The beauty of email is that it lets you review your thoughts. The process is slow as opposed to instant messages which is slower than phone conversations which are quicker than face to face conversations where a pause of a minute is not bad form, where you are socially allowed to stop for a moment to observe the clouds or a fly on your table.

Email is full of wonder. I love the process of answering it and sending it off into the nether regions of the internet. A small particle of thought zipping its way to some distant destination. It’s kind of cool to ponder.

What I’ve been pondering lately though is the process of my emails to others. How I think and the roles I play when I’m talking to various people. To some I’m the aggrieved, hurt, bitter, hurtful, pathetic bastard desperate for righteousness. To others I’m the careful rational mind full of advice to the forelorn (really…I’m not making that shit up). To some I’m a paragon of silly, sometimes insightful, comedy. To others I’m a fool and a fuckup and a worthless piece of shit.

I am all those things at the same time but I’m not all of them to all the people I know at the same time. I am a story that changes for others, I am an actor saying what I think some people expect from me and I do this instinctively.

I realized how integral to my persona this was today, about a half hour ago actually, as I was taking a shower trying to scrub the food smell off me.

Who am I then? Am I and why am I always playing to an audience?

This was especially apparent to me this past week. I just reread Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and I feel the overwhelming need to steal at bit one of his opening lines…

[note: My favorite opening line of all time is “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”]

Listen:
The foggy mirror is clearing.

I keep seeing more and more of myself and the more I see the more horrified I am by what I became.

Push them away, run away from chance, scream in the night as you flee from your life.

I am sick of this part of me. I am pissed off at what I thought I had stopped but can now only see. I am perturbed that so much of what I want is so desperately out of my reach and knowing, absolutely positively knowing that the reason is that I bound my hands behind my back with a piece of sewing thread when I was a child and have been whining about the fact that my hands are bound ever since.

I am sick of all this stupid pointless fear and bullshit rolling around my mind. I am so very very sick of seeing myself minutes after I say something, do something, write something, and seeing how that “something”was modified by an unknown unseen but always there and sometimes felt demon slithering around in my mind as desperate to destroy me as I am to destroy it.

I’ve written about this before and I’m still at the place where I can question clearly and consisely, “What the fuck is that all about?!” I’d punch myself in the head if I thought it might hurt the bastard.

What brought this on? What tripped the seeing and the knowing, what turned on the light in the darkened hallway?

Listen:
Two books forced me to think about my thoughts. Two books interested me and compelled me and cascaded a stream of dithering subcionscious thought into a torrent of a waterfall. Two books about ideas and connections and meaning and the meaning of meaning and how what we think shapes the world that we experience.

[note: Poker without Cards and Cat’s Cradle in case anyone cares]

The books are almost incidentat but they were a trigger that allowed me to see myself in the mirror for a moment and that brutal clarity was frightening.

Listen some more:
Two weekends ago a director I work with sometimes did the first showing of his new microcinema film festival. In an attempt to get people to show up I called the lost love mentioned way way earlier in this saga to see if she was interested at all. Hell, she was listed as a camera operator for a short piece I had showing so she might as well come and bask in the derision of the crowd.

She came, we all watched and diaphanous courteous applause finished my short. We all laughed and cringed at the films and I sat next to her and I surreptiously smelled her because some people smell exquisite.

[note: Smell is a grossly underused human sense and I never noticed that until I started cooking. Go out and smell stuff right now! This idiocy can wait.]

We sat afterwards and had a glass of wine. We chatted. It was nice. And undercurrent of unease after so much anger and bullshit but our time was cordial and…well…nice.

Then we sent some emails and I became increasingly strident, twisted up, my old pattern of attack and defend with cool rational arguement.

Why? That’s what I did with Natalie. Something in my head sees and commands, “Be an angry asshole!” and lo and behold my fingers type a stream of consciouness of reasonably eloguent bullshit.

It…is…maddening.

So here I am, pondering Natalie, and meanings, and meanings of words, and my reaction to all of that and I have absolutely no idea what is going on in my head. Everytime I start to think that all of my turmoil and understanding of myself is beginning to calm down and let me be for a little bit, I am bashed in the face by the Shillaly of Life.

I was recently reminded of the simplest summation of human fullness I’ve ever read.

If you can answer these three questions simply and easily you have It figured out. You know the All and the Oneness and you are flowing through the universe like water in a placid river…you are laminar flow, man!

Who are you?
What do you want?
Why are you here?

Try it! I dare you to be honest and answer those questions easily.

I sure as hell can’t. What reminded me of those questions is lost to me right now. What kept me thinking about them is that when they popped back into my consciousness after a long time away from that form, I thought, for a brief happy moment that I might just be able to answer that first one. Who am I?

And now I’m back to a place where I can’t quite be sure that what I know is what I know I know. I might have said at one point that I am a “scout ant”. It’s a conception of a seeker, of a prodder and pusher of the envelop of understanding about the way the world works and how it’s all connected.

In the ant colony of human societies someone has to push past what is known to develop new knowledge or perspectives. This is what I like to imagine that I do. I don’t but it’s the me that I have always wanted to be. And thus, with the mirror in front of me, I am lost again. That is not what I am nor have ever been. It is my story I tell myself.

My story is erased…pfffffftttt…bye by story.

What is it that I want? I don’t know. The trite answers are too easy. The complicated answers too trite. So I flip around between all states at all times in my life. My mind feels like an electron wave function with all possibilities before observation. [note: Don’t make me explain the collapse of the wave function. You look it up if you care. It’s a great analogy, that’s all you need to know.]

Knowing…a silly pretention most of the time when you really explore knowledge…what do I know though. I do know that I miss the smell of Natalie. I miss those all too brief times when we shared some minor joy or cake or a cuddle.

And this is the crux of my current spiritual conflict, my epistemological malaise. I know I feel that with all of my frail and cold little heart and would like nothing more than to be with her again, and at the same time I can easily translate those feelings, of love and extraordinary painful loss into a chemical equation of pheromones and psychological state equivalent to addiction.

What is human connection? All life connects to itself, passes messages of the internal state and the external state of its world and we are cells in the slime molds of society skittering across the world.

I think I can make a convincing case that all of these emotions and desires that plague and drive us are complex patterns of enfolding and unfolding the universe, making sense of the universe. Nothing but a bit of information following an incredibly complex program.

Or to be more mystical and to quote Bill Hicks from memory since I can’t find the exact quote right now, we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively…

So I’ve gone mystic. I always knew this would happen, had to happen because it’s the only way anything really makes any kind of sense. Or maybe it’s just that we don’t know the questions to ask or the words to use to conceive of the answers? Or maybe I’m just crazy, just bordering the edge of sanity where everything has meaning and your mind blows up trying to understand it All. Don’t think it hasn’t felt like that this past week.

Curious seeing all these perspectives all the time and curious wondering how I ended up at this place where I attack someone I love and ponder the nature of the universe while I make food for fat healthcare workers who can’t even figure out how to place a delivery order.

[note: When you place an order over the phone you want to be delivered to you, never ever say, “I want to make a delievery.” You know what that means? It means you want to get a job at the cafe and drive food to fat healthcare workers. That’s what it fucking means! Why is it so hard for people to use the fucking phone?!!!]