(Misc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm87PN-fTlg&ab_channel=bonjr-Topic

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                I

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Whatever it takes 

To see you diminished, diminished

Before the lengthening

Illusion of my shadow - before the opportunism

Of the moment

Escapes me, 

Before you’ve been provided the chance

To unavoidably prove me wrong.

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                II

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How did he put it?

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“There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior. And this human truth has an especially grinding force here, where identity is almost impossible to achieve and people are perpetually attempting to find their feet on the shifting sands of status.” 

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- Baldwin p. 88 (The Fire Next Time)

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                III

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Sometimes, conversing with grown men is like playing thumb war with a child - wherein, the rules are changed at random and sporadic becomes the decorum - all commensurate to the idea that the child must walk away feeling as though they’ve won: which is to say, feeling as though they’d won to keep from feeling as though they’ve lost.

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                IV

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Sometimes, when listening to a person speak, it’s important to remember that there’s a glass celling on how significant your response might be - and that, in all actuality, all they really want from you is some kind of affirmative gesture that somehow condones their continued talking about themselves.

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                V

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It is inescapably transactional - the deep seated hypocrisy - that patronization behind a well intended remark and the desperate plea for absolvement behind even the ugliest of insults.

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We want things from one another, and we gift wrap these exchanges in different packages to allow ourselves the opportunity to feel better about our lots: to come away feeling more, or with more, without less, justified or at least comfortably rationalized. Regardless, we will shamelessly exploit one another for them - the things we want - exploit, condemn, disregard, ostracize or ignore, and then, to further our shamelessness, we’ll gift wrap the acts as though they were somehow rooted in virtue, in some kind of personal nobility or a thankless self sacrifice. We will manufacture narratives to fit this need, to substantiate it, and then we will practice ourselves to these narratives as though they were scripture and our upholding them were requisite to our own absolutions.

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We will contort concrete, objective happenings until they fit with the necessity that becomes our version of events, alter memories, color in patterns where patterns were not necessarily there.

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We will lie to ourselves. We will lie to ourselves the moment the truth becomes more painful than our consciences are willing to bare - the moment the light is shined on the parts of us we want least to see. We will lie to ourselves.

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And the best of us at it, clearly, begin the lying early. And the worst, insufferably, never quite learn how to do it properly.

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