Influences

Okay, I admit it. I don't read very much. I don't make a serious study of authors or directors or actors. I can't quote passages, and I can't footnote and cross-reference my casual conversation. 

I'm not proud of this, and I know it often makes me seem kind of stupid and unenlightened. But there it is.

I open myself to be influenced by everything and everyone I come across. I don't really have a very sophisticated "filtering" system and that often makes me appear kind of gullible, pliable and even submissive.

Because of all of this, my internal reality is a swirling melange of ideas, perceptions and experiences that form up into little chains of consistency, and that's what comprises my intellect. But these "chains of consistency" are constantly breaking and reforming into new chains and patterns of relationship consistency. The core parameter which keeps all this conceptual chaos in check is a constant evaluation based on what works.

I am kind of proud of that particular conceptual mechanism, but I am aware that it often makes me appear shallow, waffling and somewhat bogus. 

Many times in conversation about things I really don't care about, I'll take the opposite position just to have an argument. If the conversation stays on the "high road" with valid logic, I'll generally let the other person win the argument. Sometimes, I'll turn things around so that in the end we're both saying the same thing, and actually just arguing about the words being used. As much fun as it is, I realize that it makes me look like an asshole. 

It's all good though, nobody's feelings really get hurt. I can always be dismissed as bogus, waffling, shallow, submissive, pliable or gullible.

That really doesn't bother me much because it just puts more input into my database of influence. One thing that does bother me, though, is that in this swirling melange of influence and shifting patterns of relationship consistency, I'm never sure if I'm having an original idea or not. Many times, people will credit (or accuse) me with saying something that I can't remember having actually said. By the same token, I'll come up with an idea that I think is totally original, and people will swear that they've heard it somewhere before.

That can be very disconcerting, and I end up wishing I could make a serious study of authors, directors and actors, and quote passages and footnote and cross-reference my casual conversation.

But I can't, I don't and I won't.  

But what I will do is offer this partial list of names of famous people which have had more than a casual influence on my basic patterns of relationship consistency. H.P. Lovecraft, Martin Luther King, Aleister Crowley, Madam Blavatsky, Papa Doc Duvalier, Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Mother Theresa, Cotton Mather, Tomás de Torquemada, Heinrich Himmler, Simon Wiesenthal, Robert Silverberg, Richard Matheson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ozzy Osbourne, Albert Einstein, and the guy with the hair from "Ancient Aliens."

But these people are just footnotes. My real influences are the people I've met, loved, fought with and ultimately pissed off. I carry all of them with me all the time. There's the weird kid who picked on me (and everybody else) in kindergarten, then disappeared. There are the kids who lived at the top of the hill, and taught me how to shop-lift and tried to teach me how to fight. There's the kid that lived down the road and tried to teach me how to play baseball and football. There's the mean little girl who always wanted to play doctor or teacher. There was the fat kid that nobody liked who ended up getting run over by a piece of heavy farm equipment (a disc for those of you who are in the know about such things). 

Those are just from the first ten years. I could go on for page after page, cataloguing almost every person I ever met and the little slivers of life I got, and keep, from every one of them. 

Kind of creepy when you think about it.