Jon Alston's Blog: The Year(s) After, page 4

Exhume and Resurrect are not the same thing.

Those who know me, know that I say weird/mean/bizarre/racist/sexist type . . . stuff. A lot. By far my favorite personal expression surfaces when people ask: "Whatever happened to so and so?" I don't know, who does? No one, that's who. So I respond: "Oh, they're dead." Nonchalant, and on I go to something else. It's just easier than trying to figure things out. Some people get it, some don't. There are at least a dozen occasions where people have asked how the person died. Come, people, get with it
Anyway.
Really, we don't care what happened to a person. We really don't. No matter what anyone thinks, the only reason we want to know what happened to someone we haven't talked to for years is because we either want to make sure we are better off than they are, or we need to make sure that we have all of our facts together, so if someone else asks us about said missing person, we can be the know-it-all informant. Because we are fact collectors. We love lists and lists of facts. Individuals are nothing to us, except when they can be compiled into various categorical definitions comparable with other individuals.
I mention this because my day has been completely thrown off. Here's how: I'm sitting in the waiting at the doctor's office, no big deal, just waiting. I hate waiting. I fidget like a four year old, kicking my feet, tapping my thighs, shifting positions every three seconds. But then I stop, because I see this blonde girl walk up to check-in station. About 5'10", thin build. She looks very familiar, but I'm not quite sure. You never can be, can you? Unless you go up and talk to the person, hear the voice, confirm your rising memory buried years ago. This happens to me all the time, and it's only a 50% chance that I know the person. So I don't say anything (all of this a matter of seconds; besides, she's too far away for it to not be creepy as hell), but then she opens her mouth. And I hear her voice, and her name, I know. It's her. Morgan Clanton. Well, married now (huge ring on her finger), so the last name's different, but I can't hear it. I just stare. What do you do? No way she remembers me, 12 years since we last saw each other, out on the pole vaulting mats. I remember those spring days. Lots of short spandex shorts and sports bras. Not much left for the imagination. Paradise for any teenage boy. I try to look way just enough to keep her in my peripheral, but to hide the fact that I'm examining her. What is wrong with me? I can't stop watching. And for a brief moment I think I see her look at me, recognize she knows me, maybe even remembers my name, the years together in school, all the hugs we shared, the one time I called to talk about nothing, how I "loved" her with a school boy kind of love, how we never dated but always should have. Maybe. I hope she remembers me, because I remember her. And everything. She hasn't changed. Still keeps the platinum blonde hair. Still wears spaghetti straps (this on turquoise) with the bra straps showing (magenta). Still wears those really short booty shorts (black; it looked like a mini shirt at first, but it wasn't, just really ugly short shorts). Some ghost straight out of my brain. Terrifying. And not in a comical sense. My heart starts pounding. Breath shortens. I get confused. The wife sitting right next to me, and I am weirded out by this phantom, so I tell her. I knew that girl, back in high school. How strange it was to see. Steph giggles, and we talk about friends we lost track of, never knew what happened to them. That was it.
All these feelings erupted from somewhere I can't place. I had a huge crush on this girl when I was 14. I don't know why, she wasn't nice. Most girls at 14 aren't. When we were kids, fifth grade, she shoved me for some reason I can't remember, and I totally ate on the sidewalk in the front of the cafeteria. Bashed my head against the gray cement. Huge lump, but no blood, no broken anything. Could not have been more embarrassed. And she was almost a foot taller than me. And pretty. And way out of my league. Had kissed people before (I hadn't). But, whatever, she was hot and I couldn't help liking her. But here's the thing: all these feelings came back to me, sitting there in that uncomfortable waiting room. Feelings that disappeared almost overnight when she moved. Feelings that pricked my brain stem from time to time, see if she's still alive, what's she up to. Nothing much. I get that way about a lot of people. But seeing her and that surge of emotion startled me. At first. But what baffled me even more was that they were dead. Those feelings. Corpses of feelings that I had, somehow still whole and disguisable from other feelings, but lifeless. Not even memories, but the idea of memories, or memories of memories, or even constructed memories around ideas of something that never really was. I don't know. But we were there, in that room, together but not at all together, and I felt everything for her, everything I used to feel, but deceased feelings long since ignored. I didn't like that feeling, the feeling I still have right now, typing this, why I'm typing this. I didn't like feeling emotions that have been locked in memories, hidden away so that I forget them. I didn't like that unexplainable zombie-ish draw. I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. My day is just all muddled now. It's just easier to keep memories were they are, wherever that is. Buried deep where I can't find them. It hurts too much to remember, sometimes. To know what you should have done but didn't. To know that what you used to be isn't who you are now (for good or bad). To know that you still live with your parents, at 28, being married, with a kid, and still only working part, trying to make ends almost meet. To know you aren't really an artist, no matter how much you wish you were, and wish other people thought you were too. To know, that in the end, it's the surfacing of those dead memories that makes you feel like you are nothing at all, because you still want to be that 14 year old boy, confused about everything, in love with every girl you see, happy just to get a hug and have your faced smashed into a girls small chest because that's as far as you'll ever get with any from the female species. To know that in the end, your life is amazing, that you have the sexiest wife there is with the best kid there is living in the best country there is (that's debatable), but you aren't happy because something is eating you from inside and you don't know what it is. To know you will die and still be wishing you had done more, been more, helped more. To not be who you want to be. Alone, even with loved ones, still alone underneath your quaking skin.

