5/23/2014

I’ve been talking about myself a lot.  I am going to continue to do that.  I’ve been reaching contradictory conclusions a lot, feeling mutually exclusive feelings a lot.  I’ve been starting sentences in one place and finishing them in another.  I’ve been starting paragraphs with one goal in mind and finishing them with another.  And this is just in writing, where I a free from the tyranny of linear communication, where I can go back and edit and reframe and limit, if not eliminate, the pregnant pauses and especially egregious midsentence 180s.  You can only imagine how embarrassing I am in person!

I hope I am embarrassing myself.  I hope I come across as someone who has no idea what he is talking about, because in truth that’s what I am.  I am confronted with a world that is larger than I can comprehend, larger than I can even begin to comprehend, and this insurmountability makes its presence known.  I have thoughts in a million directions, and so when I try to choose one, I hope I appear indecisive.  I am in possession of so many more feelings than I know how to name, and so when I try to, I hope I stumble.  

I like the idea of successfully hiding this confusion and wonder and uncertainty, of confidently passing it off and going about my days as if I am in command of my mind, I think I like more the idea of laying it all on the table, of naming all that I can name and pointing stupidly but emphatically in the direction of what I cannot.  That’s where this idea of being a writer is coming from.  Ta-Nehisi Coates put it like this:  “I am here to see things as clearly as I can, and then name them. Sometimes what I see is gorgeous. And then sometimes what I see is ugly. And sometimes my sight fails me.”  

If I believe in anything, it is that.  The misdirected sentences with far too many em dashes containing Carl Sagan paraphrases and Frontier Ruckus references and half-baked conclusions I’ll disagree with tomorrow if not the next paragraph--they are me, they are who I am.  Along with my kidneys and my memories of middle school and my failures to wake up as early as I would like to and my everything else.  And I don’t know what to do with me, but I am eager to find out.  We are the universe learning about itself, Carl Sagan said.  Well, I am me learning about myself.  And I don’t know what that means, but I know that it makes me feel.