Rides and Riders

Rollercoasters and Merry-go-rounds.  I just can’t help but to admit that I both love and hate the little amusements:  they’re fantastic when drunk reliving my youth at Cooney Island or the Great Escape or your nearest 6 flags, but I truly and thoroughly despise the other, more insidious kind.  You know, I never really appreciated the subtlety of those two little phrases when it comes to our personal lives, yet they ring so true:  neither go anywhere fast, but the former at least has some peaks and valleys to keep it interesting, and goes nowhere a lot faster than its latter little cousin. More importantly though, through it all I’ve come to be aware that we don’t actually get to the point of making some lame metaphor (or simile, depending on context) without first making some choices (decisions might actually be better) which fly in the face of our good sense and intuition.

Whew, glad to get that out.  But aside from figuring out the nuances of carnival comparisons, it’s really hit home as of late that each alternative we decide to take we should do so with the utmost care.  I say this not from current personal experience (though the past few months did help bring the notion to the front of my mind) and the position that the choices we make mostly always carry with them hidden implications that we can only sort out long after they have become an entrenched part of our psyche.

I could use really personal, deep rooted ideas, the paradigms that have been the prime movers in turning me into who I am today.  I could do all that, but in the publicity of cyberspace I would also be that kid who’s throwing his heart out on his sleeve for people who he doesn’t even know.  NOPE.  If you want that, and care enough to know, drop me a line (and if the readership of this gets large enough, I might consider it too).  Instead I will use the generic abusive relationship, either mentally or physically.  Most of the folks I have talked to about f&^$*d relationships of this nature have always used the same reasons:  “I love him/her,”  “I just don’t know what I would do without him/her,”
“We’re soul mates,” that kind of thing.  Aside from the fact that this is maddeningly codependent, think for a moment of the implicit assumptions behind such statements.  What they are in effect saying is, respectively “I cannot love another like I love him/her (lies),”  “Without them I am less of a person (fuck that, you can’t be any less or more than yourself),”  and “Even though we have a lot of problems, through the powers of habit and perhaps a shared interest or two I have decided to cling to this thing running with the notion that I will never find someone else who makes me happy,” and so on.

Although the importance of smoothing out this little quirk of thought is self evident, I cannot help but go on.  I have see relationships of this type turn self-confident, outgoing members of the populace into shells of their former selves:  those same people forgetting why they start fooling around with their preferred gender in the first place.  What they missed along the way was the implicit assumption that they are in some way not good enough:  not good enough to be loved (by anyone), not good enough to make someone else happy.  

Basically the idea is that these people are somehow less than themselves, incomplete without an external force.  This can include the misuse of drugs and other inebriants, sex, food, decisions of a particular type, and so on.  I would never say that we should give up these things:  hell, I love them all.  But if one is not secure in the reasons why then they are unaware of the what that is going on.  I realized that some of my least liked traits began in grade school, for Christ sakes.  It is a different thing to believe that you know yourself, and quite another to actually know who you are (which never changes except through dedicated effort to yourself, it doesn’t come from any external source).  I’ve just hit critical mass with friends and contemporaries wasting their talents on things and people that drag them down.  Our genome determines how good each of us can potentially be, we don’t need ourselves to make things more difficult.