The taste of love is like the smell of coffee. Yes, it smells better than it tastes, but the scent is so infectious that you want nothing more than to place it upon your tongue at the slightest whiff, oblivious to the inevitable disappointment.

However, that disappointment alone is not enough to push us away; no, we will be back for a second cup, because coffee gives you energy, it gives you life! As people do, in love. A kind of life that makes you forget about your initial disappointment.

But, when the energy fades away, the only memory that keeps you coming back for another coffee is the smell floating through the shop the next day—it is revitalizing and once again your lips beg to taste it.

One should cherish those moments in which you can enjoy the scent but can’t afford another cup, for nothing quite poisons the smell of coffee like its bitter, bitter taste.

while inefficient, vitality saves our ship

Life happens in chapters. You don't always know how long the chapter is going to be, but you read on because it is the best book you own and you can never tell for certain what's going to happen in the next few pages.

Everyone has a story that would play out splendidly in fiction--full of the realest of the real. Drama, comedy, conflict, resolution, tears, laughter, friendship, enmity, love and hate. Some people believe that there are stories from their lives that should never be told, usually to protect themselves or those they care about from those who may potentially read it. However, I think so few of these stories actually get told that it would be a privilege to be able to regale one in its entirety to someone who would listen, regardless of the kind of dirt contained within. Of course, as in the re-telling of any tale, the words are never as complete and as true as they were on the pages from whence they came--the pages that comprise the story of your life.

But is it even reasonable to draw comparisons between a paperback work of fiction and the real world? Does life really happen in chapters, or am I deluding myself in an effort to help better define my perpetually undefined life? I'm not sure the real world should be presented in vague riddles and analogous metaphors. I'm not sure people take it seriously. Some can (I know I can, at least), but more and more I get the impression that if you tried to explain a splitting headache to someone by referencing, oh say, the sensation of being a beer bottle when someone tries to open it with the hard end of a lighter instead of a proper bottle opener....well, I just think that most people would find that confusing and miss the point. When really, all you wanted was a sincere, "I know what you mean."

For a long time, I've been the only one in charge of defining things in my own head. This means that nobody but me can question whether or not what I am thinking and how I am operating is right or wrong. My friends that once played a big part in influencing the conclusions I would come to are not as disenchanted and cynical as I have become and I suppose that's a big part of the reason that they don't offer much support in trying to fix that anymore. It's hard to help someone if you've already gotten over the problems that they are having, especially if you've already given them the advice that worked for you and it ended up having no effect whatsoever (or leaving them even more depressed)--people are different, imagine that. At that point, your friend's problem is now their problem, not yours and that's when you begin to drift out of close contact on the level of emotional support.

That's what happened to me: my friends got better, I didn't and now they don't know to help me because I've been so fucked up for so long. It probably sounds like I'm coming off a little steamed about this, but I really don't hold it against anyone. Above all things, I am glad that my friends are mostly okay
and that the people I care about are NOT in my position. Sacrificing the emotional support of my friends for their emotional well-being seems like a fair trade-off to me. The bane of an altruist. A long time ago, when we were somewhat dependent on one another to find happiness, only one of us would have to succeed for me to reap the rewards. To see my friends happy was enough to make me happy and achieving that was my primary goal in life back then. Make it so that the people whom you care for find happiness, and ye shall find nirvana.

I don't know what happened then. I suppose love mucked it all up. My simple plan for finding perpetual bliss got its ass kicked by a more powerful emotion and it all became about making one person happy, even if it meant making the people you had cared for most suffer a little. The rewards of love are grand--worth more than I ever could've dreamed of achieving as hormonal roller coaster of a teenager amongst my friends. And worth the sacrifice, however selfish it may seem to devote all your care to someone else over your friends and family. I don't believe everyone finds that, but I don't want to pretend to be the expert either. I think that it is widely understood what love "is" and what it's like to be in love, but if you don't understand what a fool you would be to turn it away in favour of some personal ambition, then it has never truly been yours to behold. If you've had it and then lost it, the prospect of finding it again becomes all that you live for and the waiting becomes difficult and emotionally erosive over time. The only question that remains is how long you can survive empty and how long you can endure the burden of loneliness before you become too embittered to be loved, no matter how much you want it. Need it.

