. [Funny how some problems, given enough time, seem to resolve themselves or turn out not to have been problems at all; or did he actually end up receiving the help he requested without realizing it?] "I need help," Joachin complained. "Why aren't you helping me?"
Then, a few days later, he received his answer, not from Saint Peter, of course; but maybe the next best thing, his own mind: "We sent you Warren, George, and the mail lady. How much more did you want?" Well, he wants a whole lot more, actually. He wants universal help. But this will do, for now.
Warren is his next-door neighbor, a sci fi freak who's always giving him his old books, at a rate far faster than he can read them. The books are piling up, which is not at all any kind of complaint. He loves books. He collects them. Some day he hopes to have had the time to have read them all, and a whole lot more besides.
Books, really, are just a convenient way to collect ideas--in words. Words signify intelligence--supposedly, although, Joachin thinks, maybe not so often as he would like to believe. People overuse words. He himself is guilty of this, although not as much as others, and only during the latter half of his life; because, when he was young, he seldom spoke to anyone he didn't know so very well. He developed a procedure, when he started to write seriously, as an adult, a kind of bare-bones, Hemingwayesque approach to writing, for reducing the number of words used to say what you want to say:
But when it comes to speaking, to interacting socially, well, that's a different matter. His natural reticence automatically reduces the number of words he uses in conversation. Everyone, he thinks, should live their lives as if they have allotted to them only ten thousand words to speak per year, and if they exceed this number, they die. People who babble on about every little thing that stimulates their feeble little brains need to shut up for a while. They just do it to keep from thinking. This is why, he thinks, he is a writer, because he chooses not to speak directly to people, because if he does it too much, he suffers from a form of (self-induced) stress (regret). Writing clarifies his thoughts, because you can go back and edit your words before making them public, and even in some cases afterwards (such as in blogs), thereby limiting exposure; but, when you speak, the words are out there and cannot be retracted. Limiting his words, i.e., his direct social contact, is one of the ways he maintains his control of his self-image and makes himself look good.
He was sweet, he has to admit. He never intended it, but that's the way he came across, being so introverted that everyone thought he was extremely shy, when all along he was unconsciously scared as hell of the world and its duplicitous people and yet secretly seething inside, wanting without knowing it to rail against their assholedness. People rarely gave him a hard time back then, but when they did, he never did a thing about it except get away from them as fast as he could; not like now when, conditions being right (or wrong), he might give back what he got without thinking a jot about it...until later, when it might scare him just as much in retrospect as it did when he was young.
A few years ago, on a day when he was in a particularly foul mood, a guy came to give him an estimate for fixing his front steps. Joachin knew from the first minute he saw him that the guy was an asshole, even as he recognized his own projection. (You need a hook to hang those projections onto.) The guy's estimate was high, but he expected, not only to get the job, but to start it in several weeks and maybe not finish it until the end of the month. Joachin told him he wanted to get other estimates. The guy gave him a hard time, trying to hard sell him. Joachin ended up telling him, "I know lots of people who are more than willing to give me a bad time for free. I don't know why I would want to pay you to do it." The guy was pissed. He tried to convince Joachin that, if he didn't get the job, he'd have to charge for the estimate. Joachin almost lost it, but he managed to control himself. He said nothing more, but simply stared the guy down. When he is driven to this point, Joachin can be quite intimidating. When he shuts up completely, look out. All affect drains out of him. He goes completely blank. Cold, dead fish eyes. No one could ever penetrate that mask, so they have no choice but to project their own motives onto him; and this guy's motives weren't all that nice. He turned away and left without another word.
Joachin sometimes uses this same tactic with religious proselytizers when he's had just about enough of their antics and they won't leave them alone. Occasionally, they get so pissed off, betraying their message of universal peace and love. At times, Joachin can have that effect on people. Once, a Jehoavh's Witness actually ended up cursing at him. The guy's partner had to pull him away and lead him off down the street.
Joachin can almost understand why religious adherents object to people swearing and cursing; although some of what they object to doesn't really have any relevance to their religion, such as when someone invokes a god different from the adherent's own. The objection in this case is more than a mere generalization; it presumes that anybody's god is a perverted form of their own, since adherents cannot abide the idea that there could possibly be any god but theirs.
But the true generalization, when they apply their same objections to simple non-religious profanity, is just too much for Joachin to tolerate. Someone says "son of a bitch" or "bastard" or "cocksucker" (well, okay, cocksucker might be going a bit too far, depending...) and the adherents bristle as if they expect to become collateral damage when, standing too near, their God strikes the person down. They take great offense when anyone makes any stupid off-color remark. And yet, there is absolutely nothing wrong with many of the words that have been traditionally defined as being profane. [If you don't believe this, then fuck you too.] It's a fault of religion.
Religion is shite. People begin to depart from sanity when they start to talk about their religious beliefs; even respected information sources such as PBS fall into this trap. No one had any idea of one God (monotheism) before the Jews came up with it, claims a PBS Nova episode. Joachin doubts that very much. It's like saying no one knew the earth was round before Columbus proved it (which, in fact, he did not) or no one knew what democracy was before the Greeks invented it (which they did not). But Joachin agrees that it was the Jews (like Columbus and the Greeks) who turned their idea into a worldwide phenomenon.
The Jews were, originally, rebels who mythologically rebelled against the Pharaoh in Egypt but who in fact were Canaanites who rebelled against the crumbling local authority and set about to establish their own separate identity, which included myths and lies about their past, which they collected into the Bible. Then the Jews themselves became the authority, and the Christians rebelled against them. And then the Protestants rebelled against the Catholics. And then the Puritans rebelled against the Protestants. Monotheism was a big advancement over polytheism--at first; but it didn't take too long before the various conceptions of God started multiplying again.
The Judeo-Christian tradition is one of rebellion, culminating in the democracy movement of the United States via the European Freemasons. And now that strain of rebellion continues as the "atheists" rebel against the evil empire of Amerika, which has abandoned its democratic origins in favor of Corporate Capitalism, which is in fact not really capitalism at all, but a form of oligarchic autocracy run by fundamentalist throwbacks, who are not actually fundamentalists, but fascists worshipping false christs.
