Category: Personal Essays

Midpoints

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays1 Comment

We mark significant beginnings and ends when we are aware of them. But we frequently aren’t aware, except in retrospect.

Once we are aware that a first time has occurred and a last time is coming, it becomes about what we do with all the times in between. Otherwise we miss the moments themselves, which is all life is comprised of.

My wife and I have been married going on 26 years, and we are currently are on a vacation together in Nashville, Tennessee. A little mental math tells me that we are almost certainly closer to our last such trip together than we are to our first one.

Almost every good and beautiful thing I have in my life traces back to her, and I hope a day never goes by that she doesn’t know that I cherish her and all the moments we get together. Long love is not about putting on a show, it is about showing up.

And she always shows up for me.

Power Fantasies / Power Realities

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal EssaysLeave a comment

(This is a 30 minute timed write, so I am sure I am going to say something wrong. Oh well. – Owen)

If I look around me at the world, both the way it is now and how it was when I was a child, I have to conclude that people want power more than anything else — more than money, more than fame, more than love, and more than safety.

Power, for most people, is the ability to get what you want. We are all born wanting what we want, and that feature of humankind doesn’t fade with age, although we get better at hiding it. We go through adolescence dreaming of a world where we have the power to do or to be what we wish — whether it be social, sexual, physical, or any other type of thing. We may be told by the adults around us that we can be anything we want to be, but most of us hit an age where we know that’s not true. So we fantasize about what having that power would be like: whether through books, movies, music, idolizing online personalities, fantasy, super-hero stories, and so on.

There has been a lot in the news about widespread abuse of power. I was going to add “lately” to that sentence, but a moment’s reflection had me remembering that abuse of power is as old as humanity itself. If I look inward, I can see that many of the bad things I have done in my life came from the fact I had the power to do them, and chose to exercise that power (and to experience the feeling that came with it) over deciding based on either moral or ethical grounds.

In other words: you can have power without abusing it, but you cannot abuse power without having it.

The other things that is hard to escape is how double-minded and self-contradictory much of our thinking around power is. As just one example, everyday popular discourse around sex is hopelessly tangled with weird power dynamics. Popular discussions around sex workers go seamlessly back and forth between seeing these professions as empowering for the people in them to exploitative by nature, and the people who think this way seem unaware of any contradiction. That would seem to be (in part at least) because one of our favorite power dynamics plays is to pretend we are winning arguments online.

Before turning 18, I routinely fantasized about the girls around me, some older and some younger than I was. Upon turning 18, I became aware that sleeping with someone younger than I was at that time was a crime. Since I wasn’t sleeping with anyone, it was kind of a moot point, but had I been more popular with girls than I was there might have been thornier issues. As it was, my appearance and personality did more to keep me out of any potential trouble than any higher considerations might have. I am pretty sure that the “desire” part of my experience was close-to-universal; the “ability” part of my experience varies widely from person-to-person. So many older boys/young men have or had problems to deal with that I didn’t.

When I got to the point where I was sexually active, I had the experience of a young woman I was dating initiating intimacy, only to draw back from it at the point of what would have been consummation. I pulled away because I didn’t want to hurt her. However, I felt terrible and unattractive and less-than because I knew that moment would come for her someday, but she didn’t want it to be me.

She remembers and is grateful to me to this day; I still feel terrible about it. But maybe sex is intrinsically connected to power dynamics.

If you gave the adolescent version of me (or almost anyone else) the power to have what we fantasize about, the world would be in absolute chaos — which it arguably already is, and kind of for that reason. We need boundaries to power, because it is the ultimate cancer: it spreads, but contributes nothing to health of the host organism, which it ultimately kills.

Why I Keep An ‘Unblog’

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays12 Comments

When you care about people, and when you pick up everything they are feeling, even if they’re concealing it, then days surrounded by them are exhausting. Most days, I feel like a musician with a finely tuned ear who has been placed in an echo chamber; some days it almost drives me mad.

From my earliest memories, I was attuned to other people’s emotions; I could always tell who was sad, or angry, even when it wasn’t apparent to anyone else. It’s like I have an antenna that’s only tuned to the emotional frequency; and the music is always playing, and loudly, when I’m around people, like a station I can’t shut off.

People mistake my introversion for people aversion, but that’s not it at all — I love people, they just wear me out. I’ve always been terrible at “small talk” for the same reason: I often feel people are concealing what they’d really like to talk about, and when I say so, they usually tell me what’s really on their mind. I’m glad to do it – I was born to do it – but I can only do it for so long before I need rest.

