School has started up again.
I am technically in my third year of university, though I have been here for four years. I have taken four classes every semester and am pursuing a degree in computer science and a minor in philosophy.
I work in a restaurant and play in two bands. I’ve lived with my girlfriend for the past year; In late July to early August this year, we went to Russia together.
I live in Canada and have for my whole life. I haven’t even moved except for when I was born and my parents moved us to a small town, but I don’t even remember my first house. I only ever moved out of that small town three years ago in order to go to university about a two hour drive away.
I’m in a bunch of classes that are irrelevant to my degree. Since I only need two more computer science courses, I am taking all of my electives this year. The closest class I’m in that relates to my degree is “Philosophy of Mind”; After this semester, I will need one more philosophy class to finish my minor. One more philosophy class, two more computer science classes, and a handful of electives.
I don’t understand the electives courses. I am in Sociology, Political Science, and Cinema Studies this semester. Cinema Studies is okay but takes more time than I anticipated. I don’t understand why the Sociology professor and Political Science professor keep talking about Marx. I tell myself that it’s for the same reasons that the Psychology professors kept talking about Freud, but I’m not so sure.
On June 25th earlier this summer, shortly before my trip to Russia, I decided to visit my grandma about five hours north. My reasoning was that I didn’t have much going on during the weeks of summer, and I ought to see my grandmother in case I never will again. I also felt like giving Possum the night to herself as we had been spending plenty of time together during the summer. It had been about nine or ten years since I had seen my grandmother last.
I texted my dad about my plans a few days in advance and he confirmed that it was alright. We decided that I would stop by the old house and change oil in my car before I left. I had never changed oil in this car before, and I’m glad that my dad helped me with it. The odd thing about this car was that the oil filter was under the hood instead of below the car. I liked the placement; my dad remarked that it was unusual and very much “like a motorbike”. We changed the oil quickly and I was about to head out on the trip to see my grandma, but my dad invited me in to make a sandwich for the road as well as to have some water.
I made myself a turkey sandwich and drank a glass of water. My father sat down on the couch as I turned outside and remarked something about the flowers in the backyard.
“Are those lilies?” I wondered. Possum had gotten me acquainted to lilies over the past year. They are her second favourite flower and, perhaps, my favourite… I never used to notice flowers.
But none of that mattered when my dad said to me:
“So, your mom and I are separating.”
I tried to best to act natural as he went on about how they had known each other for so long and grown into different people; mom liked to go to Broadway shows on vacation and dad liked to go to different countries; mom wanted to work more and they hardly saw each other; marriage is, according to my dad “more difficult for a woman. Your mom had to give up her career; and maybe two people aren’t meant to be together for fifty years.” My dad paused at the last point and added “maybe some people”.
I did not like the concept that my mother considered raising me and my brother and marrying my father as a sort of “sacrifice” on her career as a late 90’s web designer. If a sacrifice is the exchange of one value for a lesser one, then it seems like my mother would have been wrong to marry my father and have me as a child. She should have perhaps just continued being a “girl boss” never marrying, never having kids, and continuing to be a shoddy web designer for shit websites for her real boss so she could create meaning that way.
My father then asked if I was surprised and laughed when I, in response to his question, confirmed that I was. He said my brother was as well when he was told a few weeks ago. He said he found it strange that we hadn’t noticed them growing apart the past couple of years. That didn’t make sense to me. I had not been home for the past couple years. I suspect I wouldn’t notice my parents, nor family at large, to grow apart for I have never known them as being together. I have never known them to love each other or even enjoy each others company.
To me, the rare family gatherings seemed like an event created and attended out of necessity or as an act. Like a struggling actor takes a role he doesn’t enjoy, so too did my families take to family gatherings. I only remember one family gathering on my mom’s side for my great grandmother’s birthday. My father’s side never really seemed to all be in the same place at once. I’m not going to be like them, I decided.
I ended up going on my way to my grandmothers shortly after that. I had the weight of my world on my shoulders and the model of my life breaking as the road unwound before me. But more about that later.
I had a friend in middle school called Mr. Parker. I still talk with him occasionally. In middle school we were weird, nerdy misfits. We had exactly two real friends at that time, London and Ryan. The four of us would always leave school during lunch and go to the arena across the parking lot. There, we would buy vending machine coffee or sodas. At least one of us was always in a class with the other.
London and Ryan were part of a cult called Mormonism. At that age, it didn’t matter much, and I don’t remember if it meant anything to me. They would still laugh at Mr. Parker and my edgy jokes because they, like all of us, just wanted to fit in. Eventually though, and at his dismay, London moved to Utah. No surprise there. That was at the end of Grade 8.
I was later told about this incident by another distant friend of ours, Andrew. Andrew had apparently asked if they were moving to Utah because of his religion to which London replied, “shut up”. That didn’t sound like him to me.