Joachin rebels against all religionists. It's simple advancement. No one ever advanced by believing in (any) religion. Even though some religions are advancements over others, monotheism wasn't so great an idea since the people who chose to believe in it never advanced as individuals, or if they did, it was for political and not religious reasons. Superstition is superstition. Although monotheism was movement in the right direction, ultimately, if you want to become truly enlightened, you have to rebel against all superstition. The true advancement will be to non-theism, when intelligent non-theists finally have had enough of this superstitious crap and rebel, leading the human race out of the fog and into The Light.
These religious people, Joachin thinks, especially the so-called fundamentalists, who engage in the daily practice of smearing alum around their assholes so that the sticks shoved up there do not slip out so easily out...
But, as often happens, once again he has drifted far off the subject. Let's see? What was that subject? Oh, yeah. He was going to try to explain his retirement. The real one, not that one that he decided to take seventeen years ago. (Did he already explain that? No matter.) Joachin (or someone, someone else, someone who writes this crap, one of the many characters who populate these pastiches and/or Joachin's dreams) mentioned before that Joachin (or someone) writes a lot like Samuel Beckett; or rather he used to, before he developed his "own" style. But if he still wrote that way, if that were the only way he ever wrote, he could live with that. He wouldn't mind at all continuing to document his life as if he were some odd novel character. But he (or someone) also writes, at times, like other writers, specifically Kathy Acker and Richard Brautigan, to mention just two. He incorporates the styles of writers he admires into his own (as all authors do, in one way or another). He integrates techniques and methods and (tries to, often with degrees of suspect success) smooth out the discrepancies and jarring contradictions, which become instead his own elements of style. (He should probably call it his "styles" instead, except that they are so fused together, not at all, or so much, jumped to from one to the other as they are slipped into and out of from word and phrase to word and phrase.) He writes this way because he recognizes in other (certain) writers' psychologies forms of ethereality that resonate with his own, and because this is what he does, not merely in writing, but in life: He borrows, and incorporates. He expresses the psychologies (he himself is an amalgam of psychologies) in the same way as (certain) writers do and so it's an automatic process that he follows when he writes, expressing himself (his selves). He betrays his Beckett method when he incorporates these others into his style. Yeah, he wants to write like Beckett, always, and he wouldn't be happy writing always like Acker or Brautigan or whomever else; but it's too late in any case. He writes like who he is, having successfully developed his "own" style; it's the personal psychology, not the writing style, that is diverse.
What he meant to write about above, but what he didn't quite manage to get to, was that he sometimes wants to write straight-out about his own personal life: literal and other experiences, including media of influence; thoughts, ideas (as distinguished from thoughts), dreams. But sometimes he wants to be "creative" and transform all that into: Something else. Like Beckett maybe, though that's more just him; more like Acker or Brautigan or whomever. Mailer maybe; though he's more like him too.
All of that is most apparent to him, as apparent as it is obscure to others, in his dreams:
I'm at the high school, which is also like being at a job, and a girl, who is my girlfriend (although at first it's more like we're in the process of deciding that she's going to be my girlfriend) leads me off outside, down a brief hillside, a bit out of the way, yet still in a place where we could be seen by a passerby, in order to have sex with me (sex being the way that she is, via implicit promise, going to become my girlfriend). As I stick it in, it's like we're inside a small pup tent with our feet sticking out the end and it keeps verging on the edge of slipping out so that, in order to keep it in, she keeps pushing us farther and farther out of the tent onto the grass where we will more easily be seen (though, even if, being mostly still inside the tent, we were not fully seen, it would have been obvious from the positions of our feet what we were doing). Joachin briefly awakens to realize that the girl (who resembles Maureen, he understands, awake, though not in the dream) is (either consciously or as part of an unconscious "game" move) actually trying to get them seen. This makes no sense in terms of the dream context (unless you consider that becoming seen is how they become a couple; but he didn't see it that way in the dream, he felt that all they had to do was "hook up"; but awake he recognized that the girl's agenda is to get them seen so that they could then become a couple; this represents the fundamental difference between his and her viewpoints, and maybe between prototypical male and female ones), but in real-life terms, it's obvious to him immediately upon awakening: This is what Maureen (and other women also) did, call attention to them, in devious little ways so that she could pretend not to have, so that their "relationship," which he would have said they didn't have, but only had sex (multiple times, which, he guesses, looked like it actually was a relationship; but not to him at the time), would be verified by society, and that her husband and he would have to come to terms. So, back in the dream again, I leave the area and end up (without transition) in the dining room at 1728 (very odd place to be in this context); a guy whom I have not previously met is now in the tent with the girl. This is her ex, who is leaving to go into the army so she is saying "goodbye" to him. I am supposed to have been made jealous by this maneuver, but I am not. Instead, when the guy leaves the tent (and, in a different sense, before he goes there), he finds me and talks to me, which was what the girl told him he should do (and what many girls in his life have told other men to do when claims to them have been in dispute, to provoke a game of "Let's You And Him Fight," Joachin presumes), but I am okay with him having sex with her one last time; not that I approve, but that it doesn't raise the affect in me that it is "supposed" (by her) to. We understand each other and he leaves. But I never again hook up with the girl, who is saddened by the outcome. [Typical slut, confused by the transition of society from traditional to postmodern life.]
There is this girl from Joachin's past. Actually there were four of them, but Joachin was only interested in the one, the blond, who impressed him as being different somehow from the others--in addition to not having dark hair; like maybe she wasn't so caught up in the silliness of cultural convention that the others so obviously were. Which in fact turned out to be exactly the case; except that she was probably even more caught up in the prototypical female instinct.
