goodness/you in this light

How do you measure goodness?

On the fridge, a bag of very, very tiny measuring spoons hang in a plastic bag pinned against the chalky white texture of the door via a circular magnet. The spoons are so small that they look like straws. Even smaller. It's a wonder how such a thing could hold or carry anything.

How do you measure goodness?

Worth is innately tied to our work. If you don't work, you aren't deserving. This is a mantra, the mantra, what we are couched in from day one. Help those who will help themselves. How can someone love you if you don't love yourself. It absolves us of all collective badness. You are your own person. This community is not mine.

How do you measure goodness?

Find someone you trust and, as a social experiment someday, ask them to define "work." In my experience, you will soon have someone tripping over their own conditional statements. Work is often the job, that is the first start, it's what we have to do to survive. Most people will start to expand - housework is work (with many caveats, usually from men), but before you know it, there becomes a breakdown. Homework is necessary, not work. It is not "labor hours." But then labor hours are just our job, and our house, our hygiene, these are not our job in a strict sense, but they can be. You can get turned away from a job interview because your clothes are too wrinkled, your hair not combed, your fingernails dirty. And before you know it, the common argument - the common attempt to define work -- breaks down. Writing is work if it's for your job, if you receive money for it, but outside of work? It is a hobby. It is a creative outlet. The nature of the work is not changed in any material way. Housework isn't real work. Homework isn't real work. Flossing your teeth every day isn't real work. Before you know it, the stay at home mom doesn't do any work. She has no goodness. She is not worthy.

How do you measure goodness?

A man comes out of a haircut with a new hairdresser drenched in sweat and nervous to have suggested a change. For years it was the same haircut, at the same person, disappointed each time with the results but knowing that hair would grow back. The new haircut was better. There are changes, ideas, but the man felt better coming out, minus the shirt now feeling like it had been dipped in a tub. Discomfort revisited and overcome. The only reason he went was because his fiancée was there with him, a guide, a comfort in a sphere considered so anxious the man would have not done it without her. Some light. It was such a small thing made big by anxiety, by fears, by a brain sometimes out of control, careening down the tracks. Someone was there to help it along.

How do you measure goodness?

Most billionaires have given money to charity, many of them large amount. As a percentage of their wealth though, they give very little. And as they run roughshed over the environment and labor, people debate if they have bought enough credit to do so. The donations pay for the badness. The capital revenues are work, so they are worthy. Work has been defined. Goodness has been measured in dollars. The stay at home mom is not worthy, again.

How do you measure goodness?

My parents defined goodness as a 4.0 with no exceptions, as good performance in sports with no exceptions. Anything less was badness, was a flaw needing to be yelled out, scrubbed out, like the cleanliness we were coached on from day one of our existence as kids (me and my sister). We were a simulacrum, or an attempt at one. Because it all made sense, we've all heard it. Good grades, good job, now worthy. Goodness attained.

How do you measure goodness?

We can't define work, we can't define worth, we can't measure goodness. The spoons are too small for me to handle. Try as I might, the powder escapes. Try as I might, I can't estimate the creek in the park. Try as I might, I can't measure the time I have spent measuring the time I have spent. We know bad when we see it, we toss and turn over consumption and friendship. Goodbye to John, he dropped the n word. Goodbye to Chris, he was a bully.

How do you measure goodness?

There is very little I, personally, have contributed to this world. I have not, alas, made a billion dollar donation, canvassed for people's rights, or dedicated my entire life to the soul pursuit of ethical goodness after I lost 3 years of sleep over agonizing about a friend's tacky boots.

How do you measure goodness?

Perhaps I fit inside the spoon. Perhaps the people who try their hardest to be there for me are the goodness, and that's all I can offer myself. Perhaps that's good enough, for me, for them, for all of us. Perhaps it's not. In the time you were reading this, someone overdosed and died. Someone died in a war. What goodness was available is now lost.

How do you measure goodness?

I skim this post and roll my eyes, mostly. I'm not fond of much of my writing, but this feels, unambiguously, like my high school self in a way. Vacuous and poorly formed. Not enough distance, not enough deference to elaborate sentence schemes and self-deprecation. Nothing really intelligent or revelatory or noteworthy. Killer Mike said prepare to be average. Can that be measured? It is my first post in over a month. I can not measure any goodness here. Just a void.

How do you measure goodness?

The spoons hang still on the fridge. A small webpage on a college website updates my total accumulated credit hours by 4. A check arrives in the mail connotating a reimbursement of taxes paid. The worth is unambiguous. I have no idea what it means.

-End 

Guest Post

This post is a guest post from my soon to be wife because I refused to write a blog post and instead made dinner.

Our relationship with food is tenuous, it sustains us but ultimately distracts us. Right now there is hemming and hawing over the fact that food is necessary. The kitchen harbors a pacing man, listing the ingredients to a dish we will never finish. He hums along to hozier, he pulls the asparagus from a vase- in short, he is distracting himself, distancing himself from some further notion. He would love for this to be a simple night, a restful night. He would love for this to be a productive night. He cannot decide, and decides not to decide. He wishes there were someone else to make this decision. He won't accept the decision when it comes.

