The day I turned 18 I got a tattoo.  It’s a black Sagittarius on the back of my neck, with its arrow pointing up towards two yellow stars, which stand for nothing.  I used to lie and say the tattoo symbolized strength, rebirth, tenacity, the can’t-cut-me-down spirit, and rebellion against a dearth of parental rules that enabled me to get a tattoo in the first place, but in reality the sign means nothing.  The Sagittarius stands for astrological mumbo jumbo and a lack of forethought.  I never liked that tattoo, and I knew so before he was finished being etched into me.

Once he was there, I couldn’t do much besides watch the after-effect.  The tattoo displaced me, thrust me into a limbo of uncertain social standing.

This thing was ugly.  If beauty is naturalness, then hideousness is its absence, I thought.  Some people would agree, but most who become privvy to my Archer’s existence compliment his appearance.  Most compliment his cool factor.  I’m baffled every time.  He means nothing.

Today, I biked the Katy Trail wearing a light, blue tank top that held the cool air around my body.  My hair was sprayed in an up-do.  My neck was bear.  I rode ten miles on the trail before kicking onto residential streets, where I became surrounded by big houses and long driveways that stretched underneath shiny cars, and where drivers stopped when I needed to pass.  I was happy to pass at first, until I paused to wave and for a moment, envisioned myself actually passing the driver, whereupon he would look at me as I sped away.  And the tattoo would glisten in his eyes.  This was an upscale driver, emerging from houses like these.  This was a country-club person — a parent who would give his kid the boot if he ever brought a real tattoo under the roof.

I rolled fast into a lakeside picnic area — seclusion and sanctuary — landing on a bench, pulling out a book and getting used to the voices of a nearby family  as I settled into my spot.

The family was grilling, fighting over hotdogs, hamburgers, when they would eat and when they would fish, dollar-store potato-chip portions and who better catch their damned supper. My book could’ve easily betrayed me for the type of person who would mentally correct their grammar and compare their speech to Mark Twain characters.  But with my back turned to them, the book invisible, the tattoo visible, shouting my identity — or some identity — my thoughts were hidden.  I imagined having escaped some radar system by which they could choose to monitor people who went to parks to read books.  But the tattoo branded me docile, sympathetic to the world of the poorly grammared, by which I intend no indignity but merely want to depict what was what.  But better, tell me what is what.

Of the mentors I can and often make the effort to recall, they admit their shortcomings.  Though I would argue that through my narrow-casted lens their shortcomings are imperceptible, if extant, I realize that of course as human beings and lifeforms their fabrics must indeed have some microscopic holes.

It is for me to watch them point to the holes and then patch them myself.

As their student, I would disserve those who attempt to teach me by failing to act upon their lessons, lessons which by their very useful natures can only have unraveled by the experience of my mentors themselves trying and failing, then learning.

I liken my task to what I interpret Eliot to have often preached: a notion that one’s present endeavors can only — without exception — exist as a continuation of what those before us have done.

This connection between my lessons and Eliot’s theory led me to wonder more in-depthly about how we treat those who came before and who, I suppose necessarily, have left us.

I wonder mostly whether to revere our predecessors is to waste our time, to detract from the present in for a shallow purpose mimicking that which fodders young students’ challenge of the studying of textbook history.  I wondered also, though, if to forget the work of our predecessors — to belittle that they existed, in effect — in favor of focusing (perhaps solipsistically?) on our selves and modern times would be all that horrible.

I concluded yes.  That would be horrible.

To belittle, or rather to fail to revere and honor, the work of those who came before us would be effectively to belittle any endeavors — past, current or future — of our own.  What we do in the course of a day, every day, would mean nothing, for two reasons I can see.

The first reason is that by not studying the work of the deceased, we imply and perhaps admit that what the human body can and does do in a lifetime is not all that important for others in future generations (and by extension, all others, since Baby 1788 = Baby 1888 = Baby 1889 = Baby n).  Thus, what I concluded was that if any single predecessor’s work was not worthy of being honored — if we ourselves do not honor them — then no one following us should bother to remember how we will have spent our days.  If we forget, we consign ourselves to an acceptance — a perhaps fine one — that we shall be forgotten.  We accept to be forgotten by our loved ones and friends (should they not be the same), our peers, our colleagues, the strangers who are somehow related to our lives’ work and even our enemies in whom we’ve inspired (im)personal hatred through the same work.

