As For Myself

The quote below comes from a book entitled Blink. Page 114 in the paperback version, and not prominently located, but still, the info I projected into it intrigues me.

"As Keith Johnstone, one the founders of improv theater, writes: "If you stop reading for a moment and think of something you wouldn't want to happen to you, or to someone you love, then you'll have thought of something worth staging or filming. We don't want to walk into a restaurant and be hit in the face with a custard pie, and don't want to suddenly glimpse Granny's wheelchair racing toward the edge of a cliff, but we'll pay good money to attend enactments of just such events."

I've never known what I might write about that the other would pay for to read. The manner in which I've conducted my affairs interests me a great deal, but I can't imagine that anybody would pay good money for the opportunity to curl up with it on a bearskin rug in front of a blazing log fire, and read until there was nothing left of it but warm ashes.

I don't seem to have any trouble inculcating weird predicaments for people to react to. Maybe the stinger is that I don't easily consider certain situations I wouldn't presuppose myself in for any reason. Like being trapped in a fire realizing it was really gonna hurt. I don't be hallucinating scenarios of that gross sort. I'm much too delicate by nature.

On the other hand, I have imagined Granny encountering several sorts of tragedy from which she never survived. Tha' bitch. She couldn't resist taking me down a notch or two every time we crossed paths. Scorpio females. The scourge of the universe. They're all in cahoots. Every Scorpio woman I ever met became my sadistic ol' grandmother on my mother's side, and my mother was her favorite coven apprentice. I have two older sisters that were taught the way. Thus, I was able to warn my two younger brothers to be cautious of their evil ways. But me? I never stood a chance against a determined woman, and I couldn't get excited about any other kind. I had to have something to fight against to fathom my best shit, and no woman of mine could ever survive as a sissy.

Not only were there women ruling me from above, my three female children ruled me from below. My two wives (read victims) were the only ones of this group that could be considered a harem. I never had sex with my sisters or children, so they never really fit the harem category, but I was always surrounded by women in my formative years. That is, up until around the time I was sixty years old.

So, what does my trials and tribulations with the opposite sex have to do with situations I wouldn't want to happen to me, or someone I loved?

I don't know. What has happened to me for good or ill is just what happened. I was probably paying attention to something else at the time anyway. My youngest brother and his wife and I were out in Washington State for the last week or so. The last day there we drove to the Northern Cascades for a looksee. It was easy to find. Just go north on InterState 5 and turn East on Highway 20. It takes you right through there without having to make another turn.

Two or three hours into the tour my brother pulled off into the parking area of a scenic view of a small dam with an attractive lake behind it. Lake Diablo. There was an asphalt path with a fence on the river side to follow in order to get the best view of this situation. I was stiff from being cooped up in the car so long, and found myself stutter-stepping a little to catch my balance.

I went with it. I had blisters on my left big toe because of an ill-fitting shoe, and it hurt, and I couldn't keep up with my brother and his wife, who are still in love after twenty-five years, and sort of considered this trip their twentieth honeymoon, and I was the third wheel. I yielded to the temptation and started walking like a spastic person who can't really control their body.

I glimpsed my brother and his wife scurrying ahead as if to pretend they didn't know me. I exaggerated my mimicry even more. Why would I not? There was nobody else there but the three of us the whole time we spent on that path, and we didn't meet anybody coming on to it on the way back to the car. It's my party, and I'll act retarded if I want to. I'm a natural at it. It's what I overcame to pass myself off as normal. I own it. People who can't not do it think I am is hilarious.

You see, that doesn't work for me as a story line for the stage or film as Johnstone states. It's not something I would hate to have happen to me or someone I love. For some arrogant reason I think I'm too skilled a story-teller to wax crude to achieve the desired commercially-oriented endgame. I have a double-standard that prejudices me in ways I can't easily espy. Cross my phony moral boundaries and see what happens. I can do that, but if you presume you can make mockery of my insincerity I will sulk and carry on like a spoiled brat.

I can be just that idiotic. I might attempt to punish you for my sins through projection. I might decide you should obey the rules of conscience I chose to make me into my kind of hero or make you suffer the pangs of hell for dissing my haughty presumptions. But, let me tell you this, devout reader, I'm much better at leaving you to your own devices than I used to be, and I've ALWAYS been more liberal about it than most, or so I say. But, why would I not?

Deliberately so. Golden Rule and all that jazz. I treat people like I wanna be treated (I instruct with feigned precision. Both my parents were teachers who didn't stop teaching when they got home. It's all I know as a birthright.), but over ti-me I learned not to ask too much of one person. But, everybody is not like that, and worse, they don't know what they're asking of me when they treat me the way they do. I just wouldn't treat people like that even as a loving favor.

Now. That's better. Maybe I can write about what I wouldn't do for-the-other if I wouldn't do it to them as for-myself.