Rage in its purest form:

This is going to be angry. Probably preachy. And completely emotionally driven (see all those adverbs already?). I can't guarantee that it will be worth anything, but it is what it is.
So.
I have this issue with people, and I think a lot of us do: individuals who open their mouths and start spouting off nonsense about a subject they know nothing about. It's a disease, and at times we all suffer brief, unexpected, relapses; but there are those, who for whatever reason, never received the vaccine to combat the stupidity. "Foot in mouth disease" my parents called it. True indeed.
Here's the story from today (or, at least as much story as I can give to preserve face for those involved): Me and few other individuals were having a relatively decent conversation about religion. I know, right away: "what do you expect from a conversation like that?" I know. Believe me, I know. And usually I don't get involved, I just let people say what they want, express whatever dominational point-of-view the prescribe to, and leave it at that. But these people didn't know what they were talking about because they were trying to define Christianity (a difficult task at best), and were really screwing up Christian history, so I had to jump in. Now, I am no "expert" in the classical sense (degree and all), but I have been a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints my whole life (28 years+), so that has to account for something. And I've had several history and religion classes, whatever. So I jumped in, and tried to straighten things out. Great. Nothing preachy, just simple dates and historical facts. Makes sense. Simple stuff, too. About Constantine and the Romans and his vision of the cross and the transition over to "Christianity" for the Romans and how he combined the Pagan holidays, etc. Pretty common stuff most people read about it in high school or GE college courses. Then we disputed the Bible, how it's been mistranslated, corrupted, edited, etc. Things got a little shaky, but still on track. Anyway. Then one of the individuals involved started spouting off some seriously misguided accusations about Mormons. Mind you, I've taken a lot of flak over the years from people about being a member of the Church, friends and not alike. It comes with the territory. And for the most part, I can handle it, because it comes from a place of bounding (with friends, anyway; others, you just have to ignore). But when people start repeating rumors and blatant lies about the Church -- and any religion for that matter -- that they know nothing about, I get angry. I won't try to recreate what was said verbatim, for my inability to be accurate, but here is the gist of it:
What Mormons believe (according to horribly confused person):  - Joe Smith made up the Book of Mormon- Mormonism is a business. We send missionaries on missions to convert people so the Church can get more money- The Book of Mormon and the Bible are the same- You can't prove anything in the Book of Mormon is true, so it's not true. Mormon scientists have tried to prove it's true, and they couldn't- Mitt Romney (and other Mormon politicians) were/are financially supported by the Church- All Mormons are very judgmental
Unfortunately, that's all I can remember. But that's basically all of it. And this person backed up his/her statements by saying: "I've written a lot of essays on Mormonism." Well good for you. Since when does writing "a lot" of essays make you an expert? (which no doubt was not a lot, judging by this person's writing skills) I've written dozens of essay on a variety of texts, but I would never, and I mean never (no matter how much I may joke about it) consider myself an expert on any piece of literature. I had professors in college, who had been teaching for at least a decade or two, and were still learning about books they studied in college, books they wrote their theses on, books they loved and analyzed and devoured and tore apart until their eyes bleed and there was nothing left on the page but red and black. And even they, with their brains so stretched it was all their skulls could do to keep their heads from exploding, even they were still learning, still growing, still finding new truths in their beloved texts. They are experts. And I still, now, will go to them with questions about those texts, and stories in general, because I know they know. Because they have worked for it. It's taken me years to realize that I know little to nothing, years of school and getting things wrong, and right, especially when it comes to other people's beliefs.
