Weight Bench

Now the days are long and still again. Summer has returned and the seasons have changed. The last of the spring was set out two months ago down here, while in Lubbock it still is in its fullest flower. I remember walking by the Library at the University and smelling the fishy scent of flowering dogwoods, living snow. Now that scent has been replaced with that of tall fragrant mimosa, sugarwood, hackberry and Hong Kong orchid. All of them have either pungent, repellent, sugar-sweet, or soapy scents that waft on the late evening breeze that comes off the coast. The sun dips behind the tall branches of the pecan tree that belongs to our neighbor, and at that very best time of the day I am attending to things outside–correspondences, mail, journal entries, music. How far away Lubbock and the University seem now. My own sordid pessimism often threatens me with never returning again, but I know this cannot be true. On my desk sits my plane ticket, clearly marked for August 24th. Now, of course, I am planning other trips.

Most of the day I spend working here at the house, or working out. I am eating lighter now, as the season and as the almanac suggests, and less fare that might otherwise be too heavy or too hot to make in a kitchen without the benefit of air-conditioning. I learned the hard way: three days of Hamburger Helper did not bode neither healthy nor appetizing. So now I am just sticking to light meals at lunch, the colazione or light midday meal, a snack in the middle of the afternoon (something like fruit), and then a palatable yet restrained, supper. I don’t get the opportunity to really eat as healthily as I should here, since our rations are restrained by price and therefore we buy what we can afford. My mother has said she knows the less we eat altogether, the better it will last for the month, but already I can think of my little brother’s girlfriend making an absolute mess of something in the kitchen, besides wasting food for special occasions, which I am completely against. If there is anything I hate more in the world, it is waste, and me and my mother have had to suffer with wastefulness for almost a year now, while both my little brother and his girlfriend run through milk, bread, eggs, sugar, coffee, orange juice and meat at the rate of some great establishment.

People, I know, stand in bewilderment at our exception. A former friend of mine said to me that he couldn’t understand how people could live the way we do. It seems that most of the people I have spoken to have never been in the situation that we now call normal–no one has ever had to go without, but then again, inasmuch as we are in debt, it cannot be more than those who live so extravagantly and then make off-the-cuff judgments about the way we live. Then again, those people have had little life experience as it is, dealing only with the environment they’ve been raised in. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, though. Those people are off in a world where their lives are seemingly determined by issues of control, desire, and affordability. It isn’t really “authentic” if your entire world is dominated by people who believe the same things you do, or enjoined by the same social causes, or even belief in a higher power or not. These things were ordered by people for the sake of conserving social power among a people ordered for it, not necessarily open to new or different entities. What’s uniquely horrible about my own experience in this world is that I have been both repelled and attracted by it–repelled that people can make value judgments and say audacious lies and assassinations of character, and attracted by the false sense of eqanimity it seems to promise, an absolution of shame from the lesser world I come from. I realize my own problems come from a denial of the culture of where I come from, a shame in knowing that the same people I’ve idolized all my life are the ones I don’t want to acknowledge because I would be rocking the boat of white mass-culture identity. But I know that is failing both myself as an individual and the many different and varied cultures that I have been priveleged to have been raised in. So many people don’t want to face their own selves because of this shame–the shame of being raised poor, or even in the middle class suburbs, or in a strictly religious family, or one in which a careless agnosticism seemed to reign supreme. Then there is this sense of emotional denial–denial that, since the prevailing psychological demand, at least institutionally speaking, is that we have to be calm and detached from situations we believe to be emotionally distressing, we take this home and apply it to one another. Someone said to me, “I don’t care how people feel. Never has crossed my mind.” Why would someone feel this way? And then of course I discovered why–because people suffer from immense emotional cowardice. They cannot cope with these emotions I and many people feel because they themselves have never experienced it, or are otherwise dismissive of it. It is a double tragedy–a sense of failure at not recognizing someone or something worthy or beautiful, and the actual act of rejection. A corollary tragedy to this is thinking that we can never enjoy something beautiful ever again because of past traumas. And then, as if to perpetuate these things, we force our own issues on other people, belittling them in the process, and making them feel wholly unloved, unwanted and socially leprous.

I realize now that I am destined to live my life outside of social influence–it is not just a requirement for my own happiness, it is a social mandate in itself. It is not that I do not want to mingle with people, or enjoy being around them, it is a feeling of permanent and pervasive seperation from the idle trivialities of human existence. I have lived apart from standard social norms for most of my life–beginning life without a father, then never finding social acceptance for that and other things, then moving on to a life physiologically seperated from normative social reality, then the questions of sexual, racial and cultural identity. I realize I am going to be on my own for a long time, and I am not afraid of it. I was able to eke out an existence of purely private means, all by myself in Lubbock. I will do so again. The wonderful thing about all of this is that a life apart is full of not only independence, but interdependence. Peter Garland once said to me, “I’d rather live as a little fish in a big ocean than as a big fish in a little pond.” And that’s the best part, being completely anonymous and detached from the insanity of the world, from its depravity, from its ceaseless and meaningless noise and outcry. I don’t want to belong not because the world rejects me, but because I openly reject it and refuse to let it consume me alive.

Part of my own personal desire for betterment is not only emotional stability, but strength to keep fighting for what I believe to be the right and proper things. I have to keep myself healthy and fit because I know I am on the right track and that I’m not going to end up as a just a big blob of goo like everyone else. I’m not going to die of complications from diabetes, like most of my family. I’m not going to contract HIV and die of AIDS, like some of my friends and family have. I’m not going to be so apathetic as to sink into a life of self-contentedness and shut myself up in some fortress of a house, worth more than my entire assets put together and impossible to pay for. And I’m not going to give my heart to someone who doesn’t appreciate me, who can’t appreciate me for the things I have spent most of life here on Earth studying and appreciating. Most importantly, I will never, ever again give into the completely wrong opinions of people who have never known me, never heard of what I am talking about, never bothered thinking of others, and never bothered to even discover what I have discovered. One of my friends told me a story as to why he quit college: simply stated, he hated the fact that so many people affirmed one particular music theory over another. He got tired of being told what to do, and what to think. I never ever want to be oppressed by people who don’t know what I’m good at to tell me I’m not good at what I’m doing. I will never sacrifice my own integrity for someone else’s useless opinions. And I will never, ever quit doing is good enough for me–whether that might be bodybuilding (because it IS a reality, I’m not just some guy doing it for the lulz), or ethnomusicology, or cultural studies, or living in South Texas, at the end of the state, or living the way I do, on my own terms. I may be angry but it is that anger which perpetuates me to work for the benefit of others, to do more for myself and society in general, and the betterment of the world.