Joachin is in the kitchen fixing his dad some lunch. It's a bright, sunny day and sunlight is pouring into the house all over the place. Kevin shows up outside the door with a glove and ball, holding them up and motioning to the back lot. Joachin nods and indicates to him by pointing that he'll meet him up back in a few minutes. He finishes his Dad's lunch, takes it to his room, goes and get his glove, and goes out to meet Kevin.
That's when he first saw the girl, down on the porch of the house next door, across the huge lot between the houses and the back alley. Even from that distance he recognized her exceptional qualities. But, back then, even more so than now, he never felt like he should go even the shortest distance out of his way to meet a girl, he always felt like they should come to him, which severely decreased his odds (And, considering everything, maybe that was a good thing.)
Joachin could tell by their body language that the girls on the porch were talking about Kevin and him, interested in them, probably hoping they would come over to talk to them; which they did not. Instead, they just kept throwing that damn baseball back and forth between them until the girls got tired of watching, Joachin guesses, and went inside.
Why does he feel like this, he wants to know? He's remembering this little story now because he's trying to figure out why he's this way. The reason is because he's autistic, so that he separates himself off; but, locked inside and way back in his past, he still felt the desire to approach and talk to the girl (like he must do always when he acts all standoffish, failing to feel the desire consciously, and so it reveals itself in dreams instead); but he doesn't know this reason yet way back then and so can't come to this conclusion. But he does understand how the girl feels: attracted yet disappointed to the point of melancholia; she's fallen in love with him (later on in the story) and can't convince him to chase after her and her chase after him is unsuccessful. So she feels the same conflicted frustration that he does, transferentially. That story ending has been lost in time. It had something to do with her following him out to a bus stop in the middle of the night, totally obsessed with him and wanting him to return the favor, which, although he himself wanted to do just that, he could not, because...well, that's the way he was, still is, though far less so now, all...frozen up and...saddened, like the girl in the dream, like himself in the dream, because, when you dream, all of the dream characters are in fact aspects of your own self (assuming psychic contact doesn't in fact exist); he was the one who was saddened, as well as she, she was the one who felt what he was feeling, his inability to bridge the gap, to reach out and...all of them, really, back through his history, until he learned how to do it, and then they were all afraid of him, of how well he learned, to disregard his own separateness by releasing the infinity he was that no one even knew, not even that which existed within their own selves. He found it, and it scared the shit out of them to catch even the tiniest glimpse of what they didn't know was the true nature of what attracted them to him in the first place.
You're never going to find what you need by looking outward. [This expectation, a psychological need, is programmed by association (via generalization) with the fact that we must get our physical needs (primarily food) from the environment and so we conclude that we must get our psychological needs there also.] Too many people look for what they need by going places; for example, out to bars and clubs, to movies or the theater, to other countries on vacations, treks, or quests, etc. If you like to go out and/or travel to far away places, fine. Do what pleases you. But don't be thinking you're going to find answers to all your problems there. There's nothing somewhere else that isn't also here. There's nothing overseas that doesn't exist in your own country. In one form or another, there's nothing across the country that isn't in your own hometown, in your hometown that isn't in your neighborhood, in your neighborhood that isn't in your home, or in your home that isn't within your own mind. If you feel like you need to be out searching for something, meditate instead. It's all right there, right behind your eyes. If you think it isn't, then you simply do not know how to look. And if you do not know how to look, then you won't find it elsewhere either.
But what does all this have to do with his retirement? Nothing. But it represents the way that Joachin avoided the issue throughout the month, thinking about it only when he absolutely had to, when a specific decision had a deadline attached to it, and the rest of the time preoccupying himself with his usual distractive thoughts and experiences; and this continued on deep into the summer, which he will get to, eventually, we all do, at elast once a year, it's inevitable, time marches on, or, when it doesn't, when it succumbs to dimensional instability and pops us into a different universe, sooner or later we will pop back out (or, if we never do, then it won't matter here).
Anxiety is tricky. When you manage to relieve it, which you always think is a wonderful experience, it doesn't really go away. It lurks beneath the surface appearance of events waiting to jump out and surprise you and meanwhile twists and turns itself inside you without you being aware of its insidious machinations until that time when you are more aware of it, when all of its previously unseen work becomes available to you all at once.
Yeah, it's coming. But Joachin has spent a lifetime learning to avoid it for long periods of time. Inklings of it seep out every now and then like perspiration, but he reabsorbs them like an alien lifeform (instead of evaporating them off and cooling himself down like a normal human would) with hardly any notice. Every few days or so a burp of it disturbs his mental digestion; and he deals with it by engaging in a fantasy of contingency creation: What if...then. Okay, good plan; but that might never happen. And the really good thing about fantasy is its maleability. Once engaged, the fantasy mechanism of Joachin's brain can turn on a dime, even within dreams, but especially coming out of them:
But is that really fantasy? Or something else? Sometimes fantasy turns out to be a doorway to another place (or non-place); the problem with that otherwise quite entertaining process is that the door swings in both directions, and the other direction, there to here (if there is any real distinction to be made along these lines), can sometimes get a little bit scary. It's necessary, occasionally, not very often, but occasionally, to reestablish consensual reality and turn to real-world problems as a kind of relief. It's not really relief, but once in a great while it, by comparison, can mimic it:Rothwyn, Eldred, and a Cast of Thousands Forms take shape, like bread dough rises. That's the best metaphor I can come up with. They sit beside me, one almost on top of me. I have to ask it, "Why must you be so close?" It acts offended as it moves off away. But another next to it tells it I am right. "You mustn't," it says, "give him a fright." This happened in the middle of the night. People—I think they're people—visit me. Actually, I believe they're here all the time. But I must be attuned to them to "see" them. Other times, I (sort of) hear them rather well. Okay. Okay. You don't have to yell at me. They whisper, usually. A brief word or two. A sentence here or there. Obtuse. Confusing. Out of a void of non-understanding, we see. We create our consensus arbitrarily. But I know how to change that all around. It all starts out with nothing but the sound. Then it escalates, always when sleep is near. And sometimes just after I've had a second beer. It's become far more profound just this year. It's starting to scare me, almost like a dare. I tell myself, "There's nothing to fear." No one is here.