I have developed virtually every solitary hobby known to man (I read; I play a musical instrument; I write music; I play video games; I go on long drives by myself, and so on, ad infinitum); I studied mathematics and became an actuary as the least emotional occupation I could find; I studied philosophy in an attempt, like the ancient stoics, to pass beyond emotion. Not surprisingly, none of that has worked to in any way change the basic problem, which is: being around people wears me down.

Even though I work as an actuary, I am in a position that requires me to lead and interact with people. I can do it, but I look forward to any spare moments I can siphon off the excess of emotions that dealing with people all day gives me. Which is where we arrive at this blog.

Most of what I write about concerns other people’s feelings: at one time, that was the tag line of one of my now defunct blogs. It may seem to defeat the purpose of a blog if it is not personal, but that is my personality: I am a magnet for other people’s emotions. I can’t explain it, but I know it to be true.

The best blogs I know are all blazing with the lives and emotions of their remarkable authors. It’s hard for me to write about my own life, because my own particular emotions and circumstances are just one among many in my head. I wish I could write a ‘purer’ blog, which was about my life and my feelings only, but that’s not the instrument I was given to play. I will continue to write about every thing I feel, even if most of it is second-hand, and even if it results in my maintaining what is more-or-less an “unblog”.

I appreciate all of you who read my (un)blog, and take time to hit “like” or leave comments. I am more grateful to you than I can say.

—- Owen

On YouTube, People Instantly Regret Things…

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays2 Comments

… which I find seldom happens in real life. In real life, people wallow in and relish their mistakes, their intentional cruelties, and virtually all of their other actions.

I know this, because I have been a people for some number of years. My moral failings are stubbornly persistent.

The frequency of use of certain phrases in clickbait titles, of course, reflects how effective they are. It appears many of us wish people would instantly regret hurting us. We would settle for regret at any point in time, but the instantly part means we get to be around to see it.

I have seldom seen anyone in my life immediately be sorry for hurting me, apart from the people closest to me — and perhaps that’s why they are the people closest to me. My life is awash in regret; I seem to have as many things I wish I hadn’t done as things I’m glad I did.

But I am a “slow to realize” person. Which is another regret.

I am thinking of starting to use more Clickbait devices in my titles. You won’t believe what happens next…

November Sunrise

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays3 Comments

It’s 8:45 am. I’ve been up for 5 hours.

Throughout the sixty-some-odd years that I have been alive, there has been and explosion in what might be called “substitutes”. First, it was things like margarine (substitute butter) and saccharine (substitute sugar), but it rapidly picked up the pace until we find ourselves in a world with substitute society (social media), substitute advisors (artificial intelligence) and even substitute friends and other intimate relationships.

However, there is as yet no substitute for sitting outside on a chilly hillside watching the November sun come up, which I did this morning.

There are, of course, no real substitutes for any of things I mentioned before. There are only things people want us to buy from them to use as substitutes. None of these things is better than the originals, although some of them arguably aren’t worse either; they are just new things, with new sets of tradeoffs involved. If, for instance, “social media” sites like Facebook or Instagram were still called “message boards”, their actual use would be clearer. This isn’t a new society, it’s a way of passing messages around; “society” is a much more complex thing.

I use an iPhone to take pictures of the hills. The phones of today are often people’s go-to in complaining about people’s over-reliance on technology and addiction to constant interaction (particularly among the young), and there is something in that, of course. However, constant interaction has its predecessors, like the teen of my youth who would spend hours a day on the house phone with friends, or the teen of an even earlier generation who had to constantly be at the skating rink or mall or soda shop or drive-in or wherever the teen action of that time was. The fact that young people are extremely social creatures is not new. We older people who’ve seemingly forgotten what it felt like just think it is.

None of the pictures I take are quite good enough; the one attached to this post is from a Ukrainian photographer, and is of an entirely different part of the world than I am in. This is part of the fakery of the modern age, where even when trying to tell you about something that actually happened (like watching the sunrise), there is some element of deception involved.

Being phony comes naturally to me, sadly. I didn’t need the modern age to do it, I had been doing it for some time before that. The actual me is pretty dull, and my habit of making everything I ever did sound more interesting than it actually was has been a long time in the making. It comes in handy when you have a blog, I guess; anyway, a dry recitation of what actually happened in personal situations seems beyond my ability. I embellish, therefore I am — or something.

