The natural state of man

It began, for me, in the womb. Everything before this is prehistory, or at least, the prehistory of my self.

Am I remembering those earliest moments or dreaming them?

Light and dark and noise, cold and warm, giant faces and hands.

Fingers, medical tools, tape measures, swaddling. I did not know what breathing was back then. I did not know what being human was.

Mum was having a baby. I have learned that I was a baby once, and babies get names, the same way I got a name.

I asked mum to name them Smokey. She disagreed. Smokey is not a name for real people.

Oh.

I learned what boredom was when we were driving between towns. I knew that we were supposed to ask how far away we were, if we are there yet, and how long it was going to take. Time did not make sense, so asking how far away were were or how long it was going to take was meaningless, discarded data. The important part was to annoy everyone else in the car, because we were obviously not there yet, and we had just asked that question a moment ago. Sharing the feeling of being annoyed felt right.

I liked to pretend to be asleep when we arrived. I liked dad carrying me to bed.

I liked to draw pictures of flying cars, and dinosaurs. My dinosaurs were bigger than real dinosaurs, so we called them beanadons. None of us knew why, except that I insisted on it, so we went with it.

I learned what numbers were, and no one would tell me the biggest number. I spent several days in a dark room, with a lamp trained on my beanadon-drawing paper, counting up. And up. And up. I would sometimes bring a number to mum, and she would tell me what it was called and how to say it. She always had a name for it, so it had already been discovered. I kept going. We never found the highest number, but it was a good way to keep myself awake, and say hi to dad when he came home late. I was always happy to see dad again. Do I imagine that my parents were annoyed I would not sleep until he got home, or is that a memory?

One day my grandparents were over. I knew them because they were distinctly older than my parents, and all of their skin looked like my fingers when I had been swimming too long. I liked them because they brought me presents on my birthday, and I loved presents. It set me up for great disappointment later in life when no one knew what I wanted, but that is a diversion. They happened to be visiting, but all they did was look at the TV. All the grown ups couldn't take their eyes away from it. I was five years old, September 11, 2001. To me it looked like the news always did, so I helped them by pressing the fat square that was our TV's on/off button.

News is boring. This was a fact to me back then, and I would argue it up and down until we agreed I was right. This was an important category for me, because most things could either be called boring or not boring. For me, news was in this category. It was important to me to help everyone prevent and avoid boredom. I performed this public service for free, a civic duty comparable to mum tucking me in at night or dad buckling me into the car - something that needed to be done because it was good.

I was complaining loudly once to an older person about boredom. They snickered at me and declared that only boring people get bored.

I stopped complaining about boredom then, but I kept getting bored, and I knew that I was definitely not boring, so I knew that older person was wrong. My problem was that I could not prove it, even to myself, so I kept my mouth shut. I had learned by then that it was much better to let people think I was an idiot, than to open my mouth and prove it, although I had to re-learn this lesson many times.

I would eventually insist on carrying a book with me everywhere I went, so that it would be impossible to be truly bored. Other people did not pick up this innovation. Sometimes my teachers would be unhappy I was ignoring them with my book. I knew I was listening to the interesting bits, but few teachers are patient enough to listen to an explanation like this, so I would pretend to agree with them, and then return to reading my book after a few minutes. I have learned that this method of agreeing with but then ignoring directions was pioneered by civil servants, officials, and bureaucrats.

A notable example I learned about, was that the printing press was nearly invented in China several hundred years earlier than Gutenberg, but this was safely avoided by the brave and selfless work of officials that did not wish to transition from characters to a simplified lettering system. This made movable type too clunky for the mass publication of literature, and kept those scribes in work. I hope to attain some of that legendary foresight for myself, and until I do, this subversion strategy continues to serve me well whenever I need it.

Watching TV, I knew that being able to hit things better than other people was one of the most important career skills I could have. I knew I was going to grow up to be a hero. If the cartoons on TV could beat anyone, I could too. Now, remember, I stopped complaining about boredom, but there were still many many things that were okay to complain about. I wanted to learn a martial art. My parents thought this was a bad idea, because hurting people is wrong. I agreed with this, in principle, but I was insistent as well, because I knew that if there were bad people out there, there also needed to be good people that could win against them in fights. If they were good parents they would let me learn this most important of life skills, and they would not stop hearing this until I had a white belt and was breaking boards, so this was arranged.

Dad joined with me, and then my younger brother. We learned Tae Kwon Do.