I'm no theologian. Far from it. But I know my stuff. Like I said, I've been studying it for 28 years. Certainly there are gaps in my knowledge, big gaps; but what I know, I know I know well. And I try very hard not to assume I know anything about other religions. That's stupid. Idiotic. Disrespectful. Presumptuous. And infuriating. How can we claim to know what someone else believes, when we don't believe it ourselves? It's ridiculous. It sounds like this: all Muslims are terrorists. Ludicrous. It's rash and assumptive and pathetic. It's a weak defense mechanism to try and rationalize our own menial existence in this difficult, dark, angry world. We are all alone, trying to figure what to do next, but we're lost and don't know where we are (probably at the bottom of an ever-change staircase with no lights and no ventilation). And rather than help each other, since that too is difficult and frustrating and time consuming, we find pieces in people we don't understand, pieces that we may not agree with, and we attack, hoping to destroy that person, or his/her beliefs, to add to them to the pile of bodies beneath our feet to help us climb out of that darkness. It's moronic. Because in the end, no matter how many bodies we acquire, we can never reach the top of that infinitely increasing stair.
But I digress.
I could refute all of that person's misconceptions about the Church, but to what point? You don't care, and that's fine. You don't have to care. Nor should you. And I don't care that you don't care. These are my beliefs, and as much as I want others to believe what I believe, feel what I feel, I know that not everyone is interested to hear what I believe. And that's fine. That's life, and that's what makes it interesting.
But I will say this, just to set the record straight: I believe that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates given to him by an angel. I believe the Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ, just as the Old and New Testaments are. I believe that we cannot know everything in this life; we can't hope to beginning to understand the true nature of the universe, no matter how awesome our telescopes become, or how amazing the LHC is with its brilliant and wonderful and ground breaking discoveries (I love science). There is so much still to learn. I know that God exists, that Jesus Christ is His son, and that the Holy Ghost teaches us truth. And I believe that those three are three separate beings. I believe that I am a son of God, that we all are children of a Heavenly Father. I believe this, and so much more, but for the sack of time and space, I'll conclude by saying that I believe The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the only true church on the face of the earth the teaches the whole gospel of Jesus Christ. That is what I believe.
You may not agree. And you don't have to. You may think I'm crazy. That's fine. You may be the exact opposite: an Agnostic, or Atheist, or whatever. Sweet. We can still be friends. We can still get along and have great discussions and explore the world and life together. Isn't that the point? We are still people, trying to figure out this crazy messed up rock orbiting that giant ball of nuclear explosions spinning in the black void we call outer space. We are just people, trying.
What more do you want from me?
What more should I want from you?
**     *
As a white middle-class male growing up in the suburbs, there were two phrase/mantras I heard from almost everyone I knew:
"Ignorance is bliss""The truth is difficult to digest"
I think those phrases somehow over the years have gotten mixed up, some mistranslation decades, or centuries ago, when people started thinking more and living less. It should be:
"Truth is bliss""Ignorance is difficult to digest"
That sounds right. I just want truth. I just want people to want me to want truth. And I want them to want truth for themselves. Whatever that truth may be. I believe in universal truth, one ultimate overruling truth that governs all. But that doesn't mean everyone does. And we need to find whatever truth makes us happy, and makes us better people. So we can help others be better people. I just want truth. Not facts, not statistics, not theories or conjectures or postulations; not opinions based on Wikipedia or online news sources; not something someone whose name you can't remember said to you once at a place you never visited. Just truth. That's all.
Am I crazy?
Probably.

