One of my cohorts at university asked me why I quit the fire department. After a long pause, what came out was something like this: “I had to burn everything away that remained.”
“Of what?” he asked. To which I replied, “Of everything that I thought I was.”
We each have identities for which we come in crisis with. And I know this to be true because we each have within us an ego. THE ego. The only one, right? And the ego’s function is preservation of the self. Self-preservation is something worth defending, no? I myself have found life to be very habit-forming. All’s said, I’d like to ride things out a little further down the path. The popcorn isn’t even done yet.
To this end, it can be said that that which we identify with and incorporate into our “I”ness will be that which we instinctively defend when those things into question, conflict, or direct threat. And governments, monied, and powerful interests the world’s over have thrived upon that known supposition when using familiar and repeated tactics to pull neighbors, families, and the strangers we meet on the path apart. Money, control, and power. Identity politics are the most convenient way corporations and partisan careerists use to pull on the heart-strings of everyday people and sew distrust among them. They try to tell us who we are, how to think, what to buy, how to vote, and who not to trust.
That’s all the media and the politicians are ever talking about; the things that separate us. The things that make us different from one another. That’s the way the ruling class operates in any society. They try to divide the rest of the people. The keep the lower and middle classes fighting with each other so they - the rich - can run off with all the fucking money.
Race, religion, ethnic and national background, jobs, income, education, social status, sexuality… anything they can do to keep us fighting with each other so they can keep going to the bank.
You know how I describe the economic and social classes in this county [United States]? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there just to scare the shit out of the middle class. Keep em showin’ up at those jobs!
-George Carlin
So, what are you? Who are you? I thought I was a fireman. And a teacher. I thought I wasn’t going to join the statistical drove of divorced people in this country. I thought I’d be taller than 5’6”. I thought the Power Rangers were really teenagers. I can go on all day until we burn the book and write a country song. Would you believe me if I told you I thought I wanted to raise horses? I never did it, but I sure identified with the idea. And politics. And my job(s)… there were many. Positions and raises and all the things I thought were me. So many hills I thought were worth dying on at the time.
See that’s the problem with you. You don’t know who I think I am.
Time and place my friends. Who we are in time are but crests in the ocean, coming and going. And so too are all of those in-groups we seek comfort in. Comfort, as I have alluded to in earlier writings, is rooted in what we know, not always what is good for us as the individual (abusive and manipulative relationships, employers, and social groups, cults).
When I was in the hallway at the university, something else I told my cohort was that I never fit in with the fire department. I said I loved the people, and that I appreciated the skills that they taught me, but that I often struggled to fit in to the groups there. I never went to union meetings, and I wasn’t by the Employee Handbook’s standards a model employee. It was true, and it seemed fitting in the moment. But as we parted ways, and I began to think, the math just simply didn’t add up, insofar that I created an assumption for my friend that because I did not fit in with the fire department that I therefore found my people in the university. That would be misleading.
I’ve never felt like I fit in with a group. Not really. At the risk of giving away the game, when I was in primary school through graduation, paramedic school, all the ambulances and factories, fire departments, the bars and restaurants… the feeling was the same. When I was in paramedic school, I lived with a couple of friends in a beautiful old home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Soon thereafter they became a romantic couple and I felt like the out-man. I’d go to cafes and shops and all so often I felt so very uncomfortable because I was alone while others were in groups. What were they talking about?
Time has taken the better part of nearly four decades to burn away so many of my assumptions about groups. Maybe this one will be different. Nope. And that’s not always a bad thing.
When I traveled to Electric Forest over the summer of 2023, I found a new way to work well in a group as someone who doesn’t like being in groups. Being a loner, if you will. I’ve always been a loner. And hooking up with some other cool loners who have different and special skills than my own was so very useful in moving through crowds of 50+ thousand. Finding landmarks. Reading emotional ebbs and flows of a crowd and of faces. Moving through those crowds with effortless ease dissolved my social anxiety in ways that helped me to understand something Alan Watts said so many years ago, though that night his voice was all I could hear vibrate though the music and the sea of people:
Did you know that it is possible to become invisible and levitate in this human body? How does one become invisible; you ask? By going unnoticed in a crowd. Right then, how does one levitate? By taking oneself lightly.
It got us to the restrooms in one piece and it changed my perspective on my time alone. It made me yearn for it more and appreciate what it taught me in when I would silence my own feelings about it.
And as that pertains to large crowds, it addressed a key anxiety about being in crowds: my ability to do anything or to escape them. Not all crowds or groups are inherently distrustful. Groups bring people together. And that can be a wonderful thing. To scale, however, groups begin to no longer see the individual. I distrust those groups when they begin handing out orders from above. Because groups bring people together. You see where it goes from there.
Even in the little groups though, I so often wish to be alone. My reasons - selfish or simple - you decide, are that I can’t always agree with everyone or be into what they are. Often enough when I am alone, I find or do something that I end up wanting to show my friends and family. The people I love and hold the closest to me. I can exist in a group; in fact, I thrive in some groups. I would be a fool to declare that I can and do everything by myself. Nothing happens in a vacuum, my friends.
I spent so many years trying to attach myself or find myself in these in-groups that, if they accepted me, I eventually felt alienated from. This was not their fault. What I am saying is that my alienation was a result of my false expectations for what I thought I would find. I did not find myself in those groups, only what I thought I was. Because you cannot find yourself in another person (or their causes), organizations, or ideology. Turn inward. It was always inside.
I find myself when I am alone. I see. I listen. I breathe. And sometimes I make stuff. But mostly I am still. It is a welcomed change from the First Act of my life. After everything has burned away what remains standing is likely who I was all along. That part was as true when I told my friend as it is now, and as it was 20 years ago. What you see standing is who I always was.
There aren’t very many hills these days. I suppose that’s why I live in rural Indiana. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have lines. It would be to fool oneself to say that I don’t play a role. That I don’t have human emotions that can be carried and pulled. That I don’t create doublebinds for myself. Afterall I’m a good Puritan. Jesus told us to distrust groups and authority. I took that one to heart.
The public fancied me a hero when I was on the fire department because it was my job to rescue people. To that end I would often reply with something like this: “We get paid to do what every human would do in the moment. We would do that too in the moment and in that way, we are not special. We program those spontaneous moments into 24 hour shifts for 48-72 hours a week.” I believe it is our natural inclination to help other people in distress.
This is game of weights and measures that conflates spontaneity and oneness with our fellow human with the aggrandizement of a dangerous job that subjects its employees to a painfully inhuman bureaucracy that ignores them as individuals and spits them out faster than they bring them in; another analytic that has found that running staffing deficits and exhausting overtime budgets costs less than hiring more firefighters. We the firefighters come and go yet the fire department remains. Most importantly I think this game of weights and measures creates those attachments to who or what we think we are, all which come with a terminable end.
Are we all those things that constitute our jobs? Our ideologies? Our hard and fast divisions? If we are, that must mean we are also the inherent doublebinds that exist. The North Korean State teaches their children all Americans are all 6 foot tall, 300 pound, insulin-dependent heroin addicts. Is there any part to both arguments than be agreed upon as silly? Life as play tends to dissolve those divisions far gentler than the atom bomb utilized when life is mutually agreed upon as a comedy rather than a drama, a fight.
And so long as it is a fight, there will always be divisions of us and them. And if we take a step back from the media, from our groups, our own preconceptions, and merely sit in our respective environments, quiet the mind, what divisions remain?
As unnecessary as a well is
to a village on the banks of a river,
so unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.
Bhagavad Gita 2.46