Listen, I know my own dodges.
I wasted an awful lot of time, which just about amounts to a lot of my
life, chasing myself round the globe.
But here I am and I mean to stay now.
Dodges and all. Knowing them
doesn’t mean that they’ll disappear but they can’t always get the best of me
now. Now, I have a fighting chance. Know what I mean? You see, we learn to play so many tricks to
get on in the world that we soon slip into the mode and get caught in our own
webs. For instance: say you had a job to
do that you really didn’t want to do.
Someone was depending on you for it though. There wasn’t anything in it for you so you
avoided the work. We’ve all been
there. Eventually, you either do the
deed or some poor bastard is going around until his dying day calling you a
schmuck. Bad karma but you can live with
it. It wouldn’t be so cool though if you
had to run into him down the road. You
own up, make some sorry-assed excuse that neither of you believe and it’s over. Obligation and obscuration. If you did the same thing to yourself it’s
only different because it all takes place within your body. When people say, “Stop fooling yourself,”
they know what they’re talking about. If
you keep promising to quit smoking or stop this or do that and never do, sooner
or later even you realize that you’re full of it. It’s kind of funny how we go about deceiving
ourselves. Some people can even cause
exterior objects to fall on their heads just so they won’t have to go see their
relatives. Others attempt to do
something like quitting smoking by first chewing gum, then chomping down
toothpicks, while continuing to smoke.
All along you tell yourself that you’re waiting for the urge for the gum
or the toothpicks to kick in, before you drop the smoking. Now you got yourself a triple habit. You have so many things going in and out of
your mouth that you hardly have time to lie about what you’re attempting to do
here. I’ve done that one. You see, I know my own dodges.
I’ve known about my dodges for a long
time now. I suppose some dodges can get
you out of trouble. Whether it’s moving
away from a punch or avoiding a fight.
But I say that I know my own dodges because it just came to me that I do
and much as I can go half way around the world pretending that I’m unaware that
I’m avoiding something, I can’t really.
I do know what I’m doing all the time.
And when I please ignorance it’s a way to save face. Sometimes I lose sight of whose face I’m saving. For instance, my mind played a dozen tricks
on me after I quit smoking. Sometimes I
bought into them. Like the idea of “just
one puff.” I caught myself before
succumbing. But what grabbed my
attention was that I had an entire storehouse of dodges all designed to trick
me. As if I were the enemy. I was Troy and the Trojan horse all wrapped
up in one sweet, contorted deal. Well
that kind of stuff can make you crazy.
So I can’t plead innocence anymore.
All right, I’m not innocent. This
isn’t any sort of sandwich sign proclamation.
I am not making any categorical statements. Only that I can fool myself if I choose to
but if I believe that I’m really fooling myself then it’s fooling myself to
believe that.
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