Which middle of which night

The effort to be rational, logical, and consistent, to communicate “normally,” spits out rants, ravings, fragments, unstable thought elements with fleeting half-lives or no lives at all, on its other side.

It’s impossible to write one thing without at the same time writing another thing, whether that other thing is written down and collected or not.  The other thing or non-thing consists of everything that the first thing causes but can’t contain, whose exclusion defines the first thing – what wanted to be part of the first thing, but wasn’t on the list.  In the middle of the night, whether alone or in the middle of the late night party itself, we see that all of the clean, pretty, sexy, fashionable, rich subjects on the inside are less interesting, due to their predictable perfection, than the insulted and injured whom our bouncers sent on their way.  At around that point the criteria we confidently employ for including some and excluding the rest seem like the real subject and the real problem, and we come to believe that if we ourselves were better somehow, we would know how to make better choices, and put on a more interesting, unpredictable, varied, and inclusive “event,” and this question parallels the same “societal question” about why Always Taught gets to study in the East with the real dudes, and sexy young well-to-do Yoga students way out of my league will just get sexier and further out of my league through their attendance at Scott’s classes, even as RepubliCorp takes back the House, and the world goes to Hell.

The very fact that the insulted and injured are not included or collected in our thing raises them above us, just as their exclusion gives the lie to our notion that we are so much more inclusive than anyone else.  Yet the effort to expand the guest list, to set up a new event that includes the wrong whom we wronged, still sooner or later relies on a new rule whose working is more likely to disappoint to the very same extent it was merely imagined to be better.  The frustration can lead us back, sooner or later, to the earlier rule, with renewed concentration and determination.  Next time, the bouncers won’t just tell the losers to go away, they’ll give an extra shove, and someone may end up getting hurt.

Maybe our sensitivity in this matter is a main reason we’re not on the lists that in the middle of other nights we wish held our names.  Determining whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing may depend completely on which night you’re asking.