the notion eludes definition

 

As I delve deeper into identity it gets hazier around the edges. The better I define the notion the more the notion eludes definition. 

I was raised in what could be called an Italian-American home. Don't question the Jesus, listen to the elders, eat something with tomato sauce on Sundays. I would later realize none of them knew their Christ in any meaningful way, the elders were mostly full of shit, and Italians from Italy never go so tomato mad. Such is life, we either die young or live long enough for our parents to become burdensome to us. 

I recently took a DNA test and I'm exactly 0% Italian. Which means the biological relatives I've known my whole life are also not Italian. Which makes sense since our weekly or even twice or thrice weekly family dinners eventually evolved their own kind of madness.

The crime scene would always look the same. Absent minded patriarch at the end of the table prattling off testosterone filled nonsense interjected with compliments to the chef. The chef and part-time matriarchal figure perched at the opposite end of the table would always warmly receive these compliments. My mother sat across from my younger brother and myself across from my stepfather who always insisted on being between my mother and her step father. 

The chef and grandmother-in-chief, having assembled and cooked enough food for twice the number present, would always lastly settle in her chair only after being assured of everyone else's contented initial experience with their meal. Once the party was all fully settled, we were all essentially stuck for an indeterminate amount of time until the first one was finished and could use the excuse of clean up to escape for a while into safety of the kitchen.

Aside from some sulky details I've provided, this seems like a somewhat normal family meal experience. Well, with a captive audience bad comedians take advantage. Most of my own desires around this experience revolved around fast food with a quick exit. Both of these received scorn and derision until I relented and just started reading books at the table. This new tactic received outright ridicule until I ceased the practice and would only bring myself to dinner. Without the physical act of looking over the spine of a book at the rest of the party, I was finally deemed acceptable or agreeable, maybe both. 

Well, the situation was not so agreeable with me and I would frequently express my displeasure. In order to chastise a child for "talk back" or "smart mouth" or whatever useless phrase is used to describe the irascibility of youth, you must not engage. If you engage with belligerence you become belligerence. You also lose whatever high ground you had because you chose to come down and exchange insults with a child. 

Looking back now, perhaps it was a show of respect for me when my mother and grandpa would directly argue with a teenage over dinner. Their tempers would quickly turn the argument to insults and I'd return fire, salvo for salvo. Raise the black flag, burn it down, get mean. Angry and full of angst, but also well read and well spoken enough to cause disturbed looks on their faces. My grandmother would get so flustered she'd need to leave the table early. Smartly, she purchased a bell. The kind you tap to summon a bell-hop except this bell was tapped to summon sanity. 

Ridicule followed the bell around for decades, but it worked. She trained us like some of Pavlov's best dogs. However, it was obviously an imperfect system. The bell was often misplaced, I think it was hidden on purpose but I was not the culprit, this would result in chaos days until the bell finally revealed itself once more. The majority of the post-bell period was more like controlled chaos. If I ever felt the need to snap a hurtful retort to something then I'd just catch a ding. A few dings was no big deal but every once in a while I felt like I was on a game show. 

I'm looking at that very same bell right now. After she died I found it and I took it and I didn't tell anyone I had it until last week when I sent a picture to my mother. Everyone had thought it was missing never to return (most explained the disappearance on my grandpa, who now has serious dementia issues and loses things constantly). I claimed it as my own. It feels like spoil of war that I've won through all my hard work over the years dishing out better than I received. 

Why the bell and not simply seclude or exclude me? Well, firstly that seems excessive even for this group. Secondly, I have more or less always carried the philosophy that retaliatory strikes are somehow more morally permissible. Ethically ambiguous instead of simply cruel or mean. Derision aimed at my younger brother or grandmother was never permitted. It was answered swiftly with a bell worthy insult nearly every time. I love banter and can shit-talk with the best but I also understand the nuance between the two. I felt like I was deftly navigating between the two but I was a kid and pretty dense at the time. I still am but I flow better now.

The bell was a compromise, an effort to moderate the good points on both sides. I have no idea what they actually thought of my occasional belligerence but I hoped I was some kind of protector for the two of us that usually did not speak up in their own defense. Do I believe they needed it? Yes, at the time. I have no idea now, maybe I interfered too early and all I accomplished was transforming myself into a part time bully's bully. I chose my fights and went hard with conviction. 

