Selfie

Me, Frame From Home Movie, Christmas 1954 or 1955
Absolutely Nothing To Do With The Post, It Just
Seems That Someone Besides My Mom Should Know
I Was A Cute Little Shit Once

Every 90 days or so, and particularly as I approach the end of yet another year, I find it useful to have what Douglas Adams called a "Self Moment", which he defines as “…one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think ‘Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?’”

For my purposes, this "Self Moment" becomes rather more a "Self Few Hours" as my version also includes three or four fingers of good whiskey poured neat and sipped slowly while tracing old scars with my fingertips, remembering every detail of how they came to be, of each of the people who gave them.

As with everyone, there are a lot, and some are deep, jagged, and badly healed. You can't neatly suture life hits, usually, and the crude, field-expedient repairs can be pretty horrifying in their own right.

As part of my introspection, I always ask the same question as I explore them: Were any worth it? And get the same answer: I don't know. I'd like to think at least I've learned, that the compiled map of them adds up to some wisdom. But I'm as human as the next, and harder-headed than most.  As "Sam the Lion" (The Last Picture Show) said during a reflective monologue:

"If she was here, I'd probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain't that ridiculous?... Naw, it ain't, really. 'Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones that's what's ridiculous."

I wonder if that's true. Seems like it ought to be. And not even mostly about women, either, but any history or event twined and braided and bound up with a blinding, core-deep passion.

But even so, in my experience, whatever their source and/or passion, all scars without exception, even the crippling ones, fade. They are sanded smooth by the dulling wear and fine-grit frictions of living. Eventually, nothing remains but lighter or darker paths of polished new flesh, faintly marking the spot where there was once breathtaking pain.

When you touch these torn and jagged patterns, it's all still there -- when you press with your fingertips, you can yet feel the the damage deep beneath the skin and under the meat, rolling and shifting like old stitches and tendons and runs and bundles of wire-cable threads.

Yeah, time more-or-less heals, but savage beat-downs, especially those self-inflicted, always dully ache in the hard substrate of bone and joints when memory, mood, and the weather's right.

Lately, my self-evaluations have revealed mostly these old scars, revisited as a kind of status check, to make sure an aging suture doesn't need tightening to prevent a bleed; but overall I've got through this year with no fresh wounds, or at least no major fresh wounds. Barely paper-cuts, certainly as compared to earlier years.

The big event was my son dying. It was a wounding blow, no doubt, but the nature of his life had cut so deep for so many years that death seemed just another painful event in the matrix of pain and didn't substantially add to the total burden. I don't know if that makes sense, but there it is.

Which is how I can say that this relative lack of bloodletting combined with the positives in my life actually made up a pretty good year.

The Beneficiary and I have settled into a genuinely comfortable, deeply connected romance that seems new in some not-very-well-defined way. After over 40 years "deeply connected" seems reasonable, but "new" is kinda surprising. I don't think I've ever loved her as much as I do now, and that's going a ways. My only regret is that it took me so long to get here.

My "kids" (long since not-kids) are doing extremely well; our daughters-in-law genuinely like us, and all our grandkids without exception from the 18-month-old to the college graduate think the sun rises and sets on us.

I'm doing work that's horrific and difficult in all kinds of ways, but it feels important and I like it. And, for basically the first time, they're paying me enough to do it.

Things, in short, are good, often excellent. But not perfect. I'd be lying in the most obvious way if I said -- or thought -- that "perfection" is anywhere on the menu.

For example, a constant regret often revisited is that I've given up on writing anything major (or minor) of real value, although I've got at least a novel-sized pile of junk that I can't seem to stitch into anything worthwhile. I am the more-than-a-little-embarrassed heir to Canetti's writer:

"His fear of all his endless little notebooks! By now they are mounting into the hundreds, every page covered, and he never opens a one of them! This prolific writer of nothing, what is so important to tell no one?"

I laughed out loud when I read that in his "Notes From Hampstead: The Writer's Notes: 1954-1971" but it has since been permanently thumb-tacked to the corkboard in front of my mind's eye. It still makes me laugh, but now more rueful, acknowledging -- "I hear you, brother..."

Then there was the ill-advised and ill-spent time dabbling in extroversion which was carried over from earlier years and was a wash. It remains unclear whether I care one way or the other, but in any event, it's now certain that I have no talent for it. It makes the muscles along my spine between my shoulderblades twitch the same way that sitting with my back to the door in a bar does. Probably for a lot of the same reasons, come to think of it. It was an interesting experiment, I'll give it that.

Meanwhile, old demons, past lives, and dark caverns filled with the detritus of my bizarre "did that actually happen?" personal history continue to make unannounced appearances and drag me into gray and black places and sleepless nights more often than seems strictly necessary.

All of this has prompted retreat into what turned out after all to be a really healthy, rigid compartmentalization of my life. It seems in spite of the good intentions of a variety of people to get me to "share" more and "accept" myself, they were wrong. They didn't understand, and I didn't realize, that I'd long since accepted myself, and that the compartmentalization wasn't hiding — it was caretaking.

These excursions and experiments and the repairs from them have left some walls between the dark and the light a lot thinner than I like, the darker versions of myself occasionally bleeding through unpredictably like ink on cheap paper. But these confrontations seem to be less and less serious, much more infrequent, and of shorter duration. I have no patience with them and ruthlessly throttle them in their crib when I see one a'borning.

I am, as I've said before a couple of times recently with considerable surprise, "content" and often even happy. I like my life. This is a good thing, a good summary description to apply to a year.

Yeah. I'll take it. It was absolutely and without reservation worth it, but I'm glad I didn't know how hard it was going to be to get here.

Me, Halloween Costume, 1956
"...it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out
or else they'd have no heart to start at all."
- Cormac McCarthy -