Sometimes there would be a conference with many instructors and disciples, where one of the founders of the martial art in my country would attend and we would be graded on our abilities, to justify giving us a new belt. For me the belts were the most important part, you could only learn some moves if you had the next belt up, and I quickly got tired of horse-stance punches.

My father fondly recalls, when asked by one of the founders asked why I was learning Tae Kwon Do, my response was to proudly and loudly step forward, chop the air, and say that I did it all to learn the Karate chop.

Karate is like Tae Kwon Do, except that it is the national sport of Japan, not Korea, which is where Tae Kwon Do comes from. This distinction was completely lost on me, but to the adults it was intensely amusing.

These were some of my first remembered tastes of confusion in my life. At some point in my life, I had complete confidence and assurance in myself, and believed that I knew most of what there was to know. I have learned this is actually the state of pure, blissful ignorance. I have great envy for the adults that have been able to retain this feeling for their entire lives.

Ignorance is truly wonderful.

My maternal grandmother had been part of my life since the beginning, and she was one of the most attentive and brilliant grown ups I knew. She listened to us and asked us questions, so her gifts and treats always managed to be a cut above the gifts from other adults. She was artsy, so between her and mum, I did lots of painting. She showed me paintings and tapestries that she had done herself, and I was amazed it was possible to paint that well. She purchased us an ice shaving machine and two bottles of cordial one time in the merry season, and to me and my brother this was a treasure. Thereafter we were perpetually displeased there was never enough ice or cordial in the vicinity to run like the first time we got it - I have since realized this was likely an effort to prevent hyperactive sugar rushes and obesity.

This grandma lived with a grumpy old man with a funny name - Merv. To be clear, at this stage in my life, only children had names, adults tended to be called mum, dad, grand-something, or missus-something because they were a teacher. I didn't understand why I wasn't supposed to call him granddad, I thought he just preferred it because it was funny.

It turned out, Merv wasn't related to me at all, he just lived with grandma. My mother told me that her real father used to terrify her and her siblings, that they could never go to him at night when they were scared, that he was sometimes why they were scared. One of his greatest crimes was against food, he was a terrible cook, and this struck more in my mind than fear.

I was a child, raised by loving parents, in a safe town, in a safe country. I had no concept of what fear really was, my experience was limited to unwanted spiders in the house and keeping a night light on so that it was never completely dark.

It turned out this other man had left my grandma, for a younger lady. I learned that this was definitely wrong, and this used to be a crime, and was called infidelity. That's a big word for a seven year old!

They wouldn't talk to each other anymore. I was amazed mum made me - all of us - visit him even occasionally. He was also a grumpy old man, and his nose was disfigured, so that it looked like a rat had nibbled at one side of it. He was the reason given for why I should never pick my nose, although this turned out to be an ineffective warning.

His house was always interesting, wherever he lived. He had strange things to play with like toy snakes that would twist on their own when you held them, and large collections of dolls. On the floor was a strange rug that had apparently been made out of a cow, and I recall him yelling at us because we would sprint around his house like it was a circuit, playing the best games of hide and go seek because of all the twists and turns and floors and spots.

I thought he was just a spoilsport, but having aged, I think he was worried we would smash the fine china and the glass cabinets. Being as fast and young as we were, instead of old and decrepit like he was, he couldn't catch me, my brother, or his new daughter. His new daughter was my mother's half sister, but she was only a year older than me. She made me call her auntie because it pleased her greatly.

I didn't know what was so good about being grown up enough to be called auntie, but she seemed to hold it over our heads.

Most of the grownups I knew were aunts and uncles. One of my uncles was a strange sort, but I couldn't really figure out why. He seemed okay to me. Fun even. He got along with us pretty well, and he always had the best video games. One day I insisted on showing him that I was actually invincible and unbeatable with my Tae Kwon Do, and he effortlessly put me on my ass. This was an important lesson for me, but mum scolded him anyway. I got really mad because I was convinced I was unbeatable, so he put me on my ass again. Mum continued to scold him, but it was too late, I had already learned a lesson about my invincibility. At the time I did not like this lesson or my uncle at all, but the further from the event I got, the more I appreciated what he did.

I eventually decided my strange uncle was strange because he didn't have a wife. All of the other aunts and uncles I knew had wives or husbands who I also had to call aunt or uncle even though they weren't related to me. They also had children, who were often younger than me, and who I thus saw as minions.

I did not know what a minion was at the time, or have a word for it, but it fell to me to lead games and be entertaining while the adults bored themselves with talking and watching the news. Kids made sense because they liked toys and games. Adults confused me, because they didn't care about toys and were relentlessly boring. To boot, they seemed to get more boring the more of them there were, and they only made up for it by feeding us and bringing along their children so that we could play bigger, funner games.

