Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Never Judge a Book.....

By it's cover, especially if the cover is understated, or plain old boring.

The most dangerous man I ever knew was a friend of my first wife. He was short, smiled all the time and talked to his wife in baby voices and constantly kissed her and mushed over her. He was in shape, but looked too "done" to be truly straight. He was blonde, and for all the world looked and acted like a gay aerobics instructor. You know the type. Most guys who did not know him would look at him and think, "pussy".

He was also a Navy Seal. Not just any Seal, but Seal Team Six and some other group that was so secret that we could only guess at what it did. His times away tracked the major combat events of the 80's. His life was parachuting into crazy situations and killing people. He made a career out of it.

I am glad I was always polite to him.

It is hard to know a person, any person, no matter how hard you try. And we wonder about the game we call love.

Tonight is mostly a series of random thoughts and observations. The Fiancee and I hit the gym, always a good thing. After dinner I helped honorable number one son to navigate the arcane labyrinth that is the California DMV. Generally all is right with the world. Today, I spent the work day in geek space, a rare place as I don't usually get the time to do engineering any more. Sometime this week I am going to figure out how to post links to favorite blogs on a "blogs I read" section as well as in the text. Earlier today I scooted over to The Hot Librarian and read a few of her old posts...she had me in stiches.

So far my adventure in blog space has led me to the sex/relationship zone and the political zone. The relationship zone seems to have a lot of people that are in the middle of some interesting stuff, real page turners on the nature of affairs, divorce, the implications of long term marriages and internet dating. Of course, there is enough erotic content to fill Hefner's library with words that would infect a Masonic lodge with erections, a rare experience for them indeed. I have to believe that, at the least, paperback sales are down over these past years, Why pay for fake when you get real for free.

I know from first hand that there is a therapeutic value to this, my own recent set of posts are a case in point. I had a story to tell, one that needed telling and needed reading. This turned out to be the perfect venue. Having readers, if only a few, and their comments, made the experience ten times more valuable than just putting it in a journal. Therapists need to take note, blog is a great tool.

The political guys are fascinating, but a bit more suspect. I trust reading about people's life experiences more than I trust posters facts. Journalism is a discipline that seeks the truth. Opinions follow the old anal analogy, for the most part. Still, all life is politics and all politics are viewpoints, and all viewpoints are, in the end, opinions.

Is this why all politicians are assholes?

Then again, I have to allow for the possiblility that I am just as full of shit as the rest. It is usually good to have a healthy appreciation for your own error factor. As they say in the Venture Capital world, it is ok to brew the Kool Aid, just don't start drinking it yourself.

In all human discourse, we judge a lot by first impressions. We all know that, know the dangers, and yet still do it. Our first impression of a person is the one that stays with us, informs all other observations that we have about that person. As time goes on, we adjust that opinion based on our experience of them and in the context of the experiences we share with them. My opinion of my Ex is part first impression, part learning about that person.

But it is also a large part the shared experiences that we have. I will forever judge her by the way she treated me. Would my judgment be different if she had treated, say, my co-worker that way, and I were just an observer?

Maybe in the end we never really know a person, any person, very well at all. No matter how well we think we know them, there are things that they keep hidden and filters that we create around them based on what they did with or to us. Both conspire to guarantee that our view is at best a projection, a two dimentional shadow of a three dimentional person.

We even have filters that are the remains of previous experiences with completely different people, yet we insist on applying today. These are the most insidious, old tapes, like zombies, no longer with the quick, but refusing to join the dead. They bang around, brainless monsters creating havoc and mayhem, existing only to eat the living, without sense or reason.

So even if people bared all to us, showed us their inner selves with candor and courage, would we even see it through the filters?

Very hard, when the filters are so often wrapped up in our own self defense mechanisms.

Thus the central problem of finding love, love that lasts and fills us.

We are like people in the dark, holding lamps covered with shades, each of us wearing sunglasses.

Wondering why we cannot find the light.

To find the fiancee, I had to leave the shades and glasses at the door.




2 Comments:

Blogger New Girl said...

And lucky her that you did. Well-lucky you too.

9:20 AM  
Blogger Kalleigh Hathaway said...

Maurice, I've been following but not commenting. It seems more a story you need to tell and release rather than want feedback on. But you have strengthened my convictions that everything we go through, while it may seem senseless at the time, conditions us for what's to come. I'm recognizing qualities in people I'm meeting which I may have totally overlooked if not for other more dubious relationships in my recent past. I guess all our goals might be to, on our deathbeds, be jigsaw puzzles with no pieces missing or out of place.

11:43 AM  

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