Someone to Talk To

How old were you when you realized that no one knows anything?

I miss that time in my life when I thought adults knew things. I remember showing up at my uncle’s house, my Dad’s brother, to ask him his opinion about pre-marital sex, because I was really wanting to screw my girlfriend, but I felt guilty about it. Christian upbringing. Plus, it was bothering me that all of my friends were losing their virginities, and they said pussy was the best thing, and I wanted to find out about it, but I was afraid God would be mad. I didn’t want to talk to my own dad about it, like, I needed a some privacy, and I knew full-well that dad had to maintain the Christian message about fornication, but I thought maybe my uncle would give me the real talk. I was fifteen years old, and I thought he knew things.

Teachers, doctors, directors, principals, coaches, bankers. Remember when you thought those people knew things?

It occurs to me that I’ve spent most of my adulthood just looking for somebody to talk to, but the truth is I know I’ll never find that person, because nobody knows anything. I want to ask questions that no one can answer. That’s the hard part about being a grownup, that I still have all these questions, but there’s no real point in asking them.

I had this thought just gnawing at me for a long time. I’ve never known quite how to articulate it, so it just gnaws at me, and when I try to articulate it, it comes out all mangled, and my interlocutor never understands. Aliens, is the question: Why aren’t they? Aliens being my very best attempt to make the question concrete and thereby relatable. No sci-fi here, just wondering, how can man be the measure of all things? Why aren’t there aliens, creatures ahead of us and above us, supplying us with answers? No person knows anything, but aliens just might.

I’d pose this question to my students sometimes, if you could blow up the moon, would you? I’d try to explain it, like this: If you had a gun, just imagine a huge gun, and with one shot you can obliterate the moon. You are the only one who has this gun, and only you can pull the trigger. You’re sitting there, and you have a choice to make. Pull the trigger? Leave it be? What do you do?

Almost all of them, to a person, swears up and down they’d avoid pulling the trigger. Bullshit, I say. Surely somebody here is bold enough to admit you’d pull the trigger. All of them are still very young, you see. I remember being like them, still believing that I had people I could talk to. Why would you blow up this world full of people to talk to? It took me a while to understand why they wouldn’t do it.

Owl Man fights Batman in a Justice League animated film I have always liked, Crisis on Two Earths. In this picture, we get an alternative universe and the regular universe, and the heroes are all inverted. Batman’s counterpart is Owl Man, voiced by none other than James Woods. Batman believes that life is worth fighting for, but Owl Man, the greatest representation of pure amoral nihilism ever rendered on screen, I think, wants to destroy it all. Why? Because it is the only choice he can make that would mean something, the ultimate fuck you to the universe. Or something like that. But that’s the problem with nihilism. It is an empty black hole. You have to keep heaping nihilism on top of more nihilism. The universe doesn’t care one way or the other.

That’s what’s so maddening about all these questions that no one can answer. The universe is just there, cool as a cucumber, but you are quite put out. That’s what’s so damned good about the simple poem by Stephen Crane that I quote time and time again, “A Man Said to the Universe”:

A man said to the universe: “Sir, I exist!” “However,” replied the universe, “The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation.”

The point of it that we have to give voice to the universe just so it can tell us to fuck off. It’s maddening.

Christians, God love them, just don’t get me at all. I’ve tried, dear Lord have I tried, to ask them. They tend to know less than nothing, that being that they pretend they know everything. I get really tired of all the pretending. If we are cursed to have no aliens, and to not know, can we at least just sit be honest about it? Pretending doesn’t help at all, but then again, what do I want from them? Do I also expect water not to be wet?

I’ve tried talking to women, and Christian women, and they give you the added bonus of knowing less than nothing, then losing all respect for you when you expose the weakness of needing to ask the question in the first place. Real men don’t ask these sorts of questions because real men don’t have the need. All I ever really wanted from a woman was for us both to have the questions, and for us both to not ask them in unison. Too much to ask.

So, the best I’ve come up with to this point is just this what I’m doing now, talking to myself, essentially. That’s what writing turns out to be, boiled down. It must be why I am compelled to do it. It’s why I incessantly reread my own words. It’s a conversation with myself. I’ve never had a conversation with anyone that was better than this hour I’ve spent writing this piece, how it was simmering for a day or so before I sat down and started, and how I knew what I wanted to say, which I’ve said, that no one really knows anything. Least of all, me.