My poor younger self would have never accepted that he would become an adult. Peter Pan was among my idols, so I was assured that it was possible to remain young forever. Aging was slow and was only marked yearly at birthdays, so I knew that I had plenty of time before I had to worry about it. At one point I even believed that your birthday was what made you get older, and the cake and presents were incentives for you to go along with it even though getting older is a bad thing. Attending a church regularly had also convinced me that miracles and magic had happened before and were thus possible, so this was no small goal of mine but a true intention.

I distinctly recall telling my aunties that I would never get married, and they promised to repeat what I said at my wedding. Only adults got married, the only girls I saw regularly were related to me, and I was about five years old at the time, so all of this filled me with embarrassment, confusion, and at least a little bit of horror.

The main thing to come from this, was to never mention girls, romance, or marriage to my aunties, and indeed to avoid them at all if possible, because I was worried they would grab me and marry me to someone to make me grow up. This wound up working in my favour, because getting me to come close enough to let them hug me was an exercise in offering me treats like chocolate or buttered toast. I am reminded of this whenever I offer little bits of sausage to the local magpies so that they trust me.

As time went on, I learned more about my strange uncle. He often had a girlfriend, but was never married. And the girlfriend was unusual too, and I never really learned their name.

I later learned that it was not one girlfriend, but several of them, on and off for years at a time, and they usually didn't come into contact with each other because he only found a new one after the last one had left him, so of course I could never remember her name, she was actually about seven people.

I didn't know that was possible at all! My parents were always with each other, the aunts and uncles were always with each other, and nearly everything I watched, from cartoon movies to comedy, taught me that everyone had one person who they were meant to be with.

A soulmate.

Sure, that strange old man had left my grandmother, but she had never really moved on. She always and to this day insisted that she was only living with that other man, not that I knew what that meant at the time. It probably added to my confusion.

Definitely.

This idea about destiny had already seeped into my boyhood brain. Some things were meant to be. Life was about getting to where you are meant to go. My uncle was an anomaly that seemed to just hang out. Maybe this was what he was meant to be? Maybe life for some people, many people, is just about hanging out.

I learned that he had once been a farmer, but was now a miner. People could even change jobs! This also made little sense to me. Dad was always doing medical things, mum always took care of us, I read books, we just did what we were good at, and by the time you were an adult you did the thing you were best at all the time.

I learned eventually that my uncle had a learning disability. He was actually, mentally, my age at the time. About ten or thirteen or whenever. I could ask mum for a correct accounting here, but I do not want her to know I am writing this, so you will have to share in this ignorance with me. Being myself, at this time also a child of about that age, I knew that I was great at everything and being that age wasn't a bad thing. My uncle wasn't boring like many other adults, so he had my mark of approval.

Times changed. I was still avoiding my aunties, but I was perfectly happy to talk to girls at school. I was so interested in talking to them that I started avoiding some of them, because they filled me with terror and I couldn't really talk properly around them.

This was not a good thing, as talking was one of the things I was used to being able to do by this stage. I even thought I was pretty good at talking, so not being able to talk properly was terrible. Not to mention the urge to run away as fast as possible, hide, or hit enemies that weren't there, which was incredibly distracting and not very useful for presenting my best self.

Thankfully this wasn't a feature of all women. In fact, usually it was only a feature of one or two women at a time. Even better, the girls seemed to avoid the boys most of the time, which made things easier.

Still, retaining a belief in soulmates, it was important for me to find love, whatever that was, and maybe these feelings were love. It was part of my destiny, the destiny of all or most people.

Even my uncle was looking for love, he just hadn't found the right one yet.

Supposedly.

Maybe he did find the right one and let them get away.

This also filled me with fear. I did not want to miss out on love. People seemed to enjoy it a lot when they had it, so I wanted it too. My own attempts at romance turned out to be comedy. I developed several rules and heuristics about love to explain why I was not having a great time of it. For example, I learned that I had admirers, but they were people I did not like in that way. I realized this might be true of the people I liked.

Not a nice realization.

I could imagine chains of people, desiring and unwanting each other, none of them happy with the people that would have been happy with them.

An ouroboros of torment.

Thankfully, I could avoid girls, and indeed everyone, with video games. I liked playing games, and I did not like playing them with other people. I liked to be left alone when I played them too. This stubborn anti-social instinct is something I can only attribute to having to fight my younger brother for rights to the controller when we were much younger, before the parents came up with brilliant things like taking turns, scheduling time limits, and buying separate consoles and computers for us.

