The Story of His Life

by

j jackson

I

Born unwillingly into this world, from the start, or before it, he balked at its nature. He never wants to do things the way they are "supposed" to be done. He never wants to accept the conventional way of doing things. He must always re-invent the wheel, starting out from scratch to do what he wants to do by recreating methods that already exist, because he has to be exhaustively complete, from the beginning, having known and done whatever it is he does every step of the way--and by himself, and because he must thereby learn how it is that everything is done, to teach himself, that is, and to verify that the conventional way that things are done is the best way after all, if that turns out to be the case.

Only through this method can he feel fulfilled. If he starts out at a midpoint, building upon a base that someone else has started, he feels disoriented and confused, riddled with lacunae of non-completed tasks, missing information and experience. How can he be a complete text not knowing every nuance of the subject? He doesn't want to be, ever, the author of a non-authoritative work that is his life. Authority, in this sense, grows out of the experience of having done the work--all of it.

If he is ever required to start some task or project midstream, such as when he worked at jobs and had to solve problems without knowing their full nature, having to jump right into the work up to his ass and elbows without being allowed to investigate the matter in detail beforehand, he can't seem to come to an adequate conclusion that satisfies anyone, especially himself. He is an onanist in this regard: as a member of a team assigned to a project, which is what participation in any social situation is, he balks--because all social situations are of necessity midstream enterprises.

Sooner or later, he must back out of these kinds of endeavors. He'll stay in for awhile, but eventually, he must go off and do it on his own. His sense of self demands that he rearrange the content of his life and the projects in which he participates (which are, in fact, his life; the direction of it) so that he can understand their structure, their logic, their nature. This kind of exhaustive understanding requires separation. Too many people have impregnated too many social situations with too many false ideas and erroneous details. Unless he scuppers them by starting from scratch, he cannot be satisfied or effective in any work he does; or for that matter in any relationship in which he participates.

He's in a bedroom on the second floor of his current home thinking about his bedroom on the first floor of the home that he grew up in. He lived there for a while after his parents died and before he moved away to be truly on his own. The first floor bedroom is off to the south of a large hallway that is like a bedroom in itself. The bathroom opens to the west (to the left in his current mental orientation) and the stairs to the second floor, where he is now in a different time and place, are to the east. That is, on the first floor, the entry from the front of the house is on the east (the right) and is a narrow passage to the north of a set of enclosed stairs to the second floor, the passage being on the outside wall of the house while the stairs are nearer to (but not in) the center; but on the second floor in his different time and place, the stairs rise to it from the east without a parallel passageway. Windows on the west walls of both bedrooms open onto wide areas of undeveloped land, in the second case upon hilly woods, but in the first case upon a very gradually descending slope of cleared land and fields with woods in the far distance beyond them.

He is a teenager, a year out of high school, on the first floor; but thinking back on it from the second floor, he has the sensibilities and experience of an older man. This is the advantage of telling a story: he can be himself in a young and virile body. On the first floor, he is presented, through a series of circumstances eventuated by the death of his parents, with the opportunity to have sex with a teenage girl, still in high school, a senior, who is not so cute (a bit man-ish, in fact) and who is fat; but he doesn't care about that, he wants it anyway, mostly because she has enormous tits. The girl is not at all attracted to him (or to any guy, he thinks). He knows this now, and he had an inkling of it back then. In fact, there is every indication that she is a latent lesbian. But she wants to get laid, for the experience (this is what she told him, after they saw the movie The Last Picture Show together) and possibly to convince herself that she is not a lesbian--or maybe to verify to herself, as an unconscious agenda, that she is.

They get into bed, and he is quite excited, anticipating the coming event. He lies on top of her. She is rather heftier below the waist than she is above it, which is hidden quite well when she is clothed; but she's not terribly unattractive, not so much as most fat girls are. He prepares to enter her. But there is a complication: his ex-girlfriend appears in the hallway, standing at the entrance to the room.

