Obama just spoke at the Democratic National Convention and it was a truly inspiring speech, for those of you who weren't aware of my left-leaning political affiliations. And how great was it, too, that he spoke at Invesco Field at Mile High in Denver, surrounded by the Broncos' ring of fame. Heh.
I find freedom in structure. Ceasing combat with chaos simplifies life, brings me to a different stage of being like can opener simplified being a bachelor. The removal of the most basic struggle for subsistence opens me to other struggles, this time of my own choosing, and in this ... self-exploration.
There are those who find freedom in chaos, or the destruction of otherwise stifling social constructs; the difference between them and me is the fact that they blame all structure for suffering (and some constructs are definitely oppressive) and that these constructs will never change, while I believe in course correction and being able to flip the script. Our pathologies and psychology, patriarchies, aristocracies, attitudes and behaviors can be changed for the better, positioned towards at a more tranquil, egalitarian aim.
Agents of chaos call me naive. They say that we're too far gone and we have to strip down the whole thing and start over; maybe they're right. I can't say for sure, but I'm not in favor of sacrificing thousands of years of this social experiment we've got going here to find out.
I've read LORD OF THE FLIES. I know that paring life down to its basic principles doesn't necessarily result in a utopian society, simply because the most basic form of survival requires a domineering physical strength (and aggressiveness, and essentially masculinity) and I certainly think that enough of our race memory has already been devoted to base equations that thrive on the inequality of sexes, races, classes and creeds. We should be done with that by now.
They say that we'll be able to pick and choose what we keep, when we burn the world around us, that the revolution will have an agenda that'll keep the atrocities of early civilization from repeating themselves ... but I look around and I see the number, 6.8 billion and counting, and I ask, in all sincerity, "Are you serious?" They say that probably won't be the number when they're done, that a lot of (guilty) people will die. So I ask, "Will it only be guilty people dying?" And they look at me, and they sort of dig their toes in the dirt, and finally reply, "The innocent will probably have to fight, too. There's no such thing as a bloodless revolution. These people will be heroes."
Heroes, maybe.
But they'll be dead for damn sure.
And that's when I write it off. I say, "There's got to be a better way. People don't have to die." And again they call me naive. But I don't back down, I tell them: "We're so close. We're almost there. At this stage of development, we're changing roles; the old ways are no longer working and we recognize that. Gender roles, race roles, etc. -- these things are no longer applicable. They used to be. Genetics gave us what we needed to get by, but new technology and new ways of thinking have given us ... whatever we want. And what we want is a world where we can be anything we wanna be, do anything we wanna do, where being a woman doesn't mean constant physical fear or being a man doesn't mean a life of irrational behavior simply for the sake of proving his worth to the herd."
We're in the middle.
We've conquered this survival thing, though there are still many places aching to catch up, and now it's time to move on to a different plane of expansion: we've got the tools, more and more every day, but we just have to figure out what to do with them. What do we do with this? How do we tie it all together? How do we achieve "best good for most people" while still maintaining their natural human and social rights? That's the question.
This is the short first assignment to my SEMINAR IN SHAKESPEARE class. We were supposed to read a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets and then come back with a one or two page reaction, and I chose Sonnet 116 because ... I have an affinity for it, a past with it, and chopping it up is sort of a cathartic release because the better you know something logically, the less power it has over you emotionally.
(Forgive any spelling errors ... I now no longer have a spellcheck feature!)
A REACTION TO SONNET 116
Shakespeare arranges his sonnets into three main ideas (one per quatrain) and then ties them all together with a finishing couplet, so that's how I'm going to approach a thematic dissection of the piece.
QUATRAIN 1
Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove:
The bard is shaking out false declarations of love and getting down to the meat: unconditional love allows nothing, no impediment, to derail it; anyone who says "I love you but I can't be with you because yadda, yadda, yadda" isn't really in love because a person who was would find a way around "yadda, yadda, yadda." With love, there are no problems, only solutions. If you fall in love with a girl because she's bleached blonde and fall out of love with her because her brunette roots start showing, you weren't really in love. All alterations, be it a change of clothes or the physical erosion of time, are but petty things to love -- miniscule, meaningless. He also says that true love remains even if the one you love doesn't love you anymore, if he or she (the remover) has removed themselves from the equation; you don't stop loving someone just because they decide that they don't love you anymore. In that, love is cruel but it's always faithful, it's true, and if there's anything more noble or tragic than unrequited love ... I don't know it.
