Who am I? That is a simple question, yet it is one without a simple answer. I am many things—and I am one thing. But I am not a thing that is just lying around somewhere, like a marker, or a toaster, or a housewife. That is for sure. I am much more than that. I am a living, breathing thing, a thing that can mark with a marker and toast with a toaster and house with a housewife. And still, I am much more.
I am a man.
I am also a former baby and a future skeleton, and I am a distant-future pile of dust. And I am also a Gemini, who is on the cusp (Taurus cusp).
I am “brother” and I am “son” and I am “father” (but just according to one person, who does not have any proof but still won’t let it go). Either way, I am moving very soon and not letting her know about it. I am asking you to keep that between us.
I am concepts and thoughts and feelings and outfits. And I am each of these all at once, unless I am in the shower. Then I am not outfits, because that would be uncomfortable.
I am what I eat. And I am this especially when I bite my nails.
I am often the one they call “You,” but I am not more “You” than you. I am me. And yet I am more “Me” than you are me or can ever be. I am confused.
I am the Walrus, but not the one you’re probably thinking of. I am the other Walrus, the one who is less the Walrus in the sense of legendary music and more the Walrus in the sense of his tendency to lie around in places for too long.
I am everything and I am nothing. I am just kidding. I am not everything and nothing. That would be ridiculous. I am just everything.
That’s a trimmed and re-ordered passage from Demetri Martin’s This is a Book. I’ll add a little:
I am the descendant of a monkey, a fish, a primordial slime, and a guy from West Virginia named Earl. I am not kidding. (Hi Grandpa.)
I am an economist and, contrary to popular belief, I am no more able to offer investment advice than is a very wise dartboard. But I can differentiate a cost function for you.
I am probably too manly for most girls. That seems to be the most reasonable explanation.
I am listening to Britney Spears as I write this, which makes that last part a little awkward.
I am the proud best friend of a dog, even though he smells. Smells as in jeez dude take a bath and smells as in nose in crotch.
I am legally changing my name to Ju$tn in order to disassociate myself with that goober Justin Timberlake and to associate myself more closely with that leading philosophical mind and all-around good guy, Ke$ha. “Everybody getting crunk crunk / Boys try to touch my junk junk / Gonna smack em if he gettin' too drunk drunk.” Chills, every time. Every damn time.
I am a remarkably complicated and un-intuitive conglomeration of chemicals, electricity, and star bits, and I carry on me and in me a small universe of creatures that spend an entire lifetime on/in Planet Ju$tn, a lifetime of eating, fighting, mating, and arguing about what color to paint the den, which is weird and kind of rude since I didn’t invite anyone to live on/in me, but I am working on being accepting and trying not to be grossed out or offended by the sexual activity taking place on my forehead but am finding it difficult to be accepting when there is more sexual activity taking place on my forehead than there is on my you-know-where, so instead I find that the better approach is to just not spend (m)any neurons on the Small Universe and to instead focus on more practical concerns, like differentiating cost functions and coming up with clever analogies for how I feel about Rihanna, which in a way is a whole separate story maybe deserving of 8 other clauses in this sentence but now I’m just being ridiculous and adding stuff to see if anyone is going to make it to the end of this sentence without throwing a shoe at the monitor or taking some other action in frustration that could either lead to serious regrets or a good story for later, wherein you can tell your friends that you were innocently reading some stupid blog post before the douche decided to absolutely GO OFF and write for more than 250 words without granting you so much as a freaking period when really even a goddamn semi-colon would do but instead he kept extending the shit with “but instead” and various other linguistic shows of disrespect before finally in frustration you decided to end it yourself by grabbing the nearest blunt instrument – in this case, a shoe – which some might argue isn’t the wisest choice of blunt instrument since they are designed to offer padded comfort to your footsies so can’t practically be viewed as intimidating weapons unless maybe they are the steel-toed variety but it seems doubtful that anyone reading this blog would have the need or even the inclination to have a layer of steel protection for their toesies when in all likelihood they are sitting in some climate-controlled environment where the only real dangers to toesies are clumsy people who had a few too many servings of gravy for Thanksgiving and who aren’t terribly self-aware w/r/t the location of their steps, but we have to keep in mind that even the gravy overeater has a Small Universe of his or her own (see how I brought this back around?) whose life-integrity is just as great as our own and probably greater since the gravy adds life-supporting real estate that we don’t have plus probably delicious nourishment to those creatures who inhabit the digestive tract, which is to say as I cross the 500 word mark that (a) maybe we shouldn’t, logically, feel guilty about that gravy we ingested at Thanksgiving, and (b) maybe we should be more respectful and less annoyed by the gravy overeaters and stop using words like “clumsy” and “self-unaware” to describe them since they theoretically have a greater life-integrity than we do, and although that seemed like a reasonable place to end the sentence I am now determined to make it past the 700 word mark not out of any hope of having this sentence mean anything or even of pissing people off to the point of shoe-weaponry – I’m pretty sure anyone who has made it this far is either long past the point of pissyness or else in a weird way amused with this blatant show of disregard turned epic struggle turned trainwreck waiting to happen or in progress of happening – but to see whether I have it in me to wrap this up into a semi-coherent little bundle by saying, for example, that my baseless efforts to cross the 700 word mark are just another representation of the complicated and seemingly illogical behavior that comes about when physical forces alchemize chemicals, electricity, and star bits into this strange thing we call a “human,” Boom: 701 words.
