Van's Journal: Year 7

  2005-Aug-25 | 2005-Aug-9 | 2005-May-25 | 2005-May-23 | 2005-Jan-17 | 2005-Jan-14 | 2005-Jan-12 | 2004-Dec-28

2005-08-25 : Years ago, I understood that I really wasn't attracted to many people socially, sexually or romantically. Most people just don't do it for me. It's not that I don't like people in general. I do. As I've said an obnoxious number of times, I think humanity is a beautiful thing. I just don't personally want most of them in my life.

Due to loneliness combined with stigma surrounding that resulting social isolation, I began making serious, concerted efforts to try to make myself want people. My social and sexual desires were subsidized. The result was an awkward, yet somewhat successful expansion of social abilities that benefit me today. The nasty side effect was that other people, who I never found all that much use for in the beginning, became overvalued. This, of course, played in to an array of other nasty issues.

But I've come to realize that extensively needing people is no longer really in fashion for me. It now behooves me to stop that whole subsidy charade and let my personality rest back at its natural state of not really liking very many people.

2005-08-09 : On Sunday, I spent all day in the emergency room with a friend. The whole day was emotionally extremely tiring for me and I was exhausted by the time I could leave. Toward the end of the day, I accidentally found out some news that disturbed me and slowly began shaking my comfortable little world.

A guardian angel rode up in a cab I had called to pick me up from a hospital. I've met several guardian angels in my life. I'm not a religious man, but I do understand that guardian angels exist, not necessarily in the Christian sense, but in the sense of their effect on our lives, and the way they serendipitously blow in and out at times seemingly planned out by some grand scheme. His name was Minister Clarence Drew.

Minister Clarence Drew explained that he had been driving a cab for 54 years, or in different terms, more than two of my lifetimes. From the looks of him, I thought that perhaps he had been alive for 54 years, if that, but not driving for 54 years.

"You've seen a lot change," I commented, not yet realizing he was a guardian angel.

"Nothing's changed," he said. "I've seen cosmetic adjustments. But no changes." He went on to explain how he had survived for 54 years as a cab driver. He explained how he understood the way the minds that control the city worked. He explained he understood the city.

I replied, "You get a little taste of everybody." I envied that.

"Yes, that's exactly right." He rolled the phrase around his mind as if swishing a drink across his tongue. "A little taste of everybody."

"Have you ever gotten a ticket," I asked, trying to fulfill a foolish fantasy in my mind that he had never gotten a ticket in 54 years, and that I would have that story to tell my friends.

"Of course I have," he snapped back. "What kind of question is that. But I haven't had any unnecessary tickets. I can't afford that. All my extra money goes to the kids I send to school in Africa."

He continued on to tell me of his Bible school in Malawi. Of course, I thought he was starting on a scam, as many people in DC tend to do. But I listened to his story, as I usually tend to do. I've found that if I keep my mouth shut and listen, everybody outs themselves as a bringer of truth or of lies, and will eventually raise themselves up or shoot themselves in the foot without my expending any energy on them.

As he continued to speak, his status as a guardian angel became more apparent and his story began to make more sense. He started to describe things in Africa that one probably wouldn't know had he not been there in person. He spoke of the architecture and of the children and of the restaurants with white linen table cloths. Most Americans don't even realize Africa has civilized restaurants with white linen table cloths.

Minister Clarence Drew went on to say things to me that I needed to hear, but didn't know I needed to hear before he said them. The details of what he said are not important. All that matters is that on that night, in a cab, words seemingly from somewhere else traveled through Minister Clarence Drew, and unbeknownst to him brought order back to my world.

I got his email address and told him I would send some pictures from my trips to Africa. It is not often one has the opportunity to get a guardian angel's email address. Of course, the status of guardian angel is usually something temporary, I believe. It is a status with which anybody can be endowed for a limited time and a limited circumstance, either when the situation lines up just right, or when whatever god you pray to makes it happen, depending on your perspective.

I've met a lot of important people in my life. I've met presidents and ambassadors and famous actors and people who control the workings of the world from behind closed doors. But of all the events, both tragic and splendid that I experienced on Sunday, I prefer to think of it as the day I got a guardian angel's email address. Not many people can say they have that.

2005-05-25 : I find confrontation costly and avoid it as anything but a last resort. Even when I know I can win, I rarely engage in a direct combat, as someone can always damage me on their way down. I'm not so cocky as to think I'm invulnerable in that respect.

