THE THINGS THAT WE FORGET ABOUT THAT TELL US WHO WE ARE

One of the things that I have noticed since my diagnosis (as well as experienced prior to the confirmation of my condition) has been what I feel appropriate to term a “mild dissociative fugue”.  Sometimes, I simply lose track of where I am in the world for a few days.  It is a little nerve-wracking, mainly because I can usually predict when a fugue is going to strike, usually when I am tired and my daily “task load” has grown.  Like most less-than-optimal life occurrences, my fugues always seem to occur when I can least afford to be conscious of my limitations.  What frustrates me is the biases that contribute to my lack-of-support, as my anticipation of the further eroding of support (caretaking??) that went on while I was living with Mookie Dee.  

At any rate, getting to my current “less-than” happening, I have again lost a money order, this one $150.  I intended to send it to KT’s Mom, to pay my share of her plane ticket this summer.  What super-frustrates me is that not only had I adopted and followed a protocol to avoid such a re-occurrence (I lost a money order worth $425 that was purchased to pay my monthly rent payment two years ago), but I still had a “memory hole” swallow enough of a day to where I cannot account for my actions or what happened to the money order I had purchased.  

Now it goes without saying that this was a major blow to my finances and its effect was immediate.  It also goes without saying that there is a way forward, just that it has become a lot narrower.

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When I started this journal to help me keep my emotional balance, as with many then-and-amazingly-still-current journals, there was a lot of kvetching about how much life’s complexities that were being pondered seemed to be stacked against a brother.  Not only was their lives (and mine) seemingly actively working against them, but they seemingly powerless to stop the the advance of fates tender mercies destroying their hopes.  F*ck that.  I had hoped to straighten out my thoughts so that I can go about affecting my life’s destiny as much as possible.  When I look around at my clutter-rific apartment, I have to say that it feels like I do control my life more than the forces of life control me.  So with that…

“A yes.  A no.  A straight line.  A goal.”  For years, I have repeated this and the following phrase, “That is my formula for happiness.”  It was something that as an adolescent, I thought was more self-serving and making me seem like I was deeper than I really was.  As time wore on and the sentiment that drew me to Nietzsche and Dante, et al. was forgotten, this was one phrase that I kept in mind when my thoughts were clouded.  Though my success at achieving the “straight line” to my path, my goals (as intellectually effete as they may have been), I experienced the glimmers of success.  Now, because of those glimmers, I would demand more of myself and rather than just simply wailing and wanting for divine intervention.  While there are things that I leave up to “fate”, it isn’t that I hope that an imagined deity will reach down and touch my life, it is more that the things that I don’t understand through the data that I receive through my senses and can comprehend intellectually are things beyond my reach.  My “faith” is that thing things that I don’t understand, like the power of human flight, the engineering that makes for transit, and the bytes of computation that adds up to my crappy journal, they all exists and work in a way that is out of my league in terms of explaining.  To me, knowing that there are things working in my existence, just as I am working in my existence, that operate without remorse or regard to my wants, is better for me than it is to simply accept something unproven that another person tells me to place faith in.  My agnosticism is a result of not equivocation, but of patience.  There seems to me to be more to the puzzle than plugging in deities and adding in more computational power.  And now, my ant-like understanding of the curvature of spacetime brings more rationality to my “happiness theorem”.  Because if a curve can be a straight line, why shouldn’t I expect to find my destiny, my happiness in the pursuit of what I think of as a noble raison d’etre?  

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Having reaffirmed the “why” to my life, the question of the “how” to my life is now free of the burden of further explanation.  But it is not like I have not explained that aspect of my being.  In an era where the fluidity of what defines our humanity and what it means to be a member of the human family, this is one of the complexities of life the bends and shreds the fabric of our understanding.  

It boggles my spirit… how can you “know” someone, a person, that you have never bothered to look upon in the way that a bibliophile would look upon a prized book from their favorite author?  How self-righteous is it to say that you “know” someone when you have never bothered to look beyond your own understanding of what it means to “be”, not only how it is for another, but what being means to oneself?  And we now come to another area of my life that I would visit, the various deeper interpersonal relationships that I have had since I have been in Omaha.

Perhaps it is because there has become a run on “nerdom”, “geekiness”, and my favorite adjective of self-description, “introvert”, that people no longer respect the boundaries that kept those worlds safely ensconced in their own small groups of star groups and galaxies.  I still remember going to small comic books shows and going to see people like George Takei and Robby the Robot, for little cost.  Now..?  All of “Nerdom” (which, IMO, is the larger umbrella term for those of us on the outside of general society) has been co-opted by the profit motive, and these words are now simply markets to be purchased and then sold to the masses.

I have played “Dungeons and Dragons”.  In the early 80’s I had a comic collection of over 3,000 comics, including every “new” X-Men comic from #94 through #142.  My favorite run of “The Hulk” was when Sal Buscema penciled it, just as the run the Walt Simonson had on my favorite hero, “The Mighty Thor”, was superior to anyone else’s.  But the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made changes that may seem subtle to all but the most nuanced fans (or is it fanboys, the newer term for “ultra-geek”).

See, this whole “Infinity Gauntlet” thing was a story that in the 90’s belong to a hero that I really found myself in, Adam Warlock.  In one of the movies there was the surreptitious “nod” to his existence, a scene in “Guardians…” where inside the Collector’s ship may have been the “cocoon” that held Warlock’s body.  And while I could go on, the point of this tangent is to reassert what it once meant to be a “nerd”, especially a comic book nerd, and how much deeper you would have to go before you can honestly make such a claim and be honest about it.  And if it is such for the fantasy worlds of fiction, how much more so is it difficult to gain the complete understanding of a person, the depth of which would allow you to say to them, “I know you.”  Sh*t, there are long married AND loving couples who don’t “know” each other with the completeness that people have casually said that they “know” me.  Telling me that you “know” me, well, if someone did “know me”, they would also be aware of how huge a turn off that is for me.  A big one.

I used to blog about things regarding different social worlds in broad generalities.  I did so not to defame a particular group but because I DID NOT KNOW anything about what I was trying to say, least not with the completeness that would have allowed me a fuller comprehension of what I was attempting to describe.  So for someone to dare say that they “know me” without making more than a facile attempt to get to know me… well… I heard a phrase this weekend that motivated this post… “It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are,” and to that I would like to add, “...and it is the things that are forgotten about that similarly tell us about others.”  Being careful to watch where I step when talking about memory, there are certain foundational thoughts and concepts that I keep to, like “...a straight line, a goal”, that I have come to believe in a my personal scripture.  So whether or not anyone else understands them matters less than the respect and reverence that they give them.  After all… if one cannot have reverence for the things that I hold dear, how, may I ask, can they have any understanding or respect for me?