In Grade 9, Mr. Parker, Ryan, and I went about the same lunch routine, but we weren’t in many classes together anymore. At some point, Ryan started always saying “I’m going home for lunch” as he lived just about a block from the school. Though Mr. Parker and I were best friends at this time, something felt sad about leaving to go to the arena every lunch just the two of us. Especially since the high-school, unlike the middle school, had a real cafeteria to sit down.
I remember one week Mr. Parker left on a short vacation. He was prone to doing this every year. His parents and him went to Arizona in Grade 8, and they went to Mexico in Grade 9. That left just me and Ryan during lunch time for about a week, and I would dread when Ryan would tell me that he was “going home”. That meant I was alone. On one of the last days alone at lunch, I stole two beers from my dad before I went to school. When Ryan told me he was “going home”, it didn’t hurt as much. I walked to the arena, went to the washroom, closed the stall door, opened the two beers, and poured them into a giant thermos I had taken from home. I drank that until I felt good and went back to school finishing it throughout the lunch break.
Throughout these years, Mr. Parker, Ryan and I had an extended group of friends that weren’t very close, but we’d be glad when we shared a class with them. Among them was one guy who would later become a rather disturbed best friend. His name was Griffin, and he’s part of the reason I set out to write today.
After downing about half of my thermos of beer, I went to the cafeteria and sat with Griffin and a few other guys who were a part of our loosely connected group of friends since Grade 7.
I remember my first day in Grade 7 (and my first day in public school) the teacher assigned Griffin to sit next to me. He introduced himself:
“Hi, I’m Griffin, what’s your name.”
I drawled out my name in a hilarious fashion, at least according to how Griffin told the story. When he asked which school I came from, I similarly drawled,
“Home school”.
And there I was in our first year of high-school with the first person I talked to in public school. And I would sit with him just about every school lunch for the next four years.
Mr. Parker sat with us for a little more than a year. Eventually, he grew tired of us and started to sit with another group of friends closely connected to us, but different. I would eventually do the same for the last couple months of Grade 12, but not for the same admirable reasons.
You see, Mr. Parker had a reason for leaving us back then. We had never spoken about it, but I don’t think we needed to:
Griffin was not a good friend and, by most metrics, not a very good person either.
It’s difficult to recollect everything, to put it into words, to give honesty to the complexities of a person; however, I need to try my best to see if it can bring me some sort of understanding of who I was, who I became, and why.
The metaphysical maturation experienced throughout childhood has a profound impact on adulthood. When children become into this world, they grasp nothing but their perceptual levels of awareness. They touch, smell, see, and taste things. Eventually, through their percepts, children begin to form a conceptual understanding of the world. For example, a child may touch soft things and sharp things, begin to differentiate between the two, and collapse the soft and sharp things into their own concepts. In doing so, he has successfully bridged the levels of his perceptual understanding of the world and his conceptual understanding.
Further on in his development of his metaphysics, he will begin to differentiate things from each category into a hierarchy of composition. For example, he will have a hierarchy of “what makes things sharp”. Somewhere near the top of that sharpness hierarchy is the concept of a flashing warning sign that tells him to exercise caution; somewhere near the top of the softness hierarchy is the concept of the feeling of complete relaxation. Going further down on the sharpness hierarchy is the concept of a well tapered edge; going lower on the softness hierarchy is the concept of malleability.
So, children form concepts from their percepts and form hierarchies of composition from those concepts. In these hierarchies of composition is a vast network of concepts with many repetitions. Where this gets especially interesting is the metaphysical maturation of children with regards to their socialization. It’s easy to imagine how a child forms concepts such as sharp and soft. Some of that will even be due to socialization. Their mother might tell them to be careful of the cactus because it is sharp, and the child will form his understanding accordingly; but what about when it comes to concepts such as “authority?”
With complicated concepts such as “authority”, most of the child’s understanding is necessarily developed in part due to his socialization. This can be primarily attributed to two agents of socialization: his parents and his school.
His parents represent a few models for a child’s metaphysical understanding. First and foremost, they represent parents. Whether the child knows it or not, his parents create a normative picture of what parenthood is. Second, his parents are a model of relationships. Whether the child knows it or not, his parents’ behaviours will tell him either what a relationship ought to be or will have some influence on his relationships in the future. If his father drinks and beats his mother, the child will either accept that standard, be prone to the same mental issues, or he will vow never to drink or get physical himself; regardless, his upbringing has had an affect on his future relationships. Third, his parents represent a model of authority. In the modelling of authority, the parents show the child how an authority figure is to behave, and what happens to those that disobey the authority figure. If the child constantly feels that he is being punished too harshly for minor misdeeds, he will be more disposed to be weary of authority in the future.
Parents are moreso a model of parenthood and relationships than a model of authority, however. Although the parents’ proclivities regarding their authority will be more capable of affecting the child’s adulthood, the greater model of authority is the child’s teachers. This is because of the relationship between parent-child and teacher-child. Whereas the child knows his parents as more than just an authority figure, the child sees the teacher only as an authority figure, so plenty of his modelling for normative judgements about authority figures comes directly from his interactions with his teachers (or coaches).
