I'm only about three quarters here. In relation to the rest of "normative" humanity, or what a Standard Model Human is meant to be. I mean, I'm present. I am In The World. But I'm about a quarter-step back from what "most people" perceive as Reality. Not in the sense that I hallucinate, or am subject to invasive thoughts-- those things have happened, and are easily recognizable as such --simply that, I'm not engaged with this bullshit the way everybody else is.
I am pretty sure part of that is due to having experienced survival panic & the threat of death, and having a (very Jungian) crisis of mortality at an extremely formative age that spiraled out into delusion & mental illness & PTSD and finally metastasized as my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I manifest as in the practice of my art. I relate to my body, my mind, and my world differently than other people. And I don't take medication for it. * Unless one counts the weed, which one truly must. But putting aside that bad habit, the window I have on consensual reality is pretty One Step Back from everyone around me.
I don't grapple with status or class or race or gender or sexuality the way everyone around me seems to. I know who I am and I know what that's worth in this world and I've got some pretty nihilistic views about all of it, fundamentally speaking. I'm pretty materialist. I've had my three brushes with death and my feelings about death are that it is Full Stop for me. It's left me with a little permanent fuckedness and I just can't, with nationalism and racism and sexism and all the motherfucking Othering all the time, and how important Othering is to being an American in the 21st century. Bitch, please.
None of this means a goddamned thing. None of it could be more important-- to everyone but me. Because I'm three quarters here. I do care. I care about human beings. And I care about the environment, and life, and all that. Rah rah. I love life. It's incredible and ineffable and every moment is incredible, even the dullest grimiest most gray shit is precious-- yet when it's done it's done and I'm not very worried about the state of my soul. I know I've done my best the whole time. I'm not going to peace out with Sins on my conscience. I don't have the judeo-catholic wiring for any of it, ultimately, because I wasn't raised that way. I was a gay white kid in the south with reactionary hippy parents reacting to their lace curtain irish world in a shitty not-"segregated"-but-not-integrated southern town.
The world told me what it didn't want me to be: a pervert or a monster or a murderer, and also not gay, not leftist, not humanist, not interested in women's rights or, shit, i dunno, saving the world? Like, there's a lot of self-hate involved in just getting through the contradictions we have to eat just to get up in the morning. I don't have any scales over my eyes about any of it. I do what I can. I walk up and down and to and fro in it and when I die, none of it's gonna stick to me, because--
There's this joke I have, with my co-workers. It's my three raccoons in a trenchcoat. The top raccoon, that's Mind, me, the dolt steering the entire clumsy enterprise. There's the second racoon, my Central Nervous System, the one stuck in the middle, completely covered by the coat, the interlocutor between the idiot on top and the poor indentured raccoon on bottom, Body, the feet on the ground and the guts to get around in all this tsimmis.
Mind, brain, and being: those are the three raccoons in my trenchcoat.
Sometimes one to two of the raccoons show up to work. The best days, all three are in attendance.
Those guys are why I'm only three-quarters here. Because I think about them, individually and in pairs and collectively, about as often as I'm contemplating the futility of caring about any of the shit-shit-shittiness happening because it took me fifty years to remember all the names of all the alpha morons responsible--
when all I want to do, in this life or any other, is create art & love my husband.
Anyway. No big existential taffy-pull. I just realized earlier the best way to phrase all this, as I was walking, and I stopped to move a freshly-emerged cicada to a nearby tree. He seemed quite content to accept the help and climbed his happy way to tonight's metamorphosis. Yeah, little fella, you do it.
So. I'm only three-quarters here. I'm a step removed. I think I've been this way since coming to in the hospital, watching myself be sewn up. It doesn't bother me. It just is. I don't think my top raccoon was in good shape before the crack to the skull; maybe he was four-fifths or five-sixths of a percent Present to begin with. Now he's Bueller--? Bueller--? over the hills and far away, on the best of days.
Today could be the best of days, though. That cicada was pretty cute. And yoga on the beach was good. I think I'm healing from the fall at work, and the shit in my lungs is being coughed out a bit at a time, and I feel fundamentally more embodied & sexier than probably ever in my whole life in the South, so that's basically two raccoons out of three to start the day with. If we get three raccoons in this trenchcoat then hey, Senor Droolcup got his shit together enough to crack a smile and pass the middle raccoon a brush to dip in the ol' inkwell. What day is better than that, I ask you?
Time to drink this tea and crawl back into bed with my husband.
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