One of the things that makes my life dull is that it is a fairly happy one. The primary source of fuel for what is interesting in modern life seems to be discontent, and I used up a good portion of mine years ago. I now have a wonderful wife, a good job, great kids, great grandkids, and a great extended family, and all of us at present are more-or-less healthy.

Poor health and death await us all of course. But this doesn’t rob life of its value, it makes the time we get that much more valuable.

One part of life that adds to overall happiness for me is sports. Or at least, it can. When my teams lose, it detracts from happiness. But that’s part of the way sports works. Learning to deal with failure has to be one of the top 3 things anyone in life can possibly learn, and probably the top thing no one ever learns to do perfectly. So there are always lessons there.

The stream pictured above is in honor of what has turned out to be a “stream-of-consciousness” essay.

Yesterday and today were the first two cold days we’ve had here in Georgia this Autumn. I enjoy cold in ways only someone from a warm climate can. People I know from cold climates get so much of the cold that they can scarcely even remember what it felt like to experience its novelty. This is kind of how I’ve become when it comes to getting excited about politics: it is very difficult for me to do, given that it seems like I’ve seen it all before about a 140,000 times.

But each of us must experience life in our own way from our own perspectives, and I understand the high feelings attendant with politics.

Another thing that has soured me on politics over the years was the dawning realization that I could barely manage my own life, and that perhaps I wasn’t the person best suited to tell everyone else how they should live. Now, people who follow politics are no more likely than average to power/control freaks, but the majority of people who actually go into politics as a profession are somewhere out there on the power/control freak spectrum. You have to believe you know better than everyone else how they other people should live — which seems messed up to me.

It is 9:45 am now, and my “timed write” is over. Happy November to all of you.

The Sanest Date

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays4 Comments

Okay, I want to start out here by talking about music and food.

People all over the world, of every age and societal strata, love music. But WHAT music they love differs widely from person to person. Anywhere you might happen to go, you will find dominant local musical tastes, but even there, some people like other things. When I was a teenage boy, I developed a love for a certain type of music that no one… and I mean no one… that I knew could stand at all. Not my family. Not my friends. No one.

I liked a lot of kinds of music, as it happened. But my favorite kind wasn’t a type of music many others had heard of, and if they had, they usually would say that would have rather not… ever… heard it.

But, you know, music. We all know what we like, and we (almost) all know that other people may or may not like the same music. It is just one of those things.

The same thing can be said about food. If you were to close your eyes and think, right now, of your favorite meal, I’ll bet you can see it… smell it… even taste it. But it wouldn’t necessarily be a lot of other peoples’ favorite meal. And I’m sure some people would dislike it, if they ever had it. Because that is how human tastes go. Different people like different things.

Now there are certain types of music, and certain foods, that are listened to or eaten more than almost all other types. You know, popular music, popular types of foods like pizza or tacos or burgers or whatever it might be. Even then, not everybody likes these things, although it can seem like it.

I said all that to say this: when I was around 22 years old, a stunningly beautiful new girl showed up at work, working in the office down the hall, and I wanted to meet her. I didn’t really know how, and since I was working (as a civilian) on a military base, I knew the guys would rapidly be swarming around her, so I might never get a chance if I didn’t do something fast. I asked a woman I worked with (who I trusted) how exactly I should approach the problem, and she said, “Go up to her desk. Make sure she’s not busy, if she is, tell her quietly you’ll come back. When she is free to talk, just say, ‘I’m Owen. I have seen you around and would like to get to know you better. Would like to have lunch sometime?’ Lunch is not threatening; and you are being right up front about what you are doing.”

That sounded like a terrible idea to me, but I didn’t have any better ones, so I steeled myself, walked down the hall into the large office she was in, walked up to her desk, and said, “Hi. Do you have a minute?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Owen. Owen Servant.”

“And I’m Tara. Nice to meet you.”

“Yes, I um… work down the hall. I’ve seen you around and would like to get to know you better. Would you like to have lunch sometime?”

“Sure,” she said, getting out a scrap of paper from her middle drawer. She wrote her phone number (and first and last name) on it, and handed it to me. She said, “Saturday lunch might make the most sense.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “I’ll call you. Nice meeting you.”

“You, too.”

I walked back to my office in a daze. I went right back to the woman who had advised me. “She said yes,” I said.

