I AM LOST
/Get a Grip
There is a recurring dream I have where everything is bigger than I am. I mean ginormous. It could be chairs , and tables, or even those cinders that stop your car from going over the allotted space in a parking spot. But I am surrounded by the objects, and the sheer size of these objects in relativity to how tiny I feel induces vertigo. I feel imbalanced, unconnected, I am on the ground, but I am grounded to nothing. I feel sick, but I cannot vomit, and any thought I have feels locked behind a door I can’t summon enough wherewithal to reach, let alone unlock. Eventually, this feeling of helplessness, of lopsidedness, becomes so overwhelming to my senses it yanks me hurriedly from my sleep, but the feeling may stay with me a further fifteen minutes. That dream used to just be a dream, (a reoccurring one) but a dream nonetheless, now it feels like its my life.
Same old Story
I always wanted to be in movies, around movies. I grew up shuffling around various parts of the Inland Empire (A large metropolitan area just east of Los Angeles) in Southern California. We were a steadily growing family, (we would eventually be nine - seven children) that would move from neighborhood to neighborhood each time trying to move up, and away from the consequences of the inner city. I never had many friends, just my imagination, courtesy of books and television. We could rarely afford going to the movies when I was younger, so most of my movie watching came via TV and video rentals, but I fell in love with the escapism. The farther away from reality, from the world I knew, a movie went.. the more I loved it. Movies allowed me to disappear, and at the time I liked disappearing. Not in some morose, melodramatic sense, ....I just liked it better somewhere else. My favorite book then was C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe”, I became somewhat obsessed with the idea that this world, and another so much more fantastic than this one could be so conjoined that merely going through a closet could transport you from one to the other. I would walk around waving a pencil in front of my eyes, drawing out the world I imagined myself in, most of which I borrowed from movies. In some sense movies were my closet, but I wasn’t hiding from anything drastic. I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t bullied until middle school, (and lightly even then) I wasn’t the only black kid in my neighborhood, and I wasn’t an outcast. I spray painted walls with my sometime friend Charlie, played Nintendo with Jeremy, rode bikes, and flipped on mattresses (cliché but true) but I just preferred the company of the TV set, and the inside of my head. I lived in worlds conjured by Spielberg, and Ron Howard. I watched films like “DragonSlayer”, “Return of the Jedi”, “Conan/Red Sonja”, and “The Neverending Story” until I memorized them. School came pretty easy save for math so I daydreamed through most of that, despite being placed in classes for gifted and talented students. At this time I had no conception of self, and I didn’t put much time into thinking about it. The only time I did it was in pretending I was someone else, the actor in me already forming. Indiana Jones, Conan, He- Man, anyone but myself. Because at the time the only thing that mattered was in those worlds. We spend a lot of time talking about fairy tales for women, and subsequently their effect on women because we largely effeminized the word, coded it for women. But men have fairy tales, and I wonder how much these male constructed fairy tales around masculinity affected my sense of reality.
In these tales, these male fantasies like; James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Dune, Conan, Star Trek, Star Wars, there is always destiny, and at some point surety. There is a time of being unsure, of feeling lost, helpless, incapable, but that is mostly a sign of boyhood. Manhood was all about knowing, and it was this “knowing” I was afraid of, even as a child. Fear…How much room is allotted for that in manhood? “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me”. I mean we can talk about it, I’m sure in the abstract, disconnected from the reality, from its true face, from its worst possibility. I’m sure in this era where we are deconstructing the pillars of toxic masculinity, we mean it when we say men should be able to express it. But when it’s front and center in our face, when it doesn’t take the form we see in our minds eye, when it’s not polite, or poetic like in the cinema, or literature..still? I am reminded of a quote…
“in china there was once a man who liked pictures of dragons, and his clothing and furnishings were all designed accordingly. his deep affections for dragons was brought to the attention of the dragon god, and one day a real dragon appeared before his window. it is said that he died of fright. he was probably a man who always spoke big words but acted differently when facing the real thing. ”
I am often afraid, always have been. Afraid of my destiny, and afraid of saying I’m afraid of my destiny. If fear, or vulnerability is used as the dragon in the above quote, then I am the dragon, and I wonder for that dragon what it must’ve felt like watching a man die of fright at the sight of him, after expressing such deep affection for him? How many people can really stand the sight of a man truly afraid? There is acceptable fright in a man, the kind that drives us to action like in this scene from Jurassic Park…
But what about the kind of fear that paralyzes us, leaving us unable to move in any direction, leaving us rudderless, and unable to help ourselves more less others? I don’t think we like to see that up close in anybody, but in men it can be seen as borderline repulsive. In my life right now, when anxiety, self doubt, and fear seize upon me without mercy, it’d be a lot easier to punch them, to fight them, but I can’t fight them, not in that way, and I can’t joke them away, or even love them away. I don’t feel a call to action, and I don’t feel brave, I feel a lot more like this..…
“It is said, If you want to see into a sick persons heart, become ill yourself. When a man is sick or in trouble, those who do not keep company with him are cowards, even those who are close to him in daily life. We should visit those that are unhappy and give them gifts. We must not become estranged in life from those who have a sense of gratitude. At such times one can see into a mans heart .In the world there are men who ask of others when they are in great need. However there are men who don’t remember their obligations afterwards.”
