DUH

I realized the other night that I didn't create myself.

If you're my age, you have probably just uttered an inner "duh."

When I was in fifth grade, I hated people saying "duh," so I looked up its meaning somewhere, and found that it translated in Hawaiian to 'goldfish.'

I have a feeling that if I go right now to dictionary.com I will discover this is not so.

That's why I'm not going.

I mean, sometimes I don't want to know everything.

I just wrote the above line, but now I want to disagree with it. Because I don't believe that 'ignorance is bliss.' Or, I believe it can be true, but morally I would assert that true bliss encompasses knowledge of the truth, good and bad, and that the happiness of the sugar-coated house on the hill is either empty or hiding a murderous witch.

Speaking of witches, today was the second time in a week that I remembered how Fena met me and thought I was a witch. I am not a witch. I am not good with recipes.

Speaking of fairytales, I dreamt the other night about a fairytale in which a woman poisons her husband; but halfway through, the actors in the dream morphed into me and my mother, and she found out I'd been poisoning her, and I lied and said it was just some herbs to help her with her guilt and grief. Then I realized I didn't want her to die, and I couldn't believe I had been trying to do her in.

Maybe I'm just lazy. All this 2.0 interactivity really weighs me down. I don't always want to comment, contribute, and tag. Sometimes I just want to passively read a damn article and be done with it.

I certainly have a cantankerous streak; I owe it to my father, whom I wanted to emulate so badly when I was a young child that I dreamed of growing a beard and reading leather-bound volumes and a smoking jacket. I wanted to be a wise old man when I grew up. I didn't realize for the longest time that this was impossible unless I did drag - recreated myself as a man.

When I say I didn't create myself, although it seems obvious, I feel my brain sheds a layer of dead skin, something clarifies and lifts away (like a goddamn biore commercial).

It's not that I believe in a creator-deity. But I think it's important to make sure I don't claim a founding ownership over myself. I came from other humans, who came from this earth. I am a circumstance of this universe, a happening of this world; I am not my own, but I belong to this star system, I am a piece of the large moss and ice-covered pie that is this globe spinning under the whipped cream of the milky way.

If I considered myself the product of a creator-diety, a god, I would not only a) construct my identity around the idea of that god, but I would also b) offer my loyalties to this god.

But if I consider myself a product of this planet, my flesh is made of mud and my responsibility lies with its continuation.

As I felt the inklings of this thought tickling, I watched the brash autumn sunlight harassing the reddening tops of some tall oaks, and I felt a sense of honor that the trees and I share the same parentage, the same situation, that of finding ourselves alive, not of our own volition, but here, without any point necessary, but with plenty of beauty to apprehend.

Which is why I like to imagine goldfish anytime I can.