Since father and son considered this particular weekend their private, Anti Mardi Gras festival, the elder declared, “Time to strip away the mask and face our own surprising face. I threatened to tell you and now we’ll see, that no paper pater I be. Trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing,” and the neighborhood brass band began tuning up in preparation for the impending parade.
“I have broached this matter before, obliquely and subtly, but the days of youthful gingersnaps and childish mimicry have fled, (least they’d better flee!), and it is for us to confront these thirteen lucky words head-on and dead-eyed. He suddenly leaned close in to the lad’s face and squintedly sneered, “Say, didn’t you once play your evil twin on The Young and the Unbearable?!” It was a query which thankfully went unanswered due to the increasing din in the street.
Father took a deep breath and raised the volume, (not to mention quality), of his speech to match their surroundings and continued. “The one fact you never find in all the words of all the would-be-ers regarding this curious conceit of our family tradition is that trying to wake-up is the struggle to make something out of nothing. The truth is: you are not trying to change a mental state of sleep to one of being awake. For a ‘condition’ to exist, there must be something to be IN the condition, and there is no such ‘thing’ in you to be there. The condition that IS the something, (or for the benefit of evil twins on the opposite coast, the something IS the condition).
The Invisible Man struggling to keep himself from having to face his actual condition by an endless expression of concern over his wardrobe; that’s who you and all amateurs at this are (not to mention everybody else on the planet).” A flag boy ran by, could the Indians be far behind? “A common rebuke amongst mortals is ‘Control yourself!’ Indeed, the distinguishing mark twix thinking-man and instinctive-beast is his singular ability to control his behavior. To be civilized rather than savage is to have yourself under control. So too to be awake and enlightened rather than asleep and confused, but how is such a thing possible?
How can YOU control YOUR self, if your SELF is subject to YOU controlling it. Its condition would already be as men say it should be. If water had the potential to teach-itself, or make-itself dry, it would perforce BE dry, and not wet.”
J.