The Conflict of Being in Conflict
When being your best self takes some wrangling (with your self)
You again.
Yes. You ask me of my conflict. You ask as vacantly as office space downtown. Your sly gaze and your misprinted lyrics itch beneath our skin, begging for correction and a notice in tomorrow’s paper. This conflict is ours.
Fact checked.
Corrected. I am both protagonist and antagonist—I and you—strolling through the vibrant street stalls of our shared brain touching at the knickknacks and flipping carts. Cries of injustice, a shaming within our citadel’s walls. Little birds flit to their masters to whisper of an approaching brawl.
There is no shillelagh law in the kingdom of the self. No rules. No control. I simply enter the ring and there you are.
You am I.
Yes. You beat me down.
Stay down! Stay down!
I keep getting up. The bell never rings. An endless round with blood spat out and teeth loose and aching in the mouth. Gloves and headgear and aspirin and gauze. A stew within of organs shifting and skin contracting. Wild punches and uppercuts and thumbprints of petroleum jelly gobbing on the brow. The concussions rack up like billiard balls.
It’s a cover-up conspiracy.
Formulaic frequencies reveal mundane weaknesses as I spar against myself. I am hero. I am villain. One of us is knocked out, cold. One dies on the mat to be slapped back to life by the rude hand of belief. It is unclear who was who. You are me. I am you. We are protagonist and antagonist in the plotline of this mind. It is exhausting. This movie has no clear resolution, yet we dread the end credits. The fade to black.
Who are we directed by?
And the timeline sings of injustice, and bloats and bleats against our cosmic ceiling. The timeline, still rolling, pegs its seconds to our wire.
Know thy self, they say, and yet who the hell are you? And I? If I don’t know and you don’t know, they never will.
Tell me of your pain.
It is insignificant to all who can’t feel it. It cannot be seen by the naked eye but is hinted at by light winking through the cracks of our floorboards. Dust spores released into the air with each footfall and the faint hint of smoke tickling at our nostrils, warning us of the looming.
It comes.
We burn. We crackle. We spit at the sky with fiery insolence.
I firewalk these coals and am fueled by the pain held in the soft arch of my foot.
Brave?
Enduring.
Even as the heels burn and the cauterization of soul and sole occurs, I am in conflict with the fire that we ourselves lit. Comprised of pain atoms colliding with each other at inconvenient times. Fear. Lack of trust. Alone in the moment. These are the Dodgem cars with tires melting and whiplash seated behind the wheel.
I am a new stranger to my own town, bursting through the saloon door to make the music stop. Without knowing you how can I know myself, my own worst enemy? You and I, still. Black hat and white hat. We are the pain that threatens to engulf us whole. We are the fire, out of control, and licking at our pain receptors like summer popsicles.
You. Me. Us.
But it was you, not me, who assigned us bit parts in this life. We watch, saying nothing, blending into the scenery.
Thanks for that. It is my nature to struggle mightily with these I’ve-been-left-behind feelings. The group moved on while I got distracted watching butterflies and poking at slugs. Alone again on the overgrown trail with no map. This world is a jungle, with vines that entangle and things that bite into the tender part of my armpits. There are mysterious eyes glinting in the darkness.
Wild life.
The weather systems within me are violent and unpredictable. This cloud, jealousy, that tornado, an ill-defined anger that builds and builds until it lifts foundations and flings us skyward. Conflict in the isobars. Destruction in the barometric pressure. A storm, a tempest, a de-masting gust howls across our ocean and we are swallowed by the atmosphere, watching on as it chews off our feet in giant, meteorological bites.
And still, we worship at the thunderhead.
I scream into your face. You scream into mine.
I am fighting against the world. You are fighting with—and against—me. My body bubbles with the venom of it. Scabs over until the weight of it shifts and another landslide takes out the whole side of this mountain. A scar. A slip. A resettling of my earth.
When my protagonist gets comfortable, my antagonist introduces more conflict. That’s you. That’s me. The nature of us. Wild and unpredictable with no compass and no oxygen.
We might as well be stuck on Mars.
Is that our destiny?
That I will decay? That you will fade away? That we will suffocate? No. I tell you this in confidence and I know you will keep schtum. You are the only one I trust. Listen.
I—we—continue. For as long as is necessary. Despite the difficulty, despite the conflict within, despite—and because of—our knockdown and drag-out brawls with each other. We are designed to fly and so must take our test flights and log our hours into the big book. Fate is a construct designed to bring hope, to squash the sense of pointlessness that prevails…
But?
But I do not believe in fate, therefore you do not believe in it either. I do not believe we have been doomed to this plot device. There are no three witches foretelling anything about us. We do not pluck out our own eyes. There is no love triangle between you me and the world, nor will we save it. There are no vampires in our life that just want to be loved.
We are not a tale as old as time.
Our runtime has not been set.
Exactly.
We are writing the script as we go.
Yes.
We are both protagonist and antagonist, in the exterior and interior.
Yes.
I resolve.
I resolve again.
And the timeline sings of injustice, and bloats and bleats against our cosmic ceiling.
I am resolved.
The timeline, still rolling, pegs its seconds to our wire.
And it all happens on our watch.
Exactly.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Watch a video deep dive into how I wrote this post 👇
This week’s amends…
What I learned was that every artist needs a mentor,” Lucinda Williams tells me. “Everyone needs someone that they feel like is a little bit better than they are—something to aspire to. For my dad, it was Flannery O’Connor. For me, it was my dad.” Even as a child, Williams paid close attention to the care and precision her father brought to his craft. He taught her about the importance of finding the right word for a poetic line, not just any word that will do. The difference between the two, as Mark Twain famously said, was the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.- The Epic Return of Lucinda Williams, Bronwen Dickey, Garden & Gun, May 18, 2023
The full article has a bunch of good nuggets in it. What happens when a stroke threatens to take away something that you’ve made a life from?
The stroke had not affected her voice. It had, however, sapped the strength from her left hand, meaning she couldn’t work the fretboard of her guitar, which she’d used to figure out the melodies on every song she’d ever written. Without it, she wondered, who was she as a writer, as an artist?”
Via Longreads
On Rotation: “Oh, General” by Ten Benson
This is so incredible I barely know where to begin. I think it’s the little Michael Jackson noises he throws in from time to time that really got me. So SO good.
This is not the first effort by the creator and for my money ABSOLUTE LEGEND Bobby Fingers, and I hope it won’t be the last. You can also watch the Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest, Stephen Segal Choke Hold on his YouTube channel.
Via Kottke
This is absolutely epic. Tokyo Alley made from Cardboard.
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Via The Trend Report
That was awesome, thank you!