One of the little annoyances that added to Joachin's confusion and increased his anxiety level over the spring and summer was problems he thought he was having with his ISP and/or his phone company. It started out intermittently, odd incidents of being cut off in mid-task or an occasional inability to connect. He thought it was related to the persistent efforts of Juno to convince him to upgrade to their new software, a practice (upgrading) he's been overly cautious about since he upgraded MS Internet Explorer years ago and it caused his system to crash and took him three days to get it restored to full functionability (with the old version of IE), not to mention all of the independent software that he upgraded only to discover that functions that had been free in the earlier versions had to be paid for in the later ones, and the registry entries for them were so complicated that they effectively made it impossible to revert short of completely wiping and reinstalling his operating system. So he writes a "letter" to his ISP, never intending to send it, but just to get the matter off his chest and to create a contingency and in case, at some point in the future when he does not feel so cogent, he will have the words available, already composed. (He does this sort of thing all the time):
Message to Juno and all the other internet-related software providers: I'm autistic, so I don't do change very well. If you insist upon imposing changes on me, you have to give me much advanced notice and lots of time to respond; and "badgering" me with your incessant barrage of advertisements and email notices, figuring that eventually I will relent and download your transgressive software, will not force me to act any more quickly, it will merely drive me deeper into a state where I will resist your efforts in order to try to maintain stasis. Furthermore, if you choose not to take my considerations in this matters into account, then you act prejudically against me; in which case, if the occasion should ever arise in the future where I might get the opportunity to act prejudically against you (by favoring your competitors' products), I just might choose to do so.And this is another (abortive) attempt to communicate contingently, a note to himself written at this same time:
Write a form letter to send to anyone who emails me, informing them of how and why I do not respond; then, follow up, whenever, with the idea that, maybe, they might develop an interest and buy a book, become a fan, maybe even get to know me personally. (Yeah. Right.) Be subtle.And so Joachin's e-mail continues to pile up, adding another collection of tasks to be sorted through to determine which are really necessary to complete and which are frivolous attempts of his mind to distract him away from his primary purpose, whatever that happens to be this season, this month, this week, or this day.Please don't be offended that I am responding to your kind comments with a form letter. I will try to explain:
My past is filled with regrets about not having answered people who have tried to contact me; but often I am so overwhlemed with social contact and expectation that I can't deal with...whatever...at that moment! Or on that day. Or week. Or month. And then, when the time comes when I would want to deal with it, too much time has passed and I'd feel awkward if I would respond so belatedly. Thus regret. So I want to develop a method to mediate this problem. Thus this form letter.
There have been so many people in my life whom I have "abandoned", not intentionally, but just as a consequence of how I am, forgetful, disconcerned when they are out of sight and mind. If people want to communicate with me, they must persist, which most people tend not to do, just because that's the way people are; me included—especially me. People (probably) think that, because I don't respond in a timely or even often a belated fashion, that I don't want to associate with them; and that is just not true. There are so many people that I wish would not have given up on me and so very few whom I have decided that I do not want to associate with.
I will, one day, answer your email. It may take a week, a month, a year maybe. (Oh, but I hope not so long.) If this is not all right with you, if you would rather not be bothered, just let me know and I'll will place you in that huge and growing pile of regrets I am accumulating.
Our body needs peace of mind and is not suited to agitation. This shows that an appreciation for peace of mind is in our blood.
She always had so much to do, always running around everywhere, trying to get done far more than she could ever be capable of; and she always loved doing it. Her body seemed to need, not peace of mind, but agitation; or maybe that was just a pathological defense. He never did manage to straighten out in his mind how it was that she felt in that regard. She told him he should think more about other people's feelings, meaning hers.
He said, "So should you."
He should have said that he has a hard enough time thinking about himself. He should have told her something like, "I don't like this world and most of the people in it, so I go off and live in my own. This world sucks. If you like it, fine; but don't expect me to. He always felt that living in this world required him to do a lot more than he had the capacity for doing; and in addition, he always felt that he had to worry about it.
She told him once that he didn't seem comfortable being human. He told her that it was almost more than enough for him to accept nature the way it is. Add human nature into that mix and...well...
He's sitting on the porch on a chilly morning thinking about her. It's another dismal day. Yesterday, it rained all day. The pond is nearly filled for the year with roof run-off and he just finished putting the fish outside for the summer. They look happier now. He knows he's projecting, he knows fish don't feel in the way that he would in their situation, and certainly not consciously, but they look so happy being able to swim around freely in 300 gallons of water instead of being cooped up in a small tank for so many winter months. Conclusion: He's the one who's happy now that spring is in full swing.
But is he? He's not sure. Royce went into surgery early this morning, and Joachin forgot all about it until his sister called and left a message. He's too concerned about himself, so he never remembers the troubles of others. But the message said that Royce came through it fine. Joachin thinks he should call Royce, but he just doesn't want to push the envelope of his seclusion, especially since he just spent a 14-hour day with all of them helping his nephew move into the new house he just bought and he'll be spending another long day with them this Easter Sunday.
It's not that he minds going over to people's houses and helping out. Once he's there, he's usually quite pleased to be. It's just that in order to get ready he has to upset his whole life, re-adopt the social conventions of clothing and personal hygiene, force himself into a different sleep/wake schedule than the one he's on that he has come by according to his basic nature, re-establish the rituals of (self-)control that he used to engage in daily when he was working at a job, etc.; and it's very inconvenient for him to rearrange his life in this way; it causes him much physical and mental disruption. That's what happened the past weekend, causing his present state of ennui and dismay (he hypothesizes).