I saw myself as a kind of mean old junkyard dog. He's not getting out of his house for random folks going about their business. He's only concerned with the guy trying to jump the fence. That guy is gonna get his throat ripped out. I thought of myself as some kind of disinterested protector. Like some samurai that everyone thinks is sleeping but he's been listening the whole time. Suddenly he snaps into action and swiftly slits a throat and stabs an eye and then there's silence again.

Has anyone ever seen me as a protector or am I still that belligerent youth? How much of my identity is defined by the way others perceive me? The impossible veil between minds has descended again to thwart my efforts. What does it matter how I think I'm being perceived if it may be so wildly different from reality? 

The problem with this is in even thinking about being perceived. If I wanted to protect my grandmother from foul words directed at her, why not simply do it and be done with it? Why do I need to persist in the belief or even write about it today? Mindfulness is something I only learned later in life and have only in the last year or so started to practice actively. It would have helped during these dinners.

this modern parable

 

Far and away the most misogynistic and manipulative narcissist I've ever met has recently taken up the habit of repeating the same story to me. This usually ends the conversation shortly thereafter on my part because I can almost feel the narrator's bias.

Full disclosure: this scumbag is one of my best friends and I'd be remiss to neglect some of his redeeming qualities. He's generally inspiring. Sometimes this is on purpose. Other times there's this accident that happens at the intersection of determination and teamwork where usually the result is something pretty good, pretty, pretty good. Quality is what he'd call it, though the notion in his mind and the real life result are not always identical. 

Another redemptive attribute is an unrivaled ability to adapt his mind to changing circumstances. He sees the best in situations ranging from shit-shows and cluster-fucks to serene and pristine paint by number. Every one of us are at different points in life and all have the corresponding differences in points of view. All of our thoughts in boxes shuffle along the cosmic assembly line of thoughts in boxes, the imagery itself just another thought in a box. With my own notion of identity becoming less defined the better I define it, I realize there's a similar journey for all those other thoughts in boxes.

The story goes thusly:

Every one is given three great loves. The first great love is a kind of puppy love You think it's the real thing while you're in the midst of it but it ends and you realize it wasn't real. The second great love is one that teaches you how to love while simultaneously teaching you how not to love because this one ends as well. The third and final great love comes at you when you're least expecting it and it is true and wholesome.

Typically that is where he ends the story and I ask him about what happens next but recently after a few more rehearsals, he's started to add a conclusion of happily ever after. Aside from following the rule of three and being kind of interesting, the story remains largely incoherent on the surface. Why would we call a first love or first great love not real and then go on to use the same language for loves two and three. If the first love above isn't real then none of the above are real, for coherent story telling at the very least.

Yes, the second great love sounds a great deal like someone you grow to hate. I don't feel that way about anyone I've ever loved. I know on some level you have to have love for something before you can hate it but I don't have hate in my heart. I've been saying "If you have hate in your heart, let it out" for almost two decades now and have been able to practice what I preach for the better part of the last one. I can't hate that which I love because I struggle with hate. Maybe my inability to hate prevents me from understanding this modern parable. 

The third love sounds like something I want to understand because I'm trying to learn not to expect. If I spend my time doing what I'm doing instead of thinking of other things while doing then I'm not doing a good job of anything. My thoughts while I work can be distracted by my work and my work while I think suffers from the lack of mindfulness. 

If I have thoughts worth considering then why not consider them? If I have work worth doing then why not do it? My need to rush and rustle along with the pace I think is around me only results in messy situations because of distractions. If I instead dictate my own pace and only allow the world around to inform my actions then I am thinking and then doing. I am observing the world, determining my part, and then acting. 

In no way am I saying I need things to slow down. In fact, the opposite is true when I am actively practicing mindfulness. I'm able to breathe, think, then act. It's impossible to control the outside world and it is unhealthy to react as well. Instead of reacting to the magnificence around me, why not thoughtfully respond? It provides more respect and love to the outside and, perhaps most importantly, to myself. I respect my thoughts and the thoughts and actions of others when I'm able to have considered thoughts during the silence between words instead of waiting for the next opportunity. 