The Glow of Disillusion (and cancer, and death)

I posted this on my Facebook a week or so ago, and I thought it deserved repeating here, and I'll explain why. This is a conversation I had with one of my students (who is Asian by the way, if that makes a difference):
              Student: "Are you related to Confucius?"
              Me: "Do I look Asian?"
              Student: "You're always talking all philosophical and stuff."
I laughed. And initially I took his response as a compliment. I was flattered. In their eyes, I’m a philosopher, I’m Confucius, an ancient man of wisdom that far surpasses their own. But, no. Not even close. And I started thinking about the conversation. It started to bother me.
So here’s the context. Last week during a class break, a few students were talking about smart phones. How they love their smart phones, can’t live without them, wouldn’t remember how to breathe if they didn’t have it with them. I have a dumb phone. I love that it’s dumb. It keeps me sane. It keeps me grounded. It keeps reality stable and definable. So I went off on a little tirade about cell phones. The students were talking about smart phones being progress, and the future, how cell phones were changing us and making progress possible and blah blah blah. Totally bull. I told them that cell phones weren’t progress, but that we were convincing ourselves they were progress because we don’t know how to talk about this new technology that separates us, that divides communication, that disconnects the world from physical reality; we don't know how to talk about consumer driven "advancements" in technology. Apparently that mentality is philosophical.
I’m cool with that.
Here’s the problem: during the entire conversation, every one of the students stared at their smart phone's glowing LCD screen. Texting. Emailing. Checking status updates, Twitter feeds, or Instagram images. Racking up points on Candy Crush. Nonsense. All means to killing time, destroy brain cells, fill their minds with useless information and images, all the while giving them cancer of the eye.
Probably.
This is the world we live in, I’m told. This is the way of the future. Progress. I don’t get it. I don't get how pointing out the discrepancies of virtual communication and thwarting the powers of consumerism can be considered philosophical. The idea that pulling your face away from some plastic rectangle to interact with other flesh and blood and bones and muscles makes you philosophical terrifies me. Philosophers weren't/aren't men of the obvious, of the physically definable world (at least not in the sense that I am talking). They dwell in ideas: ethics, reason, the sublime, identity, relationships (of human and object kind), discipline and punishment, government, etc.
I’m a teacher. It’s my responsibility to make sure that my students are learning – and in my case, they are learning how to write. Essays. Resumes. Cover letters. Business emails. Skills that they will need if they hope to get a job once they graduate and become part of this capitalist regime. And yet, all they want are Apps and Lols and no-grammar-necessary lives. They want ease. Over simplification. Luxury without work.
I don’t blame cell phones, at least not entirely. They are a part of a disease, a growing malignancy choking out millennia of hard work, of connection. Not a golden age (no such place existed) but a place where faces were real, where people shook hands, and hugged, and kissed, and told things to each other with vocalized words; where texting in class wasn’t an issue, and laptops were paper notebooks, and you looked people in the eye when you spoke them; where we couldn’t avoid each other on the bus, or train, or plane, or wherever, behind some false screen representing someone else’s version of our reality.
Where am I going with all this? I don’t know. I never know. I’m just trying to figure out my life before it’s too late. There are all these influences and experiences and changes in my life, in the world, that I don’t understand, that I don’t want, that I don’t like, that if I could I would cut the cord of everything and just be for the sake of being. But I can’t. Because life doesn’t work that way. Not in 2013. Not in the new generation. Not in this world of technological progress and growth and ease and “brilliance”. Not here. Not anywhere. We've created a disease of upgradable consumerism.
Just give me a Hobbit Hole. That’s all I want. Some place to lay at night next to a fire with my wife and children, reading a story, hot chocolate mustaches all around, and the world outside asleep, the stars keeping us safe, watching, burning through space and time to make sure we are okay, that life still goes on, but without interruption, without fear. Without falsified progress.

Unfortunate Circumstances of Blood

Families are difficult. At best. It's hard enough dealing with people you know, that you've known your whole life, with all of their faults, quirks, ticks, nuances, annoyingnesses, etc. Try getting married, and dealing with someone else's family. I can't begin to explain the complications that creates. But I digress.
I find that it's not so much that we grow to love the people they are (our families), because of their imperfectness ("It's what makes us human." That's bull), but that those incongruities start to fade from our peripheral, and we become blind to the unsavory traits of our families. And ourselves. Repetition doesn't make for habits, it makes for unconscious actions that don't register in our brains (check out this video to see what I'm talking about, it's a brilliant watch regardless of my rambles). But, somehow, it has become commonplace to interpret our blindness as familial piety. As unconditional love.
It's not. It never has been. And it never will be. But somehow we've convinced ourselves that it is. And generations continue to perpetuate this indefinite ideal of "love". The worst is that when we, as a newer generation, a younger generation, a "self-entitled," "self-absorbed," "doped up" and "sociopathic" generation counter the former system of respect and love, we are horrible people. We are disrespectful. We are delinquent. We are prideful. Whatever. Just because people share Phenotypes and Genotypes, does mean that automatically love, friendship, similar interest and goals exists, that those people biologically have to, and will, love and like each other.
Yes, you created me. For that, I will always be eternally grateful. And now, having a kid, I want that same respect (I say want, because that's what it is: a want). But just because I participate in creating a human life, that doesn't give me the right to say and do and act however I want, just because I am older, "wiser" (whatever that means); that because I came first, my kid must now adhere to ever single word I say. That's not going to happen, I already know it's not. My daughter's too much like her mother already. She is strong willed. And that's good. The point is that no matter what I say or do, she is her own person, with thoughts and feelings and needs and wants, and those don't necessarily fall in line with mine. I might love her, but she might not love me. And that's life. I have to earn her love. I have to earn her respect. I have to prove that I am deserving of her love. I mean, let's face it, creating human life is pretty easy. Granted, there are those who struggle to have children, for medical reasons beyond their control, and that sucks. I can't begin to imagine what that is like. But that aside, the process . . . come on, it takes a minute for conception. People do it all the time. That is no reason for any parent to expect their child to love them because of the blood they share. It's blood. It's life, I guess. But it's also death. It's because of that blue and red liquid coursing through our veins that we die. We inherent death from our parents, just as life.
I don't know what my point is with all this. I've just come to realize that no matter what I do, no matter which "team" I'm on (and yes, families are segregated into teams, that's just how it works, I don't know why), no matter who I am and what I want, I will always lose when it comes to family. Sometimes I'm on my parents team: lose. My sister's team: lose. Most often I try to stay on my wife's team: I still lose. In the middle of all this blood, there is no love, no happiness; no winning; just a group of people that by some biological circumstances find it obligatory to interact with each other.
I'm just so tired of it all. So tired.
I need a nap.