It's all getting to be too much, and most of the time it's hardly anything at all. Except that it is--to him. Maybe he needs some vitamins or something. Life shouldn't be this hard. Okay, so life can be tough sometimes; but, when it is, it should be tough for everyone. He doesn't want to be a whiner, he doesn't want to sound like one of those people who just can't accept the way that nature made people, because whatever is, is; but when, simply because of social circumstances, some people suffer while others prosper and exist in the best of posh conditions, it's a difficult concept for him to get my mind around. No matter what the fundamentalists may claim, it's just anti-Christian.
All logic and reality aside, he feels like humans should be far better as a species than they really are. They should far more easily recognize that, when the least of the species suffers, they all do. They should know, all of them, intuitively, that the sum total of existence, in this case human existence, constitutes the future well being of the species. When people adopt principles, policies, and practices that section off huge segments of populations who believe they will determine their future while the rest of the "lesser" majority are destined to suffer more and live and die less nobly, then they establish a mindset that negates much of the potential of the developing meta-bio-organism.
It pisses him off to no end when he thinks, for example, that, if he should require medical attention, he will receive a far lower quality of care (not to mention some procedures not being available to him at all) than people who have unlimited resources to pay for anything they need. Yeah, that's life. That's the way humans, as individuals, have evolved. But why can't we be broader minded than that, a species that incorporates our better nature into the social mechanisms by which we live. Society sucks, for sure, when we do not embrace each and every member of it as a valuable commodity worth nurturing, rehabilitating (or, better yet, preventing from debilitating in the first place), and assuring that they maintain some kind of a productive role in society. In other words, fuck all you rich assholes. Share the wealth, you egocentric, greedy pricks. We're all one, and you don't know it, or else you pretend not to so that you can continue to live at the expense of others.
There should be a simpler way to say all of that, Joachin thinks. And there probably is. He should practice tweeting his ideas instead. But the tweet format doesn't allow room to express the verbosity he feels. And continuing on post after post kind of misses the point, doesn't it? On the other hand, he finds it quite satisfying to restrict his expression to a fixed number of characters.
"Are some lesbians ugly," Joachin tweets, "because they're lesbians; or are they lesbians because they're ugly?"
No one he knows knows he's on Twitter, and no one had been following him, so he didn't expect any kind of response; but he ended up causing a minor uproar--if uproar is the word to use for a medium that has no vocal component; he caused a metaphorical uproar.
He got more attention from that one tweet than he got from any of his books. The great thing about Twitter is that, in addition to celebrities allowing themselves to be seen as ordinary people, ordinary people can develop (at least some form of minor) celebrity.
Joachin became a minor celebrity--for a day or two, with retweets extending the attention out over the next few weeks, slowly dying off. He picked up thirteen followers with his attempts to clarify and explain:
"Now, don't get your hackles up," he tweeted. "That's not actually offensive. It's a rationally worded observation." No one bought it, so he tried again:
"Try not to read your biases into the remark. How you interpret it reveals your prejudice."
Still, tweeters insisted that he was an anti-lesbian misogynist (which may be redundant). He's not. He loves lesbians, and he thought he might tweet that; but he decided not to. It has overtones of...well, you know.
He thought he might tweet further in way of explanation: Some lesbians are ugly (to some men; he's not sure how other lesbians see them, but he guesses that this must also be true for them, at least to to some small extent) simply because they're lesbians; that is, they naturally have a rather masculine appearance, which they will sometimes intentionally accentuate, and that appearance defies the traditional standards of what a woman in this society should look like (to more traditionally-minded men and airheaded Hollywood-type women who, out of a misplaced sense of self-worth, want to appeal to them and please them).
And--it must be said, because it's true--some lesbians, probably a much small percentage, are lesbians because they're ugly and, though they might like to hook up with a man, it's not very likely that they'll get any kind of longer-term commitment from a relatively good-looking man, and they don't really care so much to hook up with an "ugly" man who might be interested in them, not even so much because he isn't attractive as because they know he's likely to be interested in them for the wrong reason, not because he finds them attractive, but because he's desperate for sex and would take any woman who let him, which is not very romantic; but a lesbian, maybe even a good-looking one, could be interested for the right reason. All of which is an explanation that the tweeting format is not at all conducive toward.
So he gave up tweeting. It was a doomed practice in any case, he thought. Too much of a necessity to be immediately responsive. He likes to wait for some time to go by, which, by then, most people lose the sense of urgency they felt.
But, ultimately, limiting expression to restrictive formats is just too...restricting. He gave up tweeting when he realized that he already automatically restricted his expression when he talked to people in person. It's feels more natural for him to restrict his expressions when he talks; or at least remembers having spoken, later when no one is around:
That conversation happened a while ago, before the spring, when she was reading Joachin's latest book and having a hard time understanding it--as usual. Another time, she said, "I'd ask you to explain [something; he forgets what], but I'm not sure I'd understand the explanation." But he explained it anyway, even though he didn't like to do that, because the original text, he feels, is its own explanation, and she said she'd been right, that his explanation was harder to understand that the book was. Oh, yeah, now he remembers, it was something about dying. She said she was afraid of dying when he'd written that he wasn't. But he is, he'd said, afraid of any pain that might be associated with dying. As for the death itself, which he said he believes is nothing more than non-being (so that he doesn't have to be afraid of consequences in an afterlife; although, if he did believe in one, he's fairly certain he would incur very little if any punishment, considering how so many more people are so much more horrible than he ever could have even wanted to have been, had he ever had the balls to act when he chose not to), he feels not fear, but sadness, that he cannot go on experiencing, anything. He loves (his own) human experience. He loves being alive and regrets now, since he knows he cannot regret it after death, ever having to die. It pisses him off. (Anger is the sadness of hurt repressed.) He doesn't believe in a personal god, which is a good thing, because if he did, he'd be motherfucking it all over the place for its inattention and incompetence. This is the best it could do? Not much of a god if you ask him. He can understand how the trial and error of evolution could come up with this flawed system, in fact, he sees the unconscious genius it represents; but an omnipotent god? Not much in the way of omnipotent conscious genius here. If it turns out that there is a god, he's sure it will be no more conscious than the sum total of humanity, which is not very conscious at all, barely a step above the previous evolutionary rung. If there's a god, he can guarantee that it is either entirely unconscious and is pretty much synonymous with evolution or else it's one great big asshole for having created this mess. Most of that explanation was not what he'd told her at the time, most of it is how he's trying now to explain it to himself again, because he has to admit that he hadn't done a very good job of explaining to her the passage she was reading and she was quite right in her opinion that the text explained it better; because that's another reason he writes, to explain better in polished written words what he didn't do so good a job at during conversation.
