Author: Michael-Lejeune

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Employers: Surrogate Parents

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There are two types of people in this world.

How many times have you heard that one?

Well, there are.  Those who reject their jobs, and those who adopt their jobs.

Ernie is a job rejecter.  A job denier.  He shows up a little bit late each day, and leaves a little bit early.  He barely does enough of his duties at his job to get by, and will do even less if he thinks he can get away with it.  The work is a chore for him, every minute of it.  There are no joys to be taken.  Little or no sense of accomplishment when he does something well.  He moans and groans about going back to work after the weekend.  He finds petty excuses to call out, or flat out lies.

Annie is a job adopter.  She shows up early when she can, and stays late sometimes, just to finish up what she was working on.  She perceives her assigned duties as a starting ground, and does more as often as she can.  She takes special interest in understanding the jobs of the people around her.  She makes responsible decisions in her home life to make sure she has enough sleep and solid transport to work.  She builds work relationships because it facilitates the work environment.

I bet you have some defined feelings about these two types.  You may feel that you identify with one or the other.  I bet you know someone at your job that you’d categorize as an Ernie or an Annie.

What I have elected to relate to you today, in this entry of the Octopode’s bloggotron, is that I think both types are wrong.  I think they’re both improper ways of handling this ubiquitous phenomenon we all have to deal with, this….employment thing.  Why?  Because both of them take their job personally.

When Ernie’s supervisor tells him he sent a copy of the TPS Report to the wrong auditing office, Ernie gets mad.  He gets upset that he’s just been told he did something wrong.  If someone notices his lateness, if someone calls attention to his lack of output, it inspires anger.  If he is turned down for a promotion, he is insulted, and this may lead to anger as well.  His apprehension about how he is perceived at work may extend outward too, making him sensitive about other aspects of his presence there.

Annie’s output is higher, and like an overachieving child, she uses her good behavior to look for approval.  Her work is very important to her personally, and she thinks about it even when she isn’t at work.  She finds ways to improve, ways to increase productivity, and ways to improve the systems her workplace has in place.  Her ideas, and her effort to implement them, are the things she works hardest at in her life.  They represent the best of her.  When they are rejected, it hurts her.  She may react with deep sadness, anger, or by telling herself that the one who rejected her work doesn’t know what they’re doing.

The way their feelings are wrapped up in their jobs is the problem.  Their personal validation hinges on what they do in the workplace, and the way it is received.  Ernie wants to do as little as possible, but this is mostly a defense based on the explicit idea that he doesn’t care about his job and how he is perceived there, a lie he tells himself to protect himself from being recognized as a failure or as a fraud.  Annie pushes herself too hard and is far more productive than is called for at her job because she is desperately trying to prove herself, to herself, and to everyone else, particularly those whose opinion of her she values.  This is why when a negative opinion is expressed, she devalues that person in order to save herself from their disapproval.

They’re not opposites, these two.  They’re actually substantially the same:  Both of them need to be validated by their workmates/supervisors.  Both of them are using their jobs as one (likely of many) mechanisms to culture appreciation from others, which they need just to feel OK.  In short, they take their jobs personally.

And it’s not acceptable.

If I could reach into these two employee archetypes, which in my perspective are at least nine of ten employed people out there, I would switch their regard for their jobs from personal to business.  I’d make a third type of person, the type that I try to be.

The businessperson.  That’s what it is, isn’t it?  It’s business.  It’s employment; it’s a company paying a person for their time and effort, working on tasks the company needs done.  But this nonsense is childish bullshit, and no supervisor should have to coddle their staff just to keep morale up.  Since when are our jobs a daycare?  Forever, I’ll bet.  People walk into their jobs with all their issues in tow, and express them there as they do everywhere else.  And the bait is strong—you see a paycheck for what you do there.  A chunk of money is a big deal, its delivery on a regular basis is nothing short of life-sustaining, and it adds quite a lot of weight to what the employee who earned it is doing.

But this is not personal, folks.  It’s a transaction.  It’s buying groceries.  When was the last time the grocery store manager came up to you as you’re pushing your cart to the register, and with a sullen look on his face, said, “Were you okay with the selection of spaghetti sauces?  I tried to get the best ones but I don’t know….I guess I don’t really know what you want but I hope you’re happy with it.  I always try.  Sorry if it’s not OK.”

You shouldn’t have to make that grocery store manager feel better about himself.  And likewise, he shouldn’t have to make his employees feel better about themselves.  Yet he likely does.  And what’s more, he thinks it’s normal.

When you go to your job, there is an expectation placed on you.  You’re being paid to do X.  Not X minus anything, not X plus anything.  If you give more than is required, your supers won’t complain, but if your extra work is not accepted and you become unstable as a result, you’ve just failed to do X properly.  Further, anger over your behavior on the part of your coworkers may interfere with their ability to do their X.  And if you’ve got an office full of Annies and Ernies, that’s an even bigger problem.  Employees who are already validating themselves do not heap insecurities upon their boss.  They just do a good job and go home.

So, how to make it just business?

The goal is to meet what is expected of you, your X, at a level consistent with your own work ethic.  And that concept contains the key:  you are working for you.  You are earning money for yourself.  Focus on what you think is the appropriate response to the work that you are being prompted for, not what it feels like your supervisors will like.  Ask yourself, “What am I really being asked to do?”  Make a list.  That list might include going above-and-beyond, as some employers do look for that.  But this only means that going the extra mile isn’t really extra at all, it’s required.

Many employers are highly experienced at giving employees emotional validation for doing good work.  Be a foil (and likely sweet relief) to that.  Give them what they want, simply and easily.  They’ll quickly learn they can count on you.  And you in turn will receive job security.  But most of all, you’ll be at peace about your job and your performance there.  You’ll feel simple satisfaction, and you won’t worry about it anymore.

But, how to do this if you are naturally an Ernie or an Annie?  That’s hard to say, since one’s own security and self-validation are the things that lead to the negative behaviors they exhibit.  But there is one simple, mechanical thing you can do to help, in addition to making a list of your duties and adhering to it:  you can refrain from making personal connections with coworkers.

Stop making them your friends!  So they’re great people, so what?  So you want them to like you; overcome this feeling.  They are not your friends when you walk in, and hanging that mantle on them invites the kind of personal connection that will enable validation-seeking behavior.  Keep them professional colleagues.  Do not associate outside of work.  Do not trade phone numbers for any reason except work-related.  Do not send personal emails.  Do not confide about your personal life at all, in fact deflect questions about it.  Don’t be a dick about it, just hold your horses.  Find your friends elsewhere.  You and your coworkers are teammates, not friends.

Does this mean you can’t joke around?  Sign the birthday card going from desk to desk?  Of course not.  Participate in the office food event.  Use first names.  Encourage your coworkers in their work-related endeavors.  But draw a defined line.  Deflect personal conversations about others and absolutely about yourself.