In short, ignoring our predecessor’s quotidian efforts renders all human life acceptably forgettable.

The second reason I believe in studying the deceased’s work is that their work — whether resuscitated or buried by our thoughts — is nevertheless, irrefutably alive in the world we inhabit.  Their work lives in the skill behind the fabric, design and market-value of the couch on which we rest; in the fiber, bulb, artistry and physics of the lamp by which we read words and people; in the herbal combination, fabrication and cultivation of the tea or coffee on the tabletop; in the building construction in which all these things reside; in that we also reside with those things in those buildings now with others, who are themselves similarly fortuitously placed.

Thus, if we do not acknowledge that every lifeform and minute molecule of matter lie where they do necessarily because of preceding lifeforms and matter, we show stupidity; we fly colors of ignorance vibrantly and willingly.  We essentially prove ourselves unworthy of being anthing but belittled by our own successors.

This conclusion is where I stopped.  I really must get myself off these time-consuming tangential thinkings.

– Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary”

I don’t think I’ll ever have children.

What I say next might be an excuse.  But I don’t feel confident I’ll know how to teach them right from wrong, how to live life correctly, successfully and to the utmost vibrancy.  I wouldn’t feel confident saying, “You’re doing this right,” or, “That’s the way to win life, alright.  Keep it up,” or even, “That’s destructive, and you need to stop.”

Who am I, as another confused human being figuring out existence, to say?

Could anyone ever definitively know how to live life correctly?  I don’t.  You could imagine literally any circumstance — any big or little thing in a day — and know I wouldn’t know the good from bad picking.  (This excludes common-sense questions with theoretically black-and-white choices: to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal, etc.  And they rarely show up so black-and-white in real life anyway.)

Maybe the only thing I’ve ever done certainly correctly is to have generally gotten good grades in school.  But any idiot could know getting good grades is the right thing to do.  You can’t go wrong.  Grades are the only ostensibly irrefutably good thing a kid could strive for; they grade your existence.  They’re like a microcosm of life, and the teacher your God.

A — Paradise

F — Hell

C — a few months in Purgatory

But the grades don’t fulfill anything, not in themselves.

I know a guy who seemingly lived through a morally ambiguous childhood, which lacked a sound portion of guidance in concretely distinguishing between right and wrong.  The irony is, today he looks like a great father, unquestionably great.

So I wonder deeply and often how this person came to be who he is today, since I can’t imagine transforming similarly.  I can’t imagine shifting out of this Questering uncertainty of ethics into a fully confident understanding of them — into a life code so concrete I’d feel confident enough to pass its gift along to another human being.

Of course, this man might have learned right from wrong by observing others, as I sometimes feel I do.  But could teachers, mentors and friends — and the minute lessons we extract from them — possibly replace the guidance of parents?  I won’t rule out the possibility of such a substitution, but I’d absolutely burst in awe if that really were possible.  How bittersweet, depending on the kid, that parents could be so optional.

Regardless, no kids of mine will exist unless I find my own code to live by.  I can’t bequeath a flawed code, and no substitutions will assume chief parental roles for them.

Maybe the potential detriment — and entirely possible prevention thereof — of future generations is best presented in T. S. Eliot’s words.  And since the hour’s late, I’ll assume Eliot did write best and modify his phrasing only slightly:

* This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang

But with the whimpering of our children.

* Thanks, Eliot.  Thanks a lot actually.

If I say “neuroma” enough times, its meaning vanishes, but the second I step off this chair to stroll in blissful ignorance, a very agitated nerve is going to strike me back to reality.

A neuroma is an inflamed nerve in a foot that causes a unique type of pain, which the Internet might tell you feels like walking on pebbles with some discomfort.  Not so.

