Might makes right

I am only sure about what I feel. Sometimes there seems to be a correlation with the world at large, but I have recently given up looking for it.

I work very hard, murderously hard, for goals new and old. All of that sweat and discomfort will never seem wasted if I know there are good people in the world. Living and bringing life, teaching and learning, arrow and target, fish-stick and flounder.

I know there are lots of people that feel the same way, they are not heard, because they are shy or embarrassed. I, for one, am tired of lying back and resting on precedent to avoid the fall.

We are shuddering to a halt and I am tired of not celebrating the gifts that are all around us for the taking if we can manage to break the bonds of fealty to a system that has damned us.

No longer will I let things go by as they have; unadored, unreverered, unloved, untouched, unexplored, unplumbed, or lonely.

It is not labor to share love, it is relief. It is in us and when we can refuse the unnatural urge to be quiet, then we will get on with the productive work of living.

This I pledge to myself and the people of earth

To you. To everyone, the world really.

I just started reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

Of course, of course, I had heard of it. I had been exposed to it.

I even lived in a house with it. I remember specifically looking at a shelf where the book lived with The Fountainhead, and Foucault’s Pendulum.

These were all very fat paperbacks, with exciting, compelling covers that I never once cracked. They belonged to a woman. She was a woman when I was a boy, and she did her damnedest to drag me into modernity with her.

She was six weeks younger than me.

When I met her she was smarter than me, while I knew her she was smarter than me, and by all probability is still a lot smarter than me.

After starting the book yesterday, and realizing that it is prescient in nearly every detail to the world of today, I couldn’t sleep. Not a wink.

I lay there thinking. Not about the downward slide of this country, or the captured prose fifty years in the offing, not about the electorate knowingly refusing to learn or actually know anything.

No. I thought about her, and the person she might have been, and may be. We had never, to my recollection, had a political discussion. I think she had that book when I met her. The person that would form in a fire like that must have been great.

I wouldn’t know.

She read that book and could see the future approach. I read it now and see the past. I read the futures not lived, and the failure to change the world on every page.

I am so sorry to everyone. If I had been the mischievous reader then that I am now, this mess could have been avoided. At least steps could have been made and others fought to get us off in a better direction.

I wouldn’t be the person I am now, that is certain. Whatever that means. I wouldn’t have had the ridiculous adventures I have had. I wouldn’t have done ill to the world. Or infrequent good. The folly and misfortune wrought by me would not have rippled out.

I am sorry again. Not because I have enjoyed my life, but because that is all I have done

It’s a hell of a thing.

Living.

Strange how that happens if you let it.

I recently was having a conversation. I answered a question freely and without malice aforethought. The problem with the answer that I gave is the stark and imposing fact that it in no way reflected either the truth of the situation, the way I felt about the situation or even the way I wanted to feel about it.

I recognized this feeling, there was nothing true about what I had said. There were a lot of words, and no veracity whatsoever, but there wasn’t any remorse, either. It was simply something that I had said, same as anything else, and I could have defended it with great aplomb, and probably convinced you and even myself that what I was saying was what I believed when it was so clearly not.

For the first time, I cocked my head to the side and said ‘That’s not true, what I just said there, none of that was true.’

I did not consider it a lie, and even now, by some miracle of indulgent justification I still do not. The question was not about facts, after all, there are facts, and there are facts, they cannot be brought into question. The question asked was about the process I was using to make a decision. This is far removed from any type of fact. This is, in fact, very personal and private, the very type of thing that I would feel fine keeping to myself. Justifying the desire to maintain a personal space around my thoughts would have been easy to do, but you should have heard what came out of my mouth. It was, for one thing, not a dodge of the question, something else at which I am the master. I answered the question in a well-reasoned, logical, straight-forward way that shared not one whit with the truth. These were the true and earnest thoughts of someone, but they were not mine, they just tumbled out of my mouth.

So there. I did that. I do that, that thing that I just described, I am admitting that that is something that I do. I say things that are not true when, or perhaps because they are more interesting that the things I really think.

So what? No one needs to know your thought process to know you, or whether they want to continue a relationship with you. Who could get hurt by that?

Lots of people. Myself included, but also people I cared about. I have recently read testimonials from people whom I have dated, and have had real feelings for, do not see me as a good time for a while in there life, and then the inevitable understanding that our pairing was inappropriate, but they saw me a real destructive force in their lives. I have checked the tapes, and there is no logic to it, but the spooky fact remains that I did plot and plan, and execute devious maneuvers in these cases, but you must believe me when I say there was NO WAY for them to know, because I was so clever hiding my feelings.

Now? Well, for one thing, I won’t be ‘lying’ about my ‘feelings’ anymore. Too much trouble, that, and really when I looked back at my history, all that was really being asked of me was permission to move closer.