One way to facilitate this feeling is to dress at least a little formally at work.  Dressing casual at work is a quick way to invite casual interaction.  Another thing to do is adhere strictly to your own work ethic, which means that you should explicitly define it (write it down).  Being lazy about tasks or producing subpar output is a gateway to perceiving disapproval in your supers, often that isn’t even there.  Another trick that I’ve found helps psych myself out about what I do, is to write down at the end of each day a short list of what I’ve accomplished at work.  Just brief notes that I can understand.  Then when I get a paycheck, look at the check and the list at the same time.  Get a visual of exactly what you’ve been paid to do.  It throws all the superfluous fluff that goes into holding down a job into contrast.

If you can manage to make your work less personal, you can only benefit, no matter your employment future.  In the immediate, what you will find is greater job satisfaction, better overall performance, and a quieting of worries.  In time, you’ll get praise from your supervisors (though you won’t need it), and maybe even opportunities to take your game to the next level.

But the big payoff is that you’ll drive home from your job every day feeling calmer, less stressed.  And the ridiculous games that Ernie and Annie play all day at work, and which infect and detract from their home lives as well, will stand out in high contrast.  You’ll be above that nonsense.  They’ll look up to you in time, jealous on a level they don’t understand.

It’s your job, folks.  It’s business.  Don’t take it so personally.

The Rule of Skeletons

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Here’s a thought for you:

Physically, we are hardest in the center—our bones.  The skeleton is the hardest part, then the softer tissues layer outward from there.  But psychologically, we’re hardest on the outside, and the least concrete in the center, where we are unbuilt, and where our concepts and ideas float without metaphysical moorings, like print written delicately over a soup skin.

I think that the skeleton itself is an uncomfortable concept due to the unconsciously understood notion that we are softer inside, not harder. Beneath the representations, posturing, and defenses, is the utterly vulnerable core.  We see a skeleton in a scary movie or in a classroom and it smacks of cadaver, so we feel that fear that comes from seeing things associated with death, but beneath that I think there is a discomfort that comes from seeing something that is supposed to be human but is intrinsically opposite.  Like a mirror image, except instead of being a dimensional opposite, it is an inversion.

We do not carry hard centers.

Even just saying it makes me aware of my defenses and my armors, like they were glasses of water on a table someone nudged as they walked by.  Just mentioning my mechanisms of self-protection perturbs them. I see their surfaces lurch and rebalance.

Let’s extend the metaphor.  Look at the exceptions to this…rule of skeletons:  the marrow in the bone, the brain in the skull, the organs in the ribcage.  In particular the ribcage.  A bizarre thing.  As though the architect, knowing the organs needed protection, assembled a crude basket with sticks.  And with time our soft tissues loosen and sag, our skin and all else, and droop in the basket like rotting fruit.

In the ocean it wasn’t always like that.  Beneath the waves we had bones, but if you go further back you find a time when we did not.  When the rigidity required to make a brief stand against the more severe effect of gravity on land was not a concern.  And they’re still there:  the other ancestors.  The ones we could have been.

Some with rigid bones, others soft.  Some with outer shells, some without.  Some soft through and through.  Many, for which the only durable portion of their existence is the teeth, the beak, the mouth.

There is a moment of recognition when you see an injury and white bone shines through.  Even if it is blood-covered, you see the white beneath the red.  You know that the bone is seeing light, and you are witnessing a small portion of the inflexible system that scaffolds the body, girds it, and is an invisible part of every move it makes.

Let’s stretch that metaphor even farther. Engage your imagination for a moment.  What would you say if you met your skeleton in a pizza shop down the street?  Somehow it has escaped, and had a hunger for cheese and pepperoni.  It slipped out your mouth silently while you slept, and now you’re chasing it down, your soft flesh struggling to support you.

You see it standing there near the garbage can, using the posture you do while you’re eating pizza.  Slightly hunched, shoulders bunched, leaning slightly on one foot.  It has a paper plate in one hand and a napkin pinched in the fingers holding it, its head is downturned but still gazing out the window, jaw slowly rocking back and forth.  The other hand is holding the crust of a piece with several bites removed.  The crust is bent into a V, index finger in the cleft, thumb and other fingers on the outer sides of the bend.  It is chewing with distracted slowness, gazing out the window at the busy street.

You address it like a lost lover, I imagine.  You grab its attention with a  touch or a word, something quick and too strong, then there are long moments of no communication.  As though it were very important that you know you are near each other, but nothing needs to be done.  You tell it that you do not walk well without it.  It tells you that it does not taste well without you.  Nothing changes.  And you watch each other without seeing, across a gap of inches, or miles, or years.

Objectivity vs. Freedom & Why’s It Always About Sex?

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 “I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment.  Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder.”
-Chuck Palahniuk

This blog entry is wordy and not particularly funny, fair warning. And I’ll tell ya, bringing this one up gets people heated!  Even just exploring the topic, most folks start getting defensive right from the get-go.  I’m curious what you delightful readers think.

What is perversion?  Specifically, is it subjective, or objective?

If you ask people, and I have, you may find that most people divide everything into two groups:  what is acceptable, and what is unacceptable.  But there also seems to be a danger zone on your way to unacceptable behavior, i.e. this behavior is okay, that behavior is questionable, and that other behavior is not okay.

Another interesting aspect of this topic and the way people handle it, is that in nearly every case, when posed with the question of what is deviant, perverse, or unacceptable, people answer with information regarding sexual behaviors.  Not violence, not language, not politics….sex.  Always sex.  It’s not really the focus of this blog entry, but my position on the taboo nature of sex is that it is completely arbitrary and inappropriate.  Sex is as natural as scratching an itch and the fact that it is so universally illicit in human cultures is a strangely beguiling phenomenon, especially when you consider how utterly pointless this is.

So people stratify behaviors into what is acceptable and what is perverse, and then they classify somewhat loosely the things in between, that flirt with being unacceptable, but are not, strictly speaking, categorically reprobate.

But in order for a thing to be unacceptable, there has to be an acceptor.  One who deems it unacceptable.  For instance, a person finding a way to cover the Earth in a mile-deep layer of poop is unequivocally unacceptable…to me.  However, if I did not exist, this behavior might be acceptable.  If no life existed on Earth, wouldn’t it be just fine to coat it with excrement?  If not, why?

If you look up words like aberrant, deviant, depraved, you find that the definitions all include directly or indirectly subjective terms. They’re tied to a subject, a person, an acceptor.  And if you look hard enough, you can find people in the world who do not believe that the behavior you condemn is damnable at all.  These same people will likely see ordinary behaviors of your own as debauchery.  Who’s right?