Imagine a nerve in your foot–any one you use frequently–swelling to the size of, say, a quail egg.  This quail egg feels something like a tumorish lump, with neuroma meaning “tumor” in Greek.

Not to worry; your neuroma is benign.   It’s just inflamed and composed of nervous material as opposed to dull tissue.  Consequently, every step you take is going to feel as if the tip of that nerve is dangling face-down at the ground, poised to absorb the full impact of your step.  You are one unlucky homo sapien.

Step step step.

Expletive! expletive! expletive!

You might feel as if a small impossible troll has infiltrated your foot and started bludgeoning your treasured body parts–cartilage, bone, muscle, etc.

Someone thought to liken this sensation to walking on pebbles.  Now, I’d ask that person if by pebbles he meant stone and by stone, arrowheads.  Because that’s what I’d pick if I had to liken this sensation to walking on anything remotely close to pebbles.

Of course, tomäto tomàto.  His pebble can be my arrow, just as one man’s hill is another man’s mountain.

In any case, I wouldn’t hold anything against the English language should it somehow revenge our population for such negligent, disharmonied application of descriptors.

Not for something or to something, but I was praying for a reason that’s irrelevant to what I’d rather talk about: my hands.  The way my hands rested against my forehead during the prayer is ultimately what drew me out of the prayer, what distracted my thoughts away from contemplating the thanks I was giving.

My hands flatly pressed together–quintessential clap-style for the prayer, like so many.  This isn’t how I normally pray, on the rare, rare occasions I do.  No, normally I cup my hands together, left palm covering right fist.  I do this for two reasons.  One, because I’ve thought this approach looked cool ever since I saw the 3 Ninjas.  And two, because when I was a kid I used to pray the first way, with my hands flatly pressed together, in the way I’d seen my parents do.  Raised a good Catholic–or a Catholic nonetheless–I’d taken to mindlessly imitating the tried traditional poses and rites of my teachers.

Ever since then, whenever I’ve encountered a situation of prayer in college I haven’t been able to clap my hands together in the flat press, so I instead strike the 3 Ninjas cup.  Having escaped and searched for and revisited a few religions, I found the old mindless pose conjures up memories of happily attended brainwashing and incareful, unquestioned acceptance.

But something had my hands in the flat-press while I prayed today.  I tried to figure what this something was.  And I got it!  The flat-press points up.  Whether my hands pointed up to God or a force or deities or anscestors or a mana or trickster, spirit or animal–despite what they pointed up to, they pointed up.  They pointed up where unknown things lie and work, and where energies mingle clandestinely, for good or evil or a purpose unknown itself even.  They pointed up.

I pulled out of my prayer.  I let my hands fall into the cup.  Why up?  What’s so religious, so magical, about what’s up there?  It’s made out of the same basic elements and energy force working its magic on Earth, right?  At least, at the very basis of chemistry and physics this is so, regardless of what supernatural or religious element one adds to that, envisions in his or her UP.  But if what is up there is made of what is down here, why can’t God be right here?  What is so special about up?  Plenty of mysteries and unknowns and unsovled such-and-suches surround the right-here.  We have microcosms in a drop of water and oceans, deep deep oceans, and a liquid core with a solid core in itself.  Of course, we know the cores exist, know indisputably how they function to a certain extent, but I’ve still never seen them.  I still don’t know certain things.  So much not to know exists right here below us, right here within Earth, right here on the surface–I ask again, why must God be up?  Why not right here?

Why can’t He be in People?  I don’t know plenty of things about plenty of people.  They escape me, allude me, love me, make me feel emotions and heighten the ones I already felt, indeed give life to me at all.  As soon as I feel love from others, why that’s why life’s worth living, in my opinion!  To feel and to aid and to make others feel.  So why not here?  Why up there?  Are we so disillusioned with the golden palate for more that the beauty of what’s before us exists untasted?  That’s no existence at all.  That’s inacknowledgement and death.  Have we killed the goodness of the Here?  Why up?  Why not ahead?  I cupped my hands.