After thinking back on all of that during a reverie one day when he didn't feel at all like working, he recognized how, for a brief while afterwards, he'd started to try to write so that he could be better understood--by others; but then, later, he concluded that, in order to allow others to understand him better, he had to sacrifice expressing his own true self, which then in fact resulted in others not really understanding him better at all. You can't get there from here. He'd allowed her to influence him and he fell into that same damn trap. See? This is why he doesn't like it when people try to influence, manipulate, con, or otherwise twist him into doing things, even when that is not their conscious intention; and it's at its worst when it involves requiring him to make commitments:
Here he is, with only three hours sleep last night, exhausted, too late to go to bed before he's supposed to meet his nephews to go and visit his brother who is in the hospital recovering from surgery; and the reason he's going is because Royce made him feel guilty on the phone because he had not yet stopped by. (Joachin knows how he makes himself feel guilty, he's responsible for his own feelings; but we all know what he means; he doesn't have to explain how people attribute the causation of their feelings to others because it's common human behavior that everyone engages in all the time.) There is no reason why Joachin should have to go in to visit Royce, except to let him know that Royce can still manipulate him and command his attention with his "poor me" pose.
Nothing had been going too well up until Joachin went out the morning before to get a new tire. And that wouldn't have gone well either except for the fact that he planned ahead and put a spot of red paint on the good tire (see later) and took a book to read while he waited for the tire change (lots of customers, so it took over an hour). So maybe whatever pathogen had been polluting the air this past week is finally starting to blow away, he thinks. (Maybe it was all that radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactor meltdown. Hey, you never know.)
This kind of thing happens (to him) because he's been forced out of his own agenda by social (family) circumstances. His nephew's move was a big deal, his first home purchase, and it happened right at the same time that Royce was going through some difficult health problems and had to be hospitalized. But Joachin can't blame any of his current turmoil on anyone else this time [unless he blames Royce for not having taken care of himself for so long that he created his bad health, but Joachin won't do that; or unless he blames his family for creating a general atmosphere conducive to (his own) anxiety, which he won't do either, since he chooses to own his own feelings] because, this time, it's not really anyone's fault that things have turned out the way they have, and because no one is coming to him whining about how bad their lives are, etc., etc.--although Kim had been acting rather annoying and obsessive while they were moving Roy into his new house, but Joachin was too tired to concern himself with her typical antics, exhausted beyond the point of caring, pushed into a zone of moving activity exercise, the likes of which he used to appreciate a lot when he was younger but avoids now as much as he can, for fear of another heart rhythm-related episode caused by having pushed himself too hard for too long. If he were working to his own agenda, he wouldn't have been rushing around without sleep doing these things for others; he wouldn't even be rushing around doing all the things he has to do for himself. He only had to force himself to go without sleep to take care of the car because he needed it to get to his nephew's and to the hospital (as it turned out, he couldn't drive it on the hospital day anyway because the tire went flat without him knowing it until the last minute, when the sealant he'd put in it, which looked initially like it had worked, ultimately did not, so Roy had to pick him up and drop him off back home again). If it had only been himself he had to worry about, he would have allowed the car to sit until such time as he felt in the mood to go and get everything done that had to be done, in its own time, when the time to do it was right--for him. Yeah, lots of things must be done for his own purposes, but no one has to tell him when and how. He tells himself when and how and he works around the problems until he feels good and ready to deal with them. That's how he controls his life and his attitude unless someone else (usually Kim) decides that they need to try to involve him in the insistent little dramas they create in their own lives. When he works at life his way, he gets enough sleep because he sleeps when he's tired and works when he feels energetic, and not the other way around; and in this way he avoids the drama that others create for themselves, because they feel they must bend themselves to social agendas. Fuck social agendas. They've always seemed to him to do far more harm that good.
He planned on telling her, it just popped into his head when she mentioned promotion what he'd written earlier that morning in his journal, that, if he were Chinese and he wanted to set up an eStore like one of the many Chinese ones on eBay, he'd make his member name "ka-ching"; but he forgot about it until later, after she'd left, because there were more important things to say. He does that all the time. Instead, he said:
It's like the recent debate about ISBNs, Joachin thinks. (Or maybe it's not so much like that at all.) Despite what people may have been led to believe, ISBNs are not an indication of the literary or other professional qualities of a book. An ISBN is a marketing device, and nothing else. The reader need only consider how many poorly written books "legitimate" publishers who use ISBNs publish each year. Don't be mislead by corporate misinformation, the purpose of which is not to determine quality, but to sell products, no matter how poorly they are made.
Joachin reiterates (he cannot think it to himself too much):
He writes for his own peculiar purposes. (Doesn't everyone? If not, shame on those whores.) Most importantly for him (at least from others' POVs), it's an ego thing: He likes to see his books all lined up on a shelf and doesn't much care if anyone but he himself ever reads them.
But he wouldn't mind it if anyone read them, except for the fact that it could get a little embarrassing for him if the reader were someone close to him, people like, for example, his family. But never mind that. That's a personal, not an authorship concern. And he's not going to censor himself to please people.
But, finally, deep down inside, he just can't shake that modernist perception that to be published (by a "legitimate" publisher) is to be accepted into a literary community. That's all bullshit, of course; but it's an idea that's been thoroughly conditioned into him by an academic education. Besides, who doesn't know that 'legitimate" publishers publish a whole lot of crap? POD may have far lower (if any) editorial standards, but publishers, especially in this postmodern era, are not so great either. And Joachin likes the DIY approach, not only in publishing, but in everything.
