"Now I sit with different faces in rented rooms in faraway places All the people I was kissing some are here, and some are missing in the Nineteen Nineties... I never dreamt that I would get to be the creature that I meant to be But I thought in spite of dreams that you'd be sitting somewhere here with me..." "Being Boring" The Pet Shop Boys 1990 |
I am false.
I was trying to define this to Paul, my boyfriend. I used to couch it in the term "contradictory." Paul, the smart boy that he is, wanted specifics. "Ummm...I'm a vegetarian in leather?" It was a good try. Playing Devil's Advocate, he brought up two options, Sometimes you have to wear leather out of necessity, such as when he was riding a motorcycle. The other was about the difficulty of avoiding animal products in everyday life -- even vulcanized rubber products like tires, have animal products in them. But I don't ride a motorcycle, and I elected to wear a jacket -- buying tires for the bus is someone else's decision. For the meantime, I let it pass. "I'm a serious stimulant addict with no tolerance for speed users." That one was easier to reconcile. I've never stolen from anyone for coffee, unless you count taking "free" beans from a former employer, who didn't mind us taking some for home use. But my car has been ransacked by crack addicts in the alleys near my house. I've never had a seriously difficult time stopping drinking coffee (though don't ask my roommate or boyfriend what I'm like in the morning before a cup). Yet people I know have sold furniture to support their habits. I've never known my coffee drinking to affect my personality so much that people actually flee my presence. But I've patently refused to be at a then-boyfriend's house when he was on speed because I hated how he behaved at the time. No contest in my mind. It started to get tougher. "I'm a smoker and a vegetarian." Tobacco is a plant material, and I don't eat meat because I don't like the idea, not for health reasons. "I'm a longtime slut in a monogamous relationship." I was grasping at straws. What I was then and what I am now are not contradictory, just changing modes of behaviour. "I say things are fine when they're not, and lie by omission." Welcome to the human condition. "I've got a good paying job and socialist-flavoured political views." Let's not go into why socialistic political structures should or shouldn't work -- they haven't yet in any large society that has tried it. And, well, to quote Cabaret, money makes the world go around. I do what I enjoy, and it happens to pay the bills plus some. Chalk it up to good timing. In the end, I think he granted the Veggie-in-leather one, but otherwise I didn't have anything particularly contradictory to point to. Maybe I'm not false. Then what's the false feeling that sometimes echoes at the pit of my stomach? Shh...don't tell...I think I might be starting to grow up. The sense memory of being the things I was-- I've been involved in punk, in goth, in drugs, in politics, in fine art -- is at odds with what I've become. And those memories fight tooth and nail against the new things I, with no obvious effort, seem to have become. The ghostly remains of what I might have been resent that particular fact -- how transparent and easy the changes have been -- to the tip of their non-existant shadows. Their favorite barb is the single meme: "Sellout. You've gone mainstream. You're becoming the thing you always feared being...boring." I fear, dear reader, that I've lead you down into the labyrinthine crypts of my head without a lamp. I'm not sure how to end. You're left watching me vainly pat the soil around fresh burial mounds erupting with the jealous spirits of what-was-me and what-might-have-been-me. How do you bury the dead when they won't stop walking around? Maybe that's where we're all left, in the end...caught between the things we are, and both the things we were and the things we never were. Redefining one's self is made out to be liberating, refreshing...so am I doing it wrong? And will I ever be able to tell when I've done it right? |