I have learned in my life that me and my brother can actually get along really well, we just have to leave each other alone as much as possible. No one who knew us before I came up with this rule for interpersonal interaction would have thought this. I am now convinced it is a system that might lead to a kind of lonely world peace.

By this time, my uncle was between jobs. He had been between jobs before, but he really liked his last job, he had done a lot of training for it, he was friendly with the boss, and now no one was hiring him for that thing. As a boy I didn't understand the importance of money or jobs at all, but I thought that as long as he had some money a job didn't really matter. He had the biggest gaming rig I had ever seen in my life, and could play video games all day. I thought he was living the best life possible for an adult, and I envied his freedom to play games all day, while I had to split my attention between games, schoolwork, and running mental tactics around how to approach, or even exist around, my crushing love interest problem.

Supposedly this was his longest time between jobs but it was only a few months, I figured he was fine. He stopped by once while I was playing a game that was live. I couldn't pause it, but I said hi, and told him my game was live. I knew he understood that, he was also a gamer. He said he was just here to give me one of his games that he knew I enjoyed. I said thanks and returned to my game. He left before the game was over, not long at all, just ten or twenty minutes, which annoyed me a little. Where did he need to be so fast?

I didn't know that would be the last time I saw my uncle.

My uncle had his own love problems. One of his girlfriends had broken up with him recently, or that is what I was told. My uncle was generous with his gifts, I didn't understand why he felt the need to try to buy affection with big gifts, but apparently it worked for him, and I couldn't argue with what he did with his own money.

I think I understand that feeling now, of wanting to provide more value to someone so that they have more reasons to like you. Every time I shout someone drinks or lunch or bring them little gifts like books or candles I am reminded a little of what he had to feel when he gave his partners anything they asked for, and as much as he was able to give them. He was vulnerable in this way.

And when he couldn't give them enough that would be when they would leave him. And then the cycle would repeat again and again, inadequacy and hurt and fear, loss, hope and longing.

I remember feeling like he was a lonely soul, and that I wasn't the sort of person that could make him less lonely. I absolutely detested fishing, because it was something that was both gross and boring. At least in math class or in church you did not get covered it river water, mud, and fish grime! We both liked the sorts of video games that you play alone, so there wasn't much we had in common to even talk about when we met.

I think I was sixteen when it happened. If I was not sixteen yet we were getting close to it.

He was arguing with this lady after they broke up. Or was it during their break up? I have to remind myself that for some couples, breaking up isn't just one sentence at the end of a conversation that makes it official, but a process of pulling away from each other and the habits of shared lives.

I think he wanted her to return something? Probably he just wanted her in his life again. I was never told exactly what was said or how it was said, if it was texting or calling or even video call, but I know that he told her he was feeling so bad that he wanted to die.

And I know that she said do it.

She said do it, or something like that. I don't think she believed he would, and in any case, keeping in a relationship with someone because they say they are suicidal without you not really a relationship.

He still had a gun from when he was a farmer. The only thing I really know for sure about what happened is that he pulled the trigger while it was pressed against his head.

His name was Keith.

I was never told what sort of gun it was. I always presume it was a rifle or a shotgun because it had to be useful for farm work. I was never told if he pressed it against his temple or under his chin. I was never told if he died immediately, or slowly, just that he was dead.

I don't know if the neighbors heard it, or how they responded. A gunshot is the sort of thing that gets reported to police, it is not a quiet thing to hear at night. I don't know why grandma checked on him, why she found him before the authorities. I don't know if it was the next day, or several days later. I don't know if his girlfriend told my grandma what happened between them, if she was worried she wasn't hearing from him, or even if my grandma was just concerned herself, but she found him when he was cold.

She showed my mum too. Mum didn't want to see it, but I think grandma was in some kind of shock.

He was living with his dog, a happy creature, always too hyperactive and friendly. Apparently the dog was lying on the couch, silent. It was never as happy after that.

I didn't believe it at first. I said I wouldn't believe it until I had seen him.

To me he was still out there, doing Keith things. A lot of what he did and was didn't make sense to me, after all he liked fishing and was a grown up which were both ridiculous things to begin with. This was probably just another thing about him that I didn't understand.

I began to believe it at the funeral, but not totally. It was a bad joke. I hadn't seen a body, maybe we were burying an empty casket. I was told, or had to assume, that they did not do some sort of showing because there wasn't enough of his face to see.

