Failure and Recovery

I keep mentioning what a screw-up I am, which seems weird since this Slog makes me appear wisely on-target. Which, of course, is one of the reasons I do it. I sop up that artificially induced image of clarity and composure. I feed off of it like a retired actress peering at her old promotional glossies.

I've explained the trick many times (and even shot a video once). Consider the all-powerful Wizard of Oz - a masterful parable about art and artists - who was actually powered by a hiding fraught little nebbish. I like to note that Edison's "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration" oughtn't conjure up wild-eyed fanatics banging hammers in garages in the middle of the night. It's about fraught little nebbishes blithely but indefatigably putting out. The Colorado River, etcher of the Grand Canyon, is just some shitty little river. The best among us are shitty little rivers. Do not judge me by my works! The work is the juice; me, I am just the raisin.

This posting's about me at my lowest. But also the subsequent redeeming recovery (redemption is the perennial desperate target of the error-prone).

Last year a friend sent this:

Well I have not had an easy time
4 months ago I wound be in a mental hospital then a rehab now I’m on heavy
Medicine everyday
Trying hard to keep interested in my life
I flipped my lid

I responded poorly. I cooked up 500 words of gurgling mind food, my eager attempt to help expand his perspective beyond the pinpoint I could feel him occupying. I did this via large blocks of intellectual text and terribly clever insights. I spent hours laboring over it, giving it everything I could, and the result was actually a near-masterpiece, I see upon rereading. But, of course, he couldn't possibly take in a word of it. Someone in that predicament can't parse windy clever explanations. The last thing they need is vast blocks of sweeping text!

Perspective needs to be reasonably expansive to begin with to tackle clever concepts. So it came off as confusing verbiage, blah-blah-blah, talking way over his head, to boot. He's not a conceptually pliant person, even on his best days. Jesus, what was I thinking?? These are the deranged failures that keep me up at night (this is also why I'd make a poor Messiah, even though I have some of the basic skills).

However, fwiw, I do have an explanation...which is, itself, smugly clever and conceptual, so fuck me. I usually put it in dialog form:

Question: What does a ballerina do when she needs to cross a raging river but there's no boat in sight?
Anwer: She dances.

I was dancing as hard as I could for my friend. But that's hardly an excuse, as I am, alas, actually versatile. Big blocks of clever text are not the only tool in my belt. I should have tinkered less with the execution and more with the overall approach. I got stuck in the former, like a blithering idiot.

He, quite understandably, didn't talk to me for a year. But then he sent this:

After a couple of nightmare years and
Now a divorce
I’m hoping a new start will turn things around
So I'm moving across the country.

Here's what I wrote back. Just this:

Every moment starts fresh.

This, too, was met with silence. But it was a very different silence. And then he started a dialog with me about some other stuff. And he sounds so much better. Like his old self. And, as always with reframings, he didn't seem to recognize what hit him. I'm pretty sure he doesn't even recall my email. Which is fine...even optimal. Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.