14.6
Our hero saw that after her he’d have real problems hoarding junk piles in his dwelling, so he found a story he could tell himself to make the pile okay. Injured or disabled, man will find a way to stow his better self. There are concrete safes inside him waiting for the circumstance to chain up and protect. All their lives our forever couple, on feeling confused, will change that state by imitating other people. They won’t look for guidance in the ancient world — its insouciance repels them.
On one level what the parting came down to was the festooning of her inner walls against our man’s austerity. She leapt toward company where he would leap away. Consequently others went from seeking his to bringing decorations to our heroine, who was all too glad to hang them on her walls inside. What he’d wanted from a partner was one for whom he was enough, which was his conception for the woman he would love. He demanded she would be enough for him. Even if she wasn’t, he’d tie his limbs to four wild horses and then startle them to swear she was. No friends or hobbies would compare. Competition’d go unheard, for each would be the other’s sources of the varied font of nurturing. He’d seen her in that way for their whole time together — even before and after, if he’s honest. She’d seen him that way at the start, and then one day she didn’t. This was perhaps the breakup’s grossest blow. He learned that all the late-night promises of love were so much leavings if the mind were changed. He’d been so certain he would inspire eternal love in someone out there, and that he’d bask in it for the plupart of his days. He felt murdered by her lesson. Hence it did not occur to him that when she’d said, “Let’s get married,” he should have done a hand-spring and whooped, “Yes!”, dropped out of university, gone into the working world, and treated her like a queen, buying everything she wanted (staving off what would’ve been her certain cheating, and inevitable divorce), becoming exactly whom she wanted him to be. He did not want to know the true expression of the self that was once watered could be slashed and burned by one’s premier intimate. He believed in his conception, made manifest in someone else’s consciousness. Prior to her he thought it was a place that needed finding — he thought it reachable, and each new choice would get him there. He couldn’t laugh it off when getting there was not the same as staying there forever. He told its ending to garrote him, and it did.
Youth don’t understand the pinched and bitter faces of the old, but here we find the main contributor. It cannot be grokked through observation. It can only be endured. We can grab a pike and try to hold it off, at its intent to change us. Whether we allow it to reveals if we’ve been cured. For her, some of their time together was carved in granite in cuneiform, but much was typed in a card catalog soon to be deprecated. He thought that all their time together had been laser-etched in marble — he’d come to learn that much of it was light pencil on a common cardstock just the same. This was a gradual surprise to him. That disillusion was revealed when a stray unconscious click opened the folder of their photos. They performed as advertised — the events that they captured brought to mind things he had forgotten, such as holding hands at a lakeside sunset (in an oil-stained gravel park) or tongue-kissing by a shady creek (that was dry but for mosquito puddles).
They’d meet for ten more years. They would even make love. It must have been the pheromones. They’d get within two meters of each other and feel that old love once again. Once he called her up and asked if she would drive him to the airport. She said yes. She was a little late, to cause him worry, and in doubt whether she should, but once he walked out to her car she blanched, then laughed, at that old presence, the thing that made him Abelard for like 900 days. It so unnerved her that she followed him into the airport and bought them both a beer. They held hands up to the gate and there they kissed so hard, so long, so as to ground the flights, to shut the whole place down.
14.7
Something in the scope of his connection narrowed down his focus so that the veil through which he saw his life was crocheted with her face, where most display the myths imparted by their parents. A good amount have sports, hobbies, or the police form that gives them purpose. Many have the image of their kids, or any combination aforesaid. He had card catalogs, and they were not in numbered drawers but in the fingers of a woman. Who knows what hers were held by, as this was not a thought she’d ever have, nor did she ever need it. She’d get by fine without it, where for him it was a distraction, an elixir, and a trap. He suspected her catalog of memory crouched ready on a set of blocks that ran with world class steroids manufactured by her glands.
Second guessing is familiar to introverts. They can get used to anything. Extroverts perhaps cannot. They will grade and tar the road they know if it is not already there, regardless of the habitats that must make way or die. They organize their movements by directives. This alone makes certain their adherence to binary thought. Existence was presented to them as a world of yes and no. That thus is how they see it. They know they are alive but have no sense of its entirety. They know they have a self, but they have a forthright inability to see its full conception. They perform charity and help out their communities. Their tribe is the chosen one, but then they all believe theirs is. They are confounded by these statements. They have been mistreated in this world. More harm has come from others of their ilk than from the stakeholders. What harm they see directly. Which strikes with greater power than a latent economic consequence that would be more deadly to the whole. Cobblestones replete with sorrow have them stumble as they age. All their pride is in accursèd Elsinore. Propa-g is dripping in their ears. Naught but their children recognize the ghost of what they used to be.
