#358

It being my preference not to see many people, talk to many strangers, or engage in group activities, it follows that long, long times can stretch themselves out before I have to handle a dude. What do I mean?

Personally, I try not to make myself other people's problem. That's the type of dude I am. There a lot of kinds of dudes, not only two, but the reason people use that expression is to illustrate the starkness of the comparison: another type of dude tries, everywhere he goes and with few breaks, to make himself other people's problem. Those dudes want to either win or be handled, and insufferably, if handled, also win. Dudes like me, dudes that don't want to make themselves problems and whose affliction is further compounded by the ailment of feeling like they need to solve problems (and answer questions), especially when no one else can or will, often have to handle this other type of dude, but ever-fleeting victory so rarely brings any degree of pleasure that it is functionally nothing but an imposition. That's what I mean.

I used to have to handle dudes all the fucking time. It is simultaneously ponderously dull, like I wish I could fast-forward the whole process, and extremely stressful, because you might (you usually don't, but you might) have to fight another person, and that means someone could (usually they don't but they could) die. So your body's doing the whole fight/flight, which is too much, frankly. Let that be a young man's game, while they're trapped in all that anyway.

So a guy's a fucking douchebag. Why does it have to be my problem? I dunno. If I'm not around, it's not. If it's the internet, it's not, plus the most total victory is ignoring them anyway. If it's right there in my fucking face, it just is. It's just how I'm built.

Douchebag around where I can't see you if you don't want me in your stupid fucking face.

Part of the problem of the whole thing is that nothing ever ends, and consequences are ripples, not development on a straight plot line. So solving or even moving to address problems can cause further problems, invisible problems, future problems, collateral damage, etc. If I didn't care about causing people problems, and only cared about solving problems, that wouldn't matter. But I'm both. This effectively doubles the stress and makes me have to work harder to handle dudes in an aikido rather than total warfare style; manipulate aggression and transfer its force away from what you want to protect. Back at the aggressor, or in a direction which neutralizes them. I have had to study what makes a douchebag a douchebag, the psychology of it all, and had to compose a whole library of tactics, deflections, and processes by which to keep them in as much check as possible without letting things erupt into violence or other breaches of the social contract. 

The best tools are delicate, subtle. A smile, a certain type of eye contact. A comment, spoken in a low and even tone, followed by a glance. Folding your arms across your chest at precisely the right moment can shut a dude down, if you studied the situation out correctly. 

Dudes may go around thinking they love trouble. Because of how the world is, they're rarely disabused of the notion. If you can remind them that there's trouble out there that they can't handle if they don't cut the bullshit--and there is, no matter how high and mighty a motherfucker thinks he is--you almost always already won.

But all victories last only their own moment. Victory is a a birth and a death in one. The next moment is already part of the next contest, or conflict. 

That's another reason I'm always wary about leaving the house. It's like Bilbo Baggins says: some shit that had nothing to do with you in the morning can own your ass by nightfall.

*

No serious conflict darkened my personal doorstep yesterday or anything, by the way. It was quite a bloody Christmas overall, it seems to me, but my day was untroubled in the main, except by that fact. And one dude who is a memeber of my husband's family being kind of a dick. I was chill, I smiled, but I said what needed to be said and I looked him in the eye. So surely, inexorably, somehwere down the line there will be an escalation, and I will have to actually handle him, because after all family is family and the only way to really handle dudes is to teach them, if you can, to be better, to help them see that a fool is a doomed fool unless he makes a change.

Related note: making fun of people for laughing aloud, for laughing loudly, for visibly experiencing strong feelings of joy and amusement, well, that's about as stupid as low-level, baby-demon-type bullshit gets. Petty emotional fascism on the level of poking someone and not stopping when they ask you to stop. Petty, yes, but to me it feels like a massive crime, a huge problem in the collective unconscious. Fucking...if you find yourself punishing or shaming joy, take as penetrating a look at yourself as you can. Please.

Learn to laugh out loud whenever you want to and to let others, let everyone in the world laugh the same way. I beg of you. It is important. It is not a small thing.

* 

The best, most complete handling of a situation, of a person creating a situation, is healing. That is the opimal, master-level handling that we must pursue in all our dealings, our labors, our constests and conflicts.