QUATRAIN 2
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Upon further research, a "bark" is a sailboat -- apparently lost at sea, if it's so wandering -- and Shakespeare once more calls on a scene from the natural world (a tempest, or a storm) to parallel some of the hardships that love must endure. Love, like a star, is the one guiding light that a lover, represented here as the navigation of a boat, can look to in times of trouble and be assured that he or she is still headed in the right direction. Because a storm can be disorienting, it can turn a person around, but if all we've got to do is look up, rely on that unconditional love to reassure us unconditionally, then that means something. Love is order amongst chaos (or chaos amongst order, if that's your preference). And it can do that for any ship, for any person, not just the rich or the socially set; you can measure a man up, you can take his height, but his potential, his worth, is incalculable.
QUATRAIN 3
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
Here, Shakespeare denies superficial impediments (aging, a reiteration from the first quatrain) the ability to crush unconditional love. Physical beauty passes. The spiritual beauty of love doesn't. If you love someone, really love someone, then you'll love them until you die, to the edge of doom. It doesn't come and go. Real love is temporally ubiquitous.
FINISHING COUPLET
If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Shakespeare is staking his career on the truth of his assertions; if he's wrong and someone can prove it, then he's never written anything and no man or woman has ever experienced unconditional love, the kind of love people will die for -- love with a capital "L." But since he does write and he has been published and his plays performed, and both men and women have indeed died for love (and sent hundreds of thousands of other men to die in their place, if you've got a thing for Helen of Troy) ... then he can't be wrong. It's a case of "'come into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly." It's not a genuine offer. By virtue of the verbiage, here's no real question, no real room for error. These things that we've just read are right and true, and this is the nature of love.
In the interest of full disclosure, not having Microsoft Word isn't the only reason I don't write as much as I used to. Certainly, this impossible-to-fix Virtumondo virus my home computer's got isn't helping (and I'm working my butt off trying every trick in the book to get rid of it), but in the case of Jeremiah vs. his Future Career, I'm guilty by disassociation.
The thing is ... the more rain that falls, the deeper under my umbrella I go.
Used to be, I'd go out and disassemble whole situations over dinner with friends but the further away from that place I go, the less I trust the people around me to be of any useful application in removing that which distresses my heart. There are a few noble souls to which I'll run, but after awhile ... Negative Nancy overstays her welcome and I feel like they don't want to hear it anymore.
Just because your issues have kicked off their shoes to stay awhile doesn't mean the forebearance of your counselors will be likewise inclined. So I just don't talk about it. What's the use...?
Tell me, "Lean on me," but what are you going to tell me that I don't already know? I've already beat this thing to death from a thousand angles. Do you really think I want to share my story with you, and listen to you make a snap judgment about what's going on without understanding the rest of the threads at work...? If I wanted someone to offer observations born of ignorance and half-of-the-story, I'd talk to a stranger. But that's what I've got. Either I risk overstaying my welcome (and you'd be surprised how easy that is to do) or I try letting someone else in on the joke and risk them not getting the punchline (which is, more often than not, what ends up happening).
So here I go, pulling farther and farther back and spending more and more time by myself, holed up in my room, sleeping more and more to pass the time. It's escapism, even from myself. I don't write anymore because I don't like what I'm saying. If I were to be honest with myself, I'm more miserable now than I've been in a long time. I'm lonelier. I've just had a summer of tremendous disillusionment and that's the farthest I'm willing to discuss what's wrong. There's a lot more to it than that obviously, but for the intents and purposes of this message ... just know that the pieces don't fit and it sucks.
If I were to write a DEAD: WITH DICK & JANE novel, this would be the second chapter.
As always: not suitable for children.
The clink of coffee cups betrays the true nature of a small town café: without it, we could be anywhere that old men gather, not ordering or eating but assembling at their round theaters, acting out the play of a wounded calf or the resentment they held for their English major of a queer son. Because farming nowadays was so much more lucrative. And this is where Jane Good plies her trade, refill after refill, sense of smell long gone from the ash of chain-smoked cigarettes and twice-heated apple pie. With whipped cream, please. No, make that ice cream. Ala mode. No hamburgers in the afternoon, thanks. Too hot outside to eat, they'd say. Too much work to do on a full stomach.
But Jane knew different; shining these seats with their asses was the most productive thing they'd do today. Or any day. She just smiled and replaced the emptied sugar boats, fresh packages of whole cane to keep the insulin companies in business. Can't take care of yourself, she thought, then you damn well deserve to die, and immediately felt bad for having been so unsympathetic. What did she know about them, right? Put yourself in someone else's shoes before you judge 'em. That's the lesson. That's the hope.
But Jane knew that nobody else was gonna pay it forward, knew by the way she'd catch 'em staring at her ass or her tits, what tits she did have, that not a soul cared about the lesson but her. Without either, the ass or the tits, having the most petite figure in a quarter mile, she knew the tips would be hard to come by. The corn-fed girls, they did their thing and bent a little where the old fucks could see – and Jane did, too, when she could bring herself down to it – and that's how the Game was played.