Did this really happen? Any of it? Or is he making it all up? Or some part of it, modifying it to fit his later expectations? In any case, Dawn, his ex, is quite upset, and jealous. Despite the fact that they have broken up, she still cares for him; yet it was she, not he, who decided that they should not be together. He ignores her; that is, he knows quite readily what she is feeling because he can feel it too, but only affectively and not at all personality-wise, yet as if she is actually here, now on the second floor, like she was not quite there back then, on the first.

Dawn settles in the hallway. That's how he remembers the place, sfter his parents died. The hallway becomes her bedroom, except that she has no bed. But wait. That was later. It all gets so confusing, his life, when it develops like a story, when the later parts of it seem to conflict with the earlier parts because you can't quite remember. Dawn sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor because he has rented out the rooms on the second floor and she has nowhere else to go. All of her possessions are gathered into boxes and bags arranged around her sleeping area, a more or less permanent situation--i.e., long-term temporary, before she settled in more permanently; but nothing is so permanent that life cannot undo it. It's like he knew all this earlier, even though it wasn't so consciously available to him, when he was in the bedroom having sex with the fat girl. What was her name? He can't remember it.

Dawn, or her memory, hangs around outside the room that he and the fat girl are having sex in. She is besotted with hormonal juices, unable to let go of him, even though she is the one who has separated from him and even cheated on him before she did. He can't remember exactly when she first arrived at the house to stay; but when she did, she knew about the fat girl and was jealous, which he thought was flattering, but irrelevant. In fact, if it weren't for that jealousy, he might never have agreed to let her stay.

Yet still, even if she wasn't there that day, he was aware of her presence, as if she knew what had been going on. He knew even before they broke up, in that way he knew about things as if he were immediately present as a part of her state of mind, that she was being unfaithful to him, and after he had sex with the fat girl, that they were being unfaithful to each other, because she must have known in the same way that he did that he had been unfaithful to her, even though that was after they had broken up, because although he may not have actually ever cheated on her, he'd thought about it, and with that fat girl too, in which case she may have had some justification (hormonal/instinctual at least) to feel this way, at least later, because he was cheating on her memory.

Yet still, she was cheating on him long before he ever started going out on her, which he did with her full knowledge after she had moved into the hallway, because he wasn't about to do it behind her back. He may be an asshole, acting as he did while knowing how she felt, but he wasn't the kind of asshole who cheats on women when they don't know about it. He didn't know she had been cheating on him when they were together. Well, he did and he didn't. Thinking back on it from the second floor bedroom, he can see how he knew but ignored it, how all of the evidence was there, but he didn't want to believe it.

To "prove" to himself that her opinion doesn't matter, because she abandoned him, she's the one who broke up with him, he walks across the room and shuts the door, shutting out her feelings and allowing him to jump into bed again with the fat girl, whether Dawn is in the hall or not. If she is in the hall, actually, potentially, or in spirit doesn't matter. She is there, in one way or another.

The fat girl, her name was Lisa, he remembers now, says she doesn't know if she really wants to do this, which seems kind of a strange thing to say now that they are naked. He tells her that she's just scared, and she insists she's not. But he can tell from the way she says it and from the way she is acting that she is. He makes her feels good about what they are about to do by caressing her and holding her and lying close to her and he has it in before she knows what's happening, and then she begins to enjoy it.

Afterwards, she says she didn't know it'd be like that. He asks her if she means that it was good, or not so good. She says that it was good, but she didn't understand. Understand what? What it was going to be like. Like what, like she'd lose control? He tries to get her to say what she means, but she says she doesn't know. He thinks that she just doesn't want to talk about it. He tries to get her to further explain, but she will not. She only says that she thought about things she'd never thought of before. When? While they were doing it, before and after. Before and after what? She will not say. He assumes, later, on the second floor, that she meant she thought about doing it with girls.

II

He and Dawn are in bed. This must have been after he'd had sex with Lisa, because he has the idea that they had been asleep together, and they had never actually slept together before he'd been with Lisa. But maybe not. Maybe they were just in bed after school one day, before his parents came home from work.

