I am not in the business of image management. The stories you create based on what I say, write, or do are your stories. If you wish to foist upon me a totality based on a moment or based on the past then you will do that. But it is not my doing thus I shall not take ownership of it or allow it to influence me in the slightest unless I find something within it to my liking ... which, again, may be only temporary.
If I have lived my life in any particular way it is as a cut-up or perhaps the new label is mashup. Either way, it is through sometimes accidental and sometimes purposeful shifts in ways of being and sharing and expressing. Maybe that is what happened because I was a child of the 70s, maybe because I was exposed to the Beats and dadaists during adolescence, maybe because I followed Phish, maybe because I'm attracted to change, maybe because I like to experiment with reality, maybe because I did not understand cultural norms, maybe because I found stasis unbearable, maybe because I am not like you, maybe because I stumbled upon neural pathways that led to the Road Less Traveled, maybe because I lost my way, maybe because I had to leap frog too many dangers and traumas to stay alive, maybe because ...
An over reliance on causality will inevitably lead to predictability but also productivity. I may not have valued productivity sufficiently to live linearly. It looked too much like a trap to me. It still does. Maybe that's an interpretive flaw. Or a perceptual strength. I would examine that to find out which but then I'd fall into the trap and likely get lost until reality slapped me in the face again.
Complacency resulted in my most significant traumas. I can't say I live without it entirely or even commonly. Both are true, though, which means there are gaps that have not been filled, will not be filled, and possibly cannot be filled. If it weren't for the cracks, though, I would have drown. That may seem to be in contradiction to what I have previously written. Or so I suppose when I am inclined to think in terms of cause and effect. I'm grateful for imperfection.
If I do not expunge certain thoughts from my being by way of sharing or expressing them to others, especially publicly, I wind up being mentally and emotionally constipated. If I desired to have others perceive me in a certain way then I would have to embrace constipation. I've chosen not to do that for the benefit of my health. Again, it leads to interpretations and perceptions of me that do not match the course of my life. Moments of expression that may have been accidental could shape how you categorize me indefinitely. That's your responsibility.
I did care about such things earlier in life, particularly when I was a young adult, married, building my business, nurturing certain relationships, presenting myself through words and actions in such a way that I believed would lead to certain results. Often they did. And often the actuality of those results disappointed severely and led to crushing angst as I weighed the time I'd wasted to achieve such results.
It was in Amsterdam when I broke completely from living a results-driven life. As I looked back, for certain types of productivity and status, I embraced the experimental view of life, I realized I had been living a mashup, anyway, life as a cut-up of experiences cobbled together in postproduction in spite of my efforts to be as linear as society demanded as memories which oriented to better embrace change from where I "was"--as a step to the right from "here" leads to a life quite different from a step to the left from that same "here."
I don't know what you should do. In many ways, I don't care. In some ways I do. But the ways in which I care and don't care are my responsibility, not yours. I piss and shit phrases. It's the biologically correct thing to do if emotion and intellect can be said to be biological. And why not? I'm not going to put that on you no matter how much I complain that things aren't different than they are. What you don't see is the internal acceptance that corresponds with the external expressions of wishes, dreams, hopes, and desires. But, then again, it's easy to say that the biological is intellectual, at least as you or I perceive it. Those desires, wishes, dreams, and hopes are what I expunge from my being so that I don't hold them indefinitely, paralyzing me, locking me in place, disabling my ability to step right or left. So say I.
It was William S. Burroughs who said that all writing is in fact cut-ups. So, too, though, did he point out that collage is the same, that accidental photographs are the same, that films use the same methods in their accidental and purposeful ways. Music is cut-ups, most dramatically and perhaps obviously in the sampling used by DJs in House, electronica, trance, etc. But it's life itself that most resembles the cut-up. Why the hell did that guy get on the subway--and then jump back off running toward the exit?! Even within himself there was a sudden thought and then series of thoughts that said, "No, my intent has changed" and in such a moment it's a thought that bubbled to the surface of consciousness and was acted upon instantly, seemingly automatically, siphoned through a thousand values, millions of priorities, and indefinite preferences which had all been cobbled together over a lifetime of similar mashed up moments that created a subterranean labyrinth predetermining "who I am" without much conscious direction at all. The moment we may control, but we have little idea what we are creating as "ourselves."
We get glimpses of who we are, though, in those moments when we jump off the train unexpectedly or cancel our flights at the last minute or decide to road trip to nowhere on a whim. But "who we are" is made up shit, interconnected tunnels we dig in the dark, imagined by neuroscientists as our neural network, perceived by moralists to be our vices and virtues, proclaimed by postmodernists to be our identities, claimed by Gestalt to be our Gestalt.
I imagine that who I am is a giant cock with wings or a guy lying on a beach in San Diego getting a tan even when I sit in my living room typing a message. You probably imagine that you are who you are not, I guess, when you hope to some day make a million dollars or when you wish you still looked and felt like you did when you were 21. Some try to project such things as their image and the internal conflict must be great. I know it was for me when I was younger and is now on occasion.
But to convert to the philosophy of ever-changing or being amorphous can be a means for internal cohesion and stability. I certainly didn't want that to become a permanent shape. I learned, tiring though, daily practice, never stopping long enough for a form to take shape. As I mentioned, it takes practice, productivity looked like a shape to me. Most of the misery, calcified, becomes the shape you take all the time coming through occasional dalliance and the dogma of purposeful productivity. I have witnessed in life nothing wrong with accidental production, to shift from one way of being to another, but to WANT to be productive? Ewww.
I think this expressive colonic has cleansed the bowels of my thought sufficiently for now.