--JL

#68

Not since I was anticipating the very first winter of my life at the age of five have I felt so favorably towards the snow and the short days as this year. I am glad every day for the cold and the sleet, the colder the fiercer, the fiercer the warmer. It has taken nineteen years of hard work and incremental gains, but I have at last relearned my child's devouring glee in the blustering snow and the whipping wind, in plunging through the dire season with a furnace in my heart.

Also very excited for Christmas this year! Really, just generally thankful for everything that's happening. Been seeing lots of hawks, it is glorious, staggering, blessed three times three times.

--JL

#12

II.

Habit becomes conviction, conviction becomes passion, and in passion, vocation becomes illuminated. Our vocations determine our paths; in this case, with hilarious literality.

The fastest I've ever walked a mile in a straight line is between seven and eight minutes, which is only a little slower than I can run one. The furthest I've ever walked in a day is somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty-five miles. The type of walking is important context--one can place different value per mile depending on city traversal, country miles, mixed terrain, footing, load, humidity, altitude, and depending on adverse conditions, which can place us in the five to fifteen mile range when reckoning my more hardcore walks. The coldest temperatures I have ever dealt with on a walk were about negative fourteen degrees Celsius with negative thirty on the wind chill. The hottest day I've walked was about forty degrees. 

The high temperature was in the desert, east of Qatar. The lowest was right here at home. In Massachusetts I "walked" up an eighty-five degree grade, and in the Andes and in the Porcupine Mountains I carefully slid sideways down a similar slopes. In jungle, desert, swamp, cloud forest, cliff country, scrub, cities, suburbs, steppes, strips, railroad tracks, in unknown towns and neighborhoods and hundreds of times along the same haunts and pounds and efficient courses. O, to achieve as many more of my artless, scruffy, meandering walks in as many strange and wonderful places as I have the luck and wherewithal to reach in my limited wandering upon this wide and sacred Earth! 

I've walked with about a dozen different CD players and iPods, wearing a heaping variety of earbuds and regular little plastic headphones and big heavy noise-canceling wraparounds, wearing many years worth of messenger bags and backpacks crammed full over a lifetime of lugging the most absurd crap and cruft and enough loose sheets of paper to fill the winds of hurricane. Dozens of shoes and boots have been walked to pieces. I've needlessly carried trumpets, tubas, bass guitars, bags of books, athletic duffels full of gear, folders full of papers or paperback books tucked under one arm, simply to avoid a ride and walk instead--with a busted knee, with broken ribs, with smashed toes, in spite of migraines, through colds, in frightening fog, soaking rain, incredible stenches, driving winds loaded with particulate or shrieking, dangerous levels of noise, through clouds of midges and plagues of mosquitoes and streaking insanities of black flies, through long grass and close brush, weaving through dense copses far from the beaten path and standing out alone against the sky on a naked ridge, splashing through a ford or tripping across a bridge or balancing along a log over a creek. Alone and in the company of a whole biography of ghosts, and alone.

Thoughts come to you from different angles, old ways blooming into new improbabilities and gleaming realizations plunging like stars into the depths of your own unsounded knowledge. The way opens you up to insights and ideas that one cannot acquire unless one is afoot and plunging ahead, mindful without mind of the breath in the lungs and the wind and the sky. The sight and sound of all the birds and beasts and human persons and all the other living things and the inorganic bedrock and constructed scaffolding, all the angles and vectors and trajectories and fractals; all the new avenues to understanding the world you all walk through together, transforming one another, day after day. And the highest of all, the loss of self, the pure forgetfulness, the being caught up in the undifferentiated glory of creation, the infinite God within breathing coeval with the infinite God without, all boundaries sundered, all veils parted.

You never remember, because memory can't hold it. You can't say what you learn, because it is something you know, and knew, and will always know, and this knowledge is held in kind with knowledge held in the hearts of every soul that ever lived, but it isn't anything words can compass or draw into the world of symbols, because it isn't singular knowledge and it isn't interchangeable, but infinite, immutable, and absolutely silent.

Whispers of it make it into the songs that well up inside you, if you're lucky. You try to put it into the way you hold the people you love, when you're lucky enough to hold them. Into the heart you love in common. The best of your prayers. 



--JL