Did she give you a time?

“She said Saturdays might make the most sense.”

“Right,” she said musingly. “If it is a good date, it can keep going; if it is not, there is the rest of the day to forget about it.”

“That’s encouraging,” I said.

“Well, the same is true for you,” she said, laughing.

I called her the next night, and we agreed to meet the following Saturday for lunch at a restaurant out on the water (I lived in Florida at the time). When the day came, I got there first and got us a table outside, she came a little later (but not late) and was dressed casually, but looking amazing. She said she was glad we could sit outside, commented some on the view, and then, after we ordered our food and drinks, we began to talk.

It was the kind of talk you do on a first date with someone you barely know. Where did she grow up? [Talahassee] Siblings? [It turned out I knew her sister] College? [FSU of course] and so on. Then the lamp got turned on me. [Fort Walton Beach; one brother, one sister; University of West Florida]

We kept on talking, probing, slowing down a little when the food came. But I could tell five minutes in.

It turned out, we had … nothing. No chemistry. Nothing in common. Didn’t like the same kind of foods or music or interests or… anything. I could usually find some common ground on a date to make the experience passable. But it was like no two people could have had less spark than we did.

For an hour.

Things I thought were funny she didn’t, and vice-versa.

When the hour waned, and I’d paid the bill, we stood up. I walked her back to her car.

“Well that was fun,” I lied.

“Yes, thank you for lunch,” she didn’t lie.

And that was that. I didn’t ask for a second date, and she certainly gave no indication she would have had any interest if I had. So the feeling was pretty mutual. No harm done.

It was later the next week before the older woman at work who had advised me asked me how it went. So I told her.

“What did you do the rest of the day?”

Made pizza at home and listened to the Metropolitan Opera. “Tosca,” I said. “It was amazing.”

She smiled at me for some reason and walked off.

People like different music, people like different foods. People like different people, too. In many ways, that was the sanest date I ever went on, because it was nice, but we knew really quickly we weren’t really right for each other, and moved on. Which was fine.

Oddly enough, over the fifteen years that followed that date, I was rarely as wise when things weren’t going my way. But that day I was, I think.

A Precious Gift I Never Knew The Cost Of

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays6 Comments

(First published December 2013. – Owen)

In 1975, when I was thirteen years old, my parents paid for me to attend Interlochen National Music Camp in Interlochen, Michigan. I was there to study piano with Peggy Neighbors Erwin, a famous piano teacher from Coral Gables, FL. I had the summer of my life there, enjoying drawing classes; attending theater, ballet, opera (which truthfully I did not enjoy at that age), and symphonic concerts; and, of course, studying and practicing the piano. I made friends, saw sights, got exercise, had a sick weekend at the infirmary, attended church, developed unrequited crushes on girls, and brought back a lifetime worth of memories. I also cemented a lifelong of love of classical music, live drama, and the arts in general.

I was there for ten weeks, and didn’t really get homesick until about the eighth week. I wrote very detailed letters home, describing the place and what all we did, letters my mom had until very recently when she gave some of them back to me.

When my father had retired from the Air Force four years before, we had moved into a three bedroom ranch-style house on the opposite end of Florida from where Ms. Erwin lived. The yard that came with that house was odd in that it included an empty lot next door and half of an empty lot behind the house. A year or so after we moved in, my dad went away to school for 10 months, and when he came back, he used the half-lot in the backyard to build a workshop for his new business: custom-building and repair of musical instruments. The empty lot next door he used for a great labor of love — a garden. He grew fresh strawberries, onions, tomatoes, watermelons, and I don’t remember what else in that garden.

That empty lot yard was kind of important for another reason. It contained half of our semi-circular driveway.

When I returned from camp, my parents had sold the lot next door. It was weird because a fence went up and we no longer had a semi-circular driveway: we had a quadrant. Easy to drive in, but clumsy to back out. I thought my dad would miss his garden, but he said it was so much trouble keeping the squirrels out that he was relieved to be rid of the nuisance.

I didn’t think much more about that empty lot; the people who bought it never built anything on it during the remaining years my parents lived in that house.

Around 1996, we were back at my childhood home in Florida visiting my parents. My whole family had gathered there: my older sister and her boyfriend (now husband), my older brother, my (now ex-) wife, my 10-year-old stepson, and my 1-year-old son. We were going through boxes of old pictures, and my ex, who was a very inquisitive person, was asking my mother questions about the photos.