I asked some people if they believed that there are perversions that are objectively unacceptable, not just subjectively.  And I found that folks enjoyed being able to further stratify behaviors according to the level of personal offense.  For instance, non-life threatening sexual violence was deemed perversion, but not something to put a stop to.  That is, as long as all parties consent.  You may share this opinion.  But why?  If the parties consent, why is what they are doing even questionable at all?

And if they do not consent, why is it unacceptable?  We mostly agree that this is the case, but why?  It seems that we share a value in this regard:  that it is proper to do what you would like, as long as you do not hurt someone who does not want to be hurt.  But is this not a personal value, and one that not everyone shares?  Additionally, it is one that is flexible for many.  For instance, is it okay to hurt someone who does not want to be hurt, if they are themselves hurting someone else who does not want to be hurt?

My point here is that it is a personal choice of what is right and wrong, therefore is it not subjective? Isn’t it all subjective?

If you look at a broader view of humanity, you do see trends in values.  Things that are virtually universally accepted, or mostly so, etc.  I think this stems from universal concepts, things that arise from the facts of our shared perceptions of the world.  Folks are fond of pointing out that colors may look entirely different to different people, for instance, but I do not think so.  The way light plays against the machinery in our eyes and brains is not different, and I think we experience it very similarly.  Why else would favorite colors tend to be so telling, personally and culturally?

As a rule, I believe in an objective reality.  I believe that our perceptions of this reality lead to concepts and ultimately to values, which largely (but incompletely) determine our behaviors.  Less intuitively, I believe that the degree to which someone aligns their concepts and values to objective reality is congruent to the degree to which that person will succeed in life, as in achievement of valuable experience, as well as noble achievement (accomplishments).

So if our mental constructs are basically “takes” on reality, wouldn’t it follow then that there is an actual objective basis to morality?  Couldn’t you trace concrete, logical values from the basic axioms of metaphysical reality?  And wouldn’t these values provide clear delineations of what is acceptable, and what is perverse?  These boundaries would be definitive, insofar as our reasonable arrival at them is unflawed (which cannot be known for certain, but can and must be reliably assumed).

The application, however, is another story.  And it acts against the premise I’ve laid out above.  The concept of objective morality is dangerous, to say the least.  In practice it is terrifying.  Is this why I prefer to see perversion as a completely subjective concept, when in fact my basic value system implies it is not?  Am I lying to myself to save myself?  This could be.

Must we as a thinking, reflecting species allow fluid boundaries between what is acceptable and not acceptable, worldwide, in order to maintain the understanding (illusion?) that we are free?  Knowing that in some contexts what is unacceptable may be acceptable helps each of us to feel that we live in a world where anything is possible, and the constraints of the objective reality we’d like to assume exists do not extend so far into our choices as to restrict them.  In other words, ignoring the truth so that the lie will set you free.

A curious concept.  Cognitive dissonance on a global level.

Your thoughts?

Three’s a Crowdypants

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Did you know that a group of otters is called a romp?  And a group of vultures is a wake?  You might.  You just might.  I mean, you knew that a group of crows is called a murder, right?  But did you know that a group of squid is a squad?  That’s right, a squad of squid!

A group of zebras is called a dazzle.  Easy to understand, right?  A group of flying swans is a wedge.  Some aren’t so easy.  A group of turtle doves is called a pitying.  A gerund?  Really?  Others like this include the chickens, called a chattering, and ducks, called a paddling.

A group of thrushes are called a mutation.  Wha???  A group of ferrets are called a business.  That one makes sense.  But a group of gnus are called an implausibility.  Huh?

Foxes:  a skulk.  Emus:  a mob.  Flamingoes:  a flamboyance (oh come on, is this alliteration for giggles or what?)

Anywho, I came up with some fun ones for additional fun fun funsies.

A group of rocks:  a hardly
A group of earthworms:  a spaghetti
A group of bats:  a flappy
A group of raccoons:  a masquerade
A group of penguins:  a formal
A group of hares:  a beard
A group of eggs:  a breakfast
A group of termites:  a board
A group of clams:  a clap
A group of bears:  a fuzzy
A group of Woody Harrelsons:  a Forest Harrelson
A group of squiggles:  a squoggle
A group of groups:  a groupgroup
A groupgroup of groups:  a groupgroupgroup
A group of beds:  a sleepy
A group of boats:  a floater
A group of frisky cats:  a cat-astrophe
A group of sloths:  a loaf
A group of lit sparklers:  a sparklocalypse
A group of cows:  a cowncil

What are some of yours?

The Kitten’s Meow-surement

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Greetings ladies, greetings gents
Spread your blankets, pitch your tents

I am in the business of measuring things. That is my job, I measure.  I  make money doing this.  I have been trained, I have performed feats of math and science sufficient of one who is charged with working in a lab where measurements are performed and the performer must do the mathing and the sciencing and the sleuthing and figure out what exactly a measurement is.

And let me tell you, no measurement is perfect. I look at precision instruments all day, and I use advanced technique to evaluate them.  Sometimes I put a stamp of approval on it.  Most often, I adjust the instrument before doing so.  And it’s always to a level of what they call tolerance.  This means that it can be inexact as long as it is within X units of perfect.  They designate this because nothing is perfect.  Nothing is ever exactly what it is meant to be.  If you look close enough, you can find how far off it might be.  Sometimes you don’t have to look very close at all.

So one thing I learn from this job is that though many things are “made to measure”, nothing really does it perfectly. Not even me.  With careful consideration, an uncertainty is derived on every measurement I might do.  So I take your one pound weight, and I use highly specialized equipment, training, and thoroughly vetted technique, and I tell you that it weighs 1.001963 pounds.  Plus or minus 0.000032 pounds, because that’s how much I might be off by, if you consider the accuracy of the equipment I was using, the standards I was comparing it to, factors that may contribute to error like air buoyancy, magnetism, and things related directly to me, like the training I’ve received, and my observed capacity for error.

It’s all a balance of how far off can it be. The goal is not to get it exact, because you can’t do that.  This foe is beyond any of us.  How like life, yes?  Damage control.  If you’re good at this game, you can play it and still stay focused on the good things without withering under the illusion of perfection.  And the damage control is a means.  You pedal the bicycle, but you keep your eyes on the scenery, the smell of the air, the things that come and go and the beauty of all of this stuff.  Most of us give in to some degree, however, to the urge to focus on the strain of pedaling.  Or, the more enchanting distraction:  the place you’re headed.

That one is truly beguiling. You’ve heard the questions.  What’s it all for?  What is the meaning of life?  And you see these people pedaling along, hearing that the journey and the wondering itself is the point and hoping that’s right, yet feeling emptiness from never truly internalizing this platitude as an answer.  Gotta wonder about those deathbed regrets.  The sadness for not achieving lifelong goals that were never set.  The continued blindness to the beautiful life that came, went, and is over.

