August 2021
I’m not playing coy in not noting the date. But I am aiming to convey a sense of indeterminacy. It is August, of that I am certain. Yet the actual date itself seems to not matter much at all.
It’s tempting, right about here, to adopt the tone of a self-help guru in the moment before they experienced their great personal breakthrough. That sort of requires a breakthrough, though, and what more can be said of ennui? Believe me, there’s little satisfaction in dissatisfaction.
Funnily enough, while I have my moody moments (more correctly, many moody moments, according to Mrs. AHC) I’m not generally dissatisfied. I’m pretty certain that in the great lottery of human existence I’m in the winner’s circle. Am I so petty as to be jealous of those folks who have scrambled to the pinnacle? And if I’ve correctly identified myself as possessing one of the less noble emotions, should I find satisfaction in recognizing such an unseemly, even unsatisfactory, state?
Paragraphs like that last one probably lie behind an observation made by my high school lab partner: it’s easier for smarter people to end up unhappy.
That wasn’t a welcome contribution back in the day, and I probably feel about it now the way our friends–a majority of whom were, at the time, bound for the blue-collar ranks–may have then. It’s self-aggrandizing in an unpalatable way.
I like to think I do the work without cutting too many corners. I recognize real scholarship and talent when I see it. In more honest moments I can admit I possess a limited talent for verbal mimicry but lack any true capacity for insight. And what I’m truly deficient in, and so despise in many others, is the confidence that any of that matters as long as the talent, however modest, can be leveraged to ensure one’s betterment.
This is what happens when the loves that are really distractions–the music, the reading–stop working and seem burdens. Even old standby tactics, like starting another book so the pressure of the unread stack will force completion, stop working.
The only finality I find these days is in crossword puzzles. You start. You fill-in. You correct. And at the last you get a banner that says ‘Finished’ and notice of the time it took you to be a smarty-pants.
Maybe that’s going to have to pass for satisfaction for a while.
An Honest Con 