Humanninny

Humanity has acquired a database over a million or so years if you believe the scientists, or around 10,000 years on a Monday morning if you are more romantic. Let’s assume some upright animal with rudimentary language and social skills that we occasionally find the remains of evolved into at least a proto-human with enough intelligence to shop craigslist for jobs and toys. Whether evolved from photo nutrients, or hatched wholly human, we have together assembled a democratic database of what works and what doesn’t.

Many of us educate ourselves from this nest egg of wisdom, we learn the systems that have worked for humanity for between ten thousand and a million or so years, the socio/politico/religious equations linking us to how well we can do in life along with the clearly seen or invisible cautions and moral codes we generally abide by. In short, all the ways we’ve discovered and created variations on of doing, thinking and expressing ourselves.

These are universally perfected themes we reference in the shared libraries of human experience so we don’t have to entirely recreate the wheel or wig.

I wanted to create the wheel, and language and airplanes and conception and parties and footwear. Somehow I never learned how to use the library card. Once I started to feel I was doing what generations of humankind had done I‘d veer away to explore for original ways which even if I’d stumbled over I wouldn’t’ve recognized because I had only a couple of the same contexts and reference point for recognizing things others do. I believed everything and learned nothing. I was a lad with one foot spiked to the oak floor hearing the starter gun go off every ten seconds. Maybe I had neo natal Nazi Alzheimer’s. I followed whatever I was ordered to, even when these orders conflicted.

It was really bad. My relationships suffered, word got around and I walked in an empty landscape, even downtown. Here he comes, hide!! I couldn’t connect words spoken or on the page with the make-sense place in mind others seemed to be able to file things in memory or respond to normally. The database of human experience is sometimes out of bounds for some people, and I was one.

Still I felt I was a genius but didn’t know what to genie or how. People who are still having trouble tying their shoes at age 30 or remembering their name need to believe they are special in order to survive. If we ever got it how dumb we are we still wouldn’t get it how dumb we are.

What got me through it all is that I was merry and big and strong. No one ever beat me up. Those who could make mincemeat of me with a few sarcastic words didn’t. One time I walked in on a Don Rickles show on the Strip and he waded into me with rage because I was walking while he was talking, but all that came out of him was stutter.

People I hurt forgave me, or at least didn’t keep after me. I was off limits to those of the broken hearts, to predators, bullies, murderers, zealots, con men. Whores loved me because I brought out their wounded best . They made sure I was treated with respect. The mentally challenged and deformed drew close to protect me. Schizophrenics called me brother, or sister, and made perfect sense to me.

After awhile I didn’t want people around protecting me so I learned to become invisible by scanning without any felt focus other than curiosity. My image’d wander off leaving behind only stripped down awareness. On the streets if I stare at a woman shifting along fluidly she feels it and looks over her shoulder with annoyance. In scan mode there is no focused energy contact for her to refer to so she just feels a general pleasure of giving pleasure in her walk.

After awhile I knew the rules for getting into regular society but no longer wanted to. I made peace with being an outsider, it was my nature. I preferred anonymity and only paired up with others to see up close how life worked for them. What came automatically for others I had to study as lessons over and over. It took thirty years to get out of elementary school. I learned to appear normal when I shimmed into visibility, except when I spoke. When I spoke people drifted away wondering what language I was speaking. So I learned to shut up. And eventually, with nothing better to do, to listen. Little by little I got what people were saying. By then I was in my forties and working as a woodcutter and sawyer in Santa Fe. I spent ten years in and out of the woods of the high mountains in my truck. I was happier than any time in my life. I had a woodyard, sawmill, a Maine woman who rarely spoke, and all the physical labor I could handle, which was plenty. I was free to be who I wanted to be with no apologies...