a whole new woooooooorld....

oh dear. sorry for that. but it's been stuck in my head for some unknowable reason, and i thought i'd share that little earworm with all my readers - both of you. in reality, i do know why it's stuck in my head, and it's a long and winding road that takes to here from where i began. so i shall spare you the trip and simply go back to the start, which is the germane point anyway. a whole new world...or is it?

i opened the door to this a crack with my last post. i'm not at all sold on the idea that we have but one dance in this existence. i know, i know - i'm a methodist christian, and that faith (indeed, pretty much any christian denomination) leaves essentially no room for interpretation on this subject. regardless of whether one prefers to take everything paul wrote as truth or with a grain of salt of biblical proportions (see how i did that? i tied it back into itself! ha.), or if one even wants simply to pare it down to accept only the words of jesus himself, there's nowhere to go with that line of thought. once, and that is it. unless you're unitarian universalist, but they only sort of count as christian by virtue of growing out of a christian denomination in the first place. anyway...

i'm finding that i don't much care what the history of my faith says, which seems on one level to negate it as my faith, i suppose. that's been coming for much of my life, though, so please do forgive me if i'm not exactly wearing a hairshirt and sackcloth over it. i'm not rescinding my membership in that club, but likewise i am not seemingly on board with all the bylaws. in any case, i have developed a nasty habit (to hear some tell it) of cherry-picking what sounds right to me and what does not. i am comforted by the notion that i am not simply choosing the easy rules, but just passing on the ones that make little sense in light of what we know of history at this point and that are at complete odds with faith systems that were around for millennia before abram became abraham. i do not claim to be right, but only claim that i do not know, and any who might write me hate mail for this paragraph will be wasting the parenthetical gap between the health of your wrists and carpal tunnel syndrome, for i have no intention whatsoever of engaging you in debate.

so, back to it. recent events have opened me up to some...impressions that i may have had for a long time but was never in the right place to ponder. something about being in a psych ward leaves one with a number of philosophical conundra. perhaps it's all the extra time one has while hiding and praying that the more dramatic expressions of mental disease aren't communicable. regardless, a lot of introspection has been going on, only some of which has been shared here, and it has brought about the concept of the 'familiar' to me.

i have dipped my toe into this already, but the 'familiar' has become kind of my name for those people with whom i am immediately comfortable. 'soulmate', the word i originally used, seemed both too strong and limiting at the same time, for while it connotes a depth that may go beyond that about which i am speaking, it likewise has a colloquial meaning that would presuppose a singular pairing, and the familiars number more than one. and so i have been trying to make some sense of this fact that there are people who to me simply seem immediately non-threatening and my impressions of whom are instantly exempt from my own mind's fears. how does this happen? why are these people, with whom in many cases i have no reason whatever to be comfortable, so quickly trusted? is there a single common trait that they all share, something that i can recognize in them and by it know that they are not like anyone else?

and it struck me while i was in my bed one night in the ward, and it struck me again a day or two after i was out, and i ignored the thing until i was talking to one of them and it struck me again: perhaps the word 'recognize' is what it's all about. i don't mean to imply that there is necessarily any such thing as my coming to know that once upon a time this one was my wife, or that one was my best friend, and that one day with enough work and regression therapy we might realize that we have known each other as joey, susan, theodorus and grok. but if we do cycle back through here, what are the chances that we retain no impressions of our past experience? i do not speak of memory, per se, but of retained experience on some level that cannot be accessed by our consciousness while informing our new experiences.

i was reading a brief article on the recent death of the most studied man in the history of memory science. he had had an operation at a young age to remove a segment of his brain, and with that segment went his ability to consciously remember anything long-term. he could remember things for approximately 20 seconds, until it was time for that information to move into long-term memory and then it was gone. at one point he was subjected to a series of repetitive manual tasks, and each time it seemed to him to be a new task. but he slowly grew more adept at the task with repetition - his muscle memory was still working even though he had no idea that it was. he remembered nothing, but his body built that memory for his conscious mind. that is a solid analogy for what i am trying to get across. that though we are never consciously aware that we have shared our lives with someone before, that there is some metaphysical analog to muscle memory that is seated in the soul and allows us to 'recognize' those in whom we have placed our trust in the distant past.

i also do not mean to imply that we are stuck recycling the same friends over and over again. this is a big ol' world, and once one adds time into the equation perhaps things don't line up terribly well. we also must allow for the fact that we develop new friends. i have, i know this to be true. but these friends may be the ones that have taken me time to trust, and in that time has been built a friendship that may well transcend this life and wander off into another when we bump into each other again.

