Intelligent Man, Stupid Animal

Some careful life observations last night with my best friend. Of course, these observations were made under the influence of Moons Over My Hammy, so take that for what you will.

Human are interested in progress -- personal progress if not social progress -- and that progress is itself defined by struggle. Whether that struggle is an obstacle overcome or a pain endured is not fully distinguishable by our sense of pride, although I suppose that if you have more of the latter than the former, you'd burn out pretty quickly.

My friend and I are in quite different circumstances. He's a married man with a lovely wife, a steady job, and a pleasant home. And while he loves his life and is secure in his environment, he is like a tree growing indoors. He does not feel trapped, merely confined by the placement of his roots, with a ceiling above his head where the sky used to be. Now his limbs feel stunted, his leaves without air, and the twigs from the branches are searching the walls attempting to find cracks. Because his life is so structured, it does not lend to troubles which would lend themselves to progress.

I'm a single guy with a troubled romantic history, a somewhat tentative job, and an apartment by the freeway. While I am not desperately at odds with any of these things, they do color my world. The result of a break up that happened over a year ago was a nearly complete blindness to movement. The pain of the break up not being nearly as significant as the continued love for this woman and a lack of belief in a future emotion as powerful. It is as if the sun stopped setting, and I was in its presence always, and happy. Suddenly it disappeared before my eyes, and I found I could no longer see the stars that came before it and, worse, could no longer care that they weren't there.

Despite our differing circumstances, our dilemmas are both existentially troubling, and what is lacking in both our lives is cosmically similar. My friend and I are both self-assessing, self-improving, consumers of truth. We both, in our own ways, lack the resources and time and circumstantial justification to pursue that truth. We both feel present in a society that does not easily permit our need for the varied and random life experiences which would lend themselves to struggle and progress. We have minds obsessed with a growth, and that growth does not seem immediately possible and we begin to question if others live their life without it. He is bouncing off the white walls of a room with no doors, lit by fluorescence, wondering if he should even be asking for a window. I am stumbling blindly in the dark groping for a path, fairly certain that whatever path I find will lead me to another nowhere.

For the time being, we wait. We wonder if there is a struggle in waiting, if there is something to be learned there or something to grow on. We repeat the exercises of past inspirations, trying to catch a beat of the same drum that drove us to paint, sing, write, play, and move.

I generate no answers here.

Rambling Edition

I'm going to try to refrain from constantly referencing song lyrics, as I seem habitually (or maybe genetically) inclined to do. That's just a warning because I want anyone reading to know that I realize what an unoriginal consumer I can be.

I had a revelation today. I have many revelations, very often, and they last for about a day and a half, and then they fade into nothingness. I wonder if anyone else is like that. From a psychological standpoint, I feel I use these revelations on beauty, hope, love, grace, etc, to keep me from teetering into existential dilemma.

The revelation: For a straight man, I am mistaken for a homosexual one at abnormal rates. That is not in and of itself a problem, or a point of pride, or even a big surprise, just an observation which lends itself to some analysis as to why. My friend, the lovely Miss Ewa Jarosz, insists that I'm merely "European" and should've been born there as opposed to here. That's a comforting thought, at least, that I might fit in somewhere. I'm sure I'm not unique in this regard, although I may be more open than others.

Developmental psychology has been reminding us on a pretty regular basis that we are the products half of nurture and half of nature. That is to say, I developed from a canvas (nature) into a painting (nurture) -- probably a Picasso.

While I can't change how I was born, who I actually am is refracted through countless lenses: purposeful and incidental things done to me, choices I've made, tsunamis. I can wager that I have always been extremely self conscious, sensual, and emotional. I presume these elements to be nurture, but that is merely because they have been present and persistent within me for the longest time. I cannot claim my sexuality to be an inherent or learned trait, but I certainly suspect it is the former.

Social psychology has another commentary: American Heterosexual Man (we'll call him AHM) has come to be defined by certain traits -- my sexuality at least being congruent with the most private aspects of that persona. On the surface, however, AHM is (for no statistically good reason) defined by traits like aggression, competitiveness, showboating, sports, and limited emotions. I am none of these things, but that does not make me a homosexual.

Were I to wager for the sake of an explanation, I'd say that these traits are leftover primitive (or perhaps frontier) ideologies which served man in his early stages in the process of gaining mates and surviving long enough to do so. Heterosexual males (those capable of a reproductive coupling) served their prospective mates a lot better by being savage d-bags. It was a different kind of sexual battleground than exists today, aside from the fact that the desire for these traits have been passed down in the genes of women for thousands of years. That may be changing, too.

Am I part of a biosocial evolution? That'd be pretty presumptuous of me to say. What I do know is that despite my preoccupation with appearance, my obsession with certain male celebrities, my apathy towards sports, and my demonstratitive nature, I really have enjoyed only sleeping with women and have no desire to switch teams.

It is hard to shift cultural norms about sex and sexuality. I can only conclude that I have a responsibility to our society to decrease investment in this stereotype by sleeping with as many different females as humanly possible.

I'm just kidding. I'm more monogamous than the dikdik.

Introduction

We start by saying that there is a humor and a beauty to life, that human beings are no less farciful than fanciful, and that all attempts to perfect or improve upon the world or ourselves are narcissistic but natural. The sum total of all such efforts is cyclical behavior cleverly disguised as progress.

That is to say, you were born crazy and stupid enough to try and deny both.

With that being said, I declare a purpose for this blog: to speak on anything and everything of significant and trivial interest in life. I will be partly obsessive and partly blasé, fully critical and naturally forgiving, vaguely guarded or hopelessly exhibitionist. I may also be a bit dualistic.

There will be observational commentary.
There will be lazy categorization.
There will be brilliant analysis.
There will be some other things.
There might be shame.

This is a human blog -- by humans, for humans (and against them, too).