[Reflections on a first person testimonial from Thomas Gebremedhin on LitHub.]
Rather than grinding, I’ve been rejecting all my life.
Yet, I’ve been seeking out alternatives to dominant culture throughout my life so I can espouse who else we can be together and what in this world we can create even though it hasn’t existed before. My internal compass guides me towards so many, so much rather than being opposed to what has been, so I don’t expend my energy and my words by only rehashing what’s broken out here. I don’t wax poetic on what I detest.
Earlier this week, a friend shared how someone else (his 40 year old brain couldn’t remember who) said to him, “But does he like you?” “Yeah. I think so,” he replied. I chuckled because he was describing an exchange between two White men.
Just yesterday, I was imagining how I would answer “Are you more of an extrovert or introvert?”
It depends on the people, topics, mood, setting is the nuanced hypothetical because a group of people can enliven me while a different group of people huddled around a flatscreen of a football game on a Thursday night, Friday night, all day Sunday, and Monday night bores me most weeks of a season. Yet, there was one game on a Saturday night in late September that was a fun, surprising group viewing experience. I recall the exuberance of the Lakers vs Celtics followed by Pistons vs Lakers eclipsed by Bulls vs Pistons era. I suppose there could be some joy and camaraderie watching professional sports in the future but I don’t know what league that would be, nor who I’d want to be with. Maybe this, too, is a rejection of a false binary: I could be enthralled by the plutocrats’ boondoggle, the opiate for all genders, but my dislike of professional sports leagues is more incisive than I was in the early 1990s. If there’s meat on a grill, I’ll be hungry and also be enthusiastic about being amongst that group.
I noted my introvertedness recently as I sat in a room with multiple generations of family where most scrolled away on their own smartphones. I don’t know many situations where I’d feel nourished by being in a room with multiple adults, each cloaked and closeted into the amalgamation of apps that populate everybody’s home screens. I’d rather have a box of 64 crayons and stack of papers to draw on, or a competitive game of Cranium, where my nieces and nephew got more combative than I’d seen them be. It was a delightful evening where I got to be a cooler, calmer uncle exuding the sense of “it isn’t whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” I fully absorbed that value from Dad as a teen. Yet, there were times, I became fixated on winning a game, either in an organized league or a pick-up game, when I felt that one opponent or the entire other team was playing dirty or playing in sone uncouth way. That antagonism turned me into my most Competitive C garbagepail archetype.
Later, Gebremedhin describes:
I had to push back against the small-mindedness—the lack of imagination
He’s talking about our multi-issue lives what I’ve been referring to how each of us—what Fritjof Capra described as holons—contains multitudes.
I detest how anxiety is a pollutant expelled by one person onto another, as noxious as carbon dioxide, as anxiety frequently is a distortion, a form of control. And anxiety and habitual ways of controlling others are due to the inability to be creative or patient because the liminal states are a precipice.
Many industries and sectors other than book publishing demonstrate a tendency that Gebremedhin describes as:
Too often, the burden of fixing these ossified corporate and cultural structures falls on us, the ones with the most to lose.
My sense is that I don’t prop up the dead or delay what is dying rather than consider myself as one with the most to lose. I pivot towards death and dying because of what I learn and see about living, and provides me with philosophical epiphanies. With death, I’m curious about death’s dynamics with decay and rot. Curiously, rot can come to a living organism, too. My literary habits and two of my fascinations, one with wordplay and the other being with physical anatomy, get me talking about body parts, discussing how tissues, skeletons, and physical appearances change. In my 20s, my friends noted how I talked about scat more than plenty of others; now, I talk readily about death, which stirs discomfort in others.
Keeping some things alive is a part of culture. The obligation to sustain ways of being, the need to repeat stories, fables, lore, mythology and legacies so that history is lived and understood by repetition.
Reading after midnight, during Kim Kelly’s preferred writing window, I remember to borrow Hua Hsu’s memoir, Stay True, from the library.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 