Tom's Diner was no Hooters, to be sure, but certain things held true no matter where you went. A degree in business management and the whole thing still came down to buttering up the crusty but moneyed grandpas whose only fear in life was having their wandering eyes (and occasionally their hands) found out by their wives and being taken for half of everything they owned. Inherited.
Fuck this place.
Start a new pot of decaf instead.
"You ever think of movin' outta here?"
Darla.
They'd had this talk before, every other afternoon.
She was squat, thick, the only other waitress on duty 'til their relief came in at four. Could've been pretty without the weight, got lost somewhere between third grade and the third star on the right and straight on 'til morning and ended up stuck in a loveless marriage with a rebel-flag-waving alcoholic by the name of Andy Davis. She claimed he was Prince Charming but he was really the frog and only with her out of bitterness for their children. They were social obligations, all beating hearts and economic drains. Andy didn't want her, you could smell it on his breath, and all his attempts at trying to want her – sex, more sex, marriage and then babies – only increased the speed at which bullet shattered bone. She wanted romance. He wanted out. Misery was the only thing they could agree on.
"I like it here" was how Jane replied, leaning up against the order-out window.
The cooks could see her there from the back, they weren't much busy themselves, and she could see the cars as they passed by the giant picture window up front, every five minutes like clockwork. Weekday afternoons, you'd count three trucks before seeing a car, sixteen before the sheriff or one of his deputies flew by. Never any city cops. They just sat down by the supermarket and harassed the high school girls who were both too young and too stupid to see that uniform as anything but an invitation for a sexual assault. Maybe isn't a yes. Southern Comfort isn't a yes, and Jane frowned at the reasons she knew this – her old running buddies, never herself. She was always wise before her friends.
"We all like it here, Janie," was the reply. Always the reply. Always the lie. Puff, puff and then: "But don't you think you'd like it better somewhere else? You're a college girl. You coulda done something with yourself."
Hell of an observation from a woman who collected travel magazines for fifteen years because she was too chicken shit to get out in the world for herself. But Jane knew there was a shred of truth in what Darla was saying and she bit back on her tongue from saying what she really wanted to say. It was polite to take shit from a cow you had to work with. (Cow. How could she call her a cow…? She didn't know better.) Polite. Treat others like you wanna be treated. Fill yourself with pent-up spite until you hear yourself sounding like the Underground Man, 'til you stop sticking up for logic altogether and become an agent of absurd pacificity. That was her brain moving. She wasn't sure if it was even a word. It probably wasn't.
"I am doing something. Jack's got a good job and the rent here's cheap enough to get by. I'm not looking for a million dollars. I'm happy, and isn't that what's important…?"
But she wasn't. Lot of half truths today.
Jack did have a good job, though, for around here anyway. He was an oil-hand, drilling, clean-ups when necessary but mostly drilling and hauling and general oily bullshit. That's what mid-America has in store for their boys, the ones that don't waste all that time and money flunking themselves into two decades worth of student loans, and eight-fifty an hour was top dollar for a county that boasts an average income just short of sixteen grand a year. That's Southeast Kansas. Look it up. Jack had a good job alright.
But it was a small talk answer for an inconsequential conversation, destined to be forgotten and then repeated the next time they worked together, and Darla didn't even notice. Or care. Or both. Everything slid off her, as cold and meaningless as the rut her life had become, and Jane was glad when she finally parted ways to take a powder.
She herself went back to work, back around to the two or three leper colonies that had sprung up from the floorboards, refilled their coffees and fake-smiled when they marveled over some passing resemblance she had to one of their daughters or granddaughters or nieces or dead movie stars. All Jane could say was, "I like to think that I look like myself," thought that it was okay to look the way she looked and that she actually liked it, and the old men would grin and laugh so hard that they seemed like tiny wrinkled Buddhas.
But it wasn't cute. Buddha never told his waitress that she looked like his daughter and then summoned up a fantasy about fucking her when he was young enough to keep his dick hard. But that's what this town was all about. That's what all the rustic work shirts meant: an endless stream of horny octogenarians too dissatisfied with life to roll back home and fondle the aging missus, because Viagra was too expensive and Jane had to block out the anger she felt at herself for becoming part of the cycle. Because it kept spinning. Around and around and around and, insomuch as she knew, nothing was ever going to change.
John Thomas died two days ago in a motorcycle accident.Smokin' JT used to live with me for awhile back in Sedan, and this is just another in a long line of things that are fucked. Godspeed, Johnny Boy.
If I were to write a DEAD: WITH DICK & JANE novel, this would be the first chapter.
Not suitable for children, of course.
Sex.
She didn't want it, but he did.