I also don't believe we are given any loves. God, the universe, or whatever runs the cosmos isn't going to just give anyone love. It's something too precious to be given. It needs nurtured, it needs earned, it needs to grow in the silence between words. It grows in the mindfulness between souls and is only infinitely supplied when it is given the opportunity to flourish.

impossibly indecipherable

 

Self imposed identity is like building a house when you don't know how. You may know the general shape of things to come but not the full story of the innards. You're also not so great making clean cuts and what you end up with is a facsimile of a home. It looks like the hand drawn caricature of a home that we all draw when we're uncoordinated children. Proudly upon the cardboard mailbox my seal of approval gets slapped on top because I gave the whole thing a name and brought it into existence.

Identifying myself helps in this perpetual process of enlightenment but it is only a portion of the story. My identity is irrevocably intermingled with the inner thoughts of those around me and will always remain impossibly indecipherable because of the impassibility of the veil between minds.

A key aspect of identity are the roles given to us by others. These roles often have more duality than they should for accurate diagnosis so I shy away. In order to be a writer, I need to listen. I need to hear the voices in my head forming words and then my fingers need to listen to the electrical impulses sent down my nervous system to move muscles and click keys. I need to have read (because reading is a type of listening) all of the words organized here, elsewhere organized differently. I need to listen to inspiration in whatever form it takes before I can even begin.

Listening is also an important part of observing. In order to get those impulses to fire from brain to word I need to see the scene. Conjure it in my mind so that I can describe it here in words that have never been sufficient. An astute reader may have been able to intuit that my sense of smell is the worst of the bunch. I rarely, if ever, describe a scene with smell. Is my smell sense so weak because a good portion of my life has been spent with my nose buried in books?

Yesterday I did a series of experiments to determine the status of my mind-body connection. I ran for 3.55 miles to check the limits of my endurance. How far could I push my body until it decided to fight back? It didn't give me much push back. I was able to finish with less than maximum effort so either my body is obedient, I'm far fitter than I had expected, or the connection is still weak. My mind can force my body to do things it doesn't want to like run a 5k off couch or drink too much or smoke too much or do whatever too much. 

I also went out and had one drink. One drink to see if the connection is being repaired or not. When I used to drink I'd never wait for the effects of the first before the second was already ordered up. I would then never wait for the effects of the second before the third, and so on. Four or five and my body was well into the feelings by then but my mind would still be racing, seeking extra from the past that I'd never been able to mimic and knew I never would.

During this drink I was serenaded by an animatronic sorceress on percussion with a backup string section. I think sound might be a shorter avenue to the heart because it's usually through sound that I feel most moved. Sound can almost always make me feel something. The lyrical and the rhythmical combine to move the heart and mind. Songs are thought processes you feel. 

My decidedly not but assuredly so inebriated brain chose to decline the second round. Triumph? Only insofar as the siren in the corner of the cantina keeps captivating the audience with pipes like the grandest church organ. From Winehouse to Nicks and back again, I felt like I was getting a flight of heavenly treats invading my ears only periodically punctuated by background music of California burn out rock. 

Comfort music for the ears, more or less. But most certainly more. I got lost in that savory sauce every third song. Imagine if the call of Cthulhu had a female voice and it was all part of some surreal Five Nights at Freddie's show. Beautiful and terrifying yet irresistible on a level I'm unequipped to handle.

"Knowing ain't half the battle, that's a bullshit quip written by some asshole." - Aesop Rock

how's the water?

 

On yesterday's episode, I tried defining myself. Though there seems to be a lot of sharing here, it's still words on a screen. The thoughts that brought me to type these words will forever be a mystery to the outside world. A lot of times it is a mystery to me too, but usually only so long as I'm unable to form the idea into actual words. 

Trying to define myself by myself is kind of silly though. I'll never truly be able to define myself. I'm a string of thoughts in a physical body made of flesh and bone. One of these is in a physically unreachable place and the other is unable to escape its physical limitations. I live in this body which is kind of like a box in which thoughts are placed but thoughts can't actually be placed anywhere. Trying to pin down one's authentic self has been proving difficult. 

The other consideration is that of time. These words are being generated at the request of fingers clicking a keyboard today but you will read these another time. The thoughts are from before the electrical impulse is sent down to move from key to key. I'm trying to define myself now in terms of who I've been in the past. I don't want to be the ultimate repository of all this wickedness from my past and yet that's the first method I use to define myself. 