Rather, I choose to first try to nullify the dispute so that it would no longer matter to me. Second, I will try to solve the dispute diplomatically by opening up a line of honest communication about it. Third, if neither of those options work, I will engage in a lengthy and resource-intensive campaign of manipulating the opposition's environment so as to alter their circumstances or their perception of reality, in an effort to contain the threat. Only lastly will I engage in a confrontation. My actual performance in confrontation is hard to judge, as I've engaged in fewer in my entire lifetime than I could count on one hand. When I do take on a direct confrontation, everything is geared toward the fastest kill so as to minimize the risk of damage to myself. Since you don't actually want to aim for a total kill in most disputes, this is not an advisable option. But it should be understood that I either don't fight, or I aim for the jugular, there is no in-between. This partially explains why I don't take well to perceived attacks, because in my mind, if someone is merely prodding me, it has to be part of some kind of larger scheme to completely annihilate me. And while I can tell myself, no, that's not how most people do things, my defenses still act as if this is an attempt at direct confrontation, so I start going up the aforementioned escalations of dealing with the conflict. All this, while it has served me relatively well, is not glamorous or interesting to most people.

Another thing is that I'm always extra-cautious and extra-conservative when judging my own abilities. Whereas most nineteen year olds went through a cocky phase where they suddenly realize the power and beauty of their youth (and suddenly lose it before they've figured out how to wield it), I consistently performed all kinds of mental acrobatics to prevent myself from ever relying on it. Whereas most Americans tend to run up credit card debt, I build vast systems of financial buffers to maintain stable cash flows and positive account valances, even if it has meant cutting out little niceties like buying a mattress to sleep on. I always assume everybody else is stronger than they are and that I am weaker than I am, so that I never run the risk of underestimating somebody in a conflict. One of the main drawbacks of this philosophy is that I never fully use all the resources at my disposal to their fullest potential, and always function under some sort of self-imposed handicap. Luckily, I typically have the resources and intellect to still excel in spite of this, but I have made a definite decision to prioritize stability and strength ahead of excitement and expansion. While this definitely contributes to my overall survival probabilities, it also helps to make me a bit less than exciting.

To me, all the victories that matter are solemn, because a victory over someone rather than an assimilation of them is a less than optimal act. At the end of the day, I'm not a violent person interested in dominating people. I doubt I or much of anybody else has the mental capacity to effectively dominate that many people at the same time. I am, however, a person whose whole philosophy of human interaction was founded on the idea of dealing with people as potential threats first and friends second. For whatever reason, I originally saw the world as a scary place, not an inviting one. No matter how much I consciously understand the world, I see every person in terms of their tactical advantages and weaknesses, their strategic plans with respect to me, and the long-term advantages they could offer me. I have had thousands of alliances and extraordinarily few friendships. If I was somebody else and knew everything about me that I know, I don't even know that I'd want to be my friend. I would definitely tap me as a valuable resource, but farther than that, I just don't know.

And part of me worries just a little bit about what I'm becoming. I am slowly getting stronger, smarter, wiser, with more resources at my disposal. But in the end, I'm still a tactical entity who sees the world in varying shades of threats and resources. I recognized this possible pitfall years ago, and defenses from it were incorporated into that moral system I had built. But that system is now defunct. What governs me now, other than simple human desires and fear of retribution? But I guess that's what governs most people. I just worry sometimes that I could become dangerous. I would never want to go hurting people, it's simply not in my nature, and even if it was, I understand it's not a wise tactical move. But I am sometimes afraid that I will inadvertently hurt people in my life in a very bad way because it's just my nature.

2005-05-23 : I've been working on assignment actually within DC for the past few weeks and have been able to walk to work. Today I took the metro to the mall to get fitted for a tux and get my hair cut. I'm going to this birthday party thing in France over the weekend, and need to look presentable. The hair washing before the cut was amazing, the lady did it better than sex. I felt like taking a smoke afterwards. She was Ethiopian, or maybe Eritrean, and had fingertips of the gods.

I wore charcoal pants and a white shirt with a checkered white pattern sewn into it. The tie I wore all day was stuffed down in my pocket as I walked up and down the subway platform to get back home. I like how people look at me when I walk up and down the platform. We're all waiting for the same train, but I'm the only one who's really moving without purpose, meandering up and down the open spaces. It's not so much that people want to look at me in particular, it's just that I happen to be the only interesting thing in their field of view when I do it. Meandering like I do underground is just odd enough to make people take notice, but never so odd for them to dismiss me as one of the subterranean crazies. So instead, they examine me and pick me apart. You can feel it in their eyes. They're looking at the cut of clothes, the form of a walk, the curve of an ass, the withdrawing of a hairline, the curl of some hair, the pronouncement of a nose. I don't think it's so much that I like them looking at me, I just like the feeling of causing a wave of notice among a small crowd and making them truly look at something as they unwind from work and make their respective ways home.

