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Conflict is a State of Mind
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Conflict is a State of Mind Stop or go. Left or right. Yes or no. Chicken or fish. Decisions are a part of everyday life. Generally speaking, our decisions begin when we put our feet on the floor rather than hit the snooze button again and end when we get back into bed rather than watch another rerun of I Love Lucy on Nick at Nite. Now, it may be me being a drama queen, which is not entirely out of the question, but it seems that the general population has a much easier time with these conflicts than I. I’m not talking about the little decisions, the routine, the mundane. I can drag myself out of bed with the best of them. I show up to my job on a regular basis. I brush my teeth. I pay my taxes and look both ways when I cross the street. The proverbial daily grind is not my dilemma. No, my issue is with the bigger questions in life. Actually, my issue is my life, and my life is my issue, and my issue is my conflicts, and my conflict is my life. Or maybe it’s that my issues conflict with my life, or that my life conflicts with my conflicts, or that my conflicts conflict with my issues. This is all very complicated. The Cliff Notes version of my life is this: I never choose what I think will definitely make me happy without first trying what I think might make me happier. The long, confusing explanation of my problem is this: If what I thought might make me happier actually makes me happy then I want to try what I originally thought would have made me happy to make sure that my original thought won’t make me happier then what I chose at first. And if what I thought might have made me happier doesn’t make me happy then I try to make it make me happy because I don’t want to think that I was totally wrong in thinking that what I thought might make me happier didn’t make me happy at all. And by the time it has made me happy, or I’ve convinced myself that it has made me happy, one of three things have happened: It’s either too late to try what I originally thought would make me happy, which is ok because now I’m, at worst, delusional and think I’m happy and, at best, truly happy. Or I have time to try what I originally thought would make me happy, but that idea has now become what might make me happier since I’m already “happy.” Or I realize that I’m not truly happy and have a whole new set of ideas of what actually will make me happy and what will make me happier. Any way this issue is analyzed, it leads to one conclusion: my life is a string of circular choices and dizzying self-evaluations that make as much sense as the former ramblings on the motivations behind said actions. I am a product of Sin City, one of the most two-faced, conflicted places on earth. Las Vegas was built on the premise that everyone’s a winner and anyone can be the next millionaire. But those casinos weren’t built on the backs of winners. Suckers go into those places everyday and make a to Lady Luck, the city’s favorite charity case. It’s no secret that more people lose money than win. People just can’t stay away though, the other side of that losing coin, the chance of being that one lucky winner, beckons them. Play or leave. The guy at the craps table is pondering, “Leaving with my last five-hundred dollars still in my bank account will make me happy, but staying and winning will make me happier. Play or leave?” I’ve seen this all my life. This ideology can grow on a person after a while. This is the one that’s infected me the most; it’s in my blood. As I said before, Vegas is a conflicted place. The town can’t decide whether it wants to be a seedy adult playground or a weekend rest stop the whole family can enjoy. Walking down the Strip a tourist can see the Luxor, the Excalibur, and Circus Circus: all casinos with game rooms and shows for the kiddies, so they can be included in the fun. One can even stumble upon Game Works, a two story arcade with only a small bar area reserved for the twenty-one and older crowd. But on the way to these family fun spots, a person will be handed no less than half a dozen ads for on-call , a politically correct way of saying “hookers” in a town that supposedly banned . A man can take his to a mini carnival, gamble away his life savings, watch a high-wire act with his family, get a blowjob from a , get a clown to make his a balloon animal, and get stabbed by a crack head all in the same block, all in the same building if he’s lucky enough. Las Vegas is a bipolar city that can’t decide if she wants to be a homemaking mommy or a street corner , and she gave birth to me and passed those mood swings right along. In the least, being raised there is a legitimate excuse for why I’m the way I am, and I’ll be damned if I’m not going to use it. I’m not talking just about family conflicts, bickering within the ranks, though we have plenty of that. Currently, my mother isn’t speaking to her two brothers, her father isn’t speaking to them either, (but there was a time in the not so distant past that my grandfather wasn’t speaking to my mother; it seesaws), my step-father only speaks to one of his four siblings, and the whole family tries to avoid speaking to his father. Though there are too many reasons to cover on why these people don’t talk, the more interesting ones are as follows: My mother doesn’t speak to her brothers because they beat her and her two sisters, one of which is deceased and the other was given up for adoption because of her brother’s torment, when they were and because they refuse to back my grandfather in a wrongful death law suit he’s filing for the death of my grandmother. This is the same reason my grandfather won’t speak to them either. And because they won’t send him money, which he piddles away at the nickel slots. My step father won’t speak to one of his sisters because she tried to get him involved in a money laundering scam. He won’t speak to the other because she’s a drug addicted who falsely accused him of