I just returned from an annual golf trip with my brother. My family has been going to Luray Caverns Country Club every year since 1980. Over the years the size of the outing has varied, peaking at 44. Today we shoot for 16. About 15 years ago my brother assumed the reins and began coordinating the outing. I didn't go for many years because he and I were not close. To say that we enjoyed a superficial relationship would be an overstatement. About five years ago my brother asked that I come back to Luray, that we use the trip to reestablish some kind of brotherly bond. Needless to say I agreed.
Since my father's passing the trip has become a gathering of my brother's friends. Only my Uncle Walt and I remain from the original group. The trip is no less fun, just a different social experience than in the past. Golfing with 14 of my brother's friends is always a blast. I genuinely like all of them. That said, a common theme has emerged - it's become the Mike Mathews show. Mike, a former MLB journeyman pitcher, carries a 2 or 3 handicap. He beat me by 30 strokes in the three-round competition, destroying the field. He's the best golfer of the group by a wide margin. During the evenings Mike regales the group with graphic accounts of his off-the-field exploits. His retelling is hilarious, especially for the one or two newcomers each year that haven't heard the stories before. It's the typical "glory days" cliche', but a laughfest nonetheless.
Somehow the subject matter always shifts to me and the volatile escapades that dominated my 20's and 30's. Either my brother or one of his friends will mention an incident, using me as a prop to keep the conversation lively. I don't particularly care what people think or believe they know about me. In all candor, it's truly amusing to me that anyone that's been in my presence less than ten times over the past decade could believe they know anything about me, but that's a different post altogether. For my part, I'm happy to play the fool and share the incidents that troubled my past. If painting me as the family black sheep is somehow an affirmation of my brother's stature, I'm quite content to let his friends believe what they will.
Although the golf outing is the inspiration for this post, it's not my intent to poke any of them in the chest and say "you don't know me." Instead, it's to illustrate the challenge that I'll face in writing this blog. The trip with my brother heightened my awareness that people leap to conclusions on the basis of minuscule amounts of information. None of them, my brother included, has the vaguest notion what makes me tick, how I support my family, or the principals I hold dear. I'm simply Patrick's crazy brother.
It's possible that readers of my blog will also form opinions about me solely on the basis of my posts. In writing this blog I plan to chronicle family events, share photos, and talk about personal struggles past and present. In so doing - people may assume that's my whole life, and believe they'll know me because I put my whole life out there for all to see. Let me assure you that's not the case! It's not all out there and never will be. I won't share everything. There have been and will be moments and struggles that will remain deeply private.
In a prior post I stated that I blog because it's cathartic. It allows me to purge many thoughts that rattle inside my head. Instead of struggling to find the right words to verbalize what I'm feeling, I can construct the message I want to convey, click the Publish button, and BOOM it's out there for everyone to see. The downside is that there is no editing process; no one reading the post prior to publishing to fact check or simply verify that I really want to say what I'm saying. It's just me and my writing.
My blog is an attempt to put my life and thoughts into context, to provide a clearer picture of what makes me tick than I typically do in social settings. I've been told that I lack a filter, that's true, but only half the story. The truth is that I always have a million thoughts colliding in my brain. My initial verbalization is typically out of context, a purely emotional reaction to a situation which doesn't accurately reflect the totality of my perspective. Therein lays the challenge. I've learned to harness my emotions and to apply situational awareness, but if I don't like or respect the audience, I have no inhibition in delivering unfiltered content . If I say something irreverent it's not because I lack the ability to filter, but because I have so little regard for what the person thinks of me. I'm simply playing a role. It's my way to telling them to fuck off, I can't wait for this to over, without them knowing. That makes me an asshole, not crazy!
The flip-side is that if I do care what you think, my default is to say nothing until I know exactly what it is I want to convey. The trouble is that I don't immediately know. I've got to homogenize the millions of colliding images in my head into a concise, rational, thought. Despite my 140 IQ, I can't process all of the data on the fly. This poem most accurately represents what it's like to be me:
I am an enigma unto myself.
Who lives behind these dull orbs of bright blue?
Someone or something I don't even know.
Who is this "I" I keep referring to?
I am an enigma unto myself.
I do things and say things I don't understand.
Strange thoughts race around inside my head.
Is it ever possible to know me?
I am an enigma unto myself.
I look in the mirror, and wonder who
Could be staring back at me. A stranger
Who's vaguely familiar. Is it really me?
I am something no one can comprehend.
In that respect I'm no different than you.
This post would be incomplete without an illustration. Several weeks ago I hosted a Baptismal celebration for my nephew's son at my home. During the party a woman, friend of my nephew's father-in-law, approached me to inform me that she thought I was an asshole but had revised her opinion and wanted me to know that she now believed me to be a sweet and generous person. Apparently this woman was offended by the "hard ass" persona I exhibited during my daughters high school athletic careers. I say apparently because we rarely spoke and didn't share a common social network. Her opinion was formed solely on the basis of how she perceived me, and I was unaware. The key point is that on the basis of very limited interaction she decided that I was an asshole. Now, on the basis of far more limited data, entirely based on 3rd-party input, she feels compelled to tell me that her opinion of me has dramatically improved.
All I could say to her was "thank you. You know me, but you don't really know me."
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