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Lesson Eighteen

Some confuse anthropology with evolutionary psychology. You know better. Homo sapiens are neither highly developed nor capable of abstract reasoning. They are in fact rather redundant. You should know, you keep repeating yourself over and over. Just last week you made the same mistake that got you into this whole mess in the first place. But it takes three to make a pattern. Until then you can pretend there were nuanced differences between the two. You can describe your life as curiously ironic. But you’ll fuck up again. Then you’ll be forced to blame it all on your unconscious. Freud would say you need specialized assistance to analyze the random associations, dreams, verbal slips. Only in this way, will you have access to the sentient force of your own will. But there are always other techniques. Crack your skull and burrow your fingers in the cerebral cortex. Somewhere in there is the source of the problem. Pluck the virulent weed.


Lesson Nineteen

Eventually your own sorrow will be eclipsed by the trauma of another. You may be tempted to conflate your situations. But this would be a mistake. Accuracy is crucial. You abandoned your family. His boyfriend died in a hospital bed. You can barely stand to sit with him, to witness the vacancy. Only his fingers move, involuntarily tapping SOS messages into the kitchen rag he holds as a child would a blanket, a doll, someone else’s hand. It is not the sound of his sobbing, though it is terrible, or the image of him, a forty eight year old man wretched and suddenly alone. It is the gravity of your choices. He chose tough love and his lover died. You chose anything other than what you had. Now you have nothing. Eyes swollen red he warns, be careful, don’t ever do anything you will regret. But you both have. What else is there to say?