The train picked me up and took me to my neighborhood. I walked off with a rush of other people and as I squeezed my way past a pair of young girls trying to make their way upstream, one of them said to the other, "A lot of people live in Dupont Circle." That, we do. I suppose it says something about this place, that I do whatever I can to see the entire world, yet choose to tell stories about an area seven square blocks big. It's one of those rare places that has reached a critical mass of people, money and culture to have a pronounced, distinct vibe. I made my way up the escalator, happy to see a perfect alignment the way the cities planners intended it; a long line of asses on the right side, and a long line of open space on the left. I started jogging up the left side of one of the decidedly longer escalators in the city and made my way to the top, assessing the asses along the way. The little run provides the rush I look for to take the place of one otherwise provided by a tasty and expensive treat. Taking a stroll through the Circle, most of the professional types hadn't made their way out yet, so a lot of the people around were the homeless, and the ones on some sort of chemical that makes them talk aloud to themselves.

I walked on home. A few people looked at me, I looked at a few people, and for both our parts, we turned away as soon as eye contact was made, lest some kind of human connection actually be accomplished. People watch as I walk by, usually from the corners of their eyes, as they sit and sip cocktails on the outside seating at the many restaurants along the way. They look at most everybody, except for the extremely attractive ones who are afraid of peaking desperate interest.

I made my way inside, and past the building guard who read is book and took no notice of me, and into my apartment where I'm having a scotch before I settle in for the night. But I thought I should tell you about my day for once, since it's something I so rarely do.

2005-01-17 : "For the mighty air drives him into the Sea, and the Sea spews him forth upon the dry Earth; Earth tosses him into the beams of the blazing sun, and he flings him back to the eddies of Air. One takes him from the other, and all reject him. One of these I now am, an exile and a wanderer from the gods, for that I put my trust in insensate strife."     — Empedocles

See, sometimes philosophy can be beautiful. I've started studying it in an effort to rebuild my own philosophy, or rather my own method of dealing with the world around me. It was only recently that I realized for a lot of people, philosophy and a world view are matters of amusement rather than achieving a goal. I realize that I have needs. I set goals to fill those needs. This is normal. For me, though, a comprehensive world view, which takes philosophy, science and administration together, exists only to meet those goals. That is, I believe, where I do not match normal standards. There are certain things I do for amusement. Sometimes I watch a movie of no advancement value. Right now, I'm drinking this Coke and eating these banana chips or whatever they are, without any specific goal in mind. But studying philosophy is a massive investment of time and resources, and must have some other justification in my mind other than "it amuses me." It must serve the interests of the whole in some way, otherwise it simply becomes another amusement to compete with movies, against which it would likely lose out.

Today I was reading this philosophy book by the pool at my hotel, waiting for my food to arrive. When the food did arrive, I had to put the book down to arrange the utensils and to open little packets of ketchup. My mind noted that the resource demands on it had suddenly dropped significantly and it requested of my body the use of a hand to bring the book, since the mind would be able to concentrate on both opening ketchup packets and studying philosophy at the same time. The body, however, reminded the mind that two hands are required to open ketchup packets, that the book required one hand, and that only two hands were available. The mind retorted that philosophy is a higher goal than opening packets of ketchup and that the mind's hunger was more important than the body's. The body, resentful of the mind's constant dominance, ignored the request. I stepped in to settle the dispute. I reminded both that while the mind's survival required the body's nourishment, the body's survival did not require philosophy. In one motion, the mind backed down, the body rejoiced, and I suddenly realized more fully how grounded I am in the philosophy that surrounds me. That the body won out even though it was not in dire need of food has an explanation. And in part, that explanation is in the history of philosophy.

I should pursue other areas of study as well. But I've started with philosophy because it is a method by which the culture chooses to define how to think.

One facet I've noticed so far is how closely it is tied to language, and how much philosophy grapples with the definition of the word "thing," or any of its counterparts in various languages. When I chose to abolish verbal language inside my head years ago, it freed me from a lot of the acrobatics required in philosophy to get around language, but at the same time, it may have codified an English definition of the word into thought processes. That's something I'll need to audit. But I still like that I did it, as it allows for easy models inside my head to be created that can take elements of the physical and the mental, and work with them in the same model. You don't have to define the word "thing" and you don't have to distinguish between matter and energy and spatial voids. They simply interact. That you don't know if "mind" is a substance or not is immaterial to the model (pardon the pun). I can still make them interact seamlessly in the internal model based on intense previous observation, though admittedly, empirical evidence in such models is often lacking.

