Thursday, March 22, 2012

MORE PONTIFICATIN' AND FURTHER EXCAVATIN'

PROLOGUE:


See, even if I am wandering around in the kitchen, I don’t think I want just anyone to ask me what I am looking for. I am not ready to let just anyone take me by my hand and lead me to where I am trying to go. Right now it doesn’t bother me figuring out where to go in school or riding my bike around unfamiliar neighborhoods when I go to a ‘super new’ (because all of Omaha remains ‘new’ to me, a ‘super new’ place is somewhere I have not only never been but is outside of any area that I am familiar with) or I am just walking around the Westroads Mall unsure of what I was looking for has no effect on my being. And the reason why rests with something that Steve Young said the day that the Jim McMahon interview was originally aired on Sunday on the show, "Outside The Lines".


Young, who retired primarily because of multiple concussions and the risk of his continued playing professional football, said that he was worried that what is going on with Jim McMahon, who is only two years older that Young. Does what is happening to McMahon portend what may be to come for him and his situation… and I stress the ‘may be to come’ part. While someone can have CBTI and the complications are unavoidable with that diagnosis, what is not known is how fast they happen or what areas of the brain that are affected in an individual. Maybe Steve Young got out of football at such a point where he can function for a long time without any noticeable depreciation in his life skills, no one really can be sure. The only thing that the medical profession can be sure of is the MRI. Like fast, the MRI don’t lie. I have a permanent brain injury and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t change that.


LOST IN THE SUN


Pol•ly•an•na:
noun
1. an excessively or blindly optimistic person.
adjective
2.( often lowercase ) Also, Pol•ly•an•na•ish. unreasonably or illogically optimistic: some pollyanna notions about world peace.


Since the word came into language through child stories I used to wonder what kind of mood was the country in to make ‘Pollyanna’ into a word that is defined with such cynicism. Of course, I remember the Haley Mills movie and it was one of the first features that I watched when it came on shortly after I got here in Omaha. Sure, I took it as a very positive sign and though I have not read any of Margaret Mead’s stories, in the movie she did not seem blindly positive to me.


In the movie, Pollyanna seemed to me to be a very deliberate in her consideration of a situation. She did not go around encouraging people who just had their house burned down or whose family was in a horrific auto accident to be thankful for things not being any worse or telling them to be thoughtful for what they didn’t have happen to them. Most of the people she spoke with had manageable problems that they had the power to influence and were in a position to improve their lot. I feel that to really be like Pollyanna, that it means you are thoughtful and not to only be uplifting but provide a way TO the bright side. Maybe it is going to involve some hard work and maybe you will have to be patient, but you don’t have to lose hope or despair because changing your fortunes won’t be easy or convenient.


A lot of the misunderstandings I have with people isn’t that I am not happy and cheerful, but because their idealization of someone who appears pre-naturally happy must have something going on with him. I recall my starter wife telling me that she and her girlfriends that would see me doing my security guard thing at the drug store across the street from the salon where she worked, and think that I had a mental impairment. Wow she thought that of a brother… and she STILL wanted to marry him? Anywho, the point was that because I always had the biggest and broadest smile on my face that something was prolly off with a cat.


Back then… shee—oot, even as recent as 2010, for many Detroiters to walk around with a chip on your shoulder is not uncommon. In the early 90’s that was just the way that it was except I did not get the memo. One of the things that made hip hop artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Kwame (and a new beginning), and especially Black Sheep, was that they always seemed to have a knowing smile in their lyrics. Either they were in on a joke that you didn’t get, that they had gotten away with something slick, or they were just chill with who they were, their music sounded how I felt and there music obviously still does sound like how I feel. Anywho, my affable nature can be seen as a liability to someone who feel that they are more in tune with how the world really works. My starter wife is the kind of person who felt that having the advantage in experience (she is three years older than I am… dag, she is going to be FORTY EIGHT this year… vainglorious..!) and being a single mother, that she knew more about being an adult than I did. Or so the Germans would have had her to believe…


Though she had a host of other issues and views that contaminated our relationship, there were several lessons that I did learn from her that I have avoided since. Chief among them was that I need to feel respected by my partner. Second, I would like for my partner to be secure in themselves. My starter wife was definitely someone who did not feel that she should have to respect me, and I would say that she cannot respect me as a human being, much less as anything else. And I blame her inability to respect me to a lot of her insecurities.


In my opinion, being able to respect a person is essential to being able to lay down your guard and be vulnerable with someone. If you don’t respect a person then not only won’t you be able to be vulnerable to them, but you will foster an animosity against them. And this is prolly due to latent insecurity that plagues your character. Instead of being able to be selfless and kind, I think that this kind of person becomes hardened, more brutal and inconsiderate when they are involved with someone who exposes themselves to them emotionally.


Think about it. To be willing to lay drop your defenses is not a sign of weakness but one of strength. That is part of why I don’t hesitate when I find someone who I am interested in and approach them, probative at first, but very open and social. I NEVER have felt that being a ‘pollyanna’ was a sign of weakness but that of strength and confidence.


And that is why I don’t think that I can be with someone who is fraught with insecurity. People with insecurity make me think that they are unwilling to test themselves in any area of life. They cannot love because their insecurity takes the idea of being worthy of love, and like Mjolnir, whosoever worthy of the power of Thor can lift his hammer, same can be said of my love. Whosever worthy can have it. Problem is, do are they worthy of my love?


WHEN EVERTHING IS A PRIORITY THEN EVERYTHING IS WORTHY


I am in many ways discussing how I precede in most relationship approaches because a consequence of the patriarchal social system. Women have a lot of mental baggage heaped upon them because of it and I am already running long with this entry as it is! But what I do think that men and women, particularly between African-American men and women, have an harmful adversarial view of each other that has scarred and damaged how they relate to each other.


In my lifetime a consequence of the kind of thinking that makes it acceptable to think that men and women are from different planets is that women tend to ‘give up’ on men and on love. And they don’t do this just by not going out on dates and withdrawing from the pool. Worse than that, they are lukewarm and tentative as they get involved with people. And it makes me think of Dr. Phil and how he used to say that a family’s most important relationship was that between the husband and the wife. He would tell women who ‘lived for their children’ and almost completely ignore their husband that they were still doing their children a disservice, to say nothing of their wedding vows.


And at over 1600 words, this is where I am going to end… but I will pick up from here.

1 comment:

Ken Riches said...

Should definitely be the couple first, then the kids.