The Wrong Stuff
1/24/05
THE WRONG STUFF
These days, I've been taking a weird pleasure in thinking thoughts like: I'd say my life is over, but I would have had to have had a life in the first place to say that. And also: Every decision I have ever made is the wrong one. And I'm willing to reform, but I know that no matter how I change, I'll just change into someone who continues to make perfectly wrong choices, just DIFFERENT wrong choices from the wrong ones I used to make. As I say, I take a monstruous and perverse pleasure in thinking like this.
Oddly, I'm not comfortable calling myself a loser. Loser has all sorts of associations I don't relate to. What is it I'm losing? What are others winning? I'm certainly willing to indict myself for either: 1) not living fully and/or 2) living wrong every second of every day for my whole past, my present, and my future.
Do I associate "wrong" with "sin"? Sin seems to be a quaint and almost hilarious concept, like wickedness or iniquity. I prefer, it really gives me pleasure and release, to think of myself as irretrievably wrongheaded, and, yes, pigheaded. You know that line: "everything I say is a lie, including this"? Well "everything I do is wrong, including this."
There ought to be a 12 step program for the Wrongheaded Anonymous. But no one would ever attend because they'd take the wrong way to get there. And if they did, through accident or spite, manage to attend, they would, of course, always say the wrong things at the wrong time. They would manage to mortally offend one another. They would break all the rules of the organization, such as destroying one another's anonymity. They would never EVER get any closer to being right.
This is the one club which would have me, and I should say right here that it's therefore a club whose invitation I reject out of hand. But because I am so wrongheaded, so perverse, so counterproductive, I WILL accept its invitation. I will even accept its nomination for the presidency, and if elected, I will serve. But I will misrule at every turn.
Some might argue that Wrongheads Anonymous is the one place where it's safe to be Wrong, right to be Wrong. They know nothing. It's ALWAYS wrong to be wrong. When it's right to be wrong, wrong is no longer wrong.
Wrong always cuts, hopelessly, irrationally, against the grain. Wrong is anything but the sensible thing to do. Wrong is indefensible. And inexplicable. And irreducible. Wrong leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in disgust and wonder at the folly of the wrongdoer.
You may sense a certain defiant pride in us, the hopeless wrongdoers. You are mistaken. We have nothing to be proud of. We strip ourselves of the possibility of pride at every turn, with every mistake and misbegotten deed.
Wrong should be ashamed of itself, knows it should be ashamed of itself, hears every day from the rest of the world that it is shameful. Bipolar, it swings between the extremes of shame and shamelessness. Because it is so wrong, wrong can't find the happy medium, the golden mean. Rather it either crouches in the shadows or flaunts itself hideously, offensively, flamboyantly.
What you see in us is not pride, but the grotesque nugget of self which is all that is left to us. We are almost nothing. We wish we could be completely nothing. Yet we are something. When you boil away the superfluities of personality what are we but the essence of wrong. Eau de wrong. Yet we are stunned and horrified, and perversely gratified and grateful, to find ourselves, in spite of ourselves and all reasonable expectations, waking up morning after morning. We are still here. We are still alive. We, monstruous, unspeakable, cockroaches that we are. We do everything wrong yet we somehow don't erase ourselves (until we do) from the face of the Earth. We'd like to take back who we are. We'd like to take back all we have done wrong. We'd like to fill in all we have failed to do. We'd like to be correctly here and now. We'd like to live out a proper future with glowing dreams. We'd like to realize the dreams, rather than the nightmares, of our forefathers. We'd like to be a shining example to our descendents, if we happen to have any.
We'd like to be respectable. We'd like to live the kind of lives, in the kind of houses, with the kind of families, which could bear unembarrassed national exposure on reality TV.
Instead, we remain incontrovertibly, incorregibly, what we are: those who never get it right, who never got it right, who never will get it right, and who won't stop getting it wrong. It's not so much that those around us care. They don't much notice us any more, or consider us a minor nuisance or irritant. If they take time, for a brief moment, to consider our lives, they tsk tsk and shake their heads at our folly. They might, if they are pious, send up a brief prayer on our behalves, petitioning the Holy Father to straighten us out so that we might have at least a taste of right living before our ends.
If they see any value at all in the grotesque wastes of our lives, they might allow as how we can sometimes be cautionary tales, negative space, road signs that tell those who are capable of rightliving what to avoid. Everything we do, after all, is a mistake. So the safe thing for the rational to do, when in doubt, is to do the opposite of what we do.
We may also prove to be objects of fun, or butts of jokes, for the rightliving. When the rightliving are depressed, or feel they are failing or losing, they can look at us and their spirits are lifted! For their lives will always look great compared to our folly.
