Lists

As each new day begins intruding its way past the gate keeper brain waves of sleep and into some semblance of your full consciousness, you begin to ask yourself questions relative to this new opportunity of a day to come forth, roaring and alive with potential.

Some of these questions you have for yourself take the form of lists of things to be done.  These things to be essayed are such as work- or pleasure-related meetings, classes to teach, specific chores to be attended before they end up costing you emotional or financial coin.  

In short, they are daily things, sometimes in such plentiful supply that lists are necessary to keep track of them.  Other times, the one or two "things" stand out for their urgency or timeliness--or their presence in unfettered potential for leisure and the curiosity to pursue that intriguing quality.

You recognize lists as a practical source of keeping track of future ventures, compiled as an insurance in using only-too-willing brain waves to forget the least pleasant chores, leaving you instead with the sense of a sailor in a new port, pockets filled with cash, hungry for experience and adventure, eager to get out on the town.

In part because of yesterday's meditation on picaresque novels, your preference for them, and an overall need to find the proper shape of things, you set forth once again with a litany of questions about the nature of the Self that is you and your perception of the parts of the universe with which you have some contact.

Without a scattered trove of notes and, indeed, these blog essays, you are in a large sense chaotic, even though all your limbs are in their proper place, such hair as you have is behaving in accord with its own, cow-lick ways, and the arrangement of your books is in enough of an order to allow you to interpret this order in times when you feel the need to retrieve one particular volume, from which to provide at least one significant paragraph or exchange of dialogue.

Reality needs no help from you in the daily assertion of chaos riding over the universe and its denizens. Of the few predictable things that may be advanced about reality, one significant state may be chaos.  Reality is an enormous outpouring, a virtual cornucopia, of events, for which there is scant time to make anything so organized as a list.  You see of reality what you can and wish to see.  Others join you, each in their separate visions.

Rather than use logic to make the point, you'll stipulate.  You're often a walking chaos, running parallel tracks with Reality which, regardless of how busy you are, is busier and exponentially busier than you.

Given your fondness for the picaresque narrative, which seems to wander over the terrain, seeking clues and direction from its landmarks and denizens, you are not surprised to notice how picaresque your life is, off at an apparent whim to track down some result or outcome you'd not suspected when you began.  

The outcome of your narratives often come as a surprise, in most of these cases, a happy surprise, where matters get sorted as much as matters in the kinds of life you prefer can achieve any sense of resolution.  You are cautious in your fortunate outcomes because of an experience-based sentiment that most things are not what they seem to be.  You can go on from there in that mash-up of Mrs. Malaprop and those two baseball greats, Casey Stengel, and Yogi Berra, with the observation that even when a thing is what it seems, it isn't.

For the most part, you collect lists rather than follow them.  They tell you what is often in your best interest to accomplish, even if you don't feel like engaging the specific activity.  Some of your best work--so far as you are concerned--comes from the avoidance of items on your list.

One way or another, you love story as much as you love certain living things.  Story has shape and outcome.  Your life has had an extraordinary, surprised-based shape.  Sometimes, your lists, life, and stories reflect too much pedantry and pedagogic vector.  Coming on them unprepared is often a shock.  This was a part of your life you'd thought to have under control.

There is your personal agon, the teeter-totter between shape and the picaresque.

"Do you realize how difficult you make things for yourself?"  you ask in self-reflective attempts at a negotiation.

Often the answer come forth, all too soon, "And do you have any idea how difficult it would be if you were anyone else?"