On Insecurity

I know how you feel.

I have been fortunate to fall in love with the abstract. Not the abstract about people, but the abstractions about science, of science fiction, of metaphysics and philosophy, but most importantly about music. And computing. There have been several events in my life that have brought me to a small sorrowful self in which I have been reduced to the basics. So I directed all of my energies to the four things that I determined that I needed most just to get out of bed in the morning. Money. Sex. Music. Computers.

When I could not get satisfactory injections of the pure forms of those, I made what I could of the abstractions I could find. Sometimes they came in combinations. In 1981 I was on my last boom box and could not afford to buy a single new blank cassette tape. I dare not record another new song from the radio because it would cost me a song I already taped. There was a song I found in my lonely solitude. It was narrated in French about a romantic murder. So I got music about sex in one go. It was a tragedy I survived.

I watched Neil Brennan’s latest comic routine on Netflix. I get him. Deeply, like the way I got Stephen Wright and Dimitri Martin. I am such a person. I am confident in my ability to present the dilemmas of my life. I know what’s wrong with me, so I know what I need. I can sink into my own private Idaho and focus. Focus like a bedraggled crawler in the desert. Water! So what if I’m desperate now? At least I know what I need.

The flip side of insecurity is satisfaction, but it is an obvious satisfaction. It is not joy or elation. It doesn’t make me leap into the air and click my heels with two thumbs up, like the idiot mascot for Lucky Charms. It makes me say OK. When I’m super hungry and I finally wolf down half of my meal without speaking a word, I finally announce OK. I’m a human now. I know my insecurity. I know my satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction until I do. Then I’m satisfied, until I get hungry.

I just finished writing a program in Python that does this thing. This is the fourth time I have written this program. The first time was in C, and I never finished it and lost the code. The second time was in Perl and it worked satisfactorily. The third time was in Ruby but I didn’t really need it. This time in Python, I finished it in 3 days and I’m quite happy with it. Except, I really know that I need to rewrite it in Rust. Rust is the most excellent computer language I’ve ever seen. But I still haven’t gotten over its legendary learning curve. So I love it in the abstract. I’m insecure about my Python. It’s a commodity language. It’s good enough. People get it. It’s like an Ecoboost four cylinder engine. It gets you from point A to point B, but don’t pretend you’re racing, or going in style. Rust is super fast and elegant. It’s what I want, but I don’t get it. I’m insecure even though the Python works.

Happiness has nothing to do with it. You want to know why? Because I am a big brother with two younger brothers who died before me. Way before their time. I hated my responsibility as a kid, but I was not given a choice. So I couldn’t wolf down a pint of milk before they started on the half gallon for our meal. All three of them grew taller than I. I protected them until they were. I never had a choice in understanding that I was a survivor and a pioneer. It didn’t make me happy, it made me righteous. It wasn’t until I developed a self-deprecating humor that I could deal with it all. My father was six foot four. When I was a freshman in highschool, I was four foot eight. Of course I expected to be over six feet tall, but I wasn’t. I had it in reserve. I figured it was my destiny. You don’t know anything about insecurity until you go through life as a short man. Yet I was still the eldest. When Pops went out with Moms, I was man of the house until they returned. I wasn’t happy about it. It was my duty. Eventually I figured that would grow tall. I didn’t. Those I protected died off my watch.

Life has no rewards for the broken self. ‘Things’ don’t get better. We adapt. We are insecure until we can get hold of our basic fuels and then we are satisfied. For the moment. We can sleep. The day comes and we rise from bed. We code our pathetic little Python knowing we could do better. We tend our sorry little plants. We scritch our ugly, thankless cat. We stick a pacifier in the piehole of life.