damage, the making of a man

the soundtrack to this blogpost will be the tripped out reggae crew Brown Rice Family, coming straight outta brooklyn with a really funky, feel easy sound. at the same time, there’s a strong layered musicality to their work that shows the true depth of their work, even as their lyrics speak to universal subjects of love, social responsibility and human interconnection that the idealist in me really loves.

first and foremost, let me just say that i’ve been hella sick, which is why i haven’t been posting as regularly as i have been. furthermore, being sick has threw me off my schedule and so my grind queue has backed up and kept me all bz and shit. lulz.

to get some more biz out of the way, if you look at the poetry sections, you’ll notice a few changes to the poems available. i feel like these poems are more reflexive of where i currently am, and most of them will be in my chapbook. i’m actually surprised i managed to get even this done, ‘cuz between being sick and SF4 being out, i should have no time in the world. be proud. i still haven’t played SF4 yet, but intend on getting my hands on it soon and epic owning with ryu and dan.

but moving on to the meat of this post… i wanted to talk about damage and the idea that we communicate through it.

the idea for this, like many of my ideas, comes from the movie dedication… mainly from the father figure who talks about how we’re all damaged, and that we communicate really fundamentally through damage.

the exact quote goes:
“that’s the thing, the reason people get together is we think we’re looking for similarly broken people. we communicate nowadays through damage… [some folks] just pretend to be broken… girls only like the really fucked up guy for the first few months, they prefer fake broken, you know, complicated, but talk about it over chardonnay complicated.”

there’s so many layers of truth, or at least, of resonance in the above quote. i can identity with it, i can feel it within myself. i feel like it’s especially true because the movie is set in NYC, even if it’s never explicitly stated, so there’s definitely an element of NYC vibe to the entirety of the movie, coloring everything from ambiance to the dialogue above.

we really do communicate through damage. we look for those similarly broken, and we glom onto each other. this can be both problematic and beneficial… because on one hand, this common understanding of damage excludes us from connection to others, especially when we fetishize it. when relationships are based on damage, whether they be platonic or romantic, they can quickly become unhealthy and damaging for both sides.

at the same time though, there’s the ability to understand and connect when someone shares your damage that is not there otherwise. sometimes, that little bit of understanding, of human compassion, is what is necessary to allow people to start the process of healing. some of my best friends are damaged in some of the same ways as myself, hurting in roughly in the same places, and they are able to comprehend my bad times better than someone outside of this particular fraternity. there’s beauty in that i think.

and bloody hell, considering my ability to maintain a regular relationship has never gotten me past more than 6 months… i guess i really am one of those truly fucked up guys. btw, i gotten broken up with on valentine’s day. epic win.

but to move away from the emo-ness, it’s strange to say that we communicate through damage, i know it is. but at the same time, sometimes, it’s the squishy parts of us that are the only vulnerable places, especially in the city. anomie becomes a part of the everyday, we become inured to one another and to the world itself. too much stimuli, especially of the emotional variety, numbs us.

by allowing ourselves to connect with others who hurt in the same places as we do, who carry the same scars, we’re able to bypass the layers of protections we’ve put upon ourselves. for a moment, we’re able to put aside our pretensions of ennui, and that’s so very important, especially in NYC where ennui and anomie can become lifestyles all their own.

i think i’ll be talking about this more in the future, and more about nyc in general, because i’m beginning to realize how much the city undergirds what i write, what i see and how i feel.

but to end, me and my friend were talking about what we wished from our hypothetical sons, what qualities and skills that a son should possess, what we had to teach them to be able to consider ourselves good fathers capable of making sons into men. this admittedly, at least on my end, built from heinlein’s qualifications for a competent person in general, which are reproduced here for your viewing pleasure… followed by my own estimation of what a man should know, building off of that conversation. someday, i’ll write about what my daughter should know, but right now, my mind’s too colonized for me to be able to look at that rationally i think.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”- Heinlein in Time Enough for Love

“a man should be able to be a competent wingman, make love/fuck with both skill and fervor, shoot a gun, fight with both ferocity and expertise, know when it’s worth it to risk it all and know when to pull it in, sacrifice of himself for others, die with verve, deal with those weaker than himself with both compassion and justice, those stronger than him with respect but never fear, cook a meal from scratch, make bonds of brotherhood and break the same, work until the job is done.” – Vinh, half in drunken exposition, half in sleepless revelation

i think my father (not to mention my mother, whose presence is ever present) has gotten me pretty far along both sets of criteria… and i guess the criterion that’s not mentioned in either, but has to be understood for either set to work, is that a parent must be able to give their child the ability, intellectual, psychological and physical to pursue the other criteria and make criteria of their own.

to end…

life is a making mistakes and learning from them so you can make new ones.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.