if I pass, if I fail, if I drop out does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget,
'cause it won't take much for me to show my life ain't over yet...
---The Barenaked Ladies, "What A Good Boy"
This is my fiftieth entry. In terms of human years, the Breadbin's deep into middle age.
I observe I've barely gotten started. In that respect, this blog echoes my life.
Remember that question...'what do you want to be when you grow up?' Kids typically answer that with a profession. Although most people will answer the question 'what are you' with their occupation, they're kidding themselves. An occupation is something you do, not something you are. It took many years for me to take this message to heart.
I never could answer questions pertaining to my future, when I was a kid. "What do you want to be when you grow up" yielded, like as not, a blank stare and a muttered 'I dunno'. There were two good excuses for this: aimless mobility and HICS.
AIMLESS MOBILITY
My future seemed to be completely unknowable, written on the wind. We moved every year or two. I longed for roots without ever being aware that's what I was doing...how can one put a name to something never experienced? (In the same way, I suffered from crushing loneliness as a child without becoming aware of it until friends finally appeared, as if by magic.)
So what was the point of making plans? They'd just be overturned in another move...and as a child I didn't even have any control over where those moves would take me. The image I overwhelmingly chose to describe my childhood and adolescence while I was living it: being strapped to the nosecone of a guided missile, one whose guidance systems were permanently disabled. You could see this in your head from any cursory glance at my life and how I lived it. I flitted from girl to girl like a bee at flowers, seeing love blooming in the most innocent of smiles and watching it snuff out just as suddenly. Most of my interests would appear overnight and vanish in a week or a month. You know those people who live their lives by rigid five year plans? I'd love to do that, but I can't, even now. I'm grateful that I'm currently living a life of few shocks...I retire at night comfortable in the fact that nothing was uprooted and everything in my head is roughly where it should be. Five years from now? I just hope the changes that are coming are enhancements, not some grand redesign.
HICS
This is, I'm convinced, an actual disorder I have: Head In Clouds Syndrome. It's also known as Absent Minded Professor Disease and acute inflammation of the Hey, Watch Where the Fuck You're Going! gland. It's hard to describe in the same way that loneliness was hard to describe when I was young. It just is. There seems to be no alternative. Tell me to pay attention to any given thing and odds are at least fair that I can do it. Tell me to pay attention to everything, all the time, and watch elephants fly out of my asshole. The only way I can explain it is a kind of dimming of the world around me that causes my brain to go on autopilot. I'll look right at something, and if I'm not expecting it to be there, I just won't see it. I'm blinded by preconception. The funny thing is, at least half the time this blanking happens, I'm not really thinking of anything in particular. It's not a fugue state: I still retain a good deal of awareness and I can feel time passing. It's more like a trance.
Eva's helped at this, as she has in so many other places, but it would be a monstrous lie to suggest she's eradicated it. I can still drift off at the touch of a feathered dream.
You may begin to appreciate how the future could appear both completely inscrutable and mildly apprehensive to such as me. Still, I've put a lot of thought into the matter and reached some conclusions.
You're going to have to wait for them, though, because in my immediate future is a trip upstairs to bed.
to be continued...
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