Month: January 2024

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Small Revelations

It is never too late to know yourself better. In truth, working on understanding the inner workings of one’s psyché is—should be—an ongoing process. For all sorts of reasons, not least of which is to have some grasp of your own reactions and how you affect those around you, that work to understand is vital.

Unfortunately, it’s not the most amenable process to any kind of ordered plan. Revelations, discoveries, realizations come when they will, and often not at convenient moments.

We’ve been rewatching some episodes of Queer Eye. We like that show quite a lot, it’s impressive (though early on I wondered at the work they managed to accomplish in a week, which seemed…incredible) and we’ve gleaned useful insights over the course of its (so far) seven seasons. Last night we were watching one and unbidden a thought popped into my head that sent me down a twisted path of self-analysis.

One of my habits—and one I wish I could dispense with—is a tendency to revisit my past. Usually, it’s nostalgic self-indulgence. Remembering good times (or just interesting times) can be a pleasure. But the bad habit part is when I start to obsess over a period or incident I wish had gone differently. Opportunities lost, chances not taken, encounters that did not go well, outcomes that left me uncomfortable. From time to time, I find myself running things over and over as if I could somehow find a way to make them right. I am aware of the pointlessness of this, but at such times I seem helpless before the imaginative reengineering my memories demand. It’s not so much that it wastes time, but it definitely wastes emotional energy, and often leaves me feeling sapped and dissatisfied.

Last night, I had something of an insight. This kind of dwelling is, I think, all about the unfinished and unrealized part of such memories. These are things you were invested in, there was skin in the game, you had your sights set on an outcome that was never achieved, and what your subconscious is doing is trying to see them through. In the process, you relive parts of the past, and it always ends up being just as unsatisfying and frustrating as it was in the first place. That goal is not to be reached and some part of you is geared still toward reaching it. Walking away is not an option because, damnit, it’s not finished.

That it is impossible (mostly) to do that, it goes into a file that comes back at triggering of certain events. There are conversations that I have had again and again in my head that will never resolve the way I want them to, but that only makes them harder to break off and step away from.

I don’t know how common this is, but I suspect some variation of it runs through society and we see people caught up in reliving the past. Often it is at worst annoying. Sometimes it turns into a toxic recycling that continues to disrupt well beyond any utility we might derive in puzzling out the “what went wrong” at the heart of such memories. That need to finish it may be the hook that keeps us coming back and going over it one more time.

I don’t know if realizing this will result in less of this for me, but we’ll see. I just wanted to share it, just in case others may find the observation…helpful.

Art

Going Forward

I started this post last night and it turned into something rather unpleasant. So I trashed that one, went to bed, and here I am. I am on the same page with the late Stephen Jay Gould with regards to calendrical silliness. It is simultaneously one of the most useful and absurd things humans ever invented. Imposing order on the seasons, allowing for cooperation across distances, the timing of events so chaos is kept at bay—wonderful. But the idea that certain dates mean something in cosmic terms? The whole industry of horoscopy, while mildly entertaining, is a window into human gullibility.

But heck, if you enjoy it and no harm is done, go for it. I use meta-dating myself, but mainly for personal matters, like anniversaries or knowing when to cook certain things or go certain places, or, most importantly, knowing when the people around me are going to start acting oddly, usually in extra-cheerful ways. Oh, yeah, it’s that time of year again.

I both get it and don’t get it. My family long ago stopped paying serious attention to holidays. Partly, this was economic—one doesn’t always have the money to do the holidays the way everyone likes—but partly this was a mild refusal to follow the herd.

But I get the utility of making plans and setting goals and calendars can be very important for that. (Besides, I’m a writer—deadlines are real.) Guttenberg, he of the movable type revolution, prior to superstardom as a printer, had been something of get-rich-quick opportunist and had tried to mount of big festival. Word went out, artisans and vendors were to show up, and everybody could make a lot of money—except he got the date wrong and it was all a fiasco. He moved on to the next thing, probably because he really owed some people money. If he’d had a better calendar, we might not have gotten mass printing when we did. (That story may be apocryphal, but many such things happened for less famous people, and it took a revolution in time-tracking to sort it finally into what we have today.)