So is it fair to say that we, the wrongheaded, are fools? Not really. Even being a fool is something. There's a place in the world for foolishness. God protects and loves fools. In foolishness and fools is a kind of truth. There is no place in the world for the wrong. We don't belong. Yet we are here. That is the horror of us. And at every turn we have the chance to redeem ourselves. Every moment we have the chance to do the right thing. And we never do. It's not even that we refuse to do the right thing. We don't have any choice in the matter. We are doomed to always do wrong, say wrong, live and breathe and shit wrong.
It could be argued that we, the wrong, should do the rest of the world a favor and stop consuming valuable resources that the right thinkers and right doers need to survive. We should, en masse, make an end of ourselves, Jonestown style. We should stop sucking up right people's air. We should stop slurping the clean water that rightdoers thirst for. We should stop taking jobs that the right need to support themselves and their right-thinking families. We should stop taking up space on this Earth, space that the right need.
And if we were capable of doing right, perhaps we WOULD do away with ourselves, post haste. But that would be right, and we never are. If we DO end ourselves, and sometimes we do, we inevitably do it at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, in a manner most inconvenient for those who are right.
And there are those who have speculated that we, the always-wrong, the perfectly wrong, may sometimes console ourselves with a brotherhood or sisterhood of the wrong. This, of course, is wrong. We are always and inevitably solitary and cutoff from one another, no matter how much we have in common with others who are wrong. To feel a common bond with any other human, even or especially the most despised and wrongheaded of humans, would be right. And we never are.
It's not just that we butt our heads, ramlike, against the right-thinking of the world. We also oppose, at every turn, our fellow wrongheads. It's the wrong thing to do. So we must do it.
The sensible of the world, concerned for their own, and possibly even for our own, well being, warn us: Don't go there. That's wrong. That is verboten. So that is where we must go. Even warning voices in our own heads cry out: Don't do it! Now's your chance to go elsewhere. And perhaps, for a moment, or for an agonized eternity, like tyro skiiers poised at the top of the Triple XXX Beyond Category Blackblackblack Slope, we successfully fight the impulse to go where we must not. But the struggle is futile, a joke. Shooooosh! It makes it all the more tragic, ridiculous, wasteful, when we again go where we should not. Whooooosh! The wrong place is not where we belong, because we belong nowhere. The wrong place is where we must be, careening into every tree we see. It is the only place in the universe open to us. We can no more fight our tropism for the wrong than we can fight gravity, or time.
....Of course, this is only a serious problem if I AM being serious.....isn't it?
THE WRONG STUFF
These days, I've been taking a weird pleasure in thinking thoughts like: I'd say my life is over, but I would have had to have had a life in the first place to say that. And also: Every decision I have ever made is the wrong one. And I'm willing to reform, but I know that no matter how I change, I'll just change into someone who continues to make perfectly wrong choices, just DIFFERENT wrong choices from the wrong ones I used to make. As I say, I take a monstruous and perverse pleasure in thinking like this.
Oddly, I'm not comfortable calling myself a loser. Loser has all sorts of associations I don't relate to. What is it I'm losing? What are others winning? I'm certainly willing to indict myself for either: 1) not living fully and/or 2) living wrong every second of every day for my whole past, my present, and my future.
Do I associate "wrong" with "sin"? Sin seems to be a quaint and almost hilarious concept, like wickedness or iniquity. I prefer, it really gives me pleasure and release, to think of myself as irretrievably wrongheaded, and, yes, pigheaded. You know that line: "everything I say is a lie, including this"? Well "everything I do is wrong, including this."
There ought to be a 12 step program for the Wrongheaded Anonymous. But no one would ever attend because they'd take the wrong way to get there. And if they did, through accident or spite, manage to attend, they would, of course, always say the wrong things at the wrong time. They would manage to mortally offend one another. They would break all the rules of the organization, such as destroying one another's anonymity. They would never EVER get any closer to being right.
This is the one club which would have me, and I should say right here that it's therefore a club whose invitation I reject out of hand. But because I am so wrongheaded, so perverse, so counterproductive, I WILL accept its invitation. I will even accept its nomination for the presidency, and if elected, I will serve. But I will misrule at every turn.
Some might argue that Wrongheads Anonymous is the one place where it's safe to be Wrong, right to be Wrong. They know nothing. It's ALWAYS wrong to be wrong. When it's right to be wrong, wrong is no longer wrong.
Wrong always cuts, hopelessly, irrationally, against the grain. Wrong is anything but the sensible thing to do. Wrong is indefensible. And inexplicable. And irreducible. Wrong leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in disgust and wonder at the folly of the wrongdoer.
You may sense a certain defiant pride in us, the hopeless wrongdoers. You are mistaken. We have nothing to be proud of. We strip ourselves of the possibility of pride at every turn, with every mistake and misbegotten deed.
