My wife won't let me buy a mini-van. I want one because it's spacious; it has little TVs that silence two-year olds; it can go the 80 miles an hour that I don't go beyond anyway; it allows for easy clean-up of the ill-defined baby particles that seem to make their way onto the floor and seats; and it has floor stow away things that serve no real purpose but are cool anyway.
But it's a no go. It's a no go because it marks the death of what we could be. Our future rock star selves. The one's that put the baby to bed at 7, arrive by plane to the Baja coast by 11, drink shots dripped through each other's ass cracks, and be home in time to film our American Idol audition songs before our baby wakes up. A mini-van marks the death of a dream. We are our parents. We are the middle class.
I am the worst perpetrator of this fallacy of identity. I am a writer even though my books and plays and whatevers haven't been written yet. I am a jujitsu master that can defend my family with Jason Bourne-like skill even though I haven't really committed to practicing the art. And I am a great husband and father because of these things I'm going to do, not the things that I am doing.
This is a big problem; a big, under-recognized problem. It is not the dreaming that's an issue. I believe possibility to be a great source of inspiration and productivity. It is the narrative we build - that thing we create to bridge the pinpoints of our lives into a false fluidity - that is the problem. Somehow with our perceived future weaves its way into our present and, in some ways, dominates it. We begin to think we are what we want to be.
Sartre stated that we are what we are not and not what we are. Utterly confusing but expected from a man who thought he was being chased by gigantic lobsters through his amphetamine haze. Confusing but insightful. We are what we are not: we are our projects, our expectations, our goals. We are not what we are: we are not our present selves but instead what we are working towards. To some extent this is healthy. If we cannot own our future selves in some way now, what would be the point of working towards anything? Sartre was a perfect example of how this can be healthy: he was striving towards something but actively doing something about it now. He was a philosopher and writer so he wrote everyday (enough for 20 pages a day for his entire lifetime). He was active. He lived his future in his present.
I don't think most of us are like him. We get lost in what we are not. I explain why I'm a writer instead of writing. I explain to my wife why I'm a good husband instead of doing what it takes to be one. I abstract myself from my present.
I'll be coming back to this idea of the present a lot. Although impossible to pinpoint, this now, this present, this whatever the fuck this is that we're truly living in is the only thing that's real. The past is misconceived, misconstrued, and misinterpreted. The future is undefined, unpredictable, and unsustainable. The present defines us. The rest is false narrative.
But fuck the mini-van. I'm getting a Porsche. It fits my Hunter S Thompson meets Bruce Lee persona better anyway.
Sartre:
www.sartre.org/
Stow-Aways (love 'em):
www.helium.com/items/785698-pros-and-cons-of-stow-n-go-seats-in-minivans