Impending death by nature is by definition ‘pocalyptic. The future of our possibility has been constructed for us. They expect that we will go there willingly, that we will clamor to get in. Big conclusions are determinant. Disasters are transparent in the self. He realized that sometime, yesterday, that she was single-acting. All stage plays are directed dreams, and all of their derivatives. Sheer lives are spent outside their own community, unknowing the foundation that was laid there when their nana was a girl. Copper hemoglobin spilled for causes was forgotten. The jewels were slipping off of desiccated fingers. What was remedied was found to have a growth. All the cheery sciences abut their limitations and freedom is a consequence of economics, not a guarantee.
The times he’d tozed in forcèd happiness were when she had mentally checked out, but he had not allowed himself to know it yet. Years later after she’d explored the choices given to her, by the tall or muscular or wealthy, she’d admit to her girlfriends that our hero’d been the only one she loved. This view would only change when at thirty she decided that her party time was over and she had to marry. Perhaps in her heart of hearts her love for him glowed still, but it was so deep she didn’t see it when she thought back to those times, which except in sleeping dreams she didn’t. She loved her husband — he was a little like our hero — and even more the children that he gave her. She made the best match that she could, of men around when she turned thirty. It meant taking up with one already taken. He decided to leave his first wife for our heroine. She had somewhat encouraged this. Her self-esteem was sparkling when the fella said that he was hers from this day on. It must have had something real because it lasted. They stayed married (he came from decades-married parents just as she) even as our heroine remained, from time to time, available to the men of power in her circle. Her adulthood, her understanding of her power over men, attracted her to that. Poor husband — if he knew, or allowed himself to know, or if he did the same, pursuing women on the side, each tacitly complicit to their vow-partner, else hiding indiscretions from them. They moved out of the city to be closer to his parents, part his machismo and of the compromising marriage had placed on her. It was still Nebraska and she could get home rather easily, in a few hours with traffic and the children on the Friday after work to have a weekend with distaff aging ones. One kid got carsick every time regardless of the dramamine and ginger pills she gave him. Her husband didn’t get the comforts he testicularly needed underneath his in-law’s roof. Her parents thought our heroine’s choice an irritated person all the time since they never saw him as the happy sated king he was in his own home. He was not much for entertaining. Of their children the younger boy would turn out competent if unimpressive. He’d follow his dad from summer internships into a clerkship at a rival bank. Their older daughter imprinted a cocktail of the two adult’s neuroses. This combined with an impulsivity they had noted in her from an early age to give the family, via daughter’s mania for independence, more than its fair share of trouble. The family nearly bankrupted from paying for the rehabs that proved never to work. The nadir came when her brother had to unenroll from college cause she’d used up his tuition. He went to work full-time plus picked up extra bar shifts so the family would not lose their house. Our heroine would approach retirement in ill health from all the cigarettes, husband gone cause of his diet, with several grandkids from one of her children and zero from the other, on shaky finances, with the hope that one of them would take her in so she didn’t lug her wheezing lungs into a public nursing home.
14.8
In a way our hero had been paralyzed for good. He’d not yet learned that his paralysis had occurred at birth, when the chemically deficient brain he was born with received an unpleasant circumstance, molding it into the challenged state he’d lug throughout his life. It was enough to think the world itself had animus. An apex predator emerged and spread in many billions to the remotest places of the globe. It changed, by scarring, its environment to suit it in the short term, triggering epochal extinction for the language-deprived inhabitants. To slow it down it seemed the earth itself made swathes of depressed, and, in growing numbers, autistic people. These would not be such ardent consumers, nor maniacally pursue the ownership of resources, of nature’s biosphere. Yet their lamentable depletion would give some of them voice — they’d know they could be better functioning from the patterns they observed in others, so this improving would be a life motif that they would extend in turn to the environment.
Depressives are self-drafters in the eco war. It may, and usually does, take the major form of banner causes for their pets. Unwanted kitties purr at their walled-off hearts. If their parents had been made by Fisher Price, frozen-faced and armless, the mood-disordered would have been forced to find some solace in the wild. If their step-fathers had gone fishing, they would glom onto healing estuaries. They’d sense, therefore they’d repair. It went for music, corporate gewgaws, and sudoku all the same. Depressives were less likely to reproduce, reducing stress on nature — equally sad they were likely to leave office ‘ere their term was up. Depressives helped the only ways they could. They sure made easier the lives of the blithe and happy takers, incapable of self-reflection, whom if they had the right connections would grow up to be stakeholders themselves. Depressives could not out-compete the madly driven. By giving all their waning strength to barely holding on, they entwined their fingers, flattened out their palms, and gave the maniacal egotists a boost up to their goal, unaware they (the depressives) even did it, focused as they were on all their pain.