The reason I bring this up is because I have always had a weary suspicion of most authority for as long as I can remember. I figured the responsibility of most authority figures is too high; people are too flawed and too biased to be able to objectively mentor a child. Though I do believe this to be true for essentially any subject besides the hard sciences (and maybe sports to an extent) it does not make any claim about what ought to be done. Children still need teachers, and teachers need to be human.
The other more pertinent reason I bring this up is because Griffin had the same issue with authority that I had. In fact, we were very similar in many ways. I had never met anyone that was so similar to me. That is why I feel it useful, and easier, to examine myself through examining what I remember about Griffin:
Griffin lived on a large acreage outside of the town. His father built the place. His father was, frankly, a scary guy. He was a retired police officer for the city, a mechanic, and an avid hunter. Griffin took after him a lot and seemed to hold him in some high regards. One day he called me and complained about how his father once insinuated that he was an accidental birth. He needed reassurance. Long phone calls of this nature with Griffin were something of a usual occurrence.
Griffin acted out of what I could only presume to be narcissism. He constantly put others down, especially his closest friends, and always under the guise of a joke. There was a long time I didn’t want to hang around him but did because I didn’t really have any other close friends, and he was willing and able to steal his parents and families pain medications, alcohol, and cigarettes. Most of us that hung around him had put up some sort of wall between us and everyone else so as to protect ourselves. Everything was a joke not to be taken seriously, but to be met with a better insult.
I understand taking the piss; I understand the dark/edgy humour; I understand the need to keep lofty idealists such as myself grounded in reality, but this was all very different. Perhaps I didn’t see the difference at the time. It was as if there was no friendship but only the need to surround oneself with people so as not to feel lonely. From us that put up with it, there was the fear or inability to make other friends. We so desperately wanted to fit in that we would put up with anything. We never knew what real friends were. I know that all those other guys never remained friends with Griffin after high-school; some of them had been friends with him since early elementary school: I think that says everything that needs to be said.
With all of that, Griffin was the only musician I’d ever known who seemed to have the same values and sense of life that I had with regards to art. It’s a mind-boggling tragedy that people go through their entire lives without knowing what art is; it is stranger still that art students seem to be the least likely to either know what art is, be able to objectively evaluate it, or declare whether or not something is art.
“Everything” they say, as if it were profound, “can be art”.
When you look into the arts section of the universities today or walk through the public art galleries and exhibitions, when you take the classes taught, read the contemporary literature, or listen to the modernist music, then you will feel the culmination of generations of people who refused to think and refused to define what they felt within themselves. To them, art was strictly the means to make them feel something and, tragically, that feeling was more often than not escapism. Modern films and music exemplify this perfectly.
Art is also not a process through which one blindly adheres to strict traditions. Though the churches of classicism claim to have founded the arbitrary (yet concretely detailed) rules that represent the final and absolute criteria of esthetic value, the value of classic literature and music is in spite of this doctrine of superficiality and not because of it.
The classical play act structure weighing on the playwright’s mind does little to bolster the value of his work in exactly the same way as the classical form in music has forced many an artist to sacrifice his vision to the purpose of perversely amputating or distending it for the sake of counting measures evenly. That is a discussion for another time, however.
I was friends with Griffin shortly after high-school. At the end of our public school education, I no longer sat with him at lunch, but I hung out with him or Mr. Parker outside of school just as much if not more than the other few friends I had. Later on in that year, I was sitting with a different group at lunch time with some friends that I had made and who would prove to be similarly poor friends in an even worse way than Griffin was.
Part of the reason I spent my time in school with the other group was to get closer to one of the women in the group. I would be inclined to say that woman was the most tragic case of humanity I have ever met; however, a tragedy presupposes some value having been lost so she was incapable of being a tragedy but fit more into the revolting dredges of nature that never could have been anything else.
What can be drawn from this is that I never actually had any friends there except perhaps for Mr. Parker. Though I have some sympathy for Griffin for having experienced life similar to the way in which I did, I recognize still that he wasn’t a very good friend.
Shortly after high-school, I texted Griffin to do something out on the town that involved booting me a bottle of vodka. He declined and said that liquor had not been his friend…
I never heard from him again.
It was wildly out of character for him. Still today, I wonder exactly what happened and, in the same vein, why it took me five additional years to come to that same conclusion.
It didn’t bother me at the time, like I said, I didn’t like him that much. His musical comprehension and ability to get drugs was the prime motivator for my spending time with him. Without him, I only had a few months before I would be old enough to buy myself alcohol. That’s most of what mattered to me at this time.
I started working full-time just after high-school. My issues and experiences with the woman I was about to start seeing has all been detailed already; my experiences with the other friends I had, however, has not. I should talk about Reece and the others next time if I am to remain on this theme of serious reflection on the past and understanding myself through the people I chose to spend my time with. Until then, school is keeping me busy.
MyShelf 