Historically what I've done is handled all of this hard work of model making and simulating various ideas of truth, then delegated expressing the results to a lower area of the mind. That lower area typically approached the problem by choosing words very slowly and very carefully, often times taking weeks or months to come up with a translation for a thought that took seconds or minutes to dream up. More recently, I have sped up the translation process by first studying and adopting shorthand vernacular in cursory conversation and by compromising slightly on the accuracy required before a word is allowed to be spoken. Still the process is slow, and in conversation, I typically trail behind most other participants. This has, however, freed up a lot of translation time. Now I can spend weeks to years translating consequential ideas rather than translating something as insignificant as the play-by-play over tearing open packets of ketchup.

I would like to think that when I get to studying art, that this would offer an alternate method of expression to words. However, no amount of study will yield talent. Thus, I fear I am stuck with words for the foreseeable future.

My overall view of philosophy is likely still naïve, though. Philosophy is not the realm of the goal-oriented from what I can tell. How I am like the Romans, an expert in internal administration and a dunce in the matters of intellect, seeking to assimilate philosophy to add to my own strength.

But Alexander the Great pretty much conquered the known world by the time he was 25, didn't he? All I conquered was my mind.

2005-01-14 : I watched a man die yesterday. It didn't shock me or disgust me or change how much I value my own life. I watched almost as a curiosity, as if I had seen it a thousand times before, and one more wouldn't phase me. But the truth was that it was the first time I had ever seen it happen in front of me.

It was slower than I expected. I guess I had always thought that death came in two basic forms, either quick as in a gunshot to the head, or long as in someone who dies of cancer over months or years. But his death was neither one of those. His death took over half an hour, and he seemed to die in stages. From the moment he collapsed in front of us, he did not visibly regain consciousness. Sometimes his heart would beat, yet he would not breathe. That was the beginning, when we knew where he was headed. Our medical staff gave him emergency care, but soon his heart stopped. I wonder why his heart stopped. Was it his brain that stopped sending the signal to beat? Was it something else? I don't know enough about physiology to say. Was he dead? At what point did a collective of cells cease to be more than the sum of its parts? These thoughts are neither profound nor original, but they are now much more real to me.

At 10:25 in the morning, the doctor pronounced him dead, and the people surrounding him gave up trying to save him. I submit that is when he truly died. It was when the living decided that he was no longer one of us, that he had passed from something that is to something that was. This more than anything I know illustrates how much our interactions and relationships with the people around us define who and what we are. I need to draw on this concept.

2005-01-12 : The people in my fantasies tell me they love me now.

2004-12-28 : I've tried a few times, and I wasn't able to write. I wanted to write before the sixth year ended, but I couldn't. I wanted to write as the seventh dawned, but I couldn't. I wanted to write so much before that, but I couldn't get past it. I couldn't get past something I did a few months back, something I shouldn't have done. I was ashamed and angry at myself, I felt defeated by myself. I had been doing so well, then I failed miserably.

Journal, I went back to Natchez. Just for a couple of days. I knew from the moment I started the trip that it was going to end up being a mistake. I felt the impending doom just waiting for the airplane doors to open and let me on. Up until they did and I sat down, little voices in my head kept telling me to turn back, that I didn't have to go. But I struck back at those voices as an abusive father would strike his child, and they quieted.

I had forgotten what it was like to hate myself, Journal. I forgot what it was like to feel ugly and worthless, to feel like I had no place in the world, to feel paranoia surround me. I forgot what it was like to live in a place that valued my undervaluing myself more than it valued what I could actively contribute. That fucking city. I was so good to it. I did everything I could have done to part on good terms, and it fucking breached the contract. It called me back after a clean break. That wasn't how it was supposed to happen, Journal. It wasn't supposed to start again after it ended. I wasn't supposed to make that kind of mistake. I wasn't supposed to go back. And I knew it. And I did anyway.

Well, I'm not doing it again, not any time soon. I can't. I won't. I'm not doing that to myself again. And I'm not being nice to that city any more, either. I can't. Ever since I came back, I've been pessimistic and jaded, until the last few days when I finished repairing a lot of the immediate damage and started to get past it. You're probably happier without me anyway, you fucking whore of a city. I'll leave you to your own devices, to wallow in your own psychosis, to keep begging for Federal money to keep up your appearances, in hopes of convincing yourself you're still somehow part of your former economic glory, and to keep inflicting your eccentricities on the unwilling to make us believe we're the dysfunctional ones. Find some other poor soul to stick a hot poker up his ass and say, "Thank you, sir, more please." I'm not your bitch any more.

I'll make my peace with you when we're both ready. But I'm still getting over the shock of having you inflicted on me for so many years, so don't call me, I'll call you.

Now maybe I can get on with things.

Copyright © Van Goodwin, 2004-2005
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