Demon

The word ‘buff’ comes from Buffalo, or, more accurately, Buffalo grease.

 Which make a lot of sense, like, where else would it come from? Buffet means a large arrangement of food, buffet means some degree of pummeling, and buffoon reduces down to toad, but also blow, like blowhard, or puff, so it’s kind of like buffet after all.

Buffalo grease was, and still is, used for all manner of things, water-proofing, candle-making, soap-making, cooking oil, pemmican making, hair grease, lubricants, and making things shiny. Buff is shiny, buff is good, buff is muscular and lithe, one can buff out the dings on a paint job or a woodworking project, one can buff their characters in a role-playing game, which is to their, and thus your, advantage.

Buff was on one of the post-it notes that I have lined up in my desk area. Others include Sartorial=Tailor’s muscle, Circumlocution/paraphrasis, a list of tags that I intend to start using to help with the organisation of this blog, a sentence that ends in interpret which I completely ignored while writing about the word interpret, a shopping list for art supplies that I already have, and a reminder to do something that I don’t want to do. Now that I’ve tidied up, I need another reminder to do something that I don’t want to do; I need a reminder to be nice to myself. It’s not my modus operandi, this self kindness, in fact, when I talk about it, even to myself, a voice from the 80s rises through the morass of my thoughts like a bubble of swamp gas and says, “That’s so gay.”

There are a few definitions of strength, and one of them can be a weakness, because no matter what you do, strength fails, or turns against you, or turns against itself, like muscles tearing under too much strain, or ripping a tendon off the bone. Strength without temperance, or consistency, or sense, will wound, and what I learned to do was to be stronger no matter what, and when I couldn’t be stronger, I tried to be tougher, and then dogged, and then just dumb, and it’s made me so weak.

It takes a long time to become weak. We’re not born that way. We’re born with a singular will to acquire strength, and we’re supposed to learn, as we get stronger and our skulls allow our brains to expand, that there are so many ways that you will need to be strong that you probably won’t be able to learn them all. And so you’ll be weak sometimes. I am. You get like that when you’ve been reckless, or unlucky. You get all scarred up, and it hurts to move, and it hurts to move so much that it hurts to move at all so you don’t, and you die there like that. Or you don’t, but what makes the difference?

I’m all about the suffering, always have been. I’ve been learning some temperance lately because I was left with no choice but to do so, and even then I adopted as my motto “suffer beautifully” which I truly believe is a good one, but I also think I might be doing it wrong. I was recently, and very gently, led to to the concept of self compassion, the attempted practice of which created a deep, visceral, and extraordinarily dark reaction in me. Dangerously intense, like a possessing demon exposed to a crucifix (in the movies), it fucked me up enough that now I’m curious, like a cat, a curious one.

They say that curiosity killed the cat, they also say that cats have nine lives, and we only have one, but I disagree, because I’ve lived many lives in this life so far; no one says you have to die in order to change lives, or at least I don’t.

And so I need another reminder to do something that I don’t want to do, which is be nice to myself (this is circumlocution, by the way), and I don’t know how to begin, now that I have, for the moment at least, mollified my spectre of self-loathing.

I don’t really do candy corn and lollipops type positivity, it’s been proven ineffective and reeks of desperation besides, and I’m not quite that desperate. I’ve probably already written something about ‘no pain, no gain’, which you would be able to look up if I had tags set up and enabled, but maybe it’s the future and I do by now. You should go look it up. It’s probably pretty good, but my naming conventions are weird, so I have no idea what it’s called. Anyway, I need a note to begin nudging my way toward the ability to treat myself with compassion and kindness *gaaaay* that doesn’t suck, because I don’t suck, but ‘You don’t suck’ doesn’t really have the appeal that I’m after; it’s too bro culture.

Occam’s Razor has led me to this, ‘Nudge yourself toward the ability to treat yourself with compassion and kindness.’ It won’t look good on a t-shirt, but it’s good enough for me because, as Stuart Smalley says, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, gosh-darnit, people like me.”

Hell yeah.