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October 4, 2005

humility inc

My man calls me up with a martini-fueled brainstorm yesterday: "Accept your lameness," my man says, "it's what makes you human/not an asshole." He announces that he will soon be building a Dr. Phil-type self-help empire on the back this insight and that he intends to plow the resulting proceeds into the shooting of cinematic genre epics (and associated videogames) whose core aesthetic conceit will be the image of Africans on horseback. Like, lots of them.

My man rocks. He dreams the funny, big, transformative dream. Me, in the grips of a monster case of geographic dislocation, PTSD, and general disorientation, I am thinking: I should maybe get down with his program. How's that serenity prayer go again? "Eshun-Elegba, grant me the strength to change endure accept yackity smack what it is I need to change endure accept yackity smack?"

My man's proposed empire is built out of humility and I have always had a hard time with humility. This is an odd trait for someone whose inner voice is long practiced in telling him "you suck!", but a certain aristocratic and high-yellow grandiosity is unfortunately one of my main defects, so much so that my own ambition inhibits my ability to do the work at times. I mean, why bother? It won't be a good as the other man's work, or even the work of my countless in-group friends and pals and neighbors. And I'm getting gray on top of it all, should finished that shit circa 1996.

(And by the way? You suck.)

Moreover, I've been down with the Miltonian devilish thing - i.e., that it's better to rule in hell than serve in heaven - for so long that accepting my lame lot feels a little funny. Accepting my lameness may hold the promise of a liberatory exhale, but it also holds the terror of a final seeming admission of defeat. Ruling in hell keeps the game afoot. I mean, the thing about the devil isn't just that his ego prevents him from serving his lord, it's that the motherfucker figured/figures he has some kind of actual shot. Dude believes he just might win, which is reason enough by his lights (and I guess mine) to risk it all. Fidelity to possibility - which is to say to himself - even past the point of seeming reckoning is what keeps the devil in hell.

When I think about the devil and lameness and me and my man, what I come away with is that my man is full of god's love. Not like a hot Cylon is full of god's love - which is to say, full of fundamentalist insanity - but full of god's love in the measured, post-Vatican II, socially conscious way the lay teachers at my Catholic high school were filled with god's love. It's the only possible explanation. He proposes to not only forgive himself but to lay out a path whereby others can come to forgive themselves in turn, which is to say, lay out a path whereby others can come to forgive themselves through him.

Me, I self-abuse by identifying with the devil. My man - unguarded by drink - bursts with Christ-like enthusiasms.

It must be why we're friends; we need to start a production company.

Posted by ebogjonson in brain maintenance, on October 4, 2005 3:12 PM