The attempt to attempt an attempt

I'm trying. Seriously, I am. At least it feels like trying. I get up. I go to work. I stay at work and do my job. I try to take care of my wife, and my kid. I put my desires and hopes and dreams and aspirations on hold to try and give the one person whom I love just one of the things she's always wanted for her life (if not all; but let's face it, I'm a weak man and can't do very much). And she is beautiful and loves me for my efforts. This isn't about her. She's only part of me, the part that matters and makes the rest of the crap I go through in this confusing world make any kind of sense.
The point is: I try. And yet, I don't feel anything. I don't feel happy. Or sad. Or melancholy. Or whatever. I don't know a lot of words, so my lists are short. What I'm getting at, is that I feel like I'm running in sand towards somewhere I don't want to be. The dunes are high, and the sand is hot, but I have to keep going or else my feet will burn, skin will start peeling back from my muscles, and the vultures will circle around until they land on my still living face and peck the eyes right out of my skull. I have to move. And forward. No left. No right. No back. All forward. "Progress" I hear it called. By whom? I don't know. Does that really matter?
What matters are the incongruent emotions luchando in my stomach. No hearts or brains, it's all about guts. What I want. Not "love," or "facts" and "knowledge," but the deep, hidden, scary and exposing needs that are still not fulfilled, still unsatisfied. There is so much more than this. I hope.
I consider myself a writer. Scribbling, or typing, I write stories. The days are half spent in half dreams half finished half of the time. And if there is time, half of the half of the half gets put on the page, and lost in the megabytes of space on the computer. A professor once told me that we aren't "writers." He said: "When we write, we are writers." But when we sleep, we're sleepers. When we work, workers. Watching TV, watchers; wondering whether or not are bodies are going to collapses under the weight of ourselves, we are wonders. And it goes on to the infinite. We are the people we are as we do the things we do. That scares me. I'm not the -er that I need to be. I'm the -er that I think I should be, or have to be, the -er that will satisfy the social constructs enumerated by previous generations, supported by media and technology and business and capitalism. The -ers that make money; and support families; and send kids to college, and keep Top Ramen out of the cupboards so they can be filled with fancy croutons and expensive cereals.
Life's not about money, I know. I know I know I know. But I don't know; not really. What can we do without money? Living doesn't happen without money. I don't mean barely surviving, because people make it happen every day in the streets, and in impoverished countries. Billions of people. But just because some can do something, doesn't mean I want to do it. People are also sword swallowers and snake wranglers and rhythmic gymnasts. I don't want to do any of that. I want to write. And live. And create things like handmade books and beautifully strange sculptures and a sweet house.
So. I work. And when there's time, I try to write. But my mind is too muddled and dark. My eyes are heavy and I can't stay awake anymore. I sleep all the time when I'm home, or on the verge of sleep. There is no time for living anymore. And I don't even work that much, but my mind is constantly consumed by what I haven't done yet for class, whether or not he students are understanding and learning anything about writing, am I doing this right, I can't be doing this right, I don't know anything about composition writing, I barely know anything about creative writing, what do I really have to share with these people, I'm only 28 after all and I haven't done anything significant with my life regarding career and money and being someone "important" in the world.
Anyway. I just want to write. And be happy. And make my wife happy. Is that too much to ask?