Selections from the Red Book

Words will slow these things and betray their nature, cast upon this page as a fossil record of an elegant, graceful beast. Thought. Feeling. Life.

Inbetween the spaces where I am supposed to rethink my sexuality to better counteract patriarchy, read every good book I could ever hear of, and change the world for the better by balancing on the thin side of a dime, I am loving a small few of you with such intense fervor that I am actually losing weight. In those 'thems' that make up those 'us-es', everything makes sense, even when it's upside down, because making sense of one thing after another - together, is really the only thing that really makes sense. Ever.

God I love that.

I lost some of you, along the way. But what I don't know is: Are our stories in a book or on a prayer wheel? Will I see you again? And should I still be caring about all of that, this much. I might not, if you hadn't done so many amazing things. But you did. All the time I realize new ways in which you were amazing, and I sigh and smile, thinking about you all over again. My life is just better because of you. And gratitude is perhaps a worse burden to bear alone than any pain or guilt can boast.

I will show you somehow. It'll be just perfect.


***


Sometimes it starts out like that
A You, and an I
Hurtling towards each other in
Spiritual space
Until it bursts through that wall
Into what is arbitrarily called
Our reality
Which couldn't resist
Having our bodies apart
While our selves were together
Any longer.

And sometimes it's like two trains
On the same track
And we don't know
What to do
With such a beautiful mess
Afterwards
(It can't just be left that way ?)

But I love you
And I know how and why
We got here (to these places where we are, and are not)
And I know where I will be
In the future.

I'll be right here.

The Truth About Tuna

You shouldn't trust any of the words you read here, or those you read or hear anywhere else - from anyone. You should even be cautious of those words that come from you.

This is one sermon among many about the times we're living in. The words will bring forth ideas and your thoughts will be used to sort them out (or you may choose to not bother with it at all). A third thing, something deeper, can let you know the truth after words and thoughts are done. It will tell you things that my words cannot. All words and thoughts are useless without this deeper sense.

We are living in dishonest times. Our tremendous access to information and obsession with the proper ways to spend our time have created an environment where we are forced to constantly 'take someone's word for it'. An anecdote from a friend. The news. The local expert. Politicians. The televised psychiatrist/scientist/sex therapist. Our parents. Magazines. History books. Doctors. Teachers. Commercials. Countless sources whose information makes up our entire understanding of all the reality we are unable to interact with directly. This is a necessary part of learning, of course, but when our deferrence to someone else's word becomes as reflexive and widespread as it has, we begin to lose more than we typically imagine. We lose each other, and ourselves.

Cliches, stereotypes, 'common' knowledge. They affect us all, in varying circles of character and size (in your family/school/town/country/etc). 'The signs of a good _____ are _____.' 'The signs of a bad _____ are _____.' This distinction is made initially through subjective assessment. Then, the conclusion is spread (because we like to share the truths we find). If the conclusion continues to prove, or at the least seem reasonable, it continues to be spread. There may come a time where individual people adopt this conclusion as a general truth, despite never experiencing their own subjective assessment. We can't investigate everything personally. That's impossible. But there often come moments where we make decisions, large and small, with the help of conclusions that we've picked up from outside sources along the way.

Now, what might make all this difficult to understand is that I can't easily give you uniformly workable, efficient, specific examples. When we hear an obvious stereotype, we know that's what it is, and dismiss it as just that. It's the less obvious ones, the ideas we might not label as stereotypes right away, that pose a problem. They vary from person to person, group to group. I hope that can be kept in mind.

Now... the most insidious habit of stereotypes: Their existence causes their continued existence. Allow me to explain.

How, and what we think about something affects how we experience it. A preconceived idea changes our reception. A perfect example from my childhood: My dad made a pasta dish for my sister and I, but neglected to tell us what the ingredients were exactly. I erroneously identified the meatlike substance as chicken, which was enough to get my sister to consume and kind of enjoy it. Three quarters of the way through the meal, my dad revealed that it was, in fact, tuna. My sister suddenly felt ill, and the pasta dish was no longer tasting good. My sister's previous experiences with tuna, being unpleasant to her, caused her to conceive of tuna as something that was altogether, well... unpleasant. She stereotyped tuna, in all its multitude of forms. The existence of this stereotype in her mind really did change her experience of that meat substance from tolerable to repulsive. That repulsive experience further contributed to the stereotype surrounding tuna, for my sister. We see the cycle.

Now, this example is pretty harmless and even somewhat amusing - not really a big deal. We recognize that my sister had the opportunity to alter her thoughts about tuna after a different experience. She could easily have decided that tuna, in this particular form, is okay. But she didn't. This is not merely because she was 6 years old at the time, but because, for some reason, it is ridiculously difficult to get us humans, at any age, to change our damn minds about anything once we've made it up. This is still true for stereotypes that don't necessarily involve tuna. Stereotypes involving: People, race, religion, personality, social propriety, success, prestige, worthiness, morality, family, friendship, love, enemies, fun, and even pain. And countless other things as well. And I do mean countless. Most situations are harmless, like the tuna. Being cut off from tuna isn't the end of the world. But many stereotypes cut us off from each other, from the experiences we could have with each other, from the expanded knowledge we could gain, and from the people we might become if we had the understanding that expanded knowledge could give us.

I am not suggesting we try to abolish stereotyping and idea preconceiving as a whole. To a degree, these things are necessary for functioning in the world we live in. The countless amounts of situations that contain an unimaginable amount of information force us to deal with generalities that are not uniformly true, but are 'true enough'. What I am suggesting is that we be careful with the degrees of 'true enough' we are settling with in certain situations. Think twice about some things you hold to be self evident (even little things). Consider the effects of your understanding of them (this of course requires a little imagination). Are you cutting yourself off from potentially valuable experiences? OR - are you cutting anyone else off from the valuable experience of 'you'? They don't have to be big experiences to be significant.

Lastly, I want to revisit what I said at the beginning of this. These words aren't different from many others. You shouldn't trust them. Not them alone. Everything I've written about has come from personal experience - subjective assessment. I don't expect or even desire for anyone to simply take my word for it. If you understood the above, you know why. It is possible, though, that there is some truth behind the words, and the thoughts you might have in response to them. For me, there is a truth that spawned the thoughts that brought about these words. You need to personally experience the continuum, or lack thereof, between words and the truth before you can trust one way or another. Figuring this out is not always easily done, as words are treacherous and inadequate tools for representing truth, in and of themselves. It's that deeper sense, a sense that is sometimes hard to distinguish from thoughts (which can be equally as treacherous as words), which can let you know for sure. Trick is, you can only know what it's like to use this sense if you insist on not taking a word or thought for it (even your own at times) at least some of the time. You have to go to a place before any words or thoughts are even part of the equation sometimes - and that's the truth.

It Has Begun

If you're reading this, I'd like to welcome you to this new experience, which is new for me as well. I've avoided the blog craze up to this point, the reasons being many and varied. However, despite a natural resistance to trends, recent discussions with friends have given me the idea that there are some inherently good things about blogging that I should really be tapping into. The first and foremost of these is that public communication can force you to think about what's being said, which is particularly important if you ever want to stand by it. Public expression has an element of commitment that toiling over thoughts in private does not. In public, ideas can be challenged and refined, sentiments supported or critiqued. I figure this is just too invaluable to not give it a shot. It's my intention to use this space as a place to capture some of the experiences of my life in words for this purpose, and likely for other purposes that evolve out of the process. My relationship with words, particularly written language, is best described as love-hate, so I guess I'm going to find out which end of that spectrum this blog manages to inspire in me.

Thank you for stopping by. Maybe we'll see you again.