But they don’t train you for that in school, do they? They don’t teach you to validate yourself.  They don’t instruct you not to idolize perfection.  They don’t teach you to work toward the impossible goal, yet somehow realize that the work is the real goal.

Of course they don’t. That stuff is orders of magnitude outside what they can do for you in school.  Even just the rudiments that begin you working toward understanding higher-order concepts like these are hard to successfully imprint.  And as any teacher will tell you, students are already being taught harder, deeper, more formative lessons at home.  And parents?  Forget about it.  Just the fact that the bromide “these things don’t come with instruction manuals” (in regard to having children) is a thing should indicate the level of expertise we’re bringing to the table when rearing a new member of a future society.  But why don’t they come with manuals?  Why don’t we have required primers for raising kids?

Anyone who has taken any psychology course has had to grapple with the unhappy concept that our psyches are largely composed of things outside not only our understanding, but our awareness as well. The amount that is going on behind the scenes in our minds would, I think, send us reeling were we to know its proportion.  How much of our personalities is unconscious.  How much of what makes John Smith John Smith is stuff John Smith has never known, thought about, or will ever consider.  And this stuff is learning, growing, adapting, updating, changing all the time.  Our consciousness is like a spotlit pinpoint on a vast stage, and though behind the curtains there is a constant din of footsteps and conversation, all we can see and hear is the one actor in the spotlight.

Acting. Well, that’s another topic.

But we think we are so aware! Our consciousnesses delightfully frolic through the world, smugly satisfied that it’s all within our ken, and all is well because we understand everything or are at least capable of it, and what we’re not thinking about at the moment, we somehow understand it all by extension (read:  categorize and ignore).  This is what we are programmed to do.  We see what we see, and attach all significance to it.  All the significance.  There is nothing else, nothing that transcends your understanding, says your ego.  Only things that fit into it at different places.

Yet, imagine a mind that is simultaneously aware of the thoughts of two people at the same time, to as great a level of detail as both those peoples’ minds. The sum of two minds.  You cannot.  It is outside our ability.  You understand the concept as I’ve described it, but cannot actually grasp its breadth.  Now imagine a mind that could do this for a hundred people.  A thousand.  All humanity.

We are so committed to this conceit, this concept that our understanding is universally definitive, that even our fiction, which should be as far flung as our writers can conceive, rarely depicts anything that challenges it. And when it does, it’s usually described as incomprehensible, because human minds do not brook such challenges.  We just categorize each new thing into the understanding we already have.  Perhaps this is best.  I mean, imagine if an author could create a description that could reach outside your paradigm and show you something truly uncategorizable.

If I ask you to imagine a squirrel that has been magically made self-aware, what level of understanding do you give it in your imagination? Something akin to your own, right?  Or at least measurable against your own.  You have some concept of what part of existence and the world you consciously understand (effectively all of it as far as you’re concerned), and you judge the squirrel’s against that.  And in that judgement is everything, because all significance is contained within your understanding.

So here we are, on our stage, carefully (such delicate, deliberate, detailed care!) manipulating the actor in the spotlight, while the vast majority of our minds/psyches are busy, developing, existing, and interacting with the world just outside our perception. Kids are doing this too.  Only they’re starting with an untrained stage crew, so they’re learning bigger lessons, more formative ones.  And they do this at home, for the most part.  Kids are programmed to learn from their parents.  You know this, but you don’t really understand how much they learn.  And they’re not aware of it.  It’s just happening while they’re asking for a cookie or mommy’s attention.  Ever had any really deep therapy?   Learn a few hard lessons about yourself?  If so, you know where I’m coming from here.

But kids are in the care of their parents and nobody in the whole village is helping them by showing them even the most rudimentary steps toward raising an emotionally effective human. Just the body language and subtle manner you exhibit when you respond to requests for attention will have dire consequences on the child’s ability to form intimate relationships as an adult.  But the parents don’t know that.  They don’t understand it.  What’s more, they were raised in a similarly dysfunctional way and are expressing those resultant deficiencies as adults.  Most of the time they’re playing their psychological problems off the kid.  It’s all considered normal, too.  How many of the stereotypical dispositions you have encountered are the result of severe emotional dysfunction?

As for the child’s raising, it’s a crapshoot. Even as we build a world where we are able to protect our families from the elements, disease, even lack of opportunity or insufficient stimulation, we are still taking the same chance that a mother wildcat does when rearing a litter in a shallow depression in the dirt of the desert plain.  We are grimly, totally, inexorably exposed to a harsh, brutal psychological battlefield, and we are all of us scarred, limping, barely escaping utter destruction.

And we do this by protecting ourselves. By categorizing everything we perceive (vast!) into the context of our purview (teeny!).  By attaching all significance to what we understand (thanks, ego).  By fearing, attacking, hiding, and acting.  Like the mother wildcat’s kittens, we play and growl and bite and feed when we can, because we are constantly beset by danger and the threat of injury and death.

You can see it, right? Those kittens, they don’t grasp that you understand more of the world than they do.  They have an understanding of it, and that understanding IS the whole world to them.  All significance is contained within it.  And it should be.  Without the conceit of a comprehensive worldview, no living thing would have the audacity to exist.

Now, and thanks for reading all that up there, now that you have just read it, let me ask you this: how important is where you’re ultimately going in life?  When do you think you’re going to die, and do you think you’re going to perfect anything you’re working on in yourself or your life by then?  What use is setting perfection, in anything, as your goal?  There are things you’d like in life.  What are you waiting for?  You really think it’s gonna get easier?  Or that there’s a better time than right now?

You constantly judge things in your life; you should be, that’s good. How else will you know the value or position of anything, along any standard or range?  You are in a constant state of measurement.  But let’s face it, you suck at it.  We all do.  It’s what we rely on, and we need it to exist.  But we aren’t very good at it.  It’s only useful in the context of our own lives.  The kitten on the desert plain feels proud that it killed a mole rat and thus it can eat.  That pride is a measurement, and it exists mostly to emotionally reinforce that kitten so it confidently attempts another kill.  By what rubric do you measure these values?

In regard to our own, personal goals, we’re all kittens ready to accept that killing that mole rat is everything. It is worth every ounce of our selves to accomplish.  But you’re afraid.  Maybe you don’t admit it, but you are.  Likely, you blame other things for getting in the way.  This is fear too.  Some fear is good, but some fear is paralyzing.  And here’s why:  you measure yourself against your accomplishments.

That same apparatus you use to measure the value of that kill is the apparatus you use to measure your value. And you confuse the two.  The kitten that fails to kill the rat does not do very well the next time around.  And the time after that?  It’s a downward spiral.  This is a helpful tool for wildcats and cavemen.  But like so many other evolutionary advances that once assisted us, in our world we have outgrown its usefulness, and it now hinders us.