"What nourishes me also destroys me."

wars in vanity, sweet or sour

It seems like the “post-modern” world, such that it is, spends a great deal of time trying to define things that are well beyond the scope of definition. In fact, the post-modernist movement in its purist form is nothing more than bureaucracy from a philosophical point of view, as it is founded on the principle of studying the effects of an intellectual movement while simultaneously purporting to be one. I’m all for the pursuit of knowledge and clarity, but like many deconstructivist architects, I don’t really understand why you can’t build a weird-looking building without being labeled a deconstructivist by some pompous scholar of postmodern thought. Similarly, you should be able to have your opinions heard by others as your opinions and not the opinions of a postmodernist movement or some other body of nameless speakers; or to put it simply: just because you’re a grain of sand doesn’t mean you came from the beach.

As a realist, I have a hard time seeing any advantages or disadvantages to picking apart the human brain for the purposes of being able to explain it to someone else on paper down the road. This is because I’m about people and the effect that our work has on people. There’s no reason to invest more effort into something than you will gain in the end, but quite often, the end objective is either ambiguously defined or abstract in nature. You see this a lot in community services and public opinion when a large group of people will band together with some absurd goal in mind like “cleaning up the streets” or “cracking down on homelessness.” With goals that cover such a broad spectrum of variables, you inevitably require more people to administer them and the more people that get involved with any one project, the more you end up losing sight of the original goal. Of course, if the goal is unattainable from the git-go, losing sight of it isn’t really the issue and we’ve engaged in the ultimate futile exercise of keeping masses of people extremely busy for little to no gain except the satisfaction and pride they get from their own work. This applies to the study of philosophical movements quite readily too, but it is rarely studied (probably to avoid perpetuating the bureaucracy; the last thing we need is some guy writing an analysis of the effects of the effects of a movement on another movement).

Like I said, I’m a realist, so with everything in life, I like to see how it affects people on a personal level. I’m not about to sit back and write about how “people” behave and how they change as a group because I know very well that we are all individuals and although there are noticeable behavioural trends to be seen in numbers, announcing them and discussing them doesn’t really have any bearing on how we behave as individuals. I could draw up a pretty little line graph illustrating the decline in religious participation around the world over the last hundred years, but that doesn’t mean that a religious individual is any less faithful than he would have been otherwise.

For instance, there are legions of people devoted to studying postmodernism and debating its cultural applications, definitions and related concepts. When any one of those people wakes up in the morning, odds are they still brush their teeth, still tie their shoelaces, still lock their doors when they leave home and have generic introspective thoughts about all of these activities that all the postmodernist study in the world can’t get rid of. In fact, to refer back to the bureaucratic process, it may very well slow down tangible productivity in your day by spending a lot of time and energy on virtually nothing, overthinking the behaviour of others in a postmodern context and making decisions based on vague trends in thought process that other parties are not even privy to and quite frankly, don’t want to be.

The problem is that I am also an altruist, and to be altruistic and realistic at the same time is thankless work; whoever said that you only get what you give probably ended up getting a lot more than they actually deserved and didn’t realize how lucky they really were. Worse yet, I’m an altruist and a realist who works within the framework of a bureaucracy every day and it forces me to de-value nearly all of my work-related input and ride above the job, focusing instead on how the end result benefits me in my personal life. Don’t get me wrong, I do get a certain sense of job satisfaction out of completing the occasional project but it’s my nature as a realist that makes me feel a little bit deflated every time because I know for certain that there is little to no effect on individual people despite all the time I’ve put into it. Those that I work with seem to have been a little washed out by the red tape and they’ll see the completion of the project as the goal, whereas I’m stuck thinking that the “goal” is really to improve something for people—to make something better in the lives of those I work with, ya know.

