Out Of Sorts: A Short Lemmonade Today

I’m feeling out of sorts, depressed, angry and hostile, pissed and peeved, fed-up, annoyed and aggravated. I don’t suffer fools, but then there are so many, I allow a few to enter. As I age I see that I am more intolerant of foibles, less empathetic, irritable, impatient, anxious that I can’t have my own way, bristlng and surly. I imagine parts of me are calcifying, shutting down, as characterological values are becoming arthritic. The inner rigidities I have borne all my life are as dorsal finned as any hidebound stegosaurus. I don’t want to stop this ever hardening of cranky accretions. I don’t mind being miserable. After all, all of this is a cartoonish depiction of who I think I am, but am I really this global image I have of myself? I am not letting myself off the hook; I am flinty, irascible and naughty. It is like slipping my hands into a sink filled with water; what that feels like, which is grossly idiosyncratic, is what I feel about who I am, surfaces slip-sliding across and into one another. I do not have a watery self, there is a self; but it is like a deck of cards folding betwixt and between itself, all surface slick. I am neither the 52 cards; I am neither the deck itself. I am the shuffle.

Today I told a tiler as we spoke about job to be done that I am much like Joe Pesce in “Goodfellas,” in that I am no he-man, but like Pesce, don’t mess with me. I’ll come after you and do what I have to do — relentlessly. I was enraged early on as a child and it is a pigment that has stayed with me into my early sixties. Like an American paint, I am dappled with what components make me what I am as a person. And what is that palette, that ghost in my machine, that phantom opera that I perform daily?

In short, the old cliche, who am I?

Whatever I will write, is the truth, is a lie, is a misperception on my part. What I have observed is for every facet I think I have in my character it soon becomes apparent that I can provide exceptions or discrepancies, so that I am both aspects at the same time, or both differences at the same time. I am and I am not this and that; I am a slurry of traits, a lving, vibrant blur of a human being. I am no ink blot. I am a blur.

I’m lying in bed now, tired, weary from the day’s tribulations, recovering from the Tucson blast furnace heat which saps and enervates your will while it bakes your flesh and microwaves your brain like speeding up the cooking of a baking potato. I like Arizona because it reminds me of Ancient Egypt and Canaan; the place from which this Jew came, millenia ago. Perhaps I can be mummified here, interred in a tomb, and wait until a gravedigger gets at my treasure, god bless him, the unlucky bastard.

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