Let what you do be your work, and what you are be what you are. Let your shitty, incredibly biased measurement system decide your value not based on the successfulness of what you do, but on the fact that you want to try, and you do try, and you accomplish some good things some of the time.  Because you are living in a world where the mole rats are already killed, and served to you whenever you want one.  But you’re still the feral kitten, battered by an unforgiving world, driven by a dire need to succeed, and ready to hinge the value of your whole self on the attempt.

I am in the business of measuring things. That is my job, I measure.  I know that the work is frightfully uncertain, but it only needs to reach a specified tolerance.  After that, the next measurement awaits.  And though I cannot achieve perfection, I can become quite effective at meeting tolerance.  So that’s the script for the actor in the spotlight.  Realistic goals, realistic valuation of a very limited grasp of the world, and the understanding that I will sadly, unavoidably, and appropriately, attach all the significance I can conjure to only the things inside it.

So, have I just taken a long-winded approach to defending setting low goals? Or defended the erection of some sort of psychological defenses?  Is this all a blustery huff-and-puff display, designed to ward off fear of failure?  Or perhaps is there a nugget of gold in there someplace?  Hmmm.  Well, thanks for reading it anyway.  Hope it gave you some ideas.

Until next time, kittens.

Welp

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Welp, here I am.

It has been a while.  A long one. I see that I have a couple followers on here still.  Hey guys!

But it’s 12:03 PM on a day in August of 2016 and I’m here, and I’m writing this entry, and in my imagination this is the first step toward a lot more that proceed from it.  Journey of a thousand miles, first step, all that.

I started this blog in 2012 to promote my writing, or to at least create a central location for it that folks who were interested in my work could use to find it, and find out more about it.

Then a bad thing happened:  I stopped writing.

I could go into the reasons, but so much time passed that the reasons took their course and ended, and yet still I didn’t write.  Not even blog entries like this one. I don’t write these days, and I don’t have an excuse.  Haven’t for a while now.

But it isn’t writer’s block.  What is that, anyway?  Is it the way that artists associate themselves with their work too much and paralyze themselves?  I see this in music from time to time.  Inability to separate oneself from one’s work.  Leads to total meltdown.

No, I am not blocked.  In fact, I have a lot of ideas, plans, outlines, and future work stacked up and ready to go.  I think about it often.  I have no lack of motivation, either.

And I so want to say that I don’t have time.  I am, after all, criminally busy, but I never believe anyone who says that they don’t have time for something, and I can’t bring myself to try and shove that one down your throat.  We make time for something if we want to bad enough.

But I don’t, and I seek to undo that.  More on that another time soon perhaps.

So I am back, and I don’t have new writing for you to read, aside from this here thingie you’re reading.  Just letting you know.  I am here with nothing new for you.  And I gotta say, writing this without further product to share feels even MORE self-serving than usual.  I mean, a personal blog, hel-LO.  Just writing it implies that I think you want to know what I have to say.  I don’t think that, in fact.  What’s more, I don’t have a desire to share it with you.  Yet, here I am.  Trying to think of this thing as more of a…public journal.  Though I will put myself at risk of being flamed, I plan to freewrite into this blog. This new perspective, I hope, will help bring me back to this blog in the future.

Moving on. As you probably know, I am a musician as well as a writer.  More, in fact.  Music has always been my first.  I struggle daily to find time for my creative loves, and I do mean struggle.  It is by far the largest of difficulties in my life.  I realize I have much to be thankful for in this.  Recently I purchased a small plot of land in the woods, with an old log cabin on it, in deep disrepair.  I spend a day a week up there now, working on it.  I often wonder why I invited this new devourer of time (and a hefty one at that).  It has proven quite absorptive of my attention and motivation.

Anyway, as a musician, I compose, perform, and record my own work.  I do collaborations with others, and I do keep myself in a band, but taking up serious recording (a new thing, as of 2012) has freed me to pursue my musical dreams far more comprehensively.  And I’ve done a good deal of that.  This year I released three albums.  Huge, I mean enormous, efforts there.

But where are they?  They’re sitting on my computer.  They’re sitting in boxes in my apartment.  No one knows about them save the few people I sent copies to.  This is indicative of a terrible truth about myself that I still chafe at:  I am sorely unmotivated to promote my work.  I DO the composing, the arranging, the performing, the recording, the producing.  I taught myself basic Photoshop so I could make album artwork.  I set up a publishing company, a DBA.  I spent countless hours teaching myself to be a sound engineer, and yet…..visit websites?  Solicit attention?  Somehow, I draw a line here.

And because of this, my work goes unknown.  Unheard.  Even my book, which I did shamefully little to promote, has had much more attention than any of my albums of music.  Hell, I even found myself on Goodreads recently. A few reviews.  Random strangers have spent more time writing about Shame the Devil than I have in the last couple years.

I had this idea, and I’m still unsure about it, but this idea is old now and it hasn’t been banished by a stronger voice, so now it’s coming to the forefront and I think it’s time to start putting it into fruition.  The idea:  re-gear my site to be about all my creative works.  Make it a home for music, writing, ideas, and other things.  No longer only about Michael Lejeune the author, who is an ephemeral phantom at best.  Now, about Michael Lejeune the musician, author, and whatever the hell else I am.  I suppose that through this site, if it blossoms the way I hope it will, you may decide for yourself.

So, you can expect changes.  You who have put your email on my followers list.  New things coming here.  Music available.  Updates to the very old content still posted here.  A re-tooled blog, no longer about the author but about what’s going on with the guy.  I apologize now for the ridiculously vain nature of this beast, this broad display of look-at-me-I’m-worth-watching.  It is for me a simple statement of greeting.  It says hello, it says thanks for dropping by, it says here’s what keeps Mike up at night.

Death Metal and Bleu Cheese

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Dr. Hill’s reanimated corpse pushes its severed head between the legs of a beautiful, restrained girl in a surreal sexual encounter in Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1989). A pile of undead entrails stops attacking Lionel so that it can perch on a bathroom sink and admire itself in the mirror in Braindead (Peter Jackson, 1992). Nola uses her teeth to pierce the birthing sac of the unborn child in her external womb, tearing it open so she can lick her new murderous troll-child clean in The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979).

I love horror. LOVE. When it’s pulled off well, it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

So what is at the heart of horror? Why do we like it? Thoughts anyone?

The other day I was writing a pitch to submit to an online mag, in hopes of having Shame the Devil posted in their Indie Horror section. The site wanted original copy, so I had to think of an angle. Something about horror. I wound up talking about safety, or rather, a lack thereof. Not the safety of the characters in a story, or the safety of the author’s choices in subject matter, structure or story elements, but the safety of the audience. The reader.

You.

