I had a pretty interesting dream last night. One of my brothers-in-law was sitting at a coffee shop with me…in fact, it was a former Salem coffee shop which I loved but is now closed. He was telling me that he didn’t love being a father anymore, he never realized being married was going to be so fucking tiring, and that he didn’t know what to do anymore because he was just going through the motions now. So the conversation continued and he told me that sometimes he just wants to leave and start over, and I stopped him, I said “Do you love them?” He said “Yes.” I said “So then isn’t it your responsibility to make your life more fulfilling so that you’re not feeling so apathetic? Or should they just constantly entertain you?” Then I woke up.
Unfortunately, my dream brother-in-law, perhaps physically representing his own apathy, had no face…or at least I was unable to see his face in my dream. Now, this of course means that I can’t call the sister whose brother-in-law appeared in my dream and ask her how things are going.
So, I know it wasn’t my youngest sister’s husband, since they don’t have children and he is a towering teddy bear whose physique could not be mistaken for anyone else. Now, the roommate says that the animals, and they have many, are like children, and definitely exhausting for both my sister and her husband, so I suppose it could still be him. It can’t be my brother-in-law in Tennessee, because in the years that he and my sister have been married, I’ve never even heard him say “shit” let alone “fucking tiring” and his accent is unmistakeable. It could be my brother-in-law in Ohio, I haven’t ever met him so it wouldn’t be a surprise if he showed up faceless in a dream. So this leaves two other potential brothers-in-law…maybe.
Honestly, I am not going to look too deeply into my dream, after all it was just a dream, and I really don’t give a flying nun which brother-in-law it was. I’m fairly certain that it was just a dream, no vision, not a premonition, just a simple dream…but then it got me to thinking…isn’t that true?
I know that I do it…I get bored and I just replace what or whom I have become bored with. I too have been replaced upon becoming tedious…I know, it’s hard to believe.
Why do we think that it is somebody external who is responsible for our fulfillment, our entertainment, alleviation of our apathy?
The truth is, it can’t be anybody else who is responsible for that because well…they don’t ACTUALLY know us. I mean, nobody really knows any other individual better than that individual. My loved ones might know that I love to swim, but many probably don’t know that I prefer the ocean to the pool, they might know that I love the color orange but not know that the shade of orange that I most adore is burnt rust orange.
So when we’re bored, when life has become tedious, when your lover, whom you still love, just seems to be not in your realm of pleasure any longer…well contrary to what Pat Robertson might think, it isn’t your lover’s responsibility to entertain you, to keep your life from being tedious. It’s yours. More often than not, our boredom is of ourselves, not of others.
I despise the song Afternoon Delight. Sorry, I know it’s a favorite, but to me, it’s not a song about rediscovering love, it’s a song about going to cheat, and something divine intervening, some chance happening occurring which prevented the couple’s descent into shame and sorrow. However, I DO like that they realize that they’ve been thinking the same thing, that each of them have been longing for something more, and weren’t even aware enough, responsible enough, mature enough, to mention it to each other.
We depend so much on others to give us a passion for life, an inspiration for something great, we depend on them being our muses, the clearing of our blocks, whether artistic or otherwise. We search for people who will electrify us, who will breathe life into us, who will quicken us. Unfortunately, those others are usually searching for the same thing…and just don’t have anything to give when we need it.
What if we did that for ourselves? What if we were the key to starting our own engines, a self contained entity capable of igniting its own abilities, future, dreams and passions? What if we loved ourselves so much that those around us were party to our lust for life and therefore joined in, becoming active participants, rather than each person dragging the next, trying to figure out what would or might inspire them? Would marriages be stronger? Would lovers last longer? Would the ennui, so common to life, fade into the background, waiting for a turn on the dance floor that would rarely come?
Like the characters sung about in Afternoon Delight, sometimes folks have spent so much time together that they forget that they are individuals, and yet they also forget what they once loved about each other, what they once loved about themselves. Sometimes, like those same characters, they have the moment of epiphany, realizing that they still have many of those same loves, and some new ones as well.
Hellish Behavior 