Peace of Mind

I've been carrying amachete around for a long while now.Not a real one like this one, just themetaphorical kind, but I guess that’s close enough to the real thing when one is on the receiving end of it. I use it to fend off people– rude or otherwise – or create distance in crowded, public places. It is equalparts body language and confrontational staring on my part, with a fair measureof slightly paranoid preemptive supposition, wherein I gauge the next mostlikely behaviour of people. Sometimes it is a gentle weapon; for instance, if thereis a panhandler midblock downtown and I don't want to be spoken to, much lessasked for something, I just turn around and go back the way I came. I find analternate route with less potential for interaction. Sometimes it’s lessgentle; where I stop, turn, and stare at someone I know is following me, orwhen I tell the homeless guy on the bus that I don’t want to talk, I want toread my book, so please stop talking to me. I suppose I’ve been somewhatconfrontational since birth, and that tendency to speak first, to act whenothers just stand around or avert their gazes, is manifesting in more-pointedways now. It’s a product of so many factors, chief among them self-defensetraining, as well as an increasingly strong sense of time and its limitations,and the demands on it … demands on my time.

This odd machete-stylegravitation had its genesis in a thunderclap of events back when I had made arather publicly accessible flash point of myself, with a car plastered with 168bumper stickers(the other side looked the same and the hood was covered aswell) and an eager-to-meet-and-make-friends personae. A constellation of privacy-invasivethings occurred: my stickered-car was vandalized repeatedly; I was thefocal point for some very tired, cranky athletes who threw profanity andbeer-laden coolers at me when I was volunteering to help at their event; I wasstopped for the hundredth time in yet another parking lot to have the sameconversation with yet another stranger who thought they knew all about mebecause they’d read a bumper sticker on my car … stopped in the dark, by morethan one drunk guy. There were other serious bumps, too: conservative “friends”who informed me I had no right to marry my partner, “friends” who got theirfeelings hurt and sandbagged me at work. It really culminated in a tsunami of one eventafter another where I was ultimately left agog and broadsided by those I thought I knew but did not. Those Ithought I could trust, but could not.

Early on, I equatedthe bumper stickers with unwanted attention, and removing those was the firststep taken to pull in my boundaries several hundred feet to something more like conventional privacy. But that was not enough. The years before,where I’d been front and center in fights for gayrights and in marching to my owntune and not the mainstream’s, along with the abuse of exes and a host of other“thought I could count on it but I could not” experiences … it had all taken atoll I had no idea was there, and it was eating at me like some kind of cancer.I increasingly didn’t care for the company of anyone I didn’t already know, andknow well. It was a bright-line testof trust; I wanted only those around me that I could trust. Trust not to fuck withmy car, trust not to accost me in a dark parking lot, trust not to molest me,trust not to screw me over because of some immature sense of self-righteousness,trust not to leave all the heavy lifting and fighting and Hard Work to me. To notbail on long-held plans or flake out on an obligation because … well, becauseof any reason they could contrive.

Here’s where things got a bit more machete-like. I needed to weaponize mydistrust to better protectmyself … to pre-emptively forestall more betrayal. (It’sdisorienting to be a stranger in a strange land; to feel utterly and completelyalone in a sea of humanity can make one do wiggy, seemingly-irrational things.And I had done exactly that – moved to a big city where I knew no one, and thentried to jerry-rig together a social net above which I could feel safe flyinghigh.) So I started culling people who did not seem worthy of my net. To beginthe process, I created a bucketing categorization, where people went into abucket of FAMILY or FAMILY-LIKE, or ACQUAINTANCES vs. FRIENDS. There were very,very few people in the FRIENDS bucket. FRIENDS became pre-eminent, too, becauseI was far from family I rarely saw, so I had to make my own family. And it’s noeasy thing, finding friends after high school or college that you can rely onlike one traditionally would family.  (Whohas heard anyone say, “I have to take care of a sick friend”? It’s usually “Mykid is sick,” or “My mother is sick.” We Americans mostly leave the “insickness” obligations to family, not friends.) I used “bad times” to gauge and cullfriends down to ACQUAINTANCES when I believed I could not count on them in apinch, when my experience had shown someone to be flaky or unreliable, to takefar more than they ever gave, or they were rather worthless under stress.

I created a long questionnairethat I believed would help me filter out those who were not worth investingmuch time and effort in: something to identify the Sociopaths (who just lieabout their answers, stupid me) and the Flakes, the Closeted Conservatives andthe Lazies. I tried to only friend with friends-of-friends, believing “birds of afeather would flock together,” but that never panned out for some reason. (Infact, bizarrely some of the most spectacular failures were friends-of-friends.)I tried finding people with common hobbies or belief systems – to littlesuccess. There was no click, no simpatico, no Worthwhile Endeavor in groupafter group. And the one or two individuals that were of some potential interestrevealed themselves to be shockingly dangerous and insidious types: unstable,duplicitous, vindictive. I saw – and still do see – boogeymen in most otherhumans. And a machete is a great defense against boogeymen.

Honestly, I find it vaguely miraculous – and in no small way dunderheaded –that we are all not armed to the teeth and suspicious of everyone, down to thelast man, woman, and child. The human animal is not wired for populations of this size, for one. We still behave like we only see the same handful of people every day, and if there's a Stranger, It has to be Danger! (I'll save my evolutionary biology musings for another post.)

We have all been abused by those wetrusted. We have all had people let us down, sometimes catastrophically. Torely on others is a perilous activity; Sartre said, famously and accurately: “Hell is other people.” So Istarted living in Machete Land, and it’s brought me a strange sort of peace. Ino longer expect to meet anyone of consequence. I sarcastically joke that Iknow all the people now that I will ever know. Getting to know anyone else hasbeen fraught with disappointment, wasted Time (and I already mentioned I feel Ihave precious little to waste), and at times deeply depressing.

I am keeping a good peace with  my machete, and it has become a part ofme, a part of my personality and outlook. Some people end up on awarrior's path, through choices made early in life and outcomes ofevents that followed. And probably in some measure through their own genetic wiring, although I believe I was not rewarded for the peace-loving behaviour which I believe I was actually born to. I have learned "the hard way" to accept the warrior's way, and thisapproach suits me as I am now, a product of my not-so-milquetoast life and all the scars that have come with it. This way keeps me at peace within myself. It makes me feelsafer, that I am doing what I can to protect myself now from those who woulduse or abuse me ... to stop repeating mistakes previously made, giving trust wrongly given, and making assumptions that were not well-vetted.

Oh, at some point in human interactions, though, things will occasionally move from “pleasant”and “diverting”   into something more concrete and reliable, and the conversionmakes things that were disposable into commitment. That sort of metamorphosis seemsjoyous and incredible to me, maybe because it is so rare and takes so long tooccur. And there seems to be a fundamental difference to me between these “obligationsof choice” and those thrust upon us by cultural expectation: to the job, to thefamily, to societal-and-surface conventions.

If anything trulylasts any length of time, it’s those “obligations of choice.” We see it in long-termrelationships that truly last a life time, be it friendships or marriages. Wesee it among peers who love and respect one another, and so they give and feedwhat’s between each other in spite of fallow times and silences. I hang ontothose few obligations of choice Ihave in my life, and I count them periodically, like wondrous relationship rosarybeads. They have become burnished over time, worn smooth and honeyed by the caressof my hands. Operative words here are "time" and "caress."

Oh, and also metal ... machete metal lasts. Time and attention to thisweapon of mine has made  it shine, too. And I plan to hang on to it. It's my best "coping mechanism."