I started out with a quote from Eli Roth, which reads, “I think horror should never be safe, whether it’s violent or nonviolent.” He’s saying the audience must be removed from safety, no matter how it’s done.

I told the story of how when I was twelve, my father showed me Ridley Scott’s Alien. I was scared during the movie, deeply. It was a good thing. A good experience overall. But when the movie was over, I was terrified to leave my parents’ presence. I was too afraid to leave the livingroom and go anywhere else, where the lights might be off, and death might be lurking in the shadow. That feeling, the one I had after the movie, was not a good thing. It was negative, no doubt. I felt no thrill in working to swallow my fear and go to my room.

But still, it was good overall. I remember the experience fondly. Why is that?

Why do we watch horror movies? Why do we ride roller coasters? Dive with sharks? Skydive? Sometimes, do we invite danger just for the sake of having it there?

Some say that we like to taste terror without actually having to endure it. When you ride a roller coaster, you know you’re in no more danger than when in rush hour traffic. Probably less, in fact. When you watch a horror movie and see horrific things happen, no matter how far you suspend your disbelief you never experience those things in the fully negative way you would if they were actually happening to you.

Zombies are very popular right now. Think about how the people in them seek out and build shelters. They erect walls or hide behind ones they can find, and take potshots at the undead that wander toward the smell of living meat. They get just behind the safety line and seek out thrills. You can think of plenty of examples of similar behaviors in human beings, I’ll bet, having nothing to do with zombies.

When the walls fall, we delight in seeing the characters endure terror. And it’s the same if you’re listening to your friend tell the tale or if you’re watching it on AMC. It’s primal, and there’s little point in postulating theories why we’re built that way. Is the misfortune of others pleasing to us? I doubt it. We don’t love to hear about pain. Does it prepare us for our own hardships, and help us visualize the struggles of others? Likely yes. Is it simply entertaining, the way a story about any conflict is? Certainly.

But is that really what we want with horror? Do we just want to watch another form of conflict? Perhaps it is gory, or perhaps there is a hideous monster in it. Maybe it’s just horrifying, without using tropes like those. My favorites are like this. ‘Psychological Horror’, it’s termed. But what makes the element of horror, all on its own, good?

If you haven’t seen Lars Von Trier’s film Antichrist, do. In the film, you watch two characters isolate themselves in response to enduring a terrible loss. You watch them interact, you listen to them talk. You see them open up and what awful things happen when their edges start to fray. The movie is excellent for a number of reasons. It’s well-made all around. Beautiful in the extreme, intensely intimate, structured and shot with shocking imagination and speckled with metaphor. All of these things make it good. But these things are found in movies of other genres. We can find concrete reasons why it’s good cinema. But why is it good horror?

It’s good horror because it makes you feel bad. You experience a movie that is pleasing, simply and squarely. You don’t want to stop watching. But on some level, it makes you feel awful. It gives you, not shows you, horror. Where a hero movie bolsters confidence and righteous satisfaction, where a science fiction movie piques curiosity and passion, where a romantic movie melts your heart…horror degrades you. It makes you want relief. It makes you cringe inside and wish that you could shrink away.

People who enjoy this are a different kind, I think. It is akin to acquiring a new taste. The willingness to endure displeasure because you may achieve a greater pleasure. Like death metal or bleu cheese, people don’t often love it, really love it, without learning to first.

Many people watch horror because they like being scared the way we’re scared by a balloon popping behind us. You know people like this. They love the “horror” movies that rely on audio that drifts to silence followed by a loud noise and sudden scary image. The same thrill you get when someone uses a joy buzzer on you. In my opinion, this is not fun. Movies like this annoy me. It isn’t horror, it’s surprise in a horror setting. These people are part of why I rarely show horror to anyone whom I don’t know to already be an addict. Enjoyment comes from knowing the other person you’re sharing the experience with is getting a similar appreciation. When that isn’t there, well… it makes a horror flick a bad choice for say, a date with yours truly. Unless an hour and a half of silence from me will make me more attractive to you (quite possible).

Other people however, like me, watch horror with a depth that transcends any thrills like those. They get lost in the heaviness of the character’s agony. They feel it sympathetically. And though it is a negative feeling, they come out of the experience when the story is done and feel good for it. Really good.

Another good example is the movie The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005). For people who like horror thrills for the usual reasons, this is a fun movie with some scares, and a cheap/disappointing ending. For people who dig deep into the dark of the story, it is a claustrophobic nightmare that constricts your chest and won’t let you out, and the ending is so full of hopeless despair that when the credits roll you almost splooge in relief.

People who dig into dark movies become so fond of them they start to love the tropes, simply out of positive association. I love cheesy horror. It’s not good. It’s just bad. And it doesn’t make me feel bad. It just is bad. Movies like Basket Case, Zombie Strippers, or Night of the Lepus are incapable of inspiring deep feelings, save perhaps a deep desire to switch them off (if you’re not me). B horror is a safe place. It’s like watching a sitcom. It has more to do with ‘horror’ as a genre title than an actual emotional response.

But not all cheese is cheese. Some cheese belongs on a bologna sammich. But some cheese goes right on the table with the expensive wine.

Movies like Martyrs, Let The Right One In, and Suspiria are horror of very high quality. It’s classy stuff. The thrills and carefully constructed plots give more space to the feel the filmmakers are trying to create, rather than being themselves the primary means of titillating the audience. Though all the tricks of the craft are still in play, the real payoff is in the mood that is conveyed.

One of the most horrifying movies I have ever seen is a French film called Irreversible, which contains a rape scene that is so effectively terrifying, I could barely finish the movie once the scene was done. That movie ruined my day. But I still keep on recommending it to my horror movie-loving friends, because it really, really made me feel. There is no escape from that movie, if you’re into it at all. Some folks subtract themselves from a movie if at any point it doesn’t meet their liking, but others like myself willingly keep their disbelief suspended just to see if there’s anything to be offered, even if they encounter turn-offs along the way. Irreversible hurts the soul to watch.

Horror should never be safe, no matter what it’s about. When it’s real, and it intends to truly give you horror and not just show it to you, it has to remove you from your safe zone and drag you through something…well, horrible. The better it is, the longer it takes you to come back around and be okay again. It’s a strange cycle to volunteer for. Hurting yourself for the satisfaction of healing.

Sort of twisted, isn’t it?

Us Hairless Apes

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First rule of making an android’s brain: don’t tell it how it works.

Way, way back when I started trying to take writing seriously (hahahahahah ha ha ha hahaha, sigh) I decided it was time to write a book, so I came up with something I would really enjoy writing about, crudely formed it into a story outline of biblical proportions, and regurgitated my excessive imaginations into a word processor. This was my first inkling of what writing a book was supposed to be. But like a virgin entering into his first attempt at making love, I was full of awkward bumbles, nervous inhibitions, and over-calculated form.

