...lies about the truth i tell myself...
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
-Thomas A. Edison-
I had an opportunity the other day. Or so somebody told me. It is easy to embrace a dream. A belief. To call belief faith. To call faith truth. To truly believe in whatever I tell myself.
Much harder is the truth. It turns out the opportunity was a story. Someone told me something, and I believed them. What they told me was their truth for that moment, or so I believed.
I am being vague and obtuse not for play or game, but because the abstraction is what is real for me. Not all actions are lonely, but opportunity is.
I need to briefly detail four moments in 24 hours none of which formally connect beyond the way they chewed my fingernails. The first was a memory.
A man I know introduced himself by asking me to help him build something with a stranger. He made a slight investment in my art. Months later he quit investing. He built the thing. He built it twice. He never asked for my help again.
I see him phantom on the peripheral. I know him for phony reasons. The truth is I dreamt him. All the unreal ways he made me don’t make me anything.
The truth is I phantom. I phantomsize about him. Every day I am closer to not knowing him at all. That is dreamy.
There is a gaslight in feigned interest. Every apply now on the internet tastes like it. My friend is changing their work, shifting industries, attempting to do their dream. A year and a half after leaving their temporary job they got their most recent rejection. The role they want to serve is not for them. This was shared with me as a crushing defeat. Loss number 80 in an 80 game season.
Palpably painful but maybe not as meaningful as I think it is. The shrug on their grimace smells like cold chocolate hops, stout on their 9 o’clock shadow. I see what they did not gain. I see what they lost. The adage is opportunity is what we make of it. So too what it makes of us. Opportunity is the dead elephant in the room. What to make of so much grey.
“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.”
-Mark Twain-
A woman I know survives trauma with prayer. She shares prayer with all whom can take it. She pilgrimages to the apparation site of Mary. There our prayers can be answered in any form including material. What stands is a church untouched by the fires which burnt all around it some past day.
It is the month of Mary and our mothers. Mary queen of heaven. Ask and she shall deliver. It initially feels selfish to request anything, isn’t the point of catholicism confirming my guilt? Well I am guilty of that selfishness as well.
I request she take my fear. Who knows what she will give me. I let my jobless friend request whatever he needs and ignore the message as he types it from my telephone. I think I made the best of these opportunities.
Later (though everything might happen all at once) I clamber amongst the sea of tense witnesses. Eyeballs transfixed on delayed reality some thousands of miles away from other material realities. This is really the worst way to write about basketball.
I sense the grog and the tension. Every whine and cheer is a comforting scratchy tickle. The bartender stares at a man and asks him if he needs anything. He doesn’t hear her. She asks again, compassionate friendliness like mascara, honest and tangible in the din.
I point out the transaction, words unheard and stored in my mind bank. It is one distraction too far. The man prefers not to have heard me, or for me to have heard her. Inserting oneself in the niceities of others might not be very nice. I don’t want to placate the politeness, just poke at all the pretend in play.
The balls were falling the right way that night, like pier netted herring, or a proper bull stud. As I write this stupid line a childish rhodesian ridgeback bites my elder intact vizsla mutt on the neck. I laugh in the memory of the agony of the memory I was remembering. Reality watches. I use this opportunity to tell you about it. This is really the worst way to write about basketball.
I poorly tell these four anecdotes as a means to understand better. I am not what I am without. What better a moment than this very moment to let all that isn’t be isn’t.
My initial feelings, directly after these transactions, was some sword-like mix of protection through the offer of painful potential. I wanted to hurt with my words. I now feel like mocking them instead. I originally dedicated this piece to the very last liar. Maybe I’ll instead give cheers to opportunity itself.
It is clear who deserves the dedication. Isn’t it?
“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”
-Hippocrates-
…thanks to for your feedback, support, and willingness to try and stop me from telling terrible dad jokes to a captured audience every Monday and Friday morning…thanks to for talking words with me…and supreme thanks as always to any of you who make it this far…spending time with you rules…i appreciate the opportunity…
I f*ing love your photography.
"I laugh in the memory of the agony of the memory I was remembering." Only one person on the planet can write like this. Beautiful art as always, both the writing and the photos. Be good, or as you have demonstrated, be good at it, my brother.