Seeking: Egomaniac

Insecure girl fond of overstating her youth seeks enigmatic egomaniac.  Prefers to find solace in unreasoned assertions of superiority, fast driving, and stare-me-down bargaining over popcorn at discount movie chains.

Willing to take the first step in over-estimating future earnings, over-stating your good looks, and always realistically pretending to orgasm at your faintest [albeit aggressive] touch.  Equally willing to make excuses to my girlfriends about why you matter more, to blame other people for your faults, and to talk up your 1995 Volkswagen GTI, and to prop up alternate versions of whatever you wish, including foibles with family members, affairs, and less than stellar self-grooming patterns.

Let's Inhabit the Average For a Day - no?

For all of you who want to be perfect.  For those who want to excel at . . . everything.  For everyone who checks out their image in the minutest level of reflective material (say, your partner's sunglasses, the stainless steel of elevator doors, car windows, or even chrome embroidery, and of course, almost all windows).  For those who find the need to purchase a new pair of pants, excessive amounts of shirts, ties, socks, underwear, or other accouterments.  For those who find their own exceptionalism perfectly normal and expected, and never question their superiority . . .

Really?  Are you fucking serious, or what?  (I freely admit that this is a somewhat solipsistic self-mediated conversation with a version of a historical self that I loathe in a mild black tea induced froth of Saturday morning (which is to say, not a heavily frenetic mindset (which is also to say that the old self would be much more frothy than the current self if I were forced to converse with the old self)), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're always talking to versions of our old (or current) selves, and I wouldn't say that we, as in we individuals, are only mirrors of the exterior social networks, systems, societal whatevers, birds, flutes, trees, and tables, either, because the self exists, and one of the reasons it does exist is because it thinks it is exceptional, and makes distinctions and rationalizes those distinctions).

Still, there must be some capacity that we all maintain to look into the mirror and obtain real live data from the world, and recognize one thing: that most of us are profoundly average. 

The next step is to be happy with that.  Because to be unhappy with that would make us far too average.  And being happy with averageness, in a way, is quite exceptional.

Let's Pretend We're Not Competing.

That will be the goal: That we're not competing with each other, and internally, with ourselves.  That we don't care, because somehow, deeper down, our urge to care is something we're nervous about.

We'd rather, perhaps, stay detached and aloof, or reclusive and drunk, you know, I know, and we're walking around with bullhorns, third-eyes that scream out with ferocity at the minutest of interactions.

Because we're scared, deeper down, of communicating with someone and having our message actually conveyed. It is better not to engage and somehow not be pegged into a number, into a boxed reality that can be compared to other boxes.  Better to "stay out of the system," that is, to pretend.  Better to pretend.  And while we pretend, everyone else pretends.  Except for those willing to engage overtly, who we immediately scorn and judge for reducing themselves.

And when we pretend and those others don't, the cruel fact is that those others will have advantages over us, and have more access to the things that we, deep down, actually think might make us happy, were we "given a chance" to acquire them.  If not for all the assholes out there ruining everything, right?  Right.

The trick, it seems, is not to pretend we're not all assholes sometimes, and not use excuses to keep you from getting what you want.  Otherwise, you know, we have to face the fact that we might not want what we say we want, and instead, simply want to label all of the other people--that is: the convenience of ignoring reality simply becomes reality, and the reality we tell ourselves becomes delusion.

Someone Has To Care - How I Got Over

I'm not a fan of bloggers new template, but I am a fan of the Roots album "How I Got Over."

Themes of isolation, God, faith, capacity to develop oneself, boredom, and development, etc..  Very good.

Death Reduces Life to a Story -

Hopefully it was a good story.  A story that other people can enjoy.  A story like Bobby Fischer's story. I've always been drawn to it, as have millions of others.  Naturally.  And now that he's dead, what have we of his life?  We have his narrative.  His grand rise.  His mental illness/tumorous growth of genius.  We have the classic span of a story that we know and love, and one that is tragic.  In the beginning there is precociousness beyond rationale.  In the end there is bitterness, estrangement.  In the  middle, grandeur and fuck all hero-quality fame.

Insanity, and back.