Wrong should be ashamed of itself, knows it should be ashamed of itself, hears every day from the rest of the world that it is shameful. Bipolar, it swings between the extremes of shame and shamelessness. Because it is so wrong, wrong can't find the happy medium, the golden mean. Rather it either crouches in the shadows or flaunts itself hideously, offensively, flamboyantly.
What you see in us is not pride, but the grotesque nugget of self which is all that is left to us. We are almost nothing. We wish we could be completely nothing. Yet we are something. When you boil away the superfluities of personality what are we but the essence of wrong. Eau de wrong. Yet we are stunned and horrified, and perversely gratified and grateful, to find ourselves, in spite of ourselves and all reasonable expectations, waking up morning after morning. We are still here. We are still alive. We, monstruous, unspeakable, cockroaches that we are. We do everything wrong yet we somehow don't erase ourselves (until we do) from the face of the Earth. We'd like to take back who we are. We'd like to take back all we have done wrong. We'd like to fill in all we have failed to do. We'd like to be correctly here and now. We'd like to live out a proper future with glowing dreams. We'd like to realize the dreams, rather than the nightmares, of our forefathers. We'd like to be a shining example to our descendents, if we happen to have any.
We'd like to be respectable. We'd like to live the kind of lives, in the kind of houses, with the kind of families, which could bear unembarrassed national exposure on reality TV.
Instead, we remain incontrovertibly, incorregibly, what we are: those who never get it right, who never got it right, who never will get it right, and who won't stop getting it wrong. It's not so much that those around us care. They don't much notice us any more, or consider us a minor nuisance or irritant. If they take time, for a brief moment, to consider our lives, they tsk tsk and shake their heads at our folly. They might, if they are pious, send up a brief prayer on our behalves, petitioning the Holy Father to straighten us out so that we might have at least a taste of right living before our ends.
If they see any value at all in the grotesque wastes of our lives, they might allow as how we can sometimes be cautionary tales, negative space, road signs that tell those who are capable of rightliving what to avoid. Everything we do, after all, is a mistake. So the safe thing for the rational to do, when in doubt, is to do the opposite of what we do.
We may also prove to be objects of fun, or butts of jokes, for the rightliving. When the rightliving are depressed, or feel they are failing or losing, they can look at us and their spirits are lifted! For their lives will always look great compared to our folly.
So is it fair to say that we, the wrongheaded, are fools? Not really. Even being a fool is something. There's a place in the world for foolishness. God protects and loves fools. In foolishness and fools is a kind of truth. There is no place in the world for the wrong. We don't belong. Yet we are here. That is the horror of us. And at every turn we have the chance to redeem ourselves. Every moment we have the chance to do the right thing. And we never do. It's not even that we refuse to do the right thing. We don't have any choice in the matter. We are doomed to always do wrong, say wrong, live and breathe and shit wrong.
It could be argued that we, the wrong, should do the rest of the world a favor and stop consuming valuable resources that the right thinkers and right doers need to survive. We should, en masse, make an end of ourselves, Jonestown style. We should stop sucking up right people's air. We should stop slurping the clean water that rightdoers thirst for. We should stop taking jobs that the right need to support themselves and their right-thinking families. We should stop taking up space on this Earth, space that the right need.
And if we were capable of doing right, perhaps we WOULD do away with ourselves, post haste. But that would be right, and we never are. If we DO end ourselves, and sometimes we do, we inevitably do it at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, in a manner most inconvenient for those who are right.
And there are those who have speculated that we, the always-wrong, the perfectly wrong, may sometimes console ourselves with a brotherhood or sisterhood of the wrong. This, of course, is wrong. We are always and inevitably solitary and cutoff from one another, no matter how much we have in common with others who are wrong. To feel a common bond with any other human, even or especially the most despised and wrongheaded of humans, would be right. And we never are.
It's not just that we butt our heads, ramlike, against the right-thinking of the world. We also oppose, at every turn, our fellow wrongheads. It's the wrong thing to do. So we must do it.
The sensible of the world, concerned for their own, and possibly even for our own, well being, warn us: Don't go there. That's wrong. That is verboten. So that is where we must go. Even warning voices in our own heads cry out: Don't do it! Now's your chance to go elsewhere. And perhaps, for a moment, or for an agonized eternity, like tyro skiiers poised at the top of the Triple XXX Beyond Category Blackblackblack Slope, we successfully fight the impulse to go where we must not. But the struggle is futile, a joke. Shooooosh! It makes it all the more tragic, ridiculous, wasteful, when we again go where we should not. Whooooosh! The wrong place is not where we belong, because we belong nowhere. The wrong place is where we must be, careening into every tree we see. It is the only place in the universe open to us. We can no more fight our tropism for the wrong than we can fight gravity, or time.
....Of course, this is only a serious problem if I AM being serious.....isn't it?
posted by mobydoug at 1:06 AM
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