Days are like meals- overfull, necessary, and tedious. We drizzle them in fat, oil, sugar, and heat, we watch them sear, applaud ourselves the little victories. We still fall asleep, overfull, overworked, overtired. We still fall, hunger full of empty notions.

The cabinets are slamming, falling against the cheap 70's style grain. The drawers are shifting, the water running. We are all noise, no sight. We are all days, no nights.

break or broken

the best writing you ever did was after taking a multiyear break. no blogging, no fiction, nothing. you came back with ideas and motivation and in 2 years punched out dozens of stories and hundreds of blog posts.

your mind tells you it was a waste. time in your 20s, wasted. the writing isn't good enough, doesn't matter, anyways. no stories published, blog posts old and forgotten, some deleted out of poor quality or revealing info, who knows.

you squint and realize you haven't written fiction in years. you dream of a scifi novel, or even a melancholy short story. your blog is its quietest in 4 years. a break was good last time. but now you're 30. everything decays now. life is busier now. you're not getting better, not learning, so why not keep trying. write nothing, force ideas, stare at a screen. was the break important? was the writing even better when you came back? do you tell yourself that to justify abandoning your lifelong dream? you wrote before about how it's best to abandon it when you're young and won't be disappointed that it doesn't come true later on. you're still drawn to the screen, the black text on white background, the idea that maybe today it'll be different. it never is.

all at once/make it last

it's not uncommon to hear someone grapple with the difficulty of wanting to eat a good meal all at once, to completely entirely indulge, and yet want to draw it out and make it last. both have cons intrinsic to food; eating too fast is a quick route to physical discomfort, while at a certain point, too slow can cause the quality to degrade say, via, a cooling temperature or slow change in texture from when something first hits the plate. 

this is just food though, and while it's the most common application of said conundrum, it is far from the only. there's a desire to have everything and nothing, all at once and make it last. to live an entire life with the person you love right here and now, have it all and feel it all and taste it all, and yet a desire to drag it out, to not blast off this rocky vestibule and into the vast nothingness of death. and it's not even entirely something so profound. it presents itself in slightly different ways and different sectors but with the same sort of conundrum. the tears shed by emma on her last day at the high school newspaper were similar; a sense of finality, closing, the end of one stop when all she would talk about was how excited she was about college, and then it was here, it was now, and she was crushed. we talk about plowing through college to avoid debt and time and study and homework and yet the end feels like an impenetrable, unknowable object, waiting with just another cycle of future excitement and sad closing. we want it all at once; the degree, the knowledge, the experiences, the nervous makeouts, and none of it all at once, the closure, the ending, the job. we want the taste but not the bloating, the sunsets but not the chores, the love and warmth but not the separation caused by the likes of work or family. maybe that's the difficulty. it's not whether we eat the meal all at once or overtime. it's that every option comes with a tradeoff we don't want, a repercussion we wish to trade in for something else. and as you get older, more and more of these become a personal choice you have control over, and not a parent, or teacher, or peer. maybe we're all stuck staring down at the plate not having made up our minds. what would you like for dinner? i don't know.

1 year is 3 decades

there's no way to put anything other than the end as the end. there are no postscripts or epilogues that can continue ad infinitum. there is always a last word, a last period, a last page.

for almost 30 years each day that was supposed to celebrate a beginning felt a little bit more like celebrating an end. and it wasn't a good end. it wasn't a heartwarming conclusion where someone walks off into the sunset, or vanquishes the enemy, or learns, laughs, loves. it was just an end to nothing. a tiny, barely luminescent flame finally extinguished.

but i suppose, like all things, environments can change. what for 20-odd years was one story was replaced by another. a new narrative, a new cover, a new ending. the ending isn't soon now, it's  not a cold, grey sunday in february of 2019. but that's where it began. it wasn't a sunday, but it was cold, and it was grey, and that didn't matter. maybe it never did.

she told me that i wasn't turning 30. that i was really only one. that what had happened was a life i no longer lived, a person i slowly shed. and she was right. i was so fixated on the story being the same, on the end being plotted out in outlines and notes and mental constructions, that i didn't realize maybe it could change, maybe there would be an epilogue, maybe the epilogue would be longer than the story, maybe there was a sequel, maybe there was just more, more, more.

because someone cares now. and maybe i don't, fully, maybe i will never quite view my body as a sanctuary, or temple, or something to protect and cherish. but someone else does. and as she whisked you away from place to place, feeling to feeling, smile to smile, on a day i knew, knew, knew would be my last, no intrusive thoughts entered. just the warm water on my skin of a swimming pool, the sound of my favorite musical, the taste of her lips on mine, and her smile, so bright it showed the rest of the story for me, lighting the way, piercing whatever grey nightmare a michigan winter had thrust on us.