So sure, you can draft a huge blueprint to renovate your kitchen and the presentation will be on beautiful new reams of paper with bulletproof organizational plans and reference material galore; but until you get to make a sandwich on your new countertop space some summer afternoon, I don’t believe the project is done. For me, my portion of the work is finished long before you even slice the bread and without actually seeing an end result (or more often than not having good reason to believe that there is no end result), the effect is erosive—it does something to you and I can’t exactly explain what it is, but this nameless sensation is really the feature subject of this article.

I was talking to my grandmother a little while back and she explained the same sensation to me in a different context, but I understood right away. She explained that while she was still in the work force, she paid into the federal unemployment insurance fund for 35 years, had a lot of hard times, moved to a province that had considerably fewer jobs available with the intent of collecting unemployment for some time, but was told that she was not eligible. There are reasons for this on paper and rules in place governing who can and cannot collect unemployment based on where you live, but whether what she was doing was right or wrong is not the issue; it’s the principle of the thing, and she said exactly what I said: “It does something to you.” When you’re so honest for so long and spend 35 years paying into an unemployment fund, never ever collecting from it and then being told that you’re not allowed because you moved to a have-not province, it just leaves you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Meanwhile, there are people who are self-employed or who have “arrangements” with their paying authority who will work for 10 months and then collect unemployment for the other 2 every single year. So who’s the real winner here?

She also cited another experience from a welfare office several decades ago after her husband had transformed into an alcoholic of home-breaking proportions but she didn’t nearly have the means to leave him with four kids in tow. One day, presumably when she realized she had no other choice, my grandmother walked her four kids down to a welfare office and stood in line armed with a resolve to be completely honest about the situation. She basically told the person behind the counter: “Look I’m sorry, we have no food, no money, my husband’s not working and if this doesn’t work, I don’t even know what I’m going to do.” They gave her nothing and she walked her four kids back home, but that’s not the part that is debilitating in the same thankless way that I’ve been describing. The thing is, the very next day, she went back to that very same welfare office, talked to a different clerk and lied: “My husband left me…four kids to take care of…no income…” And they gave her some money.

It just does something to you.

It shattered my grandmother’s reality, I think. When everything that you have been brought up to believe is right and ethically sound just gets mercilessly pissed on in a very real situation, I don’t believe you ever recover completely. She described her stunned and bemused disbelief at getting money for telling a direct lie and being turned away with four kids for telling the truth with a kind of resignation that makes me sad that she has, and maybe never will, live the life that such an incredible person deserves.

I guess this is why I’m an altruist but as the world becomes much more self-involved and independent, it gets harder and harder to convince people of this. Everyone is so suspicious of everyone else’s intentions that it seems like there’s not a soul around who would possibly do something that only benefits someone other than themselves. Is it really so hard to believe that you can gain some personal satisfaction out of helping other people? Is that not selfish enough to be true? What do I have to do to convince the average person that my intentions are sincere?

It’s an uphill climb that my grandmother has been trekking all her life, and I’m right on her heels wearing rollerskates without the foggiest idea of how to make it easier.

walking in very saggy old shoes

What am I doing?

I've always described myself as someone who lives "in the moment" and readily proclaim myself as such without hesitation. I think it carries good logic because most of the people that I meet who are significantly older than I am seem to have a lot of regrets from their youth and a thinly-veiled yearning to be young again whenever I talk to them. By living in the moment, I don't anticipate having this problem. Countless people frown on the notion of "living in the past," but it clearly happens as the future you look forward to steadily shrinks away with time; you simply have less to look at in that direction. For this reason, and others, I support neither living in the past, nor living in the future (oft-considered good and bad advice, respectively), but living in the present.

I don't have a whole lot of experience living in the past so it makes me uneasy to be envied by older people for no reason other than my age. Nevertheless, it happens all the time and I really don't know what to say to them. What I want to say is, "Deal with it, it's the passage of time--it's not my fault I was born on the cusp of Generation Y--it's not my fault that you don't know how to program your cell phone and I do."

But I don't say that because they're not listening. It's easy for me to fall under the false impression that "envy" is the same as "respect" in this situation when they are really two completely different animals. Envy is a self-absorbed niche and when older people who seem to have some underlying issues about being old, their envy of me or people my age seems to blind them to the fact that we are people who have developed individual personalities. Instead, we are overcome by repeat exclamations as to how beautiful we are and glassy-eyed stares that make you feel like the centre of attention, when really, their own memories and their own distant life in the past is the true focus.

