I had a bit of an epiphany today. I was at work sweeping the floor of the cutting room and listening to a podcast by this one British bloke who’s not my absolute favorite, and another British bloke whom I’m fairly certain could become my favorite in a matter of no time if I listened to enough of his stuff. It was the Modern Wisdom podcast, episode #801, featuring George Mack (pretty sure that’s his name, not too worried about the spelling or even really getting it right at the present moment.). Anyway, they were talking about a whole bunch of stuff, as they do, and eventually they got this idea that like, “only weird behaviour survives.” And George goes on to give this example of going a funeral of someone he knew, and the stories that every one is telling about the decesed, they’re only about the weird shit that the person did. None of it is about anything that they were doing that was normal. Not their job, their home, none of the normal stuff. Only the weird, literally, ‘out standing’ stuff that they did was what people remembered. And I, as I often do, got to thinking about how what they were talking about applied to me and I thought, what is my outstanding thing? what do I do that is outstanding? and I thought about the last few months, particularly since the breakup, but even before, and I thought: basically nothing. And it was actually worse than that, because I’d essentially stopped doing all of the cool things that I had been doing, and especially all of the particularly strange things, over the past six to twelve months for the express purpose of replacing them with other things that I would rather have been doing, only I hadn’t replaced them with anything, I’d replaced them with essentially nothing. Anyway, that’s a very longwinded and mostly pointless way to say that I have been spending the last however long trying to kill the parts of me that make me me and I am not going to do that any longer starting, I guess, like right now ish or something. Ha ha. And now finally arriving at the actual point, the actual thing that I realized, that is now currently the like, capital S Solution to the capital A All-My-Problems is that I am fundamentally, at my core, an argumentative person. I enjoy tremendously the process of assembling, and then defending, an argument in a rigorous way. Particularly when it’s spontaneous, but I also enjoy a structured opportunity for argumentation.

Arguing is fun, and I haven’t been arguing with basically anyone about anything for the past like, six to twelve months, because I suspect that I have had basically every possible argument at the current moment with the people whom I had been hanging out with, barring significant and high-stakes arguments. And so I think that I am essentially saying that I am going to stop not arguing with people and get into the habit of arguing with people a lot more because that’s just who I am. And I say all of this while having the feeling that this is going to essentially fix all of my problems because I think that there is a very real fact sitting unmentioned at the heart of all of my social problems. The problem being, that my fundamental nature, socially, is to apply myself in an argumentative way. Meaning that when someone says something of any level of significance, my initial, unthinking response is to assemble an argument for or against the thing and commence the discussion. And that for the past however long, I have been instead stopping myself immediately and saying, “don’t argue, people don’t like it when you do that” and then I get in my head about not arguing, and instead of having a conversation, I instead end up saying something totally inane like, ‘oh cool’ and moving on. Even if it’s a topic that I’m interested in, I go out of my way to seem uninterested. Especially, in fact. In fact, I might even go so far as to say that I suspect the impression that I give about things that I do not care about is vastly more interested-seeming than things which I actually do care about.

My mind now turns, as it has been on a pretty consistent hourly basis for the past six months, to my ex-would-have-been-lover, and the kinds of conversations that I had with him. I distincialy recall on many, many occasions, him assembling some sort of argument and me rejecting it, and him getting more upset at me refusing to engage intellectually than he would be had I simply argued with him about whatever inane thing we were talking about in the first place. It is not totally lost on me that this sort of epiphanic thinking about behaviour that upset someone whom I loved and very possibly lead to them deciding that in fact I was not someone whom they loved is, shall we say, tinged. There is a certain pallet of colors one could use to paint this rambling as, rather than simply the latest epiphany that everything my gut was telling me to do when I was 21 was actually right all along, is instead a desperate, pathetic attempt to right some wrong within myself that I believe on some level will actually lead somehow to him realizing that he was wrong and I was right the whole time. I accept that this is a possible reading, I acknowledge it, and disagree with it for at least one reason that comes to mind at present.

I’m obsessed with Dave Wallace. You who know me, know this about me. I’ve read a lot of his stuff, not all of it (yet) and I’ve also watched and read interviews of him, though not all of them (yet). On one of his appearances on the Charlie Rose Show, he was talking about an epiphany that he had after watching a certain David Lynch film. He told a more drawn out story than it really needed to be, (as he is wont to do) (I am aware) about going to see the film Blue Velvet with some fellow students from his university days and being totally awestruck at the film, and him realizing that he had been performing what he thought good art was, and that what he realized after watching the movie was that good art was in fact totally non-performative and personal. This all culminating in perhaps my favorite words he ever uttered, “… and if it is authentic and true you can feel it in your nerve endings.” This phrase has stuck with me for years, and I think that I have not fully grasped its meaning until today in the cutting room of the grocery store, with mop in hand and the smell of bleach in my nose.

And so here is my defense laid out as incoherently as I can manage: Authenticity is something that one detects primarily subconsciously. As laid out so eloquently by Dave, one feels it not at the forefront of thought, but at the ends of the nerves, in the extremities. And I have been forcing myself, habitually, for the past maybe year, probably longer, to be just about as inauthentic as possible. Even with him. And even if he couldn’t tell exactly why, he could feel in his nerve endings, that I was being somehow inauthentic. And maybe he couldn’t even tell that it was the authenticity that was bothering him, perhaps he only ever could tell that he was a bit bothered by talking to me, and things fell apart from there. There were, and probably even today are, other problems, of course. The distance being one, the association with possible traumatic past events being another, as well as some other glaring inadequacies on his end that make having any relationship at all, let alone one of the importance and magnitude I was placing on it from admittedly very early stages.

I do not think that being an argumentative, contrarian ass is going to make him fall in love with him again. That ship has almost certainly sailed. It is something that I hope for with all of my heart, but my plans do not contain this. But it will help me be happy and successful, because it is just straight up in my nature to argue with people about incredibly asinine things, as well as genuinely existential, until the fucking sun comes up. It’s just who the fuck I am.