Lunacy

Thu, Mar 07, 2002 12:30AM -0600

So where am I? More importantly, what do I do now?

I've always believed in the aphorism "You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been" (I can't find the attribution anywhere. I remember the first time I saw it, it was in Tagalog, allegedly written by Jose Rizal.) But now I'm not so sure. The past, while useful, can't predict the future, can't tell you what to do. Much like all knowledge based on the scientific method, the past can only tell you what not to do.

So.

I can't help but mire myself in self-pity, analyzing and re-analyzing the convoluted paths of my mind. I wonder why I always have to make things more complicated than they need to be.

For instance:

Somehow, I have learned the inklings of the art of making sincerity appear insincere, of making my words stand on their head, of telling the bare truth to people and convincing them not to believe me. It's all an act. I'm pretending to be insincere. Or maybe I'm pretending to be sincere by pretending to be insincere. You can take it down to the nth level of recursion, I suppose. Half the time even I don't know what I mean.

I'd like to blame it all on growing up in L.A., where everything is an act, a facade, illusory. The thing is, everyone there knows everything is fake anyway, so discerning actual reality inherently becomes difficult. Bluntness, frankness, and sincerity all become liabilities, subject to being immediately interpreted as irony or sarcasm, as some kind of twisted mind game. Everything has to be convoluted. There are hidden conventions to communication. Sometimes it works. But most of the time it doesn't, and I really think that I've grown accustomed to being misunderstood. Because, I suppose, in a world where nothing is really real, understanding is not really the issue. It's the act of listening (or at least pretending to listen) that becomes critical, that signifies connection.

Or so I like to think. Or so I'd like you to believe. No, not everyone is this insane in La-La land, but I think enough of them are to make my point have some validity. Especially since I've bought into the whole mess.

It reminds me of that story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which he tries to get into the mind of Shakespeare, in which he describes the Bard as this guy who immediately takes to acting because it's only when he's pretending to be somebody that he feels like he's actually somebody. Without the pretense, he feels like he is nothing, he is no one.

So.

I like to say that, in a way, this blog is all fake. Or, as with all fictional works, I am lying in order to tell the truth.

Yes, I realize it sounds like I'm trying to play off the emotions flickering through this blog, pretending that they're not really happening, that I'm just being melodramatic, that it's all fake when in truth it is all too real.

But as I've just expounded, it may be that I really don't know what real is these days. Or maybe I've never really known, ever.

So, like many writers, of course I'm drawing from my life when I paint these broad strokes, these vague depictions of existential angst. Like many writers, this all becomes much to autobiographical.

Ah. But isn't that what a blog is supposed to be? A true-to-life description of day-to-day doings?

Well, yes. And no.

I could never post my deepest, darkest secrets here. In the end, it has to be a show. I write these things because I want somebody to read it, despite my repeated declamations that I know no one is. While in a convoluted way, it may be cathartic, it isn't the same thing as venting with a friend on the phone or scrawling into a triple-locked journal in my own invented code.

It's like reality television. The Real World, Survivor, etc., etc. Does anyone actually believe that it's completely real? It's a sign of our times: staged reality. Or the reality of staging. Or the staging of the reality of staging. Or anything even more convoluted than that.

In any case, I've always been melodramatic anyway, taken to exaggerating things in order to bolster my point. So caveat lector.