The huge double bed has its headboard against the west wall to the south of the window. But the bed was not pushed up against the south wall like it had earlier been, because he remembers his leg having been hanging off the bed to that side, so it had to have been later, after Lisa, because before that the bed was pushed up against the wall.

They're huddled together, back to back, under a single small sheet. The memories suddenly begin to return and flood his brain. It's summer, but it's cold. It's the middle of the night. They awaken, shivering and take small comfort in sharing their body heat back-to-back, pushed together to try and stay beneath the small sheet.

Later, in the late morning (or afternoon? or later, toward evening?), downstairs in the dining room--wait. No. This was in his new house, years later, and they were in the bed upstairs, in the back bedroom--they sit at the table in the dining room, which is positioned farther to the south than it is now, so this had to be just after he'd moved in because the table then was pretty much in line with the hallway, not quite up against the wall, instead of in the middle of the room like it is now. And whatever time it is, it feels like the light is waning, as if the sun is streaming in through the front door at the end of the hall and residual sunlight is reflected in soft tones through the dining room windows at the back of the house, softer tones than a morning sun emits, softer than the bright morning light in the hallway of the old house.

They share a cryptic conversation that he thinks he understands, but only recognizes later from the second floor had meant a whole lot more than he ever then could have known. He has it all confused with a dream he'd had early that morning, when it was rainy and cold outside and he'd tried to take some comfort from her warm back and from the brief episodes of sleep he'd manage to fall back into.

They were sitting in the dining room with his mother and father having a conversation, the nature of which was out-of-context with the circumstances of the dream itself and contained a subtext available only to Dawn and him. Dawn abruptly, yet in a matter-of-fact manner, asks "When am I going to get _____?" The blank is a word that means "fucked," something like "porked" (but not quite, because this was a word she and he used/thought, in their own separate, private subtexts, shared by their association with each other, but never used in common conversation), but it is at the same time a more polite version of the word, somewhat less offensive (yet still somewhat offensive) to his mother. He knows this despite the fact that there is no content or symbolism in the dream to indicate it--in the same way that he feels Dawn's jealousy when he is with Lisa.

In fact, he thinks, in general, most of his dream content, when it is not strictly images, is of this type. He thinks, later, on the second floor, that this dream seems to answer his doubts about that time when he was with Lisa, that Dawn, off in her own little corner of his mind, was plaintively crying out, wondering when it is going to be her turn, because even a fat and homely girl like Lisa can get "porked."

They sit alone in the dining room with the sun washing through the house in that sad way that it will sometimes, when contentment eludes them and they are nothing more than two people living independent lives who happen to be sharing a house and bed, the ghosts of his parents having followed them from the previous abode, because they weren't happy living there together, neither he and Dawn, nor his parents. They thought that moving to a new place might solve their problems, so his parents killed themselves in a suicide pact and he bought a new home.

From the second floor, he wants to make this situation that he remembers via his jumbled memories into a vengeance kind of mini-story, but the poignancy of Dawn's jealousy, although he was able to disregard it throughout most of his life, is potent enough to allow him to sympathize, if not empathize, with her, But the motive toward revenge remains still with him, however much he misses her and wishes she were here with him in his new home, even though they might still suffer the strained relations of two ex-lovers growing into strangers.

But the inevitability of events cannot be undone. He has a great time, he remembers, with Lisa that day long ago. He expends much extra effort to please her because, although he does not consciously realize why and will only rationalize it all out later, she needs to know that sex can be wonderful with a man who cares for her, even if he or even his gender is not the motivation for her attraction. He had planned, when he had first spoken with Lisa (the memories are becoming clearer now) to just have sex; nothing more--because he'd had the idea all along that Dawn was going to return, and so all he'd wanted to do, initially, was to get it on and get it over with, to have a good time, in his own way. But he gets carried away once he's in bed with her, and even as he does, he knows he shouldn't, lest she become enamored of him and begin to want to possess and change him, which is exactly what happens.

