As I sat in the unemployment office I wondered if the plan was a good idea. It reminded me of my old ways. When I was a kid I was violence, and violence was me. It’s what others called stubborn ni_eve determination, as if I was a bad boy who hadn‘t learned yet.
Through my childhood that stubborn, defiant, determination wrecked havoc on my family and my life. It wasn’t until I sat in front of the desk of a wiry, nervous unemployment office employee, him asking me civilian questions, expecting an account of a civilian history, that I began to realize, or rather remember, that this violence maybe was correct, and always had been.
As I understood it, there were two kinds of violence. Only one was true violence. The other fake. Only the most violent men in the world knew and recognized the difference.
Martin Luther Kind Jr knew. He had a calm, measured, stubborn, defiant, Assertiveness. A violence he had realized from another man, Ghandi. Hence, King could see right through Malcom X’s Aggression. He could see that Malcom X’s violence was reactive, indignant, and weak compared to King’s all-encompassing, absolute, Sheer Violence.
As the small man with glasses motioned for me to follow him, I understood that violence ran deeper than the Story of who won what over whom.
I could see that the wiry man before me was reactive to everything around him, to his supervisor, to his coworkers, to the line of unemployed in the other room, and the rude secretary herding them. He was reactive to me. Maybe he was a mule once, tamed to the point that he didn’t even register all the power in his mule limbs, and now its gone. I didn’t want to be like him.
He didn’t have his own violence, his own original consciousness. He didn’t have his own assertiveness. He’d lost it at some point. I wondered who’d beat it out of him, wondered at what point exactly did he choose to give it up, and whether it could’ve been a tactical move, or if it always meant surrender.
I remembered my old determination and saw that it was violence -- not aggression -- but sheer assertiveness.
I remembered how young I was, and how a four year old with the gall to fight grown men couldn’t last long in J____ County, what the old people‘s old people called God‘s Country.
I remembered how I couldn’t control it, that bottomless well of violence. I remembered being frightened of what would happen to me; how long could I last this way.
A child with fourteen more years to go would surely end up raped, killed, or abandoned. When I was eleven only four other people outside my sisters and parents knew I was alive. I could’ve become another missing child, no problem. I wondered if I should have been more violent, or less.
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Whenever I feel anger and don’t register it -- like what was going on between the LT and me -- whenever I drop the ball, it is difficult picking it up again. It’s like all the gains I had are suddenly gone, like they never happened.
I already have enough against me. When I wake, I have to remember to be Him, and not what the house insisted, despite the nightmares.
When I finish writing something, it’s like I then subconsciously assume I now don’t have to feel for awhile. In that way it can work against me.
When I write and stay conscious, it feels like a weight lifted. If it happens to be my day off, the tendency is stronger. I accidentally take the day off from feeling, and it makes me feel exhausted and embarrassed.
It was like that Sunday. I suspect it was because of the still unfelt anger of Saturday night. I couldn’t seem to snap out of it and I felt a lot of pressure to be True, to be conscious, to be cool.
When I’m like this, it’s like I do everything half-hearted, like a bad actor -- too embarrassed to truly act. At the end of the day I remembered that article on shame and how it talked about the amount of pressure shame puts on the individual. I figured I was being fueled by shame and stopped, and the pressure lifted, and I could feel my own heartbeat again, and I drifted off to sleep.
I had a dream where K___ had met a girl here, and had _rolled_ with her against a wall -- whatever that means. He was trying to pull off sleeping with her. The girl was ugly, but K___ seemed to think it was great. In the dream he came across as more sexually advanced than me, and when I awoke, I felt like if a girl came into the room right now she would prefer him to me. And I agreed with her. I then felt like sh-t. I thought, _No, you don’t agree._ My head was filled with mental noise all morning.
I had watched Requiem for a Dream Saturday night. The director treats the male characters well. In one scene, Marlon Wayans is with a girl. He’s not Marlon Wayons -- no personality, no ego, no history, he’s just masculinity. It showed him with his ancient properties only.
I think of my own self, stripped of the same things, and it feels like Sicily and Ireland, Germany and Spain and Africa behind everything. It’s a seriousness in sex that is Real, where the beauty of the woman, the material points of the man, have nothing to do with it.
Only the man’s knowledge that he’s Real. Sheer self respect. To respect yourself enough to listen to yourself, its feelings, and its experience. When I’m lost, a lot of times its taken the good treatment of men by a director, or artist, or author, to remind me of myself again.
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