An Encouraging Voice

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Thursday, February 4, 2010
12:37 PM

So I’m in my skivvies doing housework. I can get away with that because my daughter, Tara, isn't around. She started back at school today. The second term at her high school has just begun. I’m not likely to be interrupted for a few hours.

I’m down on my hands and knees on the floor vacuuming. I told you before that’s the only way it works for me. Otherwise the carpet doesn't know I mean business! While I’m making like a living shuttle brush—one two three four, one two three four--I’m thinking of what I’m going to write in my blog. It will be my first entry in seven months.

It suddenly occurs to me that my blog is the record of a guy coping with failure. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. I wanted to think that it was just the blog of a guy who hadn’t quite got engaged with his life yet but was making progress day by day.

Not just progress, but heroic progress. Wasn’t initiating self therapy back in the summer of 2004 a big step forward? Yes, it certainly was a big step forward.

Yet there it is. Failure. I’ve got it. I’m living it. It is in my bones. And I don’t like it. It makes it impossible for me to do my church work.

I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why I can’t just do that work, failure or not. That yoke is light, eh, as they say in the church business. I'm supposed to type up the minutes of a board meeting. It is half done. I could finish it in less than an hour if I could get around to it.

So why can't I?

Could it be my fucking unconscious refusing to do what I’m supposed to be doing on principle, just as, sixty something years ago, I refused to ride the horses on the carousel? That was at Winnipeg Beach back when I was four, or maybe five or six, or seven even. It’s hard to date. Anyway, I wanted to ride the horses, but I wouldn’t. I refused. Nobody could make me. I couldn’t make myself either.

Now I figure that my unconscious back then was sending a message to Mother, some kind of hellish message to her. Take that Mommy, you lousy slut. You’ve plucked my power from me and driven me back to something weaker than infancy. So take that, and that, and that. I’ll hold my breath until I die, or until history turns round. That’s your job, Mommy; turn history around for me. History as it presented itself to little Jay Stober in 1950 anyway.

But, hey, that reading of my situation is pretty strong as they say in the lit crit game these days. There's a lot of intellectual oomph behind that formulation. A guy who can see things that clearly is hardly my idea of a failure, Jay. (“Huh? Where’s that voice coming from? Who’s talking now?") Maybe you shouldn’t be wasting your time on church work. Oh, I know you need the association with people you get through that work. That part of you is also strong, the part which recognizes your need for people and does something about it...