They become involved, and she begins to become (more, or more consciously) concerned about being fat. She beseeches him with questions about his attraction for her: stuff like would he like her better if she were not so fat? Would he feel more attracted to her? Also, she wonders, while they are in bed after just having had sex, maybe for the first time, if she is a lesbian. She doesn't bring this up directly, but hints at it, so that he has to guess for a while what she's talking about until he finally figures it out. This provides him with the opportunity to relate his ideas/beliefs about the nature of sexuality/love.

She thinks she loves him (which she doesn't say to him, but he knows what she's feeling anyway), but he explains the nature of the instinct/physiology of women and how it can interfere with a real perception of what love is. He didn't know back then that he knew these things he was explaining, and so maybe the words were not so correct to get his point across. She wants to know, without asking directly, if he loves her, and when he finally figures out what she's asking, he explains that men are different than women, that they don't feel what women feel when they have sex, that it's more of a physical thing; far less emotion-bound. He tells her that when men tell women that they love them, it's usually because that's what the women want to hear and not what the man feels.

This "explanation" only causes her to want to know even more if he loves her. What's happening here is that she's trying to decide if she should love him or decide that he's an asshole because he's a typical guy, so that she should go and look for a woman instead (although she probably doesn't know this consciously, yet). He avoids the trap by not committing one way or the other whether he loves her or not, telling her that love is a feeling that grows with time, sort of holding out a promise to her for things to come. But, deep down so that it is all but unconscious, he knows that he can't really love her because he still loves Dawn, which is why he can't be as vengeful toward Dawn as he might otherwise want to be.

The act of having sex with Lisa is vengeance enough, he thinks. Despite her original one-night-stand agenda, Lisa comes to see him for more than a week, and they have sex every day. When she breaks up with him, she tells him that she's doing so even though she loves the sex (which he thinks she means that she loves him, but cannot bring herself to say it), because he will not change to accommodate her needs. She wants him to change, but she can't tell him in what way. He thought for a long time that she meant, without knowing it, that she wanted him to love her instead of Dawn, even though she could never have known that. He thinks now that what she wanted was for him to become a woman.

Before he and Dawn break up that final time, forever, they are lying in bed. She always kept her back to him during those last days. They are always feeling cold and unable to make each other completely warm, like they used to do a long time ago. She thinks that the problem is that she doesn't get enough sex, which has nothing to do with him, really, because she's the one who ignores him, trying through her pouting distance to get him to act in some way that she'll never vocalize so that he could know what it is and attempt to comply--not that he necessarily would, but at least then it would be his fault (or maybe not his fault, but his responsibility) that he will not do what it is that she wants him to.

She pouts, outside his room when he is having sex with Lisa, thinking it will make him act in some way that will bring them back together maybe. But it will not. Not back then, and not ever, really, no matter how much she tries to return, again and again, to get something she lost when they were young, by virtue of the fact that they had always been two different people. If she wants him, the only chance she has is if she will drop the stance and confront him directly. But women, generally, do not do that. They prefer (are unconsciously driven) instead to play instinctual games.

What he should have done, long ago, was to have acted on his vengeance motive instead of repressing it and simply left the area for good, never to return and never to have given Dawn another thought. She had done something to him that he could not forgive: she had been unfaithful. That was something that can never be undone. Instead of putting it behind him, he allowed it to develop and to dominate his life, mostly because he couldn't bring himself to fully admit that it was true. It was only after he worked this all out, on the second floor, that he became free to enter the second phase of his life, the spiritual phase, which he sees now he had been yearning toward all his life, but never able to break free so that he might then pursue it.

III

You can be politically aware, he'd thought, without being a political person. He does not believe in engaging in political action. Political action is by definition the alienation of large segments of population. He operates from the opposite philosophy: he believes in unanimous unity, which can only be achieved by psychological and/or spiritual means and never in the world of physical reality, at least as it exists today. (Maybe after the Christian Millennium, there is hope.)