“Now where was this taken?”

“That photo — was from the lot next door, back before we sold that. We had a garden there we loved to work in, and that was taken when were getting ready to bring in our first strawberries. They were so good, so fresh.”

“Why did you sell the land?”

“To pay for Interlochen.”

I was stunned.

It had never occurred to me as a child that my parents made financial sacrifices for me or for us. I knew that there were things we wanted we could have, other things we wanted we couldn’t; this was par for the course. But it had cost my parents quite a bit to send me to that place, and the eyes of a thirty-four-year-old man saw it very differently than a 13-year-old boy had.

“I never knew,” I told my mom. “I didn’t realize you had to sell land so I could go there.”

My mom laughed a kind of joyous laugh.  “You had the best time there. Probably no week of your life went by for the next five years when something wouldn’t remind you of that place. Best money we every spent on you.”

In my teens, I cared a lot about myself and my friends; by my twenties, I carried about very little else, and I blamed my parents for both their shortcomings and mine. I am ashamed to think of the way I sometimes spoke to my father; and it saddens me greatly to realize the poor return they got from me for all of the time, love and money they invested.

Still, that summer I spent at Interlochen was one of the great formative experiences of my life. My parents gave up a lot — literally — so I could go. The only thanks they got from me for years were the excited stories I would continue to tell about the place. This made it all worth it to them, something I understand now as a parent.

Because, when you love someone, you don’t do things for them for the thanks.

Where I Live…

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Personal Essays2 Comments 
Where I live, the colors tell stories 
Of innocence, nascence, and rue, 
Of habits habitually forming, 
And letters between me and you. 

Where I live, the autumn in blankets 
Comes nestling over the cold, 
As everyone weary grows silent, 
And everyone silent grows old.

(The essay below is of a style known as a “stream-of-meandering”. You have been warned.)

The autumn here is gorgeous, or certainly this autumn has been.

The way modern life works, beautiful weather is met with news stories about droughts and warnings from the authorities of a heightened risk of fire. Because otherwise, we might be enjoying the weather.

Which is not to say that there isn’t a heightened risk of fire, just that telling us is a little like telling people swimming in the ocean that there is a heightened risk of drowning. We already sort of know.

The counter-argument, of course, is that we almost never really know what we obviously ought to know, hence the “do not take internally” warnings on things like bottles of shampoo. It is of course crazy that people have to be told this.

One of the basic rules of life I’ve observed since early adulthood was that any time there is a situation where people’s behavior makes absolutely no sense, there is a lawyer involved somewhere at the back of it. So there are lawyers in every shower, etching their wisdom on bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

I use conditioner, which is odd, given that I have little-to-no hair. We develop personal grooming habits when we are young, then continue them the same basic way long after it has stopped making sense. I mean, I look like a a grown-up, bearded Charlie Brown Thanksgiving parade float these days.

Parades mystify me, and always have. My parents would take us to various community parades, and when we each got old enough, we were part of them as members of school bands, clubs, and so on. I never quite felt the excitement of parades the way others around me did. Maybe it is because I dislike crowds and noise, and am frankly puzzled at the sight of women on the back of flatbed trucks vaguely waving at no one in particular while smiling bravely in the face of the meaninglessness of the entire enterprise.

Or I might be overreacting.

The autumn here has been gorgeous, though, or at least this one has been…

Atop The Mountain

On By Beleaguered ServantIn Original Poems, Personal Essays1 Comment 
From up atop the mountain 
I still can't see the truth, 
Nor do I have the answers 
That I had in my youth. 

And yet, though I can't point to it, 
I still can fell the pull, 
For love is all there really is 
That makes life 

Meaningful

Love is a word that is very much in vogue. The actions that go with it seem to be far less popular.

This in itself is not that uncommon a phenomenon. We humans like to build houses out of beautiful words that hide the ugly ones we use inside.

I wish I could say I was free from this behavior myself, but alas. As soon as someone cuts me off in traffic, the real me comes out. I can’t say I really like the real me. He’s kind of a jerk.

But here’s the thing about hypocrisy: it doesn’t mean what you espouse is wrong. It just means you aren’t a very good exemplar. But that doesn’t mean (for instance) that being more loving and empathetic shouldn’t be a goal, because it should be — and is.

Maybe today I can be better. Or a little better. Maybe almost a noticeable amount.

It’d be a start.