It had been a minute

I am not one for philosophy. Deep thinking requires a lot of time and only seems to benefit certain classes of people. For the rest of us whose action are of little consequence or who lack a popular media outlet, we can think ourselves right into an early shallow grave. Despite this in the late hours and again in the early hours I am thinking about lessons I might have learned as well as those I can still learn from. A lot of the lessons I have learned are no longer applicable because I am older. I don't have to worry about advances in bars, for example. I don't have to worry about getting fucked over on the job. I don't have to worry about associating with the wrong sort of people. I don't have to be as aware of safeguarding my time. I'm not in those kinds of bars anymore and even if I were, I am far north of 30. I'll be fine. I work for my husband, he is unlikely to take advantage of my work situation. Meeting new people at this age is rare, my friend card is full. No one is calling me to do stuff. People are watching the Menendez Brothers. What I am saying is that I would have to work very hard to find situations in which to get screwed. When I was younger I was fond of saying I have gaydar. It was easier in the 90s. Now I can't say that, things are much more nuanced and thankfully people feel freer to express themselves. What I do have is a highly attuned radar for bullshit and grifters, a low tolerance, and an even lower filter. 

There is also a feeling of having seen everything already. Not in the Gen X sense of "being over it", but in the vein of feeling that everything being recycled faster and faster. Everything else is a sequel. I have a friend, who is much smarter than I and who I would call a polymath, that says we are living in a "dupe culture". This is a more elegant way of saying a snake eating it's own tail, which is the way I see our culture. 

Back to philosophy. I don't teach anymore and I don't have children, nieces, or nephews so unless AI is using this to train there is no one I can harm with my suppositions on how things are. But a few things keep coming to me. My mother never gave me more than one piece of advice; be your own role model. Certainly she was dodging parenting, at which she was very skilled. I don't think she Mothered once, however under the broken clock model she nailed this one. The central tenet being that each person is unique, hidden, and ultimately disappointing so don't start with the comparisons or the following in the footsteps of a person whose propaganda/PR you have brought into. My childhood heroes were Woody Allen and Bill Cosby and Orson Welles. Only Welles remains with me. I bought a thick biography on him, but then never read it. I'd rather just enjoy his work.

My Uncle C died when I was in my early 30s. On his deathbed, my other Uncle E asked him what he learned in this life. I thought this was amazing. The impression I get from films is that it's the family that wants to get the last word. Typical. But my Uncle E is one of those guys that believes in the universe over himself, so he asked for information. Uncle C's dying words were- this world has many traps (or this world is a trap) and sometimes the traps are the people closest to you. Uncle E then reported this to me. I didn't ask, but I am glad he told me. 

At the time I took it to mean that my Uncle's wife was a horrible person, which is all true but when I reflected on his life I see he meant something else as in - keep it rolling. He was a cool dude but he did what he thought he had to, married, settled down, and worked in a factory, bought the same house everyone did, drove a Caddy. He and his wife were never able to have kids, but they adopted a hot mess and so still had the pleasure of the pain and disappointment of childrearing. But even I could see that he was several people and those people wanted to be a farmer, a biker, a painter, a train model maker, a hunter, and a gigolo. And he had to do them all on the side. Obviously the latter was on the down-low, at least to me. Maybe he let other people stop him or maybe he let them make him stop himself. Who knows. I am from a stupid place of deferred dreams. The town itself is a trap. 

Uncle C always subtly encouraged me to follow whatever dreams I had. And one time he told me that I would outgrow him, that I wouldn't want to hang out with him any more. That conversation still makes me sad because I clearly saw him differently than he did.  I even pretended to like hunting and farming. I always wanted to hang out with him. I would get the key from under the mat and wait for him at home. His house was next to church, he didn't go so I would just walk over after. Sometimes I would just hand out in his small backyard animal farm or play in the yard even though we had our own yard and it was larger. I even endured his wife, who is still alive and is really one of the worst people I have ever met. Still, he was convinced I would break from him once I got older. Maybe he thought he might be a trap or  part of larger one. But he was the guy I called when I got so drunk during camp staff week that it took me two days to recover. And he picked me up and gave me soup instead of a hard time. 

Traps don't identify themselves or make your choice to leave an easy one. That's how you can recognize them. After his funeral his wife, whom I had always been forced to call Aunt (And I had to pronounce it with a schwa and not like "ant" because she was snooty and put on airs. I guess growing up in a shack leaves a mark...) had the nerve to ask me why I had not been to visit all those years. I told her the truth- that I didn't want to see her and it was hard to see my Uncle without her looming around. That's why no one ever came to the house. Trap.

The last philosophy came to me via Instagram from an artist friend of mine. She always sends cool reels and is much more with it than I am. She's seen most, if not, all of it. It was from a preacher- hold the phone. I am allergic to clergy and grew up attending churches whose leaders where the basis for every parody a preacher you have ever seen in a 80s/90s low-budget broad Black comedy. I don't know where he got this from, preaching is not about originality. It's largely parroting. However, he said it well, it resonated and I realized this dude had put into syncopated speech and mainstreamed actions I had been shamed for my entire life. He told the rest of the birds--spend more time with people with whom you have a common future, than with those with whom you have a common past. Okay, it's a softening of how I have been doing because in the full squawk he explains that you don't have to leave to people behind, just spend less time with them and so forth. I was a baby and bathwater person, but I was born in a trap. I would have gnawed off my own leg and then hopped bleeding over the Chester River
bridge tossing a Molotov cocktail behind me. If that is what it took.