And who needs all them numbers anyway. That's not writing, and it's hardly even publishing except that publishers make it so; that's a business concern, and a corporate one at that. Fuck that crap. Right now, he's more concerned with ideas like: How many times can you proof a document? When do you stop revising? (For him, never, if he happens to reread it later after having published it.) But, for all practical purposes, you have to let go at some point and move on, if only because every time you revise, in order to change the online working (POD) file, you have to order another proof. Some company should come along and allow you to wing it and let you hope that they got the print copy correct.
This is all diversion, Joachin understands. Again and again, he comes to this same conclusion: Life is diversion. The problem is not in not knowing that, but in deciding what is not diversion; although, in a particular sense (because he always wants to think that his primary purpose in life, whatever it happens to be at the moment, is a great universal concern worthy of being a life's goal, and not the picayune troubles that, to mix a metaphor, bug the daily shit out of him), what is not diversion at this particular time in his life is taking care of all of the routine government paperwork associated with officially retiring. And he just doesn't want to have to do it. Not right now. Maybe tomorrow. He's got some time left yet.
She doesn't understand him, she will never understand him, she doesn't really even want to understand him, even though she thinks she does. She will never be capable of setting aside her conventional mindset long enough to fully comprehend how his orientation to life is so fundamentally different from hers. She showed up to read his next new book, which he finally decided is finished.
He just spent eight hours overnight (after having slept eight hours the previous afternoon and evening) creating the cover art for the book. It didn't turn out anything like he planned because, in keeping with a week-long theme, nothing has been going his way. ("Oh, boo-hoo," she'd say, if he had said that to her; but he chose not to.) But he very much likes the way the cover looks, accidental though it is.
She doesn't recognize the very busy front-cover image until he points out to her exactly what it is, and then she says she likes it, which, by the tentative tone of her voice, he thinks she probably doesn't. She doesn't care much for guitars in any case.
At five in the morning, Joachin was out in the dining room taking digital photos of his guitars (one of the primary themes of two of the novellas in the book) and, since his house lights out there are so dim and he didn't feel like waiting for the sun to come up (which it never did anyway, in keeping with a week-long theme of constant rain), he used sunlamps.
He worried that his neighbors might wonder what the bright lights were, since he never closes his curtains in that front office (because there's just too much project junk blocking them on the sill and the table in front of the window. But the neighbors were probably all tucked into their warm beds and anyone who would have been up this early on a Sunday morning (or this late on a Saturday night) would probably intuitively understand eccentric behavior.
Now he's got to get ready to go over, without sleep, to his nephew's new home for Easter, another week-long theme: out doing what must be done, pushing the awake-time envelope when he really should be (and very much feels like) sleeping. It all started the previous Saturday when he went out without sleep to help his nephew move. Then, he had to go with his nephew to visit his brother in the hospital, again without sleep. Then he had to go and get some tire sealer to try to stop the slow leak in his right front tire. The sealer didn't work, so the next day he had to forego sleep again to go and get a new tire. When he was trying to seal the old one, he decided to mark the good tire with red paint so that, if he had to get the other one replaced, they wouldn't replace the wrong one; and, wouldn't you know it, that's exactly what they did. He knew that ahead of time. (His psychic ability, or intuition, or whatever it is, always peaks when he doesn't get enough sleep.) So he had to go back and have them exchange the bad tire that they put in the trunk for the good one that they were going to toss.
But (here's the significant part, the reason he's writing about this) he did all of that, went and got the tires and went back and did the exchange, both without any anxiety at all and with all the forethought and geniality of the competent adult that he is, and not like the withdrawn, taciturn dork that stonewalls everyone and exists in his own separate world; and all while severely sleep deprived. He feels great to be in control. He should act this way more often. But then, he is what he is.
So, continuing on this theme of the mature adult, he asked her to go with him to his nephew's house for dinner, but she said no, she had somewhere else to go. (He knew she'd say no, which is probably why he asked her; so much for mature adulthood.) He asked her where she had to go, but she wouldn't tell him. That pissed him off, made him all suspicious, and would have changed the way he treated her that morning, but it was already too late, so he forced himself to repress the feeling and appreciate the fact that she chose to come over at all. He hadn't expected her; in fact, he'd almost forgotten all about her.
Other than that experience with her however, his Easter was uneventful. Everyone at Roy's house behaved quite well, which was another of the week's positive outcomes. Royce had insisted that he be released from the hospital for Easter and be readmitted the following Tuesday. The doctors, or whomever, didn't want to do it; but, really, they had no choice. And Royce acted completely normally all day and evening, as if it were twenty years earlier.
The next day, Joachin is sitting on his front porch after having spent several hours working in the yard (80 degree weather in April), contemplating the nature of his postmodern existence. Here he is, still working hard, and for what? The grass must, of course, be cut; and he doesn't really want to pay anyone to do it. And, besides, since all of what was once his lawn is now garden beds, his entire yard has to be trimmed with a weed whacker in between beds, bushes, trees, and perennials; not something a professional landscaper would do cheaply. And other basic maintenance crap must be done, and he's not likely to pay anyone else to do any of that either. So he's kind of resigned to having to work at that kind of stuff; but, other than basic maintenance, why does he work so hard? Because he's ambitious, he guesses.
He wants to accomplish certain things, and so he works at them. But he's thinking, although he does work in a dedicated way, he really doesn't work all that hard (exhausting physical yard work, etc. excepted). When he compares how he works now with how he worked at the various jobs he's had, he worked much harder back then, because he could not take long breaks whenever he wanted, and the few he was allowed to have were hardly long enough nor diverting enough to afford mental relief. Now, though he might occasionally work through the night until morning in a marathon session, usually he dedicates himself across tasks and projects, doing a little bit of each here and there as his fancy suggests, accomplishing a whole lot over time, but hardly in any way that an employer might want work done. Right now, for example, he's working at writing, expressing himself, in between yard work, house maintenance, and projects tasks that, if he finishes any of them, great, but if he doesn't, well, hell, there's always tomorrow, or next week, or next year. He accomplishes a lot in this way over time. Rule #31: "A little bit every day equals a whole lot every year." But try and convince an employer that you would like to work that way. Jobs suck.
