Short Circuits (10 page)

Of course, being bubbly has its limits. Natural bubbliness is admirable, indicating a genuinely happy openness. But we all know people whose effervescence is about as natural as the audience response on a TV infomercial, and it is only with great effort that I am able to resist reaching out and throttling them.

It goes back, I suppose, to the fact that I expect so much of myself. I want to be bubbly. I want to be graceful
.
But I am not and never have been. Rather than try, and make a fool of myself in my own eyes, I do nothing and thereby risk making a fool of myself in the eyes of others. I have always been terrified of standing out in a crowd. Yet when 10,000 people are dancing and swaying and clapping and one person is not, guess who stands out?

I know this sounds either like I'm feeling sorry for myself or asking you to feel sorry for me. I'm not. It's simply peeling back another layer of the onion. I may not like it, but I accept it. And besides, I'm bubbly on the inside, so why should I care? To quote my friend Popeye, “I yam what I yam.”

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GOD'S SNOWFLAKES

I was waxing poetic the other day, as I am wont to do from time to time, pondering possible subjects for this blog. As always, I focused most strongly on myself, and considered doing a steeped-in-humility one about just how very special I am. Smugness was about to set in when one of my little mind voices (one of the many traits I share with my series protagonist and alternate-universe me, Dick Hardesty) casually observed, “Yes, you are indeed one of God's snowflakes.” I don't know if it was being sarcastic; as with Dick, my mind voices seem to be there mainly to bring me down a peg when I need it, and this little observation was yet another reality check.

I am indeed as unique as a snowflake. But then I epiphanied (it is
so
a word! The dictionary just left it out) that I am only one of seven billion-plus unique snowflakes. It's been important to me, all my life, to think of myself as being somehow special, to counter the overwhelming evidence presented daily by the world and myself that I am in fact nothing much. This is a reluctant acknowledgement rather than a realization, and long before the epiphany I had often questioned whether I am really as special and unique as I think I am. Logic has always strongly dictated that the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” And whereas I carefully chose the word “special” to describe myself, I'm well aware that, in my case, at least, there are any number of other words which could be substituted for it—“strange” or “weird” being among the more charitable.

People with self-esteem issues, among whom I of course number myself, seem to have a very real need to think of themselves as special as a shield against the world. For me, it validates the feelings I have had since I was very small—and I will take validation anywhere I can find it. Of course to feel special is more than a little frightening, in that it isolates me even more than I already am from others. Ours is a species which finds comfort in belonging, and part of my feeling special stems from my need to compensate for the feeling of never belonging. Being special enables me to choose with whom I am close, thereby lessening the sting of being the last kid chosen when sides were picked for games. Largely, I have chosen the ones to whom I feel close: family, a few good friends. But in almost any large group of strangers I am very much aware of being an outsider, and it is not a comfortable sensation.

I'm quite sure that having been gay from such an early age undoubtedly underlies these feelings. I, and all homosexuals, live in a world of heterosexuals, and with majority comes power and arrogance. Heterosexuals, consciously or subconsciously, simply assume superiority over those who are not heterosexual, and never let anyone forget who rules the roost. Yet though I have been, since the age of five, overwhelmed, battered, inundated, and all but drowned in a raging, roaring sea of heterosexuals, to this day I do not understand them, just as many of them do not understand me. But then, since they are the vast majority, they don't have to understand me.

One of the negative aspects of feeling special is the realization that if I were indeed as different as I think I am, I'd be better able to control those things over which I have no control: time, for example. I have always had an obsession with time. I am always excruciatingly aware of its passing and that, much as I may deny it, my days, like everyone's, are numbered, and one day time will cease for me. Therefore every second when I am not doing something I consider constructive is one I consider wasted. As the past piles up higher and higher behind me, containing more and more of the people and things which were so fundamental a part of my existence, I become more and more frantic. (Listening, as I am at the moment, to music from my childhood, only acerbates the feeling.) Nearly every time I play computer solitaire, as I was just doing, I become increasingly aware that the moments I spend on it were lost forever, and I had to stop playing and begin writing this.

So I totally ignore the fact that I am only one snowflake among a blizzard of others, and concentrate on the unarguable fact that I am indeed unique and therefore special.

* * *

WHY?

Why is there so much I do not understand, and so few things I do?

It is Sunday morning, as I write, and I have retreated to the computer to find refuge from all the screaming, shouting, arm-waving, jumping-up-and-down and “Wow! Oh Boy! Whoopee!” surrounding some sort of organized sports activity apparently going on later today. Why is it that I simply cannot comprehend what all the hoopla is about? Why is it that I don't care? In all fairness, I must admit that I can indeed get all enthused seeing Brett Favre and Tom Brady when they are not anywhere near a football field, but my enthusiasm has nothing whatever to do with sports.

How is it that I cannot understand how, when one person in a crowded room suddenly begins making a fool of him/herself, everyone else is embarrassed or cowed, but does nothing to interfere? Why don't I?

Why do far too many people seem to find it impossible to think for themselves, opting instead to swallow whole the illogical, irrational, and often harmful nonsense regurgitated by people whose right to do so is in itself not understood? Why should I do or think something simply because I am told to do or think it?

How is it that masses of people hang on every belch or hissy-fit thrown by some drug-addled “celebrity” as though it had any real meaning to the survival of the world?

How is it that people can tell you what Lindsay Lohan had for lunch, where she ate, and with whom cannot find China on a map?

Exactly who told those countless number of evangelical Christians, radical Muslims, and other religious extremists that they were empowered to speak for God? I rather doubt it was God, but you'd never know that from the reactions of the extremists' followers.