After the Christian Millennium, the very thing that we abhor as independently minded Americans will exist: "authorities" will know the contents of our minds. But there will be no "mind police" working for the government like there now is because we would know their mind content too. Everyone will know everything about everyone, at least as a matter of conscious purpose, and it will be a better world, because no one will be able to act except that he is kept in check by everybody else, which means that if someone is being kept in check erroneously or perversely, out of harmony with the will of the population at large (which will be one), in a way inconsistent with genuine human purposes, that fact will be known and countered mentally/spiritually. This may sound like liberal philosophy, but it is not; or will not be, in practice, because conservatism and liberalism will counteract each other and cancel each other out, as will all dichotomies

Politics is theoretical positions made practical through selective behavior. He tends to "side" with liberals, because he sees the inherent correctness of liberal theory, the way it "cares" for people (theoretically) in a way that conservatism does not. But he does not act toward liberal agendas because to do so would alienate conservatives and create a backlash that would diminish the liberal position; and because liberals, when they act politically, often will abandon their principles in order to achieve practical results, a problem that conservatives do not have to worry so much about, because their principles are already disgusting enough to blend right into practical schemes of political action.

The fact that conservatives are wrong, however, does not diminish their position, because conservatives are more practical people than liberals tend to be. For this reason he cannot lend his support to liberal causes: he can't afford to align himself with "losers." And, ultimately, liberals who engage in the political process are losers. They may win a few points and elections from time to time in the short term. But they will always in the longer term be beaten by practical people whose ruthlessness will always trump liberals' more caring convictions. Might may not make right, but it tends to control long term political agendas. This is why liberals stay to the middle of the road: they want to get elected; they want the power.

But politics is most poignant when it hits the home. He watches from the hill behind the house where he is burning papers as two young women arrive and consult on the south lawn in front of the house as preparation before entering. They are here to "investigate" and "advise" Dawn in her ongoing quest to "justify" (or otherwise learn to deal with) her domestic problems.

But he wonders if it is he himself who, observing the same two women from the second floor, is trying to learn this same thing, how to deal with his past life with Dawn.

These two women are slightly overweight and plain, but have abnormally good opinions of themselves. [He will later conclude that these opinions were self-constructed ala twelve-step programs, positive self-image psychology, etc.; i.e., self-instilled to overlay instead of replace the negative crap that they still harbor--all of the resentment that, instead of dealing with it therapeutically, they use as an agenda to spread their destructive message while pretending to "help" other women, all of which he knows is true because he is projecting his own horrible psychology onto them, which they fit into so well that they are the perfect foils for it, the perfect hooks.] They owe their good self-images, these women, to the "job" they do, i.e., "helping" women (like themselves; i.e., fucked-up) to deal with the "psychological abuse" that they have suffered as a result of, but not necessarily caused by (in his opinion) their experiences with men. Cut to:

The living room. He sits in the chair by the door to the dining room. Dawn is on the couch. One of the women from outside is across the room to the south, standing; but she isn't exactly the same woman as she had appeared to him to be from the hill out back. She's a little bit older, more mature, and definitely more attractive in that way that older women who maintain their physiques get when their "attitudes" mellow a bit, perhaps because they've finally gotten enough good sex, whereas when they were younger, they resented all men because the losers they hooked up with didn't know how to properly get them to a full orgasmic release. She's not fat at all, but slim and wearing a pair of those oddly-cut slacks that appear to have been designed to mimic ladies riding pants. If this is the same woman who had been a few minutes earlier outside consulting on the lawn, and he has no doubt that it is, then she has changed quite a bit--or rather, his perception of her has changed, but how much so still remains to be seen. Has it changed enough to change his original opinion?

