Saturday, March 27, 2010

What's Love Got to do with It?

STOP! In the Name of Love

I am broken. I think that’s why I have trouble articulating my feelings, difficulty locating my thoughts. I have trouble making clean connections. I’m all association; never deduction. I suffer from a failed coherence of selfhood. Self-incongruity. I lack poetry. Inchoate persona. He-he. Not funny.

Whatever great thing it is I decide to attempt, I do initially set out with some kind of “vision,” although, even from its inception, the vision is never very clearly established. Never simple or plain. Not entirely. I stab at things, great and small, as if with a dull knife, leaving only masticated valves, lacerated tubes, sucking blood and air, all the result of desperate action. Behind are left the things I maimed, unkilled. I am unsure, unskilled. I ignore important details, overlook simple mundanities. I opt for that which lies beyond me. I am ordinary. I insist on achieving the exceptional.

I think it was Aurelius (or was it the Buddha, or David?) who wrote “don’t sweat the small stuff.” But it took some complete ass to determine “it’s all small stuff.” Not everything in this life is small stuff. I know. Instead of wisdom I was given to masturbatory idleness. I was disengaged, avoidant, from birth. Not wisdom but “wasdom.” Wasdoomed. Boom. He-he. Again, not funny.

This soft underbelly of pain—the scar across my face, the arthritis that locks down my vertebrae and causes my hip to seize—I would never have believed that I was capable of such self-mutilation had not even more serious consequences passed. Which they did. “Consequences?” you ask. I didn’t know then. I did not wake up one day and decide that I would inflict tragedy on some person, on some people, some family who did not even suspect at the time that I existed, that I might have lived nearby, just down the street even. We might have passed one another, more than once or twice, in the supermarket. They probably saw me drive past their home a hundred times but never really noticed. Not until that day. This is bad. And although this sense of things, these memories sans Beauty had come forward in my mind only after encountering her, Allison had nothing to do with any of this. The accident happened long before I met her. I need to stop now.

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