Why, on a more personal level, am I incapable of dealing with any device having moving parts? Why are all instruction manuals completely unintelligible to me? Why do I so often insist on speaking first and thinking later? How can something I had in my hand 30 seconds ago suddenly completely disappear and be impossible to find?

Why am I not the person I so desperately want to be: kind, generous, and thoughtful, rather than being ruled by selfishness and egocentricity? Why do I spend so much time living in the past rather than living in the present? Why do I want so much from life and yet seem incapable of giving back to it?

When presented with four or five opposing views, why am I so often unable to pick one, instead of sometimes two or three?

Why do I firmly believe that life is far too short to worry about the vast number of things most people worry about? And why can I not take my own advice?

Please submit your answers to any or all of the above to me at your earliest convenience. I will be most grateful.

* * *

ON DREAMS

I've devoted several blogs to dreams, and how much I enjoy them. I particularly like story dreams, or musical dreams, or flying dreams, or those which seem terribly profound at the moment. Well, last night I dreamed of toasters. All night. Nothing else. Just toasters. Waking up for a bathroom break, or from a loud noise outside didn't interfere. The minute I went back to sleep, it was back to the toasters.

I can't even say I spent most of the time contemplating the history and cultural impact of toasters. I didn't. Just the two basic types of household toaster with which I am familiar: the old-fashioned kind where the side flipped down to allow you to put the bread in (and which only toasted one side at a time), and today's slot-type. I've not seen a fold-down toaster in many, many years, so perhaps, in reflection, it might all have represented some deeply subliminal longing for the past, in which my mind spends so much of its time. Possible, but I think it was just about toasters.

There was a building in there at one point…a huge, solid, windowless circular building like one of those gigantic gas storage tanks, with a wide and ornate band of decoration (Corinthian column caps and elaborate bas-relief scroll-work of some sort) at the top, painted bright purple and green and silver. (I am nothing if not stylish, even in sleep.) What it had to do with toasters or anything I of course haven't a clue, but it was there, so assume it had its own reasons for being there. That I have/had no idea of what that reason may be is irrelevant.

Other than that, there was no story, no plot, no people, no music, no sound at all. No particular emotions…frustration, boredom…associated with them. Just toasters.

I have friends who claim they never dream, which of course is impossible, and friends who claim they never remember their dreams. I feel rather sorry for them. Dreams are among the greatest of mankind's gifts, and reflecting on them and their meaning is a form of active relaxation I truly enjoy. And given my already tenuous relationship with reality in any form, reflection on dreams is perhaps more important to and common with me than with others.

Dreams are a form of game the mind plays with itself, made the more interesting by the fact that the game has no rules.

Of all the things I do not understand—and the list is endless—how and why the mind works the way it does is pretty high up on the ladder. And to consider that there are six billion or so people on earth (Go, Breeders!!), each one assumedly with his or her own dreams, remembered or not, gives depth to the phrase “mind boggling.” But again, it's fun to speculate on.

And now it's time for breakfast. Not sure what I'll have. Toast sounds good.

* * *

QUESTIONS

I always ask questions for which there are either no answers, or which there are answers which can never be known. I was wondering this morning just how many words I'd written over my lifetime. There is an answer to this one, obviously, but who would/could take the time to track them down and count them all? How many times have I said “I love you”? And to how many people?

I really want to know how many grains of sand are in all the deserts of the earth…how many pebbles line the shores of all the lakes and oceans? The mind's capacity for fascination is endless.

Some of the classic questions which have been posed throughout history and are seemingly unanswerable are, in fact, quite simple. “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”, for example. The answer is “As many as want to.” As to “How high is up?”, the answer is “any distance above the top of one's head.” “How far can a dog run into the woods?” Halfway…then he's running out. “How long is a piece of string?” Exactly twice the distance from either end to the center. Fun to ponder, though not exactly deeply significant to the human condition.

So many questions are nothing more than word games. We've all seen those lists of trick questions about the location of a house whose windows on all sides face south, or where they would bury the survivors of a plane crash in which all were killed? Most take advantage of our mind's habit of automatically being drawn to what we assume to be the obvious, and it is, in fact, the wording of the question itself or how it is asked which creates the problem.

And there are those questions to which there can be no acceptable answer, such as the classic: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” No matter which way you answer, you're in trouble.

It's human nature to expect answers (the more simple the better) to questions which are either unanswerable or too detailed for anyone to be able to answer. “What's the meaning of life?” is a perennial crowd-pleaser, when the fact is that life doesn't have one meaning, it has many. “Is there life after death?” The only way to know is to die, and the fact that there is so little hard evidence in support of a “yes,” the question is more one of wishful thinking than anything else.

But I've always been absorbed by simpler questions to which there quite probably are scientific answers which I simply do not know: do ladybugs dream? What is the mental capacity of a cockroach? Exactly what do cats think? Why can't we communicate with animals better than we do? What is the meaning of the slit at the base of a cat's ears?

Oh, so very many questions! Silly questions, profound questions, questions the answers to which affect our humanity. Why so few people seem to question anything at all? (I guess the answer to that one is that it is far easier to simply accept what one is told without question. Thus we have politicians and organized religion.)

I really would love to live long enough to find answers for 1/1000th of the questions to which I'd really like answers. That I won't frustrates me no end. Why can't I?

Well, we've reached the last stop on this particular train of thought…though they're laying new tracks even as we speak. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

* * *

ON BEING NAIVE

There is a certain charm to naivety. It is part and parcel of being a child, for whom absolutely anything is possible and everything he or she is told is automatically assumed to be true. There is an element of naivety in any source of wonder, and the ratio of wonder to realization gradually slides from nearly 100 percent on the child's end of the scale, rapidly diminishing as we age, to almost none for the totally jaded.