His neighbors have all gone back to work after the holiday and the neighborhood is quiet again. Not that it's all that noisy most of the time, but someone on weekends, especially on holiday weekends, is always round and about, cutting grass, whacking weeds, cooking out, talking and laughing, being frivolously sociable. It's nice to be alone in the neighborhood. That's one advantage of the corporate culture: People go somewhere else to work. He realizes that this atmosphere now is like he used to experience summer Sunday mornings when he was growing up. He'd sit out on the porch and soak up the peace, when everyone else was either in bed, inside their houses, or gone off to church. No one in his neighborhood goes to church. He lives in a neighborhood of heathens. Not that he's complaining. Heathens are a nicer lot that religious people are. They're far less judgmental. They don't try to impose their superstitions on you through legislation.
He thinks about that time way back, a long time ago, back when he used to sit out on the porch of his childhood home, when he didn't yet know that he wasn't a "true" Christian (or else he was a true Christian and all those other people who claim to be actually are not), thinking about Jesus' suffering and what it meant, and concluding that he was an extraordinary person, not because he was a god, as all of the good Christians claimed, but because he was in fact just a man with a vision who somehow, whether literally or in a more vaguely intuitive way, knew that, if he were to put up with all he had to put up with in his life, someone, somewhere, would take note and his actions and beliefs would make a difference in the world; not unlike though far more extreme than when Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world."
Subsequently, as time went on, Joachin forgot all of that, still understanding that Jesus was a great man exactly for that reason, but forgetting his recognition of the extremes of torturous pain Jesus willingly endured; until he watched The Passion of the Christ on Easter at it his nephew's house and it all came back to him. No, he doesn't believe that Jesus was a god (in any way that each of the rest of humanity are not also). No, he's not certain, but he doesn't believe that Jesus rose from the dead. That could very easily have been some fantasy story cocked up by his followers. But, even if he did rise, that could also be a very human possibility; people do it all the time. But Gibson made a perfect case in the film for the greatness of Jesus the man. All that god shit aside, we should all still want to be just like him. (Jesus, not Gibson; we should definitely not want to be like Gibson.)
Passion. Yeah. That it's. It's all about passion. Or else it isn't, and you find yourself lacking. He remembers her, and sees now how she's changed. She never used to be so serious. She was always so passionate about frivolity. But she's changed. That's probably his fault.
Nevertheless, when he heard her car door slam, back before she moved out of the neighborhood and got married, he had to rush to the front window to see what she was wearing. It had nothing to do with fashion, really. It was all about her. He couldn't help himself. He always wanted to see how she was dressed. He always imagined how she might be messed.
She'd have liked that back then. She liked it when he rhymed in normal conversation. And she liked it when he ruined her make-up or ruffled her clothing. Not like now, being all particular about how she looked. She also liked it when he imitated cartoons, like Elmer Fudd or Sylvester the Pussycat. "Sufferin' succotash" always made her laugh. But when he tried to get serious...that's when he started to lose her. Like the time he tried to explain to her his "theory" about lisping:
People who lisp, unless they have a physical deformity, perhaps do so because they do not take the time or haven't been properly trained to position the mouth and tongue correctly in order to produce what mainstream society considers acceptable vocalizations; in other words, they leave their tongues too far out between their teeth. "Consider," he said, "how [some of the?] the Portugese speak in this regard." Although that'd be a form of lisping that is socially acceptable and trained thusly. Otherwise, lisping can be considered to be a form of behavioral laziness (probably erroneously, since laziness in general is often a mistaken perception), which might be considered, like other forms of laziness, to be a defense mechanism in that it's a way of refusing to commit oneself to conform to the expectations for how a person should talk; in other words, by lisping, one hangs back in an introverted manner, protecting one's delicate parts (mind, feelings) and takes the "easy" (more relaxed oral muscles) way out, the personal (introverted, or even autistic) as opposed to the sociable way of forming words with better "precision."
She seriously began to lose interest, until he added that this form of protective behavior is like a thimble: Just as lisping protects one's inner self, a thimble protects one's fingers. Therefore, a thimble is a metaphor for a person who lisps, as well as being literally a symbol to a lisping person. She liked that. She thought that was clever. And, really, it was the only reason he formulated his theory of lisping in the first place, so that he could get to that punch line.
But, enough of this. Joachin sets aside his memories and goes back to the more practical activity of yard work.
The next morning, Joachin awakens with a stiff back from all the bending and lifting yard work he did the day before; and, as the day progresses, so does his back pain, until by nightfall it is excruciating. He concludes, once again tentatively, because every conclusion eventually ends later in doubt, that maybe inflammation doesn't cause his back "attacks," maybe an injured back (pinched nerves at a specific point caused by dislocated vertebrae) causes inflammation at that point, which then subsequently spreads to whatever degree throughout (whichever part of) (whichever) system. He remembers the exact point in time when he hurt his back on Monday by doing extensive bending while running sisal for the hops bines and cultivating them. On Tuesday morning, his back is even worse. By Wednesday morning, his entire spine aches and he has a severe headache. By Wednesday night, he is feverish in that way he used to get all the time, which he always recovered from immediately after getting a significant amount of sleep; which was also the case here.
Or maybe it works both ways, maybe an injury aggravates an already (albeit mild and so unnoticed) inflamed area, the area being more prone to injury because it is inflamed and which then signals the immune system to "defend" the body by more generally attacking erroneously perceived injuries elsewhere. He doesn't know; and neither do the so-called professionals, at least not those on the most reputable websites. At least, he thinks, they admit that they don't know. His personal experience with real-world healthcare professionals indicates that, if they don't know, they'll make something up. Can't have the layman know you don't really know what you're doing.