They knew somehow that they were looked down on by the ones whom they gave aid. Each group was running the same program — justification of the self. It never had a SIGINT in its life so it was full of uninterrupted expertise. It could talk its human into anything from theft to the acceptance of atrocity, the bombing and starvation of women and children. Adaptation hinders progress in this way.
Good is all that has been devastated by deception. Bells and workers toiled the same. What they hear’s the sound of obligation. Adulthood slams with latch in place when needs are more important than are wants. Depressives drag their worn out soles through workplaces that make them feel worse than their stubborn minds accomplish on their own. Which is quite formidable. It’s strong enough to deny the proof right underneath their red and running nose. That mechanical response had been more powerful than air-tight arguments. Of which there are many, despite post-modern, post-structure, and post-rock. It benefits the stakeholders of this over-heating planet to promote post-modern thought since it drives automated cars right through belief, and if belief is full of holes, then the science proving global warming is not wholly true, and the stakeholders can keep arrogating most the commonwealth. Only in these propa-g conditions will the postie peeps claim truth. For in the wild, lock-step conservative deer-hunters deplore deforestation, and the religious poor send money they don’t have to far-off starving children.
14.9
To our hero the roadtrip (road-ript), from California to Nebraska to reclaim her, was a way forward into bliss. Alas he’d be pushed into the depressive state he’d spend his life attempting to avoid. Our heroine felt backed against her inner walls by his confrontation. She really hadn’t thought of their reunion, how it could be. It had been just about a week that she was free of him, that’s all. What rose up behind the shock was disappointment — not in something like his acting out of habit, nor in the features of his face, but in his very presence, which he could feel in her, and which told him everything about their prospects going forward. She could not scent his pheromones so soon after her definitive break. He was not eager to be negative, to represent the negative to her, so he did not value what she half-mourned in response. In a way he did not value her, only her part in his happiness. When one is asked about the one for whom he cares, what comes out reveals the lens of his obsession. Good thing we’ve got pets, otherwise human chattel would prevail.
Where he arrived with promises of all that they could be, if they stayed together, he left with a directive that determined the boat course that he could take, which was was wherever she pleased, as long as she was not involved. Where she had been the point of everything, he was now left unmoored. In times like this a man without a family will turn for solace to his childhood. Born then is the collector – may corporate fools rejoice.
Adrift sans love he turned to therapy. It was anti-cynical! He was stunned! In therapy he was the star. Every thought he had, a social “scientist” would listen and dissect. Our hero received tools that helped others with what his therapist’s pattern-matching had concluded was his common depression. The incentive to keep up with it was sealed in the attention that she gave him. For how long he was treated by the same woman, more than twenty years, until her retirement, one might have guessed he was in love. It was all professional to her, she reinforced her boundaries as needed, but did not curb her vibe of mothering — it was her personality, and how she paid her mortgage in expensive Californ. He was not the only depressed male she saw. She was cognizant of the role they needed her to play. She thought if every mother gave a kind word to their sons then she would have had to go to v-school for retraining. If all she did for these patients was tell them so whenever they were right, it was like giving out embraces in an orphanage. Their gratitude was off the charts. It was not an easy job for her, staring into similar abysses every day. Professors tried to warn her class that they would be exposed to rank diseases of the mind, that no textbook could prepare them for. It was like war in that she could only learn so much, before being in the thick of it revealed its true evisceration. The therapist was on a sack of medication, prescribed by a friend and sometimes lover, because not even the wellest armed are bulletproof. At her lowest she’d been rehabbed for opiates, and now volunteered at that center in order to stay grounded. Being wise, well put together for her age, she showed up in his porn searches for roleplay therapy. He did as many had before. There’s only one place where the mind is not infinite and that place is not in the real world. It was where the manifest was slick and useless. Where it was more comforting to copy others. Where there was an assuredness that could not be got from each day’s confrontation. Where depressives copied their own parents even when they loathed to. Lamentably awareness of the cause did not prevent it. It was within a swirl of circumstance where all the while the state’s deficient. It’s little wonder that we lust for continuity. We’re given glasses and then told not to wear them. Confusion pounds us as we cannot see, while stakeholders have onan’s grip upon their station. They bare their teeth at any hint they might let go. Most of them had parents of this sort. They are adept at their own pleasure. They stand for nothing but the increment of health that they can take away from others.