Today I had a tingling feeling.  In my frontal cortex.  It didn't stop so much as spread itself like butter over the rest of my brain, engineering itself to masquerade as part of me, as something essential that I'd previously overlooked.  Somehow my examinations weren't up to snuff.  And this feeling, something akin to the buzz of an out of tune television and a drill boring down into dense pvc pipe, also anchored itself in such a way that I began to doubt any previous existence without it.  It was an acute, though long lasting, hunger, if you will, one that I thought I could quench with food. One that I thought was at once alien and familiar, and one that was frightening because it made me feel so light, like helium, like I could float up and away and not come back, and that my gradual dispersal throughout the stratosphere might be, in a way, pleasant, or at least, that my cessation of being would be a relief.  At least, a relief.

Not Drinking is Anti-Ego -

Presumably, at least, alcohol allows the ease of justification to be even easier, and the plausibility of excuse more room to grow.

Choosing not to drink is, in this way, a step toward anti-ego, a stepping down.  And it hurts.

Self-perception of our own standing in the world is tricky.  We can zoom out all the way and say nothing matters.  Or we can zoom in all the way and say that everything matters, including the way that people notice us in a glance.  Neither provides comfort, necessarily.  Adding much difficulty is the strange fact that we're not always sure what lens we're using, macro or micro.  Or neither.  Claims of neutrality in this regard are hard to stomach.  They're easier to stomach when the stomach has a bunch of vodka in it.   I feel less existentially nauseous when I'm bloated with booze.

But I'm not bloated with booze.  And I'm hopping the shimmering diving board in front of me keeps on going forward a little longer than expected, so that, maybe, it will just arch and let me off on the ground easily.

You Don't Have to Be In Charge of Making Things Okay.

There will be conflict.  It isn't something you need to pander to, or to control.  That's something I've been learning.  Conflict isn't going away.  I've led my life away from it, choosing to placate assholes and be nice to people who are mean to me.

And what do I say to myself and others when I'm nice?  I'm saying: "Go ahead and be mean to me again!  Use me.  Abuse me.  Do whatever you want, because you don't have to worry about me leaving.  I'm a faithful do-gooder."

Yeah, a do-gooder who craves acceptance like a precocious kid.

The worse part of this story, which I'm just realizing as I re-read the above, is that I, in turn, had/have become an asshole to other people who don't deserve it, simply because I have refused to state explicitly my disagreements with assholes above me.  I bring it home, in other words.  And that's wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong.

So even when my instincts tell me to appease, I'm going to pause and try very hard to ask whether conclusions being drawn are advantageous to me, or not, and if not, speak up. We won't often get another chance, after all, and fully realizing that is shocking.

Restriction and Life -

I'm not going to say that pure restriction makes all of life grand.  It doesn't.  But what it does do, when we have a chance to reflect, is force us to grow emotionally.  We might not like restriction.  We often don't.  But it sure can help us to appreciate what we have.  That's not a necessary conclusion.  Often restriction is simply hard, and there's no associated apotheosis.  When it does happen, though, it is something to savor.

Driving To The Bed -

Ah, well, that's what I just told my mother in law I would go do, ya  know, instead of walking.  God bless Polish.

It Doesn't Matter, So Do IT for the Pure Joy--

We are often--most often--under the illusion that our endeavors matter for some reason beyond our sheer enjoyment of them.  We're often--most often--wrong.

I'm not saying sheer enjoyment is cheap, or superficial.  I'm just saying we can forget about the idea of our own importance and get down to the specifics of our endeavors already.

Rejecting Advice -

Rejecting advice comes quite naturally to most people, especially if they feel that following the advice given will lead to ends that they find emotionally unappealing.  I'd venture to say that rejecting advice (combined with feeling qualified to give it) is a fundamental bias in human nature.  We know our lives better than anyone else, right, and our wants and desires and outcomes?

The point is that, if someone is taking the time to give some nugget of advice, they might have thought about it and might have access to a "you" that "you" don't actually quite know well.  That's certainly not always true, but, if the advice comes from someone who has navigated an experience that you know theoretically, the odds are they have something to say that you should listen to.

I certainly have found that out the hard way.