The Open Matt Project

Her Books

Summer began yesterday, or so I'm told. There was something about a full moon in there, but my memory is fickle and yesterday is unusually far away so who can say?

My expectations of people and from life are often pretty high, and as is typical of my life, recently that fact has been called to my attention. In at least one case, painfully.

It is possible this is the flightiest of preambles for an angry rant I've ever written. In some ways that fact could summarize what is to come, and I would be saved the inevitable backlash of writing it.

When I was growing up, my father and many others would occasion to lay that flaccid chestnut "life isn't fair" on me. I was young, and so initially it stumped me with its sheer obvious truth. Ornery as I've always been, I quickly came up with a retort which has stayed with me to this day. "Although that is true, there is no need to make it more so!" was the fruit of my simple mind, and still is.

It would be many years, and innumerable mistakes, later that I would come to see that much of life's unfairness came from individual efforts to simply live. God only knows how many platitudes I could regurgitate here to describe what is generally known without them - life is one wily, miserable bitch.

There was an interview with Burt Renoylds I saw a while back where the interviewer asked him about his changing financial fortunes, in particular how he felt about being rich and poor. His response was, "well, I've been rich, and I've been poor." Pause. "I prefer being rich." There is a spark of primal morality there.

Each of us go through life with changing desires, changing perspectives, changing environments. We each make decisions constantly about which what to what and how. The why of it tends to only intrude when the whichs, whats, and hows refuse to play nice. Still, it's the times that the why takes the lead that we are given an opportunity to take stock of our lives and make powerful, meaningful decisions about its direction.

In my late teens, aided by any number of psychotropic drugs and a shameful library of overly cerebral books, I spent a few years doing nothing but soaking myself in the why. Why am I so angry? Why do people around me suffer? Why is McDonalds so popular? Why bother living? Why is the mundane both insufferable and intimate? Why? Why? Why?

When I want to seem particularly sage, after telling people about that period of my life wherein why rode in each breath, I ask them if they want to know the answer. Everyone says yes, even if they are only humoring me, and I tell them. "Because." Before you scoff, and most do, consider that it was the fruit of at least four years of grueling introspection and examination that yielded that answer.

Still, it was not enough. Obviously. It became more and more clear to me over time that the decisions I made both came from somewhere and went somewhere. It was a process, not a construction, and the actions I took were both conclusion and origin - if those terms were even necessary. I was hurt and I hurt in turn. I was wronged and I wronged as well. I pleasured and was pleasured. It all happened because of what had happened, and what would happen after it would be the same.

Enough metaphysics. That shit is so boring.

My expectations are high because I have managed to see flaws in myself and exert as much effort as possible to correct them. I have managed to change myself from a very angry, very destructive young man into a moody and somewhat flamboyantly foolish man. It is my hope that I can manage to continue making myself better for as long as I live. It is less my intention to make myself better as it is my disgust with my failings that drives me.

Things like truth, honor, integrity, justice, compassion have real meaning for me. They aren't something abstract, they are exactly the mechanisms which make life that much less unfair. It's by spending the time that I do focused on not being unfair, unpleasant, untrue, and so on that gives me my sense of indignation when I see the opposite in others.

To clarify, it is not the failing to be a good person that angers me. It's knowing that one could and choosing not to that I find insufferable. It is hard to do the right thing. It is hard to even know what the right thing is. I know this because I live it. I fail constantly. But I cannot see any other way of being without accepting and, by accepting, perpetuating the endless unfairness of life.

And so, my rant.

Don't fucking patronize me. Don't compound the error of compassionately lying to me by playing the martyr. Embrace your strength - give me the finger, make a decision, force me to act, or just ignore me. Don't mistake an apology for absolution. We are not done yet.

Posted by Matt at June 22, 2005 06:52 PM

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