Me being a butthead

So I’m in a parking garage downtown, in a medical complex, and the way this works is all the spots except on the very top are usually taken by 10am at the latest.  I get stuck behind this old lady that is going walking speed through the garage.  I don’t know if we can speak of a parking garage etiquette, but if we can, going as fast as you can without missing spots would be part of it.  She was also veering on every turn into oncoming traffic, I watched several vehicles on their way out roll their eyes.  She was doing it wrong, and was not learning.

Me, I am an impatient driver. I am trying to work on it, and believe I am making progress, but I’m not there yet.

Anyway, we go around about 5 times, and I decide to pass her.  Right as I pass her, a car pulls out at the end of the row, and I pull in.  She honks at me.  I cuss her out under my breath.  At the moment, I was feeling both anger and relief.

Now, this is textbook, dictionary definition asshole behavior.  I get that.  She was likely old, a little slow, and likely there because someone she knew was sick, or because she was sick.  My brain tells me this.

But I looked at my feelings, and I was happy, at least for a time.

Now, I have been processing some deep things.  There are other unpleasant things going on I don’t feel like talking about, but suffice it to say a lot of very deep GAPS–that is the word–in my development are coming out.

I looked at my happiness at besting some little old lady.  It was pathetic.  That is what my brain said. Now, my father bullied me, bested me, all the time, and I am likely repeating this behavior.  But what lies at the root?  Tracking it is quite different than understanding and disposing of it.  I want to be spontaneously good, but that is going to mean at times spontaneously bad.  My task, my responsibility, is to USE those times for self purification.  It starts with seeing honestly.

Now, as I have said, my upbringing left me with a feeling of self hatred.  Self hatred is the result when you do not get the love you need, and particularly when you are subjected to emotional or physical violence, as I was.  Self hatred is a means of resolving the tension between what was done, and normal social standards.  It is very difficult to view your care-giver as an awful person–you are after all fully dependent on them at least until your early teen years–so what you do is internalize a sense of unworthiness and self loathing.

But it is never fully justified, UNTIL you do bad things.  When you ACT like an asshole, well then the emotional dissonance, the split, is healed for a moment.  And it is hard for me to describe what a heavy burden all these feelings are.  Whatever you do, wherever you go, there is this voice telling you to fail, that you can’t do it, that you aren’t worthy.

Obviously, you can combat that voice, you can use positive self talk, but if I ask you to hold up a wet mattress, say, something heavy and unwieldy (and by the way incontinence was not an issue for me, so I don’t think there is a deeper meaning here, although there may be), who wins: you or gravity?  As long as that thing keeps driving you down, and you have no means of dropping it, it will win every time, without fail.

Being a bad person, I think, may in some ways help to make that load feel lighter.  This is just a guess, but it feels right.

Then I got to thinking of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man–or really any number of anti-heroes, or neurotic nuts, from that rough era of literature (latter 19th century through today)–and they seem to think that being honest about being mean and miserable is somehow profound.  It isn’t.  It never was.  These things, awareness of these states, is simply a waypoint.  You enter into awareness of evil in order to do something with it, to transcend it.

What stops this process is a rejection of morality.  At its root, Socialism is a rejection of individual morality.  It is a rejection of individual meaning.

I don’t like hospitals.  I have had one outpatient surgery in my life, and that was enough.  I don’t like watching all the fat, decrepit sick people wander through there.  This, probably, is an ugly sentiment too, with one perhaps redeeming feature: I don’t like people who do not value their health and well being enough to do even the BASICS as far as maintaining health.  We Americans age SO poorly, not least because we have this enormous complex built up around keeping people who have never given a shit about their health alive, with expensive pills and treatments.

Then I got to thinking how we treat old people.  Ponder this: how could an old person be valued for wisdom, when wisdom is rejected in principle?  Put another way: if morality is social and not personal, how could an old person have more of it?

If we value old people, what do we value them for?  Practical knowledge.  Some old men, like Warren Buffet, are exceptionally good at doing what most people actually care about, which is making large sums of money.  But would you trust the future of your soul, the future of your happiness in this present life, to a shark whose early fortunes were made in ways most of us would reject handily?

No, we put old people behind curtains, on the other side of the hill, over THERE, where we don’t think about them much.  It was a Socialist, and not a Japanese ethos being expressed when a Japanese Prime Minister said he wished all the old people would just die.  If they could not contribute to the economy, if they had no MATERIAL value, to him they had no value at all.  Their life experience meant nothing to him. (Note here too, as I have commented somewhere, the rush to put everyone on the public dole, then complain about the expense.  This is one more lunatic aspect of the whole thing.)

And if you think about it, what DOES an average person really learn in the course of a lifetime if their constant focus is material in nature?  If their lives revolve around promotions, new houses, weekends, and vacations?  They can talk about these things, but little else.

How much wisdom is there, really, in an average nursing home?  I don’t know, but I wonder.  Contrast that with, say, an old Tibetan, who has chanted and meditated and sung religious/spiritual works all his life.  To the extent we would find wisdom in nursing homes, I think it would be among the deeply and sincerely pious.

Returning to Good and Evil, I think it needs to be said that there is a vast moral difference between playing a role, and understanding a situation.  You can beat pacifism into people, and some cultures do.  You can beat courtesy, filial piety, a work ethic, and cleanliness into people.

But do they then own those virtues?  I would say no.

Goodness, to me, is expressed spontaneously.  It simply comes out. Love comes out; compassion; generosity; kindness; beauty; warmth.  That is why the Windhorse metaphor is so apt: you have the power and motion of a horse, and the brilliance of a jewel.

If you cannot express things spontaneously, you are an artifact, a remnant.  You are not you, but somebody else’s idea of who you needed to be.  Habits can be very strong and useful.  But until you reach bottom, until you know all of your self, all of who you are, all of what you are capable of, you are not free.

For my part, I am starting to try and focus on positive energies, but I’m sure I will have relapses.  These old habits run strong.  I watched them and was subjected to them for many, important, years.  That sounds like an excuse, and perhaps it is, but no plan based on wishful thinking is reliable.  My explanation may be wrong, but I am certainly describing my present reality.

Few thoughts, from my asshole moment.