Sometimes, I am able to say other things that break this trance. Sometimes, people are listening just enough that they actually process what I'm saying and when that happens, I find I'm much better off at establishing some sort of working relationship with them. I operate much better with words than making impressions and my physical strengths are largely overshadowed by my mental ones. To have that recognized by a total stranger who spent the bulk of the conversation mesmerized by my age rather than my input shows a strength in their character--an ability to read between the lines a little and see that although there is beauty in youth, it doesn't mean that beautiful young people get that beauty from their age alone.

Lately though, I've been questioning my approach. Or rather, I'm questioning the angle at which I am approaching things. This applies to both the traits I consider valuable in others (i.e. that ability to read between the lines) and my mantra of living in the moment. I have to make a run at both of these daily philosophical challenges because they define my conduct but I've hit an interesting road block in my life. Before now (at least in adulthood, for what that's worth), I was pretty convinced that my values were the right ones, my ethical framework was respectable and I was sufficiently kind, caring and generous enough to be considered a great person in the eyes of others. I believed this and stuck to it in spite of the fact that my own personal life seemed to ultimately collapse around me and I was destroying myself from the inside out. When that collapse happened, I retained the values and state of mind that I had established as a happy person because I was so convinced that it was the right approach. It's easy to draw a dotted line between these two items now and say, "Well duh, Randall, you gotta change your approach--look what's happening to you," but even now, I'm not sure they are related.

I first established this confidence in my conduct while overcoming great hardship in the interest of reaping an even greater reward. The effect of actually accomplishing that, defeating the odds and claiming the prize was so potent that the idea of changing my "approach" seemed completely insane. It took a lot of years of frustration to drum up some sort of personal mode of thought that actually works--why waste that when it has proven potential to be so right?

Then again, it hasn't yielded a great deal of good times for many years now, so I begin to question why I'm attached to my approach and whether or not it is indeed the right one after all. It's hard to go from being so very certain of something to having your sense of reality questioned by your own mind. Like discovering that there's no Santa Claus by accident when you're five years old--it's just unsettling. In any case, I have yet to hit this extreme anyway and am only feeling slightly detached from my own behaviour, meticulously picking it apart as an overhead observer. Looking for faults. Finding a few, even.

But what keeps those happy people going? That's what I wonder. Am I doing something wrong by just fluctuating between indifference and malcontent all the time? I thought I had this shit figured out! So, I'm forced to question what it is exactly that I need to change to be happy, without sacrificing what it is that already makes me a good person (...or what I...think? makes me a good person??).

Once again, I tend to live a life of casual spontaneity, cherishing the moment and spending less of my time working to build a brighter future, especially if it makes for a darker present. Like I always say, the present is all you'll ever get to experience; why not make the most of it?

Even so, I've been weighing the pros and cons of living in the future, a concept I readily abandoned without much consideration after having been so thoroughly convinced of the practicality of living in the moment. One might reason that if the present in which you live becomes too dark to live in, you can achieve a happier outlook by dreaming of a better future and spending all of your time and effort trying to build it. Whereas my point of view dictates that most of your time and effort should be spent on building the best out of what you have, with respect to building for the future well enough that you can maintain that routine until death, I guess. Maybe I just never considered it worthwhile to spend 5 or 10 years in complete misery just to achieve a wonderful 40 years afterwards. It seems like it's ridiculous that you can't be happy every year and that somehow there's no way of achieving that. In fact, I know it's ridiculous. I've gone entire years where I was happy every day. If you can do it for consecutive years, I don't see why a whole lifetime is out of the question--you know, scatter in a few bad days every third Autumn or something just to make it real and voila! Bury me a happy man.

Knowing that it's possible makes it harder to achieve happiness by default. It sets the bar. I'm not sure how high I can jump anymore--maybe not high enough. I think maybe instead of leaping for the bar, I'll do some training instead--build some leg strength, some agility--think about the future.

Who wants to live in this moment anyway?