Treadmill

I’m the kind of guy who says something whether or not there’s a need to say anything. Not always, of course -- I’ve learned a few thing over the years. In fact, sometimes I’m actually quiet. So I suppose I should amend the statement: I’m a guy who sometimes says things there’s no need to say. Take today, frinstance. Someone told me that I had been missed … just in the way that you might miss the presence of a friend. Well, that was nice. And I said something like, for all that I loathe myself, I’m still a pretty nice guy … awfully nice.

Even at the time it seemed, oh, how to say, sour. Loathe is such a strong word, and my tone didn’t quite do the job of softening it. And being me, I had to question myself, later, about the truth of the statement -- because we may find truth in any number of surprising places, even in the throwaway one-liners of emotional deflection. Do I actually loathe myself? Cuz I know I’m an awfully nice guy, in my own peculiar and autocratic way.

Not loathe, of course. It’s just that I have missing parts, and I feel their absence. As the years pass, I become more phobic, more reclusive, more confirmed in my isolation, for all that I have daily social interactions. I can’t speak to determinism or predestination. I do believe that it doesn’t take much effort to completely ruin a child, though, and the adult who follows.

The spiritual hunger that results from abuse and neglect is consuming, the way cancer consumes. The fact that it is, finally, a spiritual hunger answers its own question: spirit fulfills the spiritual man. The other side of that coin is that not all spirit is light. We have free will, and we can chose healing or decay. At the pool of Bethesda, if memory serves, Jesus asked, do you want to be healed. Not a rhetorical question. Not everyone does.

That’s what I mean by loathe, then. No man ever hated his own flesh. On the surface this is clearly an incorrect statement. Suicides hate their own flesh, their lives. But of course what they really hate is their pain. The only thing they hate more is what it would take to actually cure it, rather than pass it along to others; someone after all has to clean up the mess.

For my part, I am sometimes furious, sometimes despairing, at the very idea of my having been trapped in the moronic situation of my childhood, where every moment seems in memory to have been either the presence or the anticipation of rejection, mockery, contempt and invalidation. I make a joke of it nowadays, but I don’t seem to be able to allow myself any actual comfort -- always avoiding rather than confronting. It’s no way to live.

I had a wife once, long ago now, and I picked her because she was the broken mirror of my broken soul, a bad match, voluble where I was terse, sexless feminine to my male aggression, incomprehending and probably even more resentful than I myself was. I loved her as best I could, and still do for all that I never turn my thoughts to her, and I would still be married to her, regardless of the presence or absence of love -- because loyalty is a duty whereas happiness is just a blessing. Point is, she was my chance, and it didn’t work. I’m afraid that I don’t even want another chance. That’s what I must mean, by loathe.

I was told there’s a picture of my son on his facebook page where he looks super amazingly ripped, which he is. I spent some time trying to find it, cuz I don’t see him much, but I can’t figure facebook out. What a stupid idea. Incomprehensible. The company was supposed to be worth two thirds of the GDP of New Zealand, and what is it exactly that they sell? Chitchat? Pictures of cats playing with yarn? Worthless. Next year UqWelbBiq will replace it, and facebook will be myspace, the way Kodak became Victrola.

I need a treadmill. A fast one. Fat boys are beating me in running, and this cannot be tolerated. I used to be fast, but it seems I will only train on treadmills.


J