sixfootdwarf

As a songwriter, once in a while you hear a song so perfect that it evokes everything in you that you could ever hope to evoke in someone else. So you listen to it, and listen to it, and listen to it, until it’s the only thing that matters anymore, the only thing that exists.

In that moment, as luminescent rivers carve canyons down your face, you know why you spent ten years of your life striving for this kind of genius. You could spend the rest of your years chasing it down and still never come close to this, a throwaway track from some obscure album by a band that isn’t even a has-been but a never-was. But instead of envy, you just feel pride that at least somebody on this sad planet created something beautiful. And it makes you kind of glad you gave up, because you see how seldom people appreciate the good things in this world.

Don’t send me away.
Come with song in the air.
Bring your life and your love.
Show that sparkles last.
Drag on. Away.
Maybe you’re the same. Without me.

—“Song in the Air” by Elliott

Modern day science is still just a vast primordial swamp, waiting for that elusive spark of life to give rise to some higher understanding. Beyond that veil of hubris, out past the rugged frontier of speculation, what keeps you up at night is how little you really know about yourself. Ask a hundred different people and get a hundred different answers. A hundred different cures to a hundred different diseases you never knew you had.

The behaviorist will say you learned to act this way. You were rewarded, reinforced. The sociologist will examine your past and blame the social and economic institutions you were helpless to resist. The psychotherapist will inquire about your fear of failure, your struggle to control, and—of course—your parents.

Speak of the devil, your parents just tell you that you’re not right with God. That you need to find Jesus. If you’d please just take another look.

But the psychiatrist will climb up your family tree, tracing the tell-tale trail of chemical imbalance. The biologist will no doubt agree that you were genetically predisposed after singling out the offending gene. Luckily, the pharmacist can provide you with a variety of expensive pills that may just do the trick.

The fortune you stuck to the bulletin board reminds you: “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.”

What I’m asking is this: where the hell do you factor into any of this?

The philosopher will tell you to check your premises.

Up all night again. Having a hard time with the head lately.

Going through boxes inscribed with names of various ex-lovers. Relationships, or close enough, reduced to letters, photographs, and other random useless junk. Hard copy backups of memories long written over in the mind. All taped shut and rotting in the closet since I moved in almost a year and a half ago.

Crack one open just to remind yourself which things change and which things stay the same. You’ll be surprised.

I try to talk myself into throwing it all away, but I never do. Always the packrat, preserving artifacts for my imaginary biographer.

Peer at every photo, reread every word, but none of it ever does any justice to anything. You were there in person, you read the fresh ink. The moment is over. And so, what’s the point?

Why not just let this stuff vanish, like the circumstances that produced it in the first place? The funny and sad thing is, you really would forget.

“Do you always think this much, Charlie?”

“Is that bad?”

“Not necessarily. It’s just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.”

“Is that bad?”

“Yes.”

—The Perks of Being a Wallflower