i am coming to think that possibly we all have this ability, that it is just part of the human experience, but that i am sensitive to it because it is so hard for me to trust anyone that those with whom i quickly feel safe stand out in the starkest of relief.

friends

ah, the little miracle that is facebook. what once was lost now is found and all that. the problem is that many are being found that may have been better off lost, yes?

not that i believe i am one of those. but there's a side effect to my past coming out of the digital woodwork on which i had not counted, and while it may have been a side effect regardless of timing, it's suspicious at best that some of those magically delicious long losties are popping up on the heels of my stint behind doors which required a badge to get out. not in some 'they've been watching and waiting for me to fall apart' way, but in a cosmic, destiny-is-creepy kind of way. some of those who are now in the list of one-hundred-some-odd folks who count as my 'facebook friends' were once among my best friends on this earth, and it no less than convicting that someone to whom i was once a trusted confidant was recently married and i was not even aware, let alone invited. (i say this not to blame her, mind you - this is entirely of my own making).

and so it now strikes me that i have spent my life cycling through people the way many cycle through clothing. you have a particular wardrobe that you bought for a particular year, and much of it goes by the wayside quickly as it has gone terribly out of style. in this way, a lot of friends are like acid-washed baggy jeans with pleats, and i don't think that is abnormal. everyone has people that come and go swiftly from his life. but then there are the staples: a good brown sweater, a handful of t-shirts and that one pair of levi's 501s that are just right. but in the end they're clothes, and clothes wear out. eventually, the t-shirts get holes in them, some chick steals the sweater one night and you wear the jeans while hanging christmas lights and tear the ass clean out of them and have to climb down hoping none of the neighbors is outside that day because you decided it would be a short project and you'd go commando....but i digress. the point is this: even your staple clothing one day will be gone, and generally in 5-6 years or so if it's something you wear frequently. but most of you are probably not like that with friends. i am, or was. or am. hard to say these days.

starting in 6th grade when i moved to texas i cycled through a lot of friends quickly. i had one set of best friends for 6th, another for 7th and 8th, another for 9th and 10th, and yet another for 11th and 12th. now, there were some holdovers into college, even while i was in denver my freshman year, but starting with my return to dfw a whole new group came on and i left those who had been my friends and lovers behind yet again. now these people to whom i have shown no respect, but to whom i was simply willing to disappear (and in a couple of cases, actively tried to avoid), are back. now i am finding that while in most cases i'm alright with that as it would likely have happened anyway, there are a few over whom i am finding i feel genuine regret.

now, some who read this may be thinking 'i've known this sap for more than 15 years! what the hell is he talking about?'. those are the people who have known me since brandie. the fact of the matter is that without her to keep me in touch with the people i call my friends today i'd have let them go as well. i can't explain why, really; i just know this to be true. i am simply not built in such a way as to be inclined to keep in touch. i don't call, i don't write, i don't send flowers, i don't sing love sings anymore. i just don't. i'm sure there's a pathology there that i'll uncover before too long, but for now i only know that i'm talking to people with whom i haven't spoken in more than a decade and some of them i wish i had known all along. too damn bad, you don't get a do-over.

life is funny that way. the ol' river only flows the one direction and if you try to swim upstream you'll find the best you can do is negate the current and go nowhere. forward, huckleberry. and in some way you might find that you wish you had been next to the other bank because you missed some really spectacular scenery, in another you may realize you napped right through the wide-open and beautiful bit only to wake up in a stagnant segment, dry-mouthed and covered in mosquito bites. and in the worst kind of way you'll find that the calm and serene fork was that left turn at albuquerque, while you're immediate problem has become the level 5 whitewater in front of you that you suddenly see leads for a fairly nasty waterfall. whoops. too bad. suck it. hold on tight, because i don't care how hard you swim, the best for which you can hope is that the pretty fork joins back up somewhere up ahead and that you don't break anything really important on the way there.

and i guess the final issue is this: sometimes that fork does join back up, and you can see what you missed. the trick is to find the beauty in that it has joined back up and not cry over the spilt-milk fact that you took the wrong fork in the first place. be lucky, feel lucky.

i kind of wish i had a do-over on today's entry. it's a little scattered, a little drunk-on-a-motorcycle. hope i didn't get any on your shoes...