Is It My Fault? Or The Stars? in life stuff and misc.

This would be the point in the story, were my life a hero’s tale or even just a mostly-good-natured comedy, where some long shot would come out of the blue and turn things around. The point that is not the most tragic or hopeless but rather the point where the tragic things way down the road seem most intractable, most unavoidable, not the sad end-game but the point of no return from some eventual sad end-game. Myself unemployable, my folks showing more and more of their age, my brother still wracked with med side-effects that might even be getting worse. Alone, without a partner or any kind of forward motion. Stuck and getting older the whole time. This would be that point.

You know the point I mean. When an old raffle ticket would be found, an old resume finally enthusiastically answered, a dear friend or would’ve been lover making good out of the blue and calling you up to share with you in the bounty. Something. A boomerang back to hope and progress again. A telegram signed hee-haw Sam Wainwright and all of that.

But of course, that’s not about to happen to me. Part of me says, simply, it won’t happen like that because life doesn’t happen like that, because the laws of entropy state we are all succumbing slowly to order’s tendency to diffuse into chaos and what chaos doesn’t take, rigged systems will and that’s just life. Life is just like that.

Still, I grew up on television and movies, I grew up with OCD and weird superstitions, there is a deep base plurality of my soul that cannot believe my life works like real life, that my life must work like a story so maybe it’s not that kind of story. Maybe it’s not a hero’s journey or a come-from-behind comedy underdog tale. Maybe it’s a tragedy, maybe it’s a dark farce, maybe it’s a cautionary tale about expecting too much out of life, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because the stories I write aren’t like that and you can’t live a story life too much unlike the stories you forge in your own heart. The stories I write have ambiguous endings, generally, cautiously hopeful at best. If the good guys win, they win at great cost or they win incompletely or they win but have no idea what to do with what they’ve won. Parallel identities clash and blur into each other, separating again, dazed and dazzled by the process even if they end up better off than they started. Pyrrhic victories or confusing ones anyway, where you’re left wondering why you won, if the other shoe’s gonna drop down tomorrow. Maybe when I’m really feeling up about the nature of things, there are good things that could happen but could still be fucked up if the old cycles repeat.

I don’t write stories so often like the Christian apocalypse, where terrible things go down but in the end, the good people triumph and then have triumphed forever. I write stories about Norse Ragnarok, really, where the “happy ending” is that evil and ending has been fended off for another year or another decade or generation but someone else will always have to fight it off again. Stories where the happy ending is that you live to fend off the bad stuff for a little while before it comes back.

Do our stories become us? Do we become the stories we tell? Where is that telegram from Wainwright with a hee-haw and then we have food and water and Krusty The Clown rides in on a white horse to save us from this summer camp and smite all of our enemies?

I want to blame myself instead of the universe, is what it comes down to. I want to pretend that the big flip isn’t coming not because life just usually doesn’t work that way but rather because I am not telling the right kind of stories to make my own life so.

Like the Gilligans Island where the castaways were nearly poisoned by radioactive vegetables and so I didn’t eat vegetables for three years as a child, twisted up in-between real life and story, knowing the difference but still not quite understanding that the difference actually matters.

Just because it was made up on a typewriter by some old man in the Sixties and acted out on cheap sets by B-actors, just knowing that didn’t mean to me it didn’t have some bearing on the real. It got to my television where I was in bumfuck nowhere as a kid, somehow, there must be a kind of truth and reflection on the real if it made it that far.

But here I am, near the end of a visit with my brother and my endless worries for his health and my own complete lack of a vision for anything but the nearest of futures and I just keep thinking… is it my fault somehow?

Did I make this happen by not telling the right kind of stories and rather the kind of stories that felt right to me?

I await that saving telegram and also know that it cannot ever come.

Last updated March 14, 2017