Irony

People always tell me that I am being ironic. But honestly, I have never really understood irony very well. When I was a kid, people said I was obnoxious – I just thought irony was the grown up version and left it at that. I do however, understand irony in its sarcastic form, but it becomes a difficult concept to grasp from the perspective of general observation. Many people feel that because something is incongruent, it is automatically ironic. That itself might be ironic of those people, but again, I am not sure. Ironically, I don’t know if stating that I do not understand irony here is ironic or not (I don’t think it is). This is why I named my blog Incongruent Rationalizations and not Ironic Rationalizations, even though the later name might have actually been understood faster by everyone that does not actually understand irony (ironic? I have no idea).  When you are writing about something or anything, it is often important that you eventually point the reader to the actual point that you will be trying to argue in your writing. So, here it is: I think that my life is somehow ironic or at least has hit a patch of irony, because irony is like black ice (Did I get it?).

For over a decade I held my family and myself to a daunting dilatory strategy in which we deferred any and all immediate gratifications in favor of the grand pay-off of our accumulated hard work and sacrifices. I had us all convinced that our immediate hardships and abstinence of standard comforts, material gains and  – I cannot stress this one enough – TIME, would in time reward us in an abundance of all three. This is what is referred to in economics as delayed or differed gratification. It is the argument for investment of any kind (education, time, monetary), in which delaying immediate gratifications will result in long-term or future benefits of greater utility (basically happiness). I let slip by career opportunities with immediate benefits while holding the long-term view that my education would eventually offer an immensely rewarding lifestyle that current opportunities lacked and therefore justify the costs of those opportunities (I want to end every paragraph with a statement about irony, but I cannot find one here).

Then I came down with a touch of brain cancer (a little goes a long way) right when things were beginning to pan out for us, we never actually got to have the material comforts that I continuously professed we would enjoy. But it is still usually easy enough in our deficiencies to manufacture a noble view of materialism and hold to a simplistic style of living, by which all standards of measure still leaves us wanting little in terms of location, entertainment, sustenance and safety. It is time that causes all of the trouble in our current lives. Time we sacrificed to time alone and lost because of a statistical anomaly so minute that it was never factored into the equation. (Dumb luck is probably not ironic though).

It seems that all these shit moments stretch and expand to fill the eons beneath the Planck scale of time where the substance of thoughts exist at the tips of the temporal realm in the absence of physical constraints in naked view of only God and self in an eternal hellish loop of regret and frustration caused from a linear inability to re-posture for a better present position. Did you see that; I touched on physics, God and the fact that deep down, I am a 13 year-old Goth chick with an unconventional Kafka-ish fetish. Now, within each day I have a larger amount of time available to give –although lacking the desired quality - and simultaneously less of those coveted days to give them. Do you see the irony? I am a grown man and a little girl at the same time. And maybe there is some ironic crap about time too. I don’t really understand irony.

So here is the deal. I cannot alter the past and I might not be able to stretch the future as far as I would like for myself to be able to enjoy the grown men that I am currently raising/ruining (it is debatable) or the elegant educated woman that will surely realize her mistake in choosing me if I can only stay around long enough to give her the chance (not giving my wife this opportunity might actually be a win for me though). This gives me the diseased filled present to paint an everlasting image of my glory that will follow my children into the future and prevent my wife from replacing me with…well, anything (maybe my love is ironic).

I have been trying desperately to create memories out of the abundance of immediate time that I have with them that do not highlight my current condition for my children to hold onto (my wife will have to rely on her drunken days of our courting). Ironically, I want them to remember me doing something manly and dangerous (I am not sure I got it right that time – that could be ironic too, I think). So, creating memories in which I still appear manly? There is this blog of course. Then there is their most recent memory of me passing out while attempting to cross the front room and being rushed to the hospital (it is my natural sense of dramatics I real life that gives my writing so much flavor). I now throw the ball underhand-lefty and I continuously ask everyone to slow their pace because it hurts my hip and I cannot keep up. I cannot drive a car, ride a bike, go hiking or swim well enough to be the only adult at the pool when my kids are swimming (my leg attempts to drag me to the bottom sometimes – like Jaws). I am not even strong enough to be abusive. I think that maybe the only manly thing that I am still capable of doing is growing a mustache. (Is ant of that ironic?).

I figured that I would just stumble upon an ending to this post. That did not happen, so I am going to just make something up instead (it’s harder than it sounds). Someone recently told me that the definition of manly is finding something that terrifies you and just doing it. Mike Tyson terrifies me, but I do not think my kids would want to see me doing him or that they would feel that I was very manly afterwards (maybe if I didn’t cry after). I think that nothing is what you expect it to be; unicorns are just deformed semi-retarded goats at backwards carnivals, the most spectacular sunsets are caused by pollution and my life will always be remembered by my unintentional impacts and externalities and not by my intentions.  (Maybe it is my efforts that are ironic, but I doubt it. I will never understand irony).