Sometimes you have to switch to spinach soup

Sometimes you have to switch to spinach soup. Sometimes you have to turn away. Sometimes you have to embrace. It is through these mechanisms that we make our life. Of course, switching always involves some manner of castigation and it’s the hardest thing in the world to do, to give up our loves.

This is a post about ruts. And free will, which, perhaps, is illusionary. I’ve been reading about the brain lately. Say you hold up your hand, palm towards your face, and bend all your fingers at the knuckle save the middle and then you stiffen your arm and wag that finger at some Tea Party member or bible thumper. Surely this is an act of volition? But when measured by machines more complicated than a wife, one discovers that synapses fire and muscle fibers begin their twitch a few moments before consciousness “decides” to shoot the bird at whatever abomination is being confronted. We’re being tricked!

I’m not sure what this means. I do know I was in the car during my lunch hour on my way to U-Haul to buy boxes. All my books, some of them at least, are going into the boxes to be sealed away from the open and free air. Maybe I will sell them. Or give them away. The walls are being cleared where we’re planning some color. Color must be planned, so rarely does it sprout on its own. This culling was my suggestion.

My wife turned toward me, her face full of suspicion. “Are you sure?”

“Physical things carry spiritual weight,” I said.

“First you decide to give up chicken-fried steak and soda. Now your books? Are you ok?”

It’s not that I’m giving things up, it’s that I’m looking for free will. But that’s not what I said. I told her, “Maybe.”

All agony arises from hesitation.

When we’re acting, we’re ok, right? Rarely do we abhor the actual drinking. It's the next day woe shows its black face or it's the waiting for everyone to go to bed before the glass is poured. We agonize after we stick the knife in the bitch or the bastard or before we work up our blood enough to grip the haft. I trail my fingers over the spines of the books on the shelves. There’s Gass. There’s McCarthy. There's so many others that have been there my entire life. There’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind! How can I box that? Attachment stirs and latches. It’s like fucking a woman that loves you but wants to get away. It’s like punishing your children.

Then there’s Rum. There’s something that compels. Compulsion is the same thing as those muscle fibers arcing into action before the thought gels. It’s not as if every decision we make is one we make. How can we tell?

She crawls up into my lap, all blue eyes and candy-sticky fingers. “Daddy,” she says, “I love you. Wanna play princess?” And it’s a shame one wonders where that action comes from. Did all the molecules for all time collide and merge to produce this moment? It seems like an awful act of good will to give me that.

But there I go again. Good will is an illusion.

Sometimes all one can do is switch their weight to the left foot when the right is aching.