One thing I intended to write about last night was all the things my fellow humans dote on that I simply don’t get. The list was not long, but the complaining was turning nasty. Not what I wanted to leave out there for the start of the coming year. I wanted to be more upbeat, which can sometimes be difficult for me. One on one, here and there, I’m not a dour fellow, but anyone who has read my posts here should be aware, when my gaze turns global, I can be a buzzkill. There are things people embrace that I don’t get, but usually I don’t care. I only react when the evangelizing starts and my ambivalence is called out by those who think I’m missing something or simply wrong or even stupid. I don’t have to like what you like for you to continue to like it. But if you’re going to call me on it, then I will explain, sometimes at length, why I think you may be, well, off-base.

The other day we listened to a report on art fraud. Some of the prices mentioned were jaw-dropping. I’m sorry, but $50,000,000.00 for a painting? I think it fair to say that this has nothing to do with how beautiful the painting is. There are painters who will never sell a piece for four figures and may be wondering where their next month’s rent is coming from who are likely just as good as (and sometimes better) than that long dead “master” some people with too much money bid on. But beyond that, I had to wonder—why is the provenance so damned important if you enjoy the work at hand? I mean, if you bought it because you like it…

I feel that way about many things. But I realize that other factors get piled on top of such a simple idea and people will find ways to make money on everything.

I believe in my heart that there should be some things kept outside the precincts of profit-making.  Food, healthcare, housing. Beauty. Nature. Education.

We, as I’m sure anyone who actually owns a house has experienced, have been getting cold calls from these “I want to buy your house!” enterprises. I resent them. How dare they. If I want to sell my house, that should be entirely my decision from the get-go. I will reach out, I will call the brokers, I will initiate the transaction. But what we have now is a high-pressure environment driven by people who need your property to generate their bottomline and it is a given that everyone wants to sell what they have. They are making money on the churn, the turnover. A piece of property sitting there comfortably off the market is an offense to their notion that everything has to be constantly in motion, monetarily speaking. But they lose the simple idea that for many people these are not houses but homes and they should be kept apart from all that until the owner is ready. By acting as they do, they “adrenalize” people into making decisions that in the long run hurt us all, because it erodes the idea of constancy and security. It’s only a few steps removed, actually, from abusive eminent domain, which I believe is a corrupt and twisted system that has drifted a long way from its original intention.

There. That’s the kind of thing I was doing on multiple fronts in that discarded essay. I had several things (sports, beer, country-and-western music, junk-throat singers, and on and on etc etc) on the dissecting table and it got…bitter.

I’ve had enough bitter. The last decade has been more than filled with disappointments and let-downs and delays and baffling absurdities and death. For a while, in my younger days, I thought we were getting better at this living thing, but it’s easy to feel we ran off the rails. In so many ways we haven’t. There are so many truly wonderful things happening, all over, and it saddens me that all the ugly hides it and steals our hope.

So going forward, I want to privilege the wonder over the horror, and find ways to damp the horror. Constant bad news is depressing and being depressed, among other things, leeches energy, and we end up too tired. As I said, on a one-to-one level, I’m not an unhappy guy.

But 2023 handed out some difficult to manage stuff. My dad died, being the chief one. We all knew it was coming, and in many ways it was a relief, but months later I find myself from time to time wishing I could have one more argument, share one more cool thing, talk to him one more time.

Going forward, then. I wish everyone to have a clearer road and to find something new and achieve something desired and to have more days of optimism than pessimism. We should expect better, not just hope for it. Make it better where possible. We’ve got a year ahead of us in which changes can be made and hope recharged. Most importantly,  we have each other. Be generous with hugs and smiles and willing ears. Many of us have more than we think. Share.

And don’t let the bitter boil your brain.