Warning! Potential Buzzkill.

I want to ask you some questions. But I need to define some terms first.

I read a play called Thom Pain (based on nothing) this week - it's a long close-to-home monologue in which a man (protagonist implies too much agency) slips between various episodes from his life. He knows he's being watched - he's performing for (or confronting) an audience - but he doesn't know what he means. There are only episodes, there is no narrative he knows that can bind them. He apologizes for being so scattered, but is resigned to it. He defies the audience to do better, not believing for a second that they can.

And so, as a boy, he watched his dog being electrocuted. He was fascinated and appalled. He wet his bed. He had a dream about being covered by bees and their stings were relief. He once loved someone. It was sublime and visceral and it ended and he wants it again, but not as it was. He's too savvy to give in to the blithe veneer of conventional narratives, but'll be damned if he knows what else to do. He's as honest as he knows how to be without necessarily believing in honesty. He wants to be sincere, but sincerity is a "joke":

A horse walks into a bar, and the barman says, "Why the long face?".
The horse replies, "I've just been diagnosed with AIDS. And I guess, well, I'm feeling sorry for myself."
So the barman says, "Oh God. That's awful. I'm so sorry."

The monologue ends in an incantation. Despite it all, despite the incongruity, the missing links, the obvious connections, the shifting, the sincerity, the irony, the fickleness, the desire, the ambivalence, despite all of it, Thom Pain has to "Be stable. Be stable. Be stable. Be stable."

What a crazy imperative to live by - to be stable. The reason it hit me so hard is because I know many people for whom being stable - or at least seeming stable - is a primary directive that governs their actions and words. In fact, I wonder if I know any people for whom it is not.

I grew up with someone extraordinary. A wonderful artist, a beautiful singer, brilliant at sport. She lashed out as a teenager, was institutionalized as severely bi-polar, and has spent the rest of her life doing her best to be ordinary. She's in sales now. She moves from tortured relationship to tortured relationship with the most "stable" marriage prospects she can find. Between bouts of alcoholism and depression she speaks emptily as though trying to convince herself and others: "You know, if you just keep your shoulders back and your head held high, and your nose to the grindstone, you'll be fine."

When I was an undergrad I met a man who grew up in a conservative Christian home. He came out to his Christian therapist and was told to put an elastic band around his wrist to be snapped every time he felt lustful towards a man. Away from home at college, where he was pursuing an economics degree, he exploded into drug-fueled promiscuity and insisted that he wanted to die. He too was institutionalized - as much for the sake of those of us on suicide watch as for his own. When he was released, he ran away from home and worked the streets as a crack whore. The last time he called me, he was doing a correspondence degree in economics because he was "just tired of disappointing everyone".

I've worked with veterans of current and past conflicts who were struggling to string their experiences together. The post-bellum narrative doesn't hold. Past trauma slips through the cracks of their "peaceful" present. And yet they're charged with the responsibility of "reintegrating" into civilian life - as if civilian life is and always was homogeneously comfortable and safe.

Those three examples are "pathologized" - bi-polar disorder, reactive depression, PTSD. But what about a man who spends two hours a day in a gym. Or a person who spends four hours a day sitting in front of a laptop obsessively ordering words that'll probably never be read. Or a woman who can't leave the house without covering up every blemish and ordering every hair on her head - or a man, for that matter. Or people who can't stop talking. Or people who won't say anything. Or people who won't concede a point. Or people who roll over. Or people terrified of loneliness. Or people who lose themselves to their lovers. Or people who believe in God. Or people who don't. Or people who live in gated communities. Or people who revile people who live in gated communities.

I sometimes think there's nothing more to us than what we do while we wait for who knows what.

How fucking Godot of me. Or, like Penelope waiting for Odysseus, staving off undesirable suitors with the promise that, once her tapestry is done, she'll marry again. And so, without the likelihood that Odysseus will come home, she weaves and weaves and weaves during the day and unravels and unravels and unravels at night. It's an endlessly absurd sequence that barely holds her together. And yet Penelope is figured as the image of subdued suffering and loyalty to a cause (her cause, incidentally, boned everything that moved on his way home).

This then, some would have us believe, is the postmodern condition - an a priori skepticism that undercuts ideas of real value and depth, a state of perpetual nausea, a fingerhold-less sheer wall, an un-mappable topography of irreconcilable episodes, a veneer of signifiers in the midst of which we, afloat and un-moored, feel compelled to be stable, be stable, be stable.

My own personal tapestry? What do I weave and unravel? Bizarrely enough in light of the foregoing, the story I tell myself is that people are good - even if I don't always know what "good" means. I guess you could call me an optimist. My glass is usually half full (he says, aware of how emptily conventional the metaphor is). And, look, I'm not going to pretend to be very stable. I'm curious and stupid enough to turn my glass over to see what it looks like half empty. Sometimes everything spills out (he writes, relieved that he has managed to redeem the metaphor with a little flourish of his own). No spillage today. I'm in kind of a good mood.

And what do I do while I wait for who knows what? I think about my hair and like to remain skinny. More importantly, believing in goodness, I rely on the kindness of strangers to affirm my faith, and I aspire to being a kind stranger myself. And I get very upset when strangers fail me and when I fail strangers. I also believe in curiosity. I read, I write, I teach, I opine. Pointless maybe. Maybe not. But this way, I can live.

Which brings me to my questions, ye kind and strange denizens of the floating interwebs:
1) Am I wrong? Is this vision of the world a symptom of a middle-class comfort bowdlerized into onanism? If so, help me see what I don't now.
2) However, if what I've written rings true to you, what do you do while you wait for who knows what?

I ask because I'm curious.