May 21, 2007

It’s the Amazing Plastic Brain! Watch! As it backs away from poignancy and cascades into flippancy! Marvel! As affection transforms into vexation! Wonder! At its amazing capacity for self-deception! Ladies and gentleman, you will not see a better show at this carnival, at any price! Not the bearded lady. Not the tattooed man. No! Not even the twin Malaysian albino transvestite dwarf acrobats! My fine friends, this is the show of shows, this is the curtain behind which you will find the greatest entertainment value on these fairgrounds!

Unless, of course, you’ve got one just like it in your own head. In which case, you should probably just move on to the Ferris wheel, and maybe buy some cotton candy.

But seriously, folks!

I had to drive all the way to Target in Ventura to get the fissile material I needed to build Steven, but now I’ve got a happy little device with machined aluminum bits and dangerous flashing LED displays and neat bundles of wires that look intriguing.

Steven and I were having a discussion about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and—being myself and not someone else—I took a brief trip through the words, sentences, and paragraphs I’ve written over the past few years. Good heavens! What a story I have created for myself. Steven—being a bomb—doesn’t have a lot to say about himself. His story is simple: when it’s time, his little fissile core will do its fissile business and fuse the bits of deuterium and tritium in its center together, which will then get very hot, fast, and large, taking whatever’s around him with it. He doesn’t have much in the way of conflict about that, because it’s not in his nature. He’s a thermonuclear device. He blows up. He doesn’t need to drink himself into insensibility to handle that. In fact, he’s somewhat proud of the fact that someone as clever as Einstein had to think him up, and that he shares kindred processes with the stars themselves. He is, in short, stable, comfortable with who he is, and remarkably free of neurosis and anxiety.

I, unfortunately, am not a thermonuclear device.

Neither, I have come to understand, am I broken. This is terminology I adopted fairly recently, partly because I felt that way, and partly because I was around people who also considered themselves broken. It’s a fine metaphor, as such things go, but I find it limiting. It doesn't work for me. There is always the possibility of repair, of course. But the image I hold in my mind of brokenness is that of a lumbering machine, capable of a kind of shambling progress, but always hampered by the fact that large portions of its mechanical anatomy are shattered or just not working properly. Oh, it’ll eventually get where it’s going. But its progress will be slow and torturous. Any repairs that are effected will be temporary at best. It’s a machine that’s doomed to break down. Doomed!

So no, despite all the intimate depictions on these pages of exactly how it is that I don’t function properly, I’ve rejected the terminology of brokenness. I may be a work in progress, but that just means I’m not finished yet, not that I’m damaged. Part of the reason I’m able to say this is because even in the depths of despair, I have an acute sense of place in my life, and I have always been where I needed to be. Always.

Steven is reminding me that this can be hard on people around me, and that’s true. It’s difficult for someone to hear, “Well, I kind of needed to be drunk for five years, sorry about that, I’m better now, see you around.” In fact, it’s more than difficult. “Difficult” doesn’t even come close. I know that, especially these days. There is no question in my mind that I can be a real bastard to be around while I’m “exactly where I need to be.”

It’s tough to follow up a paragraph like that with a qualifier like “but” or “however” or “yet,” because it gives the impression that it’s all well and fine for me to carom about the place like a drunken bull in a china heart shop. It’s not, it’s really not, and I know that, too. At the same time (yes, I know that’s a “qualifier,” shut up) I wouldn’t be where I am now if I wasn’t where I was then. I truly wish that I could’ve figured out the things I’m figuring out now in some other way, but I couldn’t, and I didn’t.

Steven is prodding me to write about all about all the things I’m figuring out—he’s quite personable, for a weapon of mass destruction—but, really, this post has gone on for over 800 words already, and it will have to be enough to simply say that I can see joy. I’m not there yet, not quite, but I’m getting some on me, little droplets of it, blown by the wind from further up the trail.

Steven wants a sandwich.

Which is a queer thing for a thermonuclear bomb to want, but there you are.