There's three or more different gears moving together that I'm attempting to stop and make sense of while they continue to spin and, in fact, need to continue to spin for my continued existence. I hope you've been able to follow along so far because I'm not so sure I have. The inadequacies of language or thought or maybe even the universe or the nature of consciousness make it hard to understand the notion of self. If it's so hard to understand, how will I ever be able to pin myself down with an actual definition?

Before I can get any further into this idea, I want to talk about the links between these things. As mentioned and as must be obvious by now, I express thoughts. The fact that writing is really a series of words expressing thoughts is why I'm drawn to the activity: it feels natural to express myself this way. Some people are feeling people and they can understand emotions and better express themselves in ways related to intuition rather than thought. Because of either a preference for thought or against feeling, I spend most of my time in my head and produce short essays of self reflection like this. If I were a feeling person, I have no idea how I'd answer these questions. Perhaps I would never have the need?

I spend more time in my head while others spend more time in their hearts. I probably have an aversion to feelings because it takes me so long time to digest them and bring them up to my head to roll around and describe in words. I suppose a feeling person might take a while to feel something about a thought but maybe that's just my own bias. 

The only way I've ever found to give myself anything resembling definition is when I had someone to live for. If you think of the idea of "space" as in outer space or even the space outside or inside your home. These places, these spaces, are only defined by their inability to be a place. Outside only has meaning when you understand inside. Light only has meaning when you understand the dark.

"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, he nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”" - David Foster Wallace

 As the bee provides meaning to the flower, I found myself with an identity and meaning but only because of the relation to the love that gave me an identity with which I felt comfortable. Without a purpose I am adrift and unable to define myself other than through such coarse methods as these.

Imagine love as water. I am like a lake or eventually the ocean at the end of the water cycle. It waits there until it's ready to rise and return to the source of the system. At the source of the river is usually a mountain or somewhere water flows freely. A serene meadow filled with deer and rabbits and all manner of gentle woodland creatures. Punctuated by a billowing waterfall in the distance and embraced gently by a swiftly flowing brook, the source of all my love and life and purpose was a Bob Ross painting made alive. On the ocean side of things, wave caps breaking wildly with a hurricane on the way with nothing but darkness on the horizon. 

I lived in the ocean. Lost in my thoughts. Lost in the depths, scared of even breaching the surface. I needed to traverse the underwater obstacles and emerge at the end of the river system and go onward to enjoy the serenity of that happy little valley.

Who even is Javier Nelson?

Dating all the way back to 2006, this blog is almost twenty years old. Throughout that time I've often thought of why I write. What drives me to put these words on this computer? Who do I think is going to read this? What kind of dysfunction do I have to think this is even worth reading? 

This compulsion of mine is partly the same as any writer who self publishes: stroking one's ego. And maybe I do need to stroke it from time to time; take it out of the closet and show myself and the world I'm still coherent. While I have it out, why not see what the old girl can do. 

I remember the first time someone told me they appreciated the words I'd written. Not a teacher or professor or anyone engaged in actively coaxing out words, but someone off the street. Someone who had no dog in the fight, so to speak. Astonishingly, or not, I befriended the fellow. We drank, ate, smoked cigars, and enjoyed a few evenings of revelry and reminiscences of high school. I can't recall much friendship before the compliments. Nothing gay here, simply one dude who liked another dude's words and some bonding.

I've been asked what I write about. Well, almost everything I've ever typed is here aside from papers and such from school. If you take the time to read it all you'll quickly discover that it is a roller coaster of addiction, trauma, narcissism, racism, sexism, many other -isms, many -phobias, and I would like to hope, most importantly, hope. If you end up in the sewer, make sure you're looking at the stars, eh?

I don't even think that's a saying although it reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe. I feel like he was drunk in a gutter at some point, possibly at his death. Which is a pleasant segue into how I've been feeling lately. Like a dead alcoholic who may or may not have his corpse facing the stars. Although most likely it was overcast that night.

