Being and Letting

A tornado warning--the best sound the radio offered all day (honorable mention to "Trap Queen" though).

I didn't even know tornadoes could form in New York. Driving through a wooded area between Poughkeepsie and Rhinebeck, I wondered about the damage it might cause to the natural habitat-- to the deer, ground hogs, foxes, squirrels. Did they know what to do? I didn't. I was from hurricane country. Yet, come to think of it, I didn't know how to increase my chances of surviving hurricanes either. My only knowledge of what to do in case of a tornado came from Wizard of Oz and Twister. Which, if you are not familiar with the films, meant my options were either lie down on a bed in my room and ride the wave or chase the damn thing.

I imagined pulling a U-turn in front of a newborn tornado. It screamed with the terror of a  confused and pained infant and so did I. It was a narrow road, so I had to really swing it. I booked it in the other direction, I couldn't imagine there would be much more to it than that. I would just outrace the tornado's tempestuous influence with my action-movie-hero grit. Simple.

My more rational self became audible.
Nick, you would probably run the car into oncoming traffic as soon as you saw the tornado--you probably wouldn't even see it with all of these trees around.
Hm. True.

That word. "True." It bothers me. I have a loose relationship with it, like a chronically dislocating shoulder, tendons forever weakened.

"True" is the uncertainty I feel in this life. I do not know anything about where I am going. I feel like I am losing touch with friends I held dear, with those in my geographic vicinity, and ultimately with myself. I would say I do not know myself, but I think I do. It's only that sometimes when attempting to express what I feel to be my essence, I fail ever so slightly so that my true self is altered in order to fit what I have just expressed. In this way, I change myself, I lose a part of me and I gain something else.

Worse than "true" is the "right" and "wrong" discourse. It is a conjecture not only that something is true, but also that it is the only truth. There is something about the object or action in question that makes it superior (not even-- superior suggests opinion, whereas "right" is assumed to be a non-debatable attachment that makes all else incorrect) to all other objects or actions.  How could something ever be right? There are only things that are beneficial and detrimental to the individual and even that is a grayscale and fluctuates from person to thing to place to person to corporation to plants to person.

I think something that would be beneficial to me is understanding that I am not quite as important or large as I think I am  not even remotely close to as important or large as I think I am. I have not been able to accept that, try as I might. Too much pride or ego or something that keeps me feeling like I am relevant beyond those who interact with me or explicitly care about me. I guess pride came about as an evolutionary trait that helps us survive. If we did not have pride, we probably would lose our young since we would not really see them as special, probably not fight for food since that would be hard and someone else needs that food just as much as we do, probably just give up sooner in general. Pride is important in that sense, but when I am soul-searching, it is a hindrance. All I can think about is occupation, what would pay well, what would society value, what would make a noticeable difference? That is not even soul-searching. It has nothing to do with me. It is about finding something that would make an out-of-touch boy feel proud and in-touch again, even if not with himself.

Why I am soul-searching in the first place? Can I stop looking for a grand purpose and just do the things I enjoy and live a life that I find worth living? I want to yell and laugh and break rules and be present, but all I can do is think of the consequences and the embarrassment and all of the reasons why I cannot do those things. Yes, money makes life easier, no doubt, but do I really have to waste my time cutting my hair every two weeks so that I can pretend to be professional or with menial tasks such as changing the periods to hyphens in the office's phone directory? Is that something that is going to matter when you or I is dead (or even tomorrow)? God, I hope not.  I want to be the goofy, happy-go-lucky, compassionate, sensitive person that my subconscious mind tries to let me be.

And this does not really matter in the long run (either), but I, as I know "I" to be, would want to be ended by a tornado--a beautiful epic destructive force that has been unchanged by the concrete and skyscrapers, unchanged by the opinions and the voices on the radio, unchanged by a description of itself. I do not want to die beneath a knife in an OR; too much antiseptic, too many scientific words. I just want to be, like a natural phenomenon, what I am.