The other woman however has turned into large man-like creature and stands in the middle of the room like a lecturing Dr. Phil in an expensive, but non-descript suit that s/he probably thinks is quite professional looking (like Dr. Phil himself). S/he is "investigating" him--and another guy, he later thinks, who is not himself, except that everyone in the room other than he himself thinks he is identical with him. In fact, he is having a hard time distinguishing himself from him, just as, later, he will have the same problem distinguishing between the Dr. Phil woman and his own investigating self, because he sees that his aim, if not his motivation, is exactly the same as hers: to discover the truth; however his truth, he feels, would be more objective, whereas hers will be severely biased, based upon social/political stereotypes.

Dr. Phil approaches him, intensifying her questioning as s/he does, leading him to believe that s/he doesn't have his best interests at heart, especially when s/he begins to lean over him too closely so that he has to tell her to back off, which s/he willingly complies with, trying to make it seem like s/he had no intention of violating his personal space, when that is exactly what s/he was trying to do, to intimidate him in order to get the "information" that they wants so that they may establish the foundations of their "case."

He points out to her, after s/he claims that s/he wants to be as objective as s/he possibly can be, that s/he and her cohort, who throws in a question or two from time to time (he finds himself wishing that it were she who would come close to him and lean in over him), have no intention of being objective, and their pretense at it disgusts him. They pretend they don't know what he means so that he has to explain in more detail:

"I know what leading questions are. And I know what loaded questions are. And the two of you have been using both. You maintain this professional investigatory attitude, but your intent is to uncover information that is favorable to Dawn's opinions. If you happen to find any, you will be quite quick to include it in your reports; but if you find anything that is not conducive to her positive position, as likely as not you'll find some justification for excluding it."

Confronted thusly, and seeing that s/he is not dealing with an amateur, s/he shifts her focus to the other guy (the other aspect of his own self, as s/he seems to want to see the situation), and s/he begins using him to get the scoop on his own self. Although he sees through this ploy too, he does not point this out, because he himself is a bit curious about (and intimidated by, he will later realize) the other guy. This is when everything really starts to get confusing; and this is the point from which all of the confusion of the rest of his life proceeds, until the day he decides to move onto his second floor after the last renters have moved out, to begin to make a concentrated, twenty-four hour a day effort to straighten it all out in his own mind.

The television is on, volume turned low so that it can barely be heard when no one is talking. A western is underway, perhaps an old movie or a rerun of "Gunsmoke" or "The Virginian." The other guy, the bad guy, has, at first, a gun, but later he has a bow and arrow. They all move, first, into the kitchen where he points the weapon(s) in a semi-threatening manner at various targets, scanning its aim past everyone else in the room as he does; and then they go outside, where both he and the other guy target a distant tree. The other guy just misses it on his first shot, proving that he is a capable, but not an expert archer. He himself then takes the bow and hits the tree dead center.

As the other guy goes off toward the hill to the south, Dr. Phil questions him re the nature of this other character. He is non-committal, but he realizes, keeping it to himself [thereby compartmentalizing his investigation, some of it functioning in the (detached) personality of Dr. Phil, another part of it reserved for his own ego "self"], that the other guy is at best a nuisance, but worse, he could be dangerous. He climbs what at first he himself thinks is a tree and targets objects on the ground to the south. But the tree, as he looks more closely at it, turns out to be a huge pagoda-like house (yet in a western style of rustic wooden construction with buttresses and overhanging eaves, consistent with the television program), each floor (except the ground floor) a single room, each room slightly smaller that the one it is stacked on top of.

Politics, of course, is a practice that often requires diplomacy and tact. And Dr. Phil possesses excess quantities of both, so that the conversation proceeds quite amiably despite its content. But conservatives who believe themselves to be liberals are quite good at disguising their agendas so that it's difficult to see their ruthlessness. The television western ends just as the conversation is winding to a close. Both sides have made many cryptic remarks, for good and bad. The eventual upshot has already been concluded in any event. Dawn is gone and he lives now alone, searching for the spirituality that he feels has been missing from his life. For the first time now he feels like he has a chance of finding it. Living on the second floor has helped a lot.