However, despite the fact that I was a novice, I did finish the job. My bucket of idea vomit, stretched over a plot spine that could barely hold itself together, was a complete novel: a science fiction yarn called An Epoch of Uncertainty. It was an early work for me. It’s said (I thought by Vonnegut, I’ve since seen Raymond Chandler credited with the quote, but nowhere have I seen a real citation yet) that one must write a million words of crap before producing good fiction. If this is true, for me Epoch was that first twelve inches of butt chocolate that leads the charge for a huge dump.

One of the book’s central characters is Mark, an android. He is the first machine that was made not only to emulate the human form but also to approximate the human mind. His designer describes the process of building Mark’s mind as following three steps:

  1. Build a mind that is powerful but also limited in the ways human minds are.
  2. Obscure it from itself.
  3. Expose it to the world and teach it step by step, building on knowledge as you go.

Essentially, to make a human machine, the designer creates a computer that will think like a child, puts it in a humanlike body, and raises it like a son, forcing it to learn about itself and its world the same way its human counterparts did. This, I reasoned, was an interesting way to approach the well-mined territory of machine-become-man. A choice nugget in the bucket of idea vomit. Of the many nuggets it resides with, this one has resurfaced in my mind often.

As humans, we are amazingly ignorant of our own inner workings. Have you noticed? And it’s the most effective type of ignorance too: the kind you think isn’t there. We really think we know how we work. But we don’t. We have no idea why we feel the way we do, why we think the way we do, and why we act the way we do. Just look at the fuzzy edges of the science of psychology. Ever used it to try to understand something about why you think or feel some particular way? If you haven’t, you’re in for a ride. Discovering that volition, the very meaning of our drive, isn’t always in the driver’s seat, was a terrifying experience for me.

Without getting into the actual science, let me just sum up what I’m trying to say: we are biological creatures, and our psychology is a part of that. A dog doesn’t know why it farts, and a man doesn’t know why he chews his nails, why he is lazy when he doesn’t want to be, or why he marries someone who is wrong for him. He can go back and try to understand it, he can study the science and work with a therapist, but no matter what he does or how astutely he does it, he will only be laying contrived conceptual framework over something that was there already, in action and working without and beneath his knowledge.

Even today, we are only beginning to use the context of our evolution to understand why we do the things we do. You have probably read/heard something like this already—like the idea that the reason we desire to eat so much salty, fatty, sugary, high calorie foods is that we are programmed to. Until only very recently, foods rich in these things were a rare treat for us. We sought after them constantly. No wonder we go nuts over their availability now.

This same principle can be applied to so many other things. How about gender roles? The tendencies for either sex to be better or worse at certain things? The way we respond to emotional trauma? Our need to believe in the supernatural, gods, luck, etc.? The bonding patterns that draw us into romantic relationships? I mean really, isn’t it weird that just about everybody finds someone they could marry? As picky, fickle and difficult as we are? How about the way we fill and regard the space in our homes? The way we respond to authority? The way we get complacent with what we accomplish and keep looking for the next best thing?

Great mysteries? Not really. None of these are hard to explain if you use the context of our species’ infancy. Never studied anthropology? Skip it, just go read Clan of the Cave Bear (clearly the Cliff’s Notes version of a college anthropology course). Then every time you wonder why people are the way they are, imagine Ayla’s clan and why the quirk you were wondering about might be useful to them.

Bam! Mind blown.

Like Mark the android, we are creatures with extensive, detailed programming that we are unaware of. We operate using it every day. We think it facilitates us, gives our lives bounds to bounce around inside of, but the very idea of what constitutes our lives is part of that programming, and the bouncing is too. We facilitate it. If it were any other way, our species would not have survived and reached such a height of success.

With that idea in place, one can really start to ask some heavy questions about us hairless apes. The sort of questions that rub shoulders with the limits of our concepts of who we are. The sort of questions that, if answered, compel us to either change deeply or choose to blank out what we have just learned. They are a short road that dead-ends at existential crisis.

I’m going to end this blog entry now and proceed directly to ice cream and cartoons. I’m not going to ask why I’m doing it. Can’t go down that road.

If I did, I might not ever make it back.

Fëanor and the Idle Hearts – on this month’s VH1 Behind the Music

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Disclaimer: this blog entry is sappy. If you are not a fan of the occasional dollop of same, I advise you to make your way to this month’s Misfortune 500, a bright little tale told from the perspective of next year’s comic book hero. *crossing my fingers for a movie deal*

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Recently a friend asked me how life was going, and I noticed that I gave a stock response. The fact stuck in my craw. Stock responses are not meant for friends who want to know how you’re really doing. Who are looking out for you. In a case like that, where someone close is asking how you’re holding up, a stock response is an evasion.

This isn’t strange for me, I do a lot of evasive chat. Beginning at the tender age of seventeen when I left home for college, I started to learn that I was a much more private person than I believed myself to be. People, on the whole, were pretty open in my perspective. More open than I was comfortable being myself. I’m told this is typical of writers, and I like to cleave to that notion rather than likening it to cowardice.

But despite the evasion of my stock response, there was something behind it—a nucleus of a possible following discussion. That, I think, was my way of opening up. Just a crack, really, but enough to get a foot in if you were inclined to do so.

My response was, “So busy. I always try to get things to slow down but life just seems to keep getting faster and faster.”

Even as I said it I knew that I had been saying it for quite some time. I’ve been spouting variations of this for a few years. But what does it mean? Have things really been getting increasingly intense? Is my life like a movie, where there is a pre-written plot that swells and thickens until finally it climaxes, shortly before the credits? Now that’s a scary thought.

Or, perhaps, am I just experiencing life harder?

The subject got me thinking on the notion of experiencing life. It’s a value, I find, with many people. The idea that the game is more fun the deeper you’re in it. But how does one quantify that? How do you know when there’s no longer a part of you that is a spectator in your own game?

In Tolkein’s Middle-Earth (if you will indulge me in a moment of nerdery), there is a character in the ancient history of the world named Fëanor. Fëanor was an elf, and an exceptional one. He trapped the light of the Two Trees, the source of all light in Middle-Earth, into the Silmarils—three gems. After the desecration of the Two Trees, the Silmarils were the only light left in the world. He created the Palantin as well, the magical crystal balls, one of which was possessed by Saruman. Gandalf said this feat was beyond the skill of either Saruman or Sauron. Fëanor was fierce and passionate. He gave his life in the pursuit of banishing the evil that would drive his people apart, and rob the world of beauty. When he died, the passing of his fiery soul reduced his body to cinders.

I thought of Fëanor when writing this blog because he is a paragon for the concept of living hard, of playing the game with all you’ve got. If you take a look at fiction in general, you’ll find a lot of characters like him in one way or another. We like to look up to people who refuse to be detached from their world. People who belong on Earth.