Her mamma always told her that men just sorta needed it, and if she didn't give it to him then he'd just go out and find someone who would, so Jane grinned and bore it for Jack's sake and he barely noticed how dry she was while he was inside her. Mamma also said that lust was a peculiar thing, that sex was a man's reward for protecting his family, a Pavlovian response, and that it was simply her duty as his mate. You got to give a little to get, but it wasn't just a little and mamma never told her anything about what happens next, when she didn't need a man to provide her all her earthly needs.
Things were one way, a status quo, and a girl's gotta abide by the status quo or she risks bein' nothing. No matter how successful or strong she thinks she is, there's a relationship between men and women, a balance her mom had called it, and that teeter-totter of give and take had kept mankind going for the better part of fifteen million years. He'd stepped up, walked right out of the primordial goo and there was no holding him back.
Jane just wondered, from time to time, while mankind was off conquering and Jack got into one of his moods where she was trying to wash the dishes after supper and he kept trying to make her horny by pushing his already-hard dick into the back of her pajamas, Jane just wondered where woman-kind had fallen off the wagon.
Old cultures – the Mayans and Incas, all the South American tribal folk – they were woman worshippers. They're still finding figurines of fertility goddesses at Pompeii, but here at Jane Good's kitchen sink, with her boyfriend's hands searching the front side of her body while his chest pressed hard against her back, the only worshipping to be had was done by her, a few minutes later after she'd dried her hands from the sink and knelt down along the corner of their shared bed. She took him into her mouth, a little rough the way he liked, and listened as he talked her through it, telling her what she already knew, how good she felt and looked from the top down, and that he was ready to cum because he was always ready to cum.
She sucked him off to make him go away, really, just because she knew he'd be done in a matter of minutes and be satisfied for the rest of the night, or at least until early morning, and it wasn't anything to do with Jack … not really, he was a good guy. Emotionally and physically needy, but he tried harder than he should have to, to make her happy. He just didn't understand and she didn't know how to explain it.
Jane didn't need him to stand outside her cave with a club and she only occasionally wanted him the way he wanted her – incessantly, feverishly, wholly given to the lust and the moment – but she liked having him around because of what he represented; she had a kind of faith in the old ways, in a system that had "worked pretty well so far," but she wasn't sure if that's because she honestly believed it or the give-and-take relationship that existed between the sexes was just something her mother told her to make the sting hurt less when she got paid less for doing the same job, or couldn't get the job at all.
Mamma came from a different time, from a different place … but maybe she knew. Maybe she thought that reinforcing the social model, the way things were, that she could hide some of the pain and disappointment that she herself had felt when the opportunities and success had never come her way because femininity was God's joke.
Here you are, a woman, sinuous and curvy, wielding all the powers of womanhood and the sacred vessel of man's children, but because you are what you are your body belongs in the kitchen with the rest of the milk and the eggs. It was something God laughed about with His buddies at the bowling alley, thunder made from crashing pins, and He has to be a man because … insert any number of witty one-liners here, about men making a mess of things when a woman could've done it so much better. But did Jane turn the whole thing into a caricature because hyperbole makes tragedy easier to swallow? She wondered; she knew, though she'd been conditioned to deal with her uneasiness with "humor" rather than revolution. She knew. Wit was dangerous. You poke at the problem and it never really goes away, but at least you don't feel like you're doing nothing.
That realization didn't make Jack any easier, but he didn't say anything when she lifted the dangling corner of the sheet or used her own shirt to wipe his bitter-tasting stuff out of her mouth. He thought he was being nice by pretending not to notice, by allowing her to think that she fooled him into believing that she swallowed, that she was keeping that part of him inside of her for … however long it takes to make its way through her system.
Sometimes she did. Most of the time she didn't because it was too thick, too unctuous, and the biggest part of the charade that comprised all their intimate moments was the confidence that a part of him remained inside of her at all times – like marking his territory, his, Jack's chest swelled unconsciously because he'd been taught to feed off the power, the humiliation of subjugating his mate, to make her his, an apostrophe to show ownership. There's a reason they call it "dotting the eyes," even the language she used was against her.
Things would have been different if Jane would've wanted to swallow, on her own without his suggestion, because everything changes in mutuality. Maybe she would've liked to carry him with her, like being pregnant but without the baby. Maybe she liked the taste sometimes, when he'd had a lot of sugar that day. Because it made a difference. She could've been satisfied herself, just curling his toes with her kink, indulging him his fantasies of power and being at one with her through his juices … but she wasn't.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda. The hypotheticals didn't matter because she was never given the choice, not of her own, and for all intents and purposes, Jane Good was a slave. Not to Jack and especially not Jack's cock, but to something far more sinister and far-reaching than a simple backwoods boy could imagine in his wildest dreams. He wasn't even aware he was part of it sometimes. Ever.
She wasn't a slave to anything but herself, and everything she'd allowed them to do to her.