What are the stages of grief? I knew what the stages of grief were, but in my own grief I completely forgot them. This was the completeness of my shock and denial.

I experienced anger for much longer. I was angry he didn't say goodbye properly, or leave a note. I was angry the grown ups were sad. I didn't understand their sadness, for me he made a decision for himself, he would not want them to be sad and if he did they should not be sad for him, so it was a completely logical circle. Further, I was angry at him for killing himself over being rejected by a partner. They were using him anyway. Love is nice, but so is pizza and video games and in his case apparently fishing, and none of those sorts of things needed the attention or affection of other people.

The red dirt I threw down into his grave was clammy and hard, like play-dough that had been left to solidify into almost-rocks.

Grandma was destroyed by this. She built a whole shrine to Keith in her house and prayed for him more than she had ever prayed for anything in her life. She never moved on. For me that is what my grandma became, she died with her son and has continued to die slowly since then. Between this and the grinding onset of her Alzheimer's, the bright and creative lady I knew is now long gone. I feel like I have finished mourning her already while she is still alive - for Keith I seem to have found new stages in my grief over years.

Keith had a will, something basic that he created several years before. He bequeathed his possessions between his mother and surviving siblings. I do not believe he mentioned his father, but I never saw his will, so what I write here is just hearsay.

What I do know now, is that if I have someone in my life that I despise, especially an older or younger relative or a partner, I need to absolutely mention them in my will, and bequeath them something petty and specific, like a single dollar coin, or a Rick Astley single, or a packet of half-finished chips. Apparently this would have gotten the case thrown out faster.

Keith's father wanted more than what he got in the will, if he got anything at all. He entered a legal battle with his surviving family. My mother and uncle had little need for money, being respectively a surgeon's wife and a banker, and they had enough resentment for their father that they were willing to fight him for it. In some ways I think it was the last battle they could fight for their brother, which made it more important for them than money.

To my knowledge the father got nothing after that, mainly succeeding in reducing Keith's estate by some, what there was to reduce. Keith's great gift was likely to teach my parents and now myself to keep our affairs in order, to specifically ward against vultures like that man. We do not visit my mother's father anymore, and I do not like to think of him as my grandfather, but rather as my mother's father. I am sorry to have lost my youngest aunt, but she took a stronger position on the other side than I could tolerate, even if, now, I can understand why she would back her own father, as I would back mine.

I have learned that sometimes we do not choose our enemies, just as sometimes our enemies do not choose us. Shoulds, ifs, and buts, all reasoning and logic, it does not always get to factor into the truth.

If the natural state of man is confusion, there are very few things in my life any longer where I get to live completely free of confusion. My rejection of my mother's father is one of them. Certainly I remain confused over his disposition and behavior. How he managed to turn my mother against him I will never know, her being a human made almost entirely out of kindness and forgiveness. But I will never be confused over my antipathy towards that creature.

At some stage, I went from wanting to never grow up, to wanting it so much that it hurt. Having supposedly reached adulthood now, and been in this state for several years, I am still not sure I have grown up properly. I am always on the lookout for rituals of adulthood, to make me more of an adult. I am noticing that the adults around me, they are themselves still growing up. I once thought maturity was measured by age, but I realized fast that adults are just children that have been around longer than the other children, and there is not much useful supervision around. In other words, they are just the big kids, that have one up on us because they have had more time to know the playground.

My confidence, self assurance, and righteous assumptions and beliefs, they have all been melted into a puddle of confusion. So many things that were confusing or unknown throughout this chapter of my personal history remain confusing and unknown. Even remaining confused on much of what happened though, I get to enjoy some insight through what the experiences have taught me.

What is the natural state of man? All the grownups have shown me what it is for them. Man can be great or poor, kind and cruel, fun or boring, smart or stupid. What is common to all of them? In time I have been able to boil it down mainly to confusion. Adults are defined by how they handle confusion, and what they have done with the confusion in their lives. Mankind lives in a sea of confusion, and grown ups are able to swim and build rafts. I am not a very good swimmer, but I can float, and I think my doggy paddle can get the job done when it needs to.

I am going to try to keep growing up. I can't seem to go back, I will never be careless and innocent again, but I will at least have the chance to find my own safety, comfort, and happiness. I think it is better to be confused than to be bored or in pain. I can report watching the news has gone from filling me with boredom, to filling me with seething frustration, which is improvement of a kind, and I am sure we will find more improvements along the way. My hope in life is that I can have a great time while I am here, and leave the world better than I found it for the next group to come through.