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My life.
Two simple words. Two profound thoughts. Two incredibly misunderstood concepts.
My. Life.
Say them separately. Say them together. Say them in any language you please. Doesn't matter. Most people get them wrong, anyway.
My Life.
The most important phrase in human history. As a pair, the words form the basis for all of civilization, all of learning, all of morality. Politics. Literature. You name it.
I can hear you now: "Yeah, right. What a crock! I've never heard such a gross over-generalization. Your ignorance is astounding."
Well. I plead guilty to ignorance. I "don't know" vastly more than I do know. Lack of knowledge, however, is merely a side-effect of two fundamental facts of human existence: none of us -- not one damned, solitary, lonely, ornery or otherwise characterized soul -- no one is (1) omniscient and (2) nary a single person is infallible.
That and a dollar or two or three will get you a cup of coffee.
Acknowledging that we human types don't know everything there is to know about everything and that we make mistakes is about as profound as saying we eat food and breathe oxygen and drink water. Such basic facts are not -- or more precisely, should not be -- in doubt. (Though you might be surprised at how many people will argue against even this common heritage of mankind.)
What's more important than the reality of our less-than-all-encompassing-and-competent minds, of course, is what we do about our innate limitations.
And that brings me back to:
My life.
My.
Life.
If this were an autobiography, I could begin this story with "My life began as a poor white child..." But this tale is not about me. It is, sure. But it isn't, either.
Really.
Amazingly, both of those judgments are simultaneously true. Just not in the same way. As in much of life, we go astray when we forget that context is critically important in knowing something. Knowing anything, if you want to get down to essentials.
My life.
What statement, what proposition encapsulates the diamond-brilliant significance and relevance of that wafer-thin slice of language?
My life...
...belongs to me.
Whoa! Hold on there. That can't be true. Can it? Actually? Does anyone deeply and truly believe that? I don't mean giving the idea lip-service. I mean: how many of you out there in the great fog of the world would commit fully and wholeheartedly and without reservation to that outrageous claim? Go on. Raise your hands. I'll wait...
My. Life. Belongs. To. Me.
I talkin' 'bout me. Yours sincerely. The guy sitting here typing these virtual black specks onto this virtual blank sheet of virtual paper. Me. Yo! I lookin' at yah!
Hmm.
Of course, by my life, I mean you, too. And me. And that other guy over there. All of us. Any of us. Sing it with feeling in three-part-harmony!!!
My.
Life.
Belongs.
To.
Me.
Nah... I don't think you believe that. Not in your bones where it counts. Not about me. Not even about yourself. And surely not about that lady down the block with the yard gone to weeds.
I'll shock you even more. Ready? Here it comes:
There is only one reality.
Do I need to drag out the smelling salts? Do you even know what smelling salts are?
I had a dose of them once as a wee tyke. Well. Maybe not so wee. Grade school, anyway. Elementary, my dear student.
My mom was a beautician. Oops. A professor in grad school once suggested I use the term "hair dresser." He meant well. But P.C., I most definitely am not. My mother was a beautician. That's what she called herself. That's what she was. Reality, baby. Deal. After I had finished with school one day, I visited her at the beauty shop where she worked. Being the naturally curious -- and snoopy -- lad that I was (am), I rummaged in a drawer where she kept her arsenal of scissors and combs and bobby pins and all the rest of the implements of destruction central to the tasks of a woman dedicated to reinforcing a woman's beauty.
I found a small crystal bottle with an oddly pointed metal cap shaped a bit like the helmet of an old-fashioned suit of armor. Unscrewing the top, I brought the bottle to my nose...and immediately whipped it away. Yeow! The aroma's strength certainly packed a wallop.
References identify the substance in that small container as crystalline ammonium carbonate, sometimes with a perfume or in an ammonium solution. It is used as a "stimulant" and a "restorative." It certainly stimulated me...to remove it as quickly as possible.
Real, those salts were. They were no matter of "opinion." No "social construction of reality." They were what they were.
And I yam what I yam. (Apologies to Popeye.)
You are what you are.
My life belongs to me.
Repetition is important to learning. If you come away from this story with nothing else stuck in the crevasses of your brain, go hither remembering that. Repeat it to yourself. Engrave in your mind. Drive your friends and neighbors crazy repeating it ad infinitum: "My life belongs to me."
Wasn't so hard, was it?
Sorry. It is. Always has been. May always be. Though it doesn't have to be that way.
Feeling that reality, that truth (and -- another shocker! yes, truth exists, too, and...we can know what it is! Sometimes, at least!), experiencing that truth in the very fibers of our being so it becomes as natural and spontaneous a part of who we are and what we do as the blood coursing through our veins and the air filling our lungs is an incredibly difficult and heroic undertaking. Try it and see. Other people will castigate you. They will laugh at you. They will hurl epithets, sneer, turn away. Hate you. Why? Because you speak a truth that frightens the shit out of them. To acknowledge the accuracy of proclaiming to all who care to listen that, "MY LIFE BELONGS TO ME!" would be for them to recognize the lie that underpins the misbegotten manner in which they have conducted their lives...and have attempted to run the lives of their friends and family and neighbors and strangers who exist on the far side of the world who have not an inkling of who they are or the nature of the abomination that lingers on the air with each exhale they make.
I wager that before I am done here that many of you will likewise curl a lip or shake a head at what I write, at the temerity I exhibit by focusing so fixedly on the notion that my life belongs to me. That's okay. You'll be the ones who suffers from your mistake at dismissing those five words I have so insistently strung together.
Okay. I admit it. It's really not okay. Yeah, sure, you'll experience the negative consequences of your error, but like a sinking ship, this particular instance of inexcusable igorance will drag me into the shark-infested depths along with you. Be fish-bait if you want to be, but attempt to feed me to the Great Whites of Society along with you and you're going to have a fight on your hands. No Marquis of Queensbury rules, either. Step beyond your proper bounds, baby, and you'll see gouging and kicking and stabbing and punching as you have never witnessed before.
Context. Keep me out of yours.
Sadly, though, there are oh-so-many-more of you than there is of me. You're all just as wrong, of course, no matter how much you out-number me. But -- damn it all to hell! -- you can royally fuck me up by not acknowledging what "my life belongs to me" means.
And fuck me up you have. On more occasions than I care to recall. But I will. Recall, that is. After all, that's why I take pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and pound away like this with small expectations but high hopes that a few of you out there -- one or two or ten or a million or so, at least -- will awaken to the glory and the power and the rightness of the fact that my life belongs to me and shout the same about yourself as well as me.
If you're seeking the same, old, tired pladitudes that have kept your head submerged beneath the waves for so long, you're in for a rude awakening. But with any luck, at all, you may sputter and shake and snarl...but you'll no longer be drowning in a pool of your own delusions.
Welcome to My Life. It's a comic adventure. Enjoy it while you can. Before it's too late. For me. And for you.
You're not afraid, are ya?
No. I didn't think so.
