Uncle

The definition of insanity, the saying goes, is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. I thought this was such a great opening line for the first thing I’ve been inspired to write in months that I had to look it up. I was pleased to find that it is attributed to the great Benjamin Franklin, a man I admire for his brutally honest eloquence. Except that it was also sourced to Albert Einstein, another great thinker. Dilemma! It turns out that it was actually written by Rita Mae Brown, a 1980’s mystery novelist. And that’s just it, isn’t it? The honest truth, ugly and boring as it usually is, is something you have to find out for yourself. You can’t just ask. Chances are that if you take someone at their word, you are professing your faith in ignorance as much trust. But hey, it’s bliss right?

And you want to trust. It’s almost spiritual in its reassuring safety: to know that someone’s got your back. And not just that they have it, but that they won’t do things behind it. You don’t need to glance over your shoulder because you already know exactly what you will see. Why waste time supplanting prophecy with reality if the plot twists are so lame and predictable? I long for that blanket again, threadbare as it is.

I have a constant soundtrack, and my dj is not for wont of relevance. Or salt-in-the-wound moxie. I hear over and over in my head today one of my favorite songs: I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real… I really do. I want a life that looks and sounds just like a movie. And I want to be idealistic and naïve, and to believe everything you say.

I was shaken from organized religion a long time ago. But that doesn’t stop me from believing that there is some sort of … something out there trying to teach us about where we are. It was only after years of being beaten over the head with hypocrisy and small-minded anger that I decided just maybe it was possible that those people should turn their gaze inward, and that I should leave. I took it as a lesson bought with much heartache. Being who I am now, I could never find it fulfilling, but I do miss it. I do see the draw of being told what to believe. That feeling is so safe and comfortable and worth protecting, even aggressively. It’s not a surprise to me that committed people violently defend their ideology in the face of a reality they are terrified to confront.

After all, I do the same inane thing, the same insane thing, repeatedly forcing myself to shake things off and move on, closing my eyes tightly to avoid the glint of a lesson it seems I should have learned long ago – that skepticism is painful and lonely, but a threadbare throw doesn’t protect from the cold anymore than a lack of one. When things wear out you replace them. And when trust is broken you move on. And this deity, this force, this fastidious ruler of the universe has got me in a headlock, demanding acquiescence. “Just say it,” he commands, “and I’ll let you go. Because you know the rest of the story. Rita Mae Brown had another poignant phrase: ‘Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.’ Thus sayeth the Lord, learn from your mistakes, asshole.”

And I relish plugging my ears and turning the music up in rigid defiance of an attack on the last shreds of adolescent innocence I have. Truth, it seems, is no match for desperation.

How long can I withstand the siege? When is enough enough? When are you down for the count? Don’t make me tell you, ye of too much faith, how the song ends.

I know you're wise beyond your years
But do you ever get the fear
That your perfect verse is just a lie
You tell yourself to help you get by?