Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2003-07-13- 9:05 p.m.

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

I’m pretentious, a snob, and a dilettante. I’m arrogant, selfish, and abusive. So I’ve been told in the last twenty-four hours. And since I’ve been told it, I suppose it is all true.
Perhaps, I am not really twenty-six years old. My first memory takes place in December of 1979. My birth certificate says I was a little more than three years old then. But if I cannot remember it, what makes that true?
Is this truly all that I am? Am I just this jumble of my memories, my ideas and emotions? Just this sagging lump of flesh playing host to the bones, organs, blood and bile inside of me, all working simply to maintain the random pulses of electricity working their way through the highways of my nerve endings, resulting in the firings of neurons within the pasty gray matter of my brain, where all those memories, ideas and emotions reside.
I can imagine myself, stepping out accidentally into traffic without looking. What happens if some luxury sport utility vehicle busy dodging taxicabs collides with me? My ribcage will shatter, I assume, collapsing inwards, sending shards of bone into my liver and kidneys, as the force of the car collapses my lungs. After that, my body will hurtle through the air and land on the street, where with a little luck, my skull will avoid being smashed by the pavement. So, with luck, I’ll soon be rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital, where Emergency Room doctors will try to stem the blood loss that is starving my brain of oxygen, resulting in failures of those electrical neuron firings that regulate my body and mind. But shortly after that, the damage in my liver and kidneys will result in renal failure, introducing a myriad of toxins into my blood, which will be carried back up to that pasty gray matter. After that, it gets harder to predict, but not too much time will pass before the myriad of sudden traumas result in the failure of my heart and brain.
At which point that sagging lump of flesh, those bones, those organs, even the blood and the bile will die. What was once a living organism that walked and talked, ate and slept, thought and felt, will be no more than a variety of dead tissue types beginning the long, slow process of decay. That is what will happen to everything that I can look at in the mirror and identify as ‘me’.
But what about those memories, those ideas, those emotions? Where will they go? What is in store for them?
Considering how important to me those things are, it seems almost scandalous that I can’t answer those questions. But this cloud is still like all the others, having its own special silver lining: no matter what happens for the rest of my life, I’ll get the answer to those questions. Someday, we all will.
I find the hard part to be that there is nothing to be done, nothing at all, about any of it. I am, in turn, pretentious, a snob, a dilettante, arrogant, selfish, and abusive. I am, in fact, all of those things and much, much worse as well. I contain multitudes. I cannot change any of those things, I am powerless against them, not least of the reasons why being because it does not matter hardly at all if I truly am any of those things. I am perceived to be them, which in many ways, is far worse. For while I may be in turns optimistic and delusional about the notion that I do, in fact, have the power to change myself, to make myself into a person of my own choosing, I have hardly any power to change and even less capability for understanding of the myriad of beliefs and experiences that result in the manner that other people see me.
So here I sit, trying to confront the fact that I haven’t a clue what to do, and that even if I did, it is almost certainly wishful thinking that anything I might do would matter. Sartre would have been proud, I suppose, except that near the end of his life, he claimed everything he wrote was bullshit. The Bard wrote that “to thine own self be true,” but frankly, I don’t know what to do with that nugget of advice. I feel like I have spent my years in ceaseless exploration of this thing called myself, and that everyplace that I have been seems familiar and yet I cannot mark any posts to help me find my way.
I could not tell you what it means to be happy. The best I could manage would be an inaccurate description of what happiness feels like. Supposing of course that what I believe happiness to be is what happiness actually is. After all, it occurs to me that all I know of happiness is because I believe that I have been happy at times, and because I believe that other people are happy sometimes, and that I’ve seen them when they are happy, and that I can understand something of the reasons why. And like everyone else, I want to be happy; it is so important to all of us, isn’t it? And so I try to draw on experience, my own and what I have observed in others. But I wonder, do any of us really have a clue as to what the fuck we are doing?
The thing is, you see, is that I’m not really very happy at all. Are you? Perhaps you are, perhaps you know something I don’t, or a great deal more than me even. I don’t know. Perhaps it is simply that I have read the wrong books, had the wrong conversations, thought the wrong things. All I know is that I’m sick to death of not knowing. I’d like to read the right book, and think the right thoughts. I’d like to ask you for the answers. But I doubt that any of you are holding the answers. And I suspect that even if you did, you wouldn’t share them with me. And I could call you a bunch of names because of it, but after all, I’m not really any better, am I?

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If you want to make me
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jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

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