The Triassic Basin and Me

I live on the edge of the Triassic Basin and, because of the work that I do, end up telling people about it once in a while, that it’s an area of subsidence with weird soils because of all the muck that flowed in, gathered and grew there after it sank. It reminds me of myself.

I had been supported by a highly disciplined and structured educational system that was suddenly dismantled and removed to be replaced by something with no structure at all. I mean NO structure. They stopped teaching because it was too authoritarian. All the muck flowed in instead.

A subsidence had ensued, a void in me where all that information and structure and discipline had taken up space. I had a sticky mind and was emotionally pliable — impressionable, as they say. I became a mess, I would say ... a brat, a smartass, a budding degenerate and an occasional bully.

I was termed an “instigator” for stirring up trouble and thought it an honor, as adolescent boys of a certain set and disposition would. In the longer run I think it made me empathetic. I realized how much success in life, whatever that is, and how much of everything is determined by often accidental, circumstantial stuff or presumably well-intentioned bullshit.

The circumstances that created the racist mire we inhabit now are not accidental or well-intentioned. It’s vicious, deliberate, systematic, systemic ... and it’s producing exactly the results anybody would expect. The shit flows into the void. If there’s a shortage of shit we make sure the supply is replenished, watch the results and blame the people we’ve victimized.

This is an classic example of unloading — one group making another carry the burdens of their own corruption and insecurity and then putting a torch to them, a bonfire of the dark vanities that keep us from knowing ourselves and owning our natures. Why the resistance to self-knowledge? Suspicions about the darkness that’s there. Fear. Of course there’s darkness there.

There’s always darkness there.

The error is in thinking it’s exceptional, which originates in thinking we’re exceptional — that we’re more than we are and that the evil in us is therefore potentially epic. We’re all only human. There’s nothing epic about us except what we create in compensation for failing to accept our limitations and our insignificance. But accepting our insignificance is liberating.

We don’t become small we become who we are, as genuine and authentic as we can be. Otherwise we become monsters. There are monsters among us these days. We’ve empowered them. We’ve delegated our unloading to them so we aren’t even authentic at that. We’re internally colonized by wankers, too inauthentic even to be our own villains.

I will say this, we’ve found some first rate stand-ins.