So what position do you play in your own game? Benchwarmer, or Team Captain?

Allowing yourself to feel, to really feel things that are happening to you and to become emotionally invested as frequently as you can… this takes a lot of courage. And it’s that courage that we look up to. It’s what we, as authors, weave into our boldest characters. It’s what immolates the flesh of Fëanor as his body finally fails him. The tireless audacity that makes us throw ourselves into the fray day after day, though it causes us greater pain than we know we can handle.

And that last bit there, about the pain—that’s the defining mark. Audentes fortuna iuuat, they say. Fortune favors the bold. In poker and many other things, it is prudent to weigh your options and consider your reach before taking the plunge. Measure your risk. Knowing your limitations will save you. You can always shuffle the deck and start again. But the moments in our lives, the commitments we make, the bonds we form, and even our lives as a whole, these cannot be repeated. Wagering anything less than everything is only meaningful to a soul that never steps out of reflection and back into the game.

We can’t afford to stoke idle hearts and regret after the fact.

I leave you with the following quote, from the brilliant Louise Erdrich. May it help you in hard times as it has me:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

Word-fuddlery: A Challenging Perspective

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You ever have one of those moments when a word suddenly sounds bizarre? When you think about a word too long and suddenly it sounds impossibly strange? I have those. And I’m not the only one who is, at times, befuddled by ordinary words. That’s right, I know you’re out there, fellow Word-fuddlers. You are not alone.

What makes it happen? If a word isn’t weird, but suddenly becomes that way to you, should you be concerned? Should you call your therapist? It’s kind of scary, after all. “Yeah, hey Monica. I um…when I think about the word ‘antiquated’ my tongue feels like I’m licking a wooden waffle and my brain does a face plant…yeah, I know that seems unreasonable…I know, my brain doesn’t have a face…no, waffles are made from flour and milk and stuff and…okay now ‘waffle’ is starting to sound weird.”

I think most of us who have experienced this phenomenon have come to realize, at some point, that it happens when you think too long about a word. I can remember being a teenager, a word-fuddlery virgin, trying to convince my friends that the word “often” was the strangest thing to occur in the English language. The reason, I later came to understand, is that I used the word too…well, often.

Let’s try it together shall we? I’m not saying we should do it often, but let’s consider what often happens when you use a word too often. You don’t have to say it aloud, but please mouth out the word often with me, every time it appears here, which is often. Often enough perhaps to induce word-fuddlery? Perhaps. Perhaps not often enough. Are you saying it with me now? Often. Often. Often.

It looks weeeeeeird now right? Often. Ah – f – ten. Offtin. Ahftun. Auffe-tonn. Just LOOK at it. Often.

It’s not a positive feeling either, is it? You didn’t enjoy reading that, I’ll bet. You’re probably feeling a vague relief at the fact that I’m not using that word now (don’t worry, I won’t betray your trust and use it again…soon). When a word becomes a puzzle, it’s almost like we’ve failed somehow. Failed to properly ignore the inanity of a necessarily mundane, common triviality. I suppose that makes sense.

For example, imagine that, during a date with a possible romantic partner, you became preoccupied with the rhythm of your breathing while trying to eat and talk. Yargh! And have you ever had that feeling like you can’t maintain proper posture while walking when someone attractive is looking at you? Egads! It’s horrible!

So that’s it then, the answer is simple: just don’t think about words too long and they won’t go rogue on you. Protect the language center of your brain from the beguiling abyss lurking behind every word you think, say, read or hear by forgetting the abyss is there.

Sure, no problem. Ignoring the pink elephant is easy. I’ve done that before. If I can ignore the urgent, burn-holes-in-your-eyes cleavage mocking my forcefully diverted attention under the chin of a gorgeous date (who is only trying to have a conversation and would appreciate eye contact from me thank you very much), I can ignore the crisis that unfolds when I think about how perplexing the word ‘perplexing’ is, and whether this counts as onomatopoeia.

But very recently I encountered a phenomenon that takes word-fuddlery to a new level. I stepped a little further into the abyss.

I was pushing a grocery cart in a department store, feeling the rough vibration in its handle bar under my palms. I was bathed in fluorescent light, observing others similarly cloaked in sickly shades, noticing that the roof was pocked with sky-lites that let a precisely meted amount of sunlight in, and how its well-rounded spectrum was clearly distinguishable on the forms around me, refreshing and improving them. I was smelling the smell that grocery stores pass off as freshness but is really a less grotesque variant of the odor that stains their loading docks and trash bins. My jeans and cotton tee were rough on my skin. The time since my last sip of coffee was obvious by the taste in my mouth.

And suddenly, it was ALL weird. Everything. Every aspect of my being, my life, this planet and the beings and lives that I share it with, all of it. It was all ‘Often’. Unfitting, bewildering, impossible.

Now that is a strange place. I’d been there before, and I know I’m not alone in this type of fuddlery (meta-fuddlery?) either. Others feel it too. Some folks feel it frequently. And it’s unsettling not only because of how it feels, but because of what it suggests. When you overuse a word, you can retreat from it, forget it and move on. There’s nowhere to retreat to when you take a step back from the world. Existential crisis, man, it’s a bitch.

But while it’s a difficult experience, and one that infinitely hampers my ability to function on this planet , it also has utility. It outlines the significance of things. Putting a border on the footprint of everything that exists in my life, tangible or not, and reminding me that I have the capacity to make decisions and value judgements with the whole of my world as a factor and not a context. It’s similar to what it was like taking LSD (ahem, back in the days when I um…experimented…with limited quantities…), except that under the influence of LSD the significance of things, while outlined and highlighted, was unbearably beautiful. During meta-fuddlery, it trumps still but becomes immeasurably banal.

So, what’s the point, Mike?

Well, it seems the take-home message is this: our ability to function in this world is dependent upon our ability to ignore it. Without our default mode of focused interest on the details of our actual lives, we are capable of sensing the importance of everything outside of it. And just as you feel small and insignificant when you gaze at the cosmos too long, you can feel meaningless if you gaze at your own feet too long.

Is this what Nietzsche meant when he said, “…for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss also gazes into you”?

At what point does self-examination become destructive?

I’m sure I don’t know, but puppies are damned cute and I like playing with them. Pizza is the king of foods and demands worship if you have ever liked a food, ever. And sex, well, sex is many things, almost all of which are wonderful, even if they’re not.

The universe however, is awesome but nothing more. Constant, fun to think about, impossible to affect.

So for the sake of puppies, pizza, and sex, remember this: the big picture in our lives isn’t the biggest picture there is, and that’s just fine. Have a slice. Get some. Snuggle a puppy and try not to use words too…often.

Advice worthy of Confucius.