molesting her. His brother took off after he got in trouble with his drug supplier. As for his father, after getting out of federal prison, he is now delusional and thinks he can make money appear every following Tuesday. Throw in a couple manic depressives, a few people with OCD, a murderous cousin in a maximum security mental institution, and my biological father who committed suicide by napping on a train track because he couldn’t deal with being bipolar and we are quite the colorful bunch. We do have our share of problems, but my core family is extremely loving, would do anything for me, and raised me the best they could. For what it’s worth, I think they did a damn good job. I was raised by my aunt, uncle, mother, grandmother, and grandfather. My aunt passed away when I was five; I stayed with the rest of the family until my mother married my step-dad. From there on, my family consisted of us three and two little brothers that popped up along the way. We had some hard times, but nothing I would consider scarring. What stuck with me was the dualistic nature of my household. For instance, my mother is a relatively conservative woman, meaning one wouldn’t find her tying up my step-father and beating him with a whip or even understanding why anyone would do such a perverted thing (her thoughts, not mine). But her conservative nature didn’t stop her from having sex on my bed when I was seven or matter-of-factly explaining how to pleasure a woman to me when I was ten. Another example was how strict the house was when it came to school. School and extracurricular activities were priority number one. But if my brothers and I had everything done and were doing well in school, we were allowed to stay out late, even on school nights, and go to places my parents knew would give us access to sex, drugs, and alcohol, as long as we promised to be safe and not do anything too stupid. I could have sex in my room with my parents home. I was dead though if I left a dish in the sink. My family couldn’t decide if it wanted to be the twisted, sick people on the block everyone whispers about or the loving, caring family on the block everyone raved about. My parents didn’t know if they wanted to be the cool, “I’ll let my do what they want” parents or the strict, “get the hell in your room and finish your homework until you get it right” parents. I come from a family whose coat of arms reads, “Oxymoron.” For me, the struggle has always been good or bad. I wanted to do well and succeed. I wanted to be a complete screw up who gave into every impulse. In junior high, I was a straight A student, perfect record. I was also in a tagging crew, spray painted on walls, smoked pot, and drained my parents’ liquor supply. Not to mention I was suspended from the bus for throwing a bottle at a truck and suspended from school for fighting the day before I was supposed to give my speech for the National Merit Honor Society. I cleaned up my act in high school and stopped my life of crime, minus some shop lifting, and laid down the drugs and alcohol. But that didn’t stop me from hanging out with the drug dealers and pot heads, even though I was the valedictorian. Instead of doing narcotics, I did girls, in mass quantity. I settled down my senior year other than the fact that I almost didn’t graduate because I ditched so many days of class. Now I’m a respectable member of society, one who will swallow the occasional handful of pain killers, wash it down with a few shots of tequila, and snit an adderol or two or three. The dilemma of good or bad has evolved for me though, expanded into new realms because of the freedoms that come with adulthood. Not only do I have to think about good or bad, but I have to think about big city or small town, high pay/high stress job or low pay/ lower stress job, married with a family or partying with a girlfriend. There’s no right answer because the only choice that makes me happy is having a choice. There’s always something I wish I was doing or wish I had done. Happy. Happier. Happy. Happier. Happy The time between my senior year in high school and now is a perfect example. My senior year in high school I was on top of the world. I loved my city. I was the valedictorian. I had my first long term girlfriend that I was in love with. And I got accepted to my first choice, Stanford, which was close to everything I loved. But I got an offer from Duke, a place and area I knew next to nothing about, and I thought the change might make me happier, so I took it. At first I was miserable and ready to go back to what I knew would definitely make me happy, but then I met a girl that really made me happy, so I convinced myself that how happy she made me balanced out how unhappy the school made me and stayed. Then I graduated college, but this time I was more down in the sewers than on top of the world. My bipolar disorder was full blown, I had two stays in psyc. wards, once delivered by cops after I called 911 because I was trying to bite off my tongue, I was in complete denial, and the meds. they gave me made me so lifeless that suicide would have been redundant. That was ok though, I still had the girl that made me really happy. But then I got to thinking, what if there’s something that would make me happier. A brilliant idea came to me: “Don’t accept the high paying sales job near the beach in Florida and ask your girl to come with you. No! Take a low paying teaching job in Roanoke, Virginia and live there by yourself. That will give you plenty of time to really learn about yourself and figure out what will really make you happy.” Now that my decision didn’t quite live up to my expectations, I’m thinking about moving back to Las Vegas, the place that originally made me happy; I don’t know if it will make me happy, but I think it might make me happy, at least happier than this place. It’s logical. Move back to a city and be with people that are as confused as yourself. A no brainer right? Here I go again. handle handle  |
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