The reason, of course, is heartache. Or rather, I think it's more of a headache. I've picked up the habit lately of wearing bandannas. [Since I'm having difficulty finding the footnotes on this editor, I'm including parenthetical(s) and making the font smaller like this. The point of this note is to inform the reader I believe there to be fewer N's in that word than what appears here, I'm only begrudgingly accepting the spell check and lazily not looking it up. I feel it's important to lazily not look things up while I write so as to either write around the block or simply put some placeholder in like this to return to later.] I think it's because I write phrases like "I think" far more often than "I feel" and this is in a largely autobiographical medium. Aside from the obvious obfuscation surrounding identity: Who even is Javier Nelson?

Javier Nelson was born from shame. One drunken night I was surfing facebook and encountered some wall shenanigans that incited an insecurity or two and I wrote some embarrassing rant like the ones you can find in the archives and was mortified in the morning, again. It had become a habit born of loneliness and inebriation to browse facebook or instant messenger (in those days) for anyone willing to listen. Or share something of interest, but never to share something where I didn't immediately or secondarily benefit in some way.

The depths of the night combined with a dash of frustration brought back from a bar strike out or whatever dead end decision led me to be drunk and alone at 2AM. It was only much later in life that I would discover the delights of daytime drunk dialing, at this stage it was a lot darker and less refined. I still had a lot of anger issues, I see that now. This storm of darkness collided with the alcohol and fireworks went off all over friends' facebook walls. This was in the early days of facebook when it was only friends, unless mom or dad worked at a specific set of universities, facebook just wasn't a thing. The internet was much different back then, but suffice to say that it'd be far more devastating if I had those problems with the technological access of today.

I felt embarrassed by an especially outrageous public post (which was also not even a thing at the time, you just had friends that could see your wall or people that weren't your friends). I just said "Fuck it" and deleted the whole thing. I went through and deleted everything I could and nuked the account. I don't remember if I used my a university email for my grand emergence or if I actually waited for a more open facebook, but Javier Nelson rose from the ashes of this embarrassment I can't even remember now and a stubbornness to go back to the old ways or the old me. 

This may have initially been a time of sobriety or not, but Javier Nelson never had much to say about anything other than alcohol or alcohol related activities or activities after the alcohol. At any rate, a casual read through of the archives can easily confirm the themes of addiction, trauma, and poorly coping.

I guess I still don't have much to say about it because it's only now that I've turned 40 where I truly understand what the -ism part of alcohol means. Which is why my head hurts so much, my personal journey lately has taken me from bible summaries to farming to being kind of an arborist with a bunch of extra steps. I drive a company vehicle either way and I have much to be proud of, aside from the aforementioned heartache, or headache, which is what ultimately brings us here. 

My writing hiatus was largely due to finally finding my muse. She made me realize that you can look for love your whole life and never really know what it is that you're looking for. Love is inspiration, to be your best. Love is hope, for the future. Love is a reason to get out of bed in the morning and motivation to get you to go straight home after work, instead of the bar. 

The last time I've ever had any type of disposable income, it mostly went to support the Primanti family and all the good work they do with their charitable eatery in the South Side on Carson street. Also a large number of the south side charities, some call them "cantinas", or sometimes "bars", but that was all behind me for a while because I was kind of depressed and living in a tent with only enough money to afford the occasional bottle of spirits.

My muse also made me realize that I didn't need to write to express my frustrations. I could get triggered by my insecurities and take out my frustrations on her, but that wasn't the way it was at first. First was the passion, the ecstasy, heights of love and loving and being loved in return. In the span of 37 years I've only ever been loved a handful of times. Romantically, I really can't say if that's true because emotions are strange and I just made the mistake of including all of my 37 years which has a lot of overly emotional teens and twenties and a long history of an internet diagnosis of autism, or something. 

One of the reasons my teen years were so wrecked was because my Pap died when I was a but a youth and left me with a shitty dad. I had to tell my dad he was a loser when I was 22 and then I went out for a pack of cigarettes and some scratchers and never looked back. I was definitely sober when I did that, but I may have been hungover. This stuff happened so long ago it's hard to remember, but it's important to inform ourselves of who we are by what we've done and where we've been.

I owe my whole future to a beautiful woman whom I loved and loved me back. True love too, not the kind you find at the bottom of a bottle or the end of a bar, the kind you want to find at the end of the day, everyday instead of the bottle. The kind of love that makes life easy. Makes decisions easy, just do whatever leads to the happily ever after. The kind of love that pushes and pulls when you need it, not just when you want it. The kind of love that's everything I've ever wanted and billions of things I had no idea I needed. Basically, it took me a while but I hit the love and life lottery with one of those scratchers. I was ready to cash it in for the mega millions jackpot but instead, as she so eloquently put it, I "shit all over the whole house, and both of us" and then I gave her a high five with a bunch of shit in my hand and it "got all over both of us and in our faces and mouths". Quite understandably so, she's disgusted. I'm also disgusted but I'm the one that metaphorically shit the whole house instead of just the bed or however the phrase goes. Coining phrases is just another reason I love her.

However, it was due to my inability to let her help me fight my demons that I shit the whole house and got it in our mouths and, I assume, hair and all of our stuff. Also in the fish tanks and on the cats and there's usually a fan running somewhere. The metaphor is a powerful one, which makes sense because our love was so potent and the destruction so devastating. 

It wasn't even like we weren't aware I had a drinking problem, I sent her a link here to this compendium of cathartic alcoholism. Which made it so no one was overly surprised when I was secretly consuming alcohol. Which, also not surprisingly, I had either before or after this event ridiculed a neighbor for doing the same exact thing.

Essentially, everything I'd written with or without an alcohol reference (and if you look through, there's far more of those than should make anyone comfortable) was in some way probably influenced by alcohol. Because I was an alcoholic. It's not defined by physical dependence but by the negative effects the use of alcohol has on one's life. 

I drank. I lied. I cheated. 

I don't know if that's all part of the theme of this blog but the first part definitely fits the bill. I also disrespected, but that was the whole time because I'm an asshole and don't value properly that which I should. I did not listen to love. I listened to the demons we both knew I had and had both tried to actively work on, her more than I! Her gut feelings (she is far more intuitive than myself) always work on overdrive. On instinct she can pull over and find a cat in need. She has supernatural hearing for all old people that fall over. She has the patience to spend three years with an old man while he continually fails to defeat alcohol or the its grip. But it doesn't really have a firm grasp, it just has deep roots. And shame and embarrassment and Javier Nelson. 

I can't say for sure whether this whole Javier journey started as a nom de plume or guerre: pen name or war name. I definitely fought some demons with Javier Nelson, but I think in the process, I definitely created a few more. There exists this catalog (of sorts) of events and it is also my recollection of stuff, but what else have we accomplished other than scapegoating alcoholism and mental illness?

I call her my muse earlier and yet there's no outpouring here. Or elsewhere, I assure you I only took the time off here because I felt like I had control over my life and didn't need the therapy. Well, I do. I also didn't have the need to write because I had other notions on my mind: farms, trees, pigs, goats, cats, and most importantly kids. All these things have one thing in common: life and love and hope and all that for which we seek in life. I have no words to describe what happens when you find your purpose in life, which is why I didn't write much once I'd found mine. 

I did. I did things for her, for us. Or, at least I thought that's how to love back, you see another theme here is the desire for but the lack of, actual love. I had a bit of luck once in my twenties but nothing like the glory and purity of the mega jackpot super win I just burned away. 

Of course I want her back, of course I hope she could forgive me. I don't know if she could, I took a vulnerable little bird and pretended to take care of it for a period of time then threw it on the ground and let the cat play with it for a while. Maybe the creature survived but say she's able to get back to safety, she's never going to want to deal with the person that nearly did a cold ass murder. So I guess another theme is loss.

I'm a thousand percent better now than when she met me and it is because she gave me purpose. 37 years of essentially floating through life with alcohol as a crutch changed me nearly completely. Obviously I still kept my crutch, but I went from homeless adjacent to home owner adjacent, finally, after 40 years. I don't own a home but I do have multiple certifications and many minor accolades to the credit of my muse. We created a breakeven profit pig farm on a farm we got kicked off (also because of me, which should be a separate entry eventually) but it was ultimately for the best ... or not, depending on where you stand, I suppose.

This is a rather anti-climactic conclusion but I still hope you enjoyed. I don't know what the future holds and I have no particularly hopeful words to share at this time about any of this. It feels pretty fucking bleak, and I think it is a weird sensation to know how things feel but that's something else I've learned from my muse over the last three years even though I'm still terrible at it: feeling feelings.