Thoughts of a Noble Savage

YIKES!!!  It’s the middle of February…20freakin’15!  The holidays are long past, and stored with pleasure (and relief) in my memory. 

However, more than 1/12 of 2015 has evaporated, and I have neglected my annual New Year’s Resolutions scrum.  Now ordinarily, I have a slavish commitment this marvelous ritual.  I, like everyone else, want to confirm my own legitimacy by transforming into sublime wonderfulness. 

But not this year.  For some reason, I have not been highly resolved to alter or remodel myself as in years gone by. Oh, the need is grossly apparent.  The desire is not.  Of course, I want to create my Designer Self and become a living proverb, but not enough to aggressively pursue nobility.  In my glaciated mind, I’d rather rely on natural selection – only the strongest traits will survive – with no effort on my part.  Besides, there is no logic in being enemies with myself in a heroic crusade to be flawless.  Couldn’t I just have a personality transplant and inhabit the identity of a more perfect being? Then I could be cryogenically frozen and spend eternity in beaming perfection, outshining my fellow beings in hubristic glory. 

Why must we be voltage-goosed into becoming unblemished paragons just because a new year has begun?  It makes no sense, really.  Can’t we just savor being creatures of impulse, with warts and irregular terrain?  Personally, I’d rather spend my time counting under-arm rings than flaws in my character.

I have been pondering this annual ritual of major change whose sole purpose is catapulting oneself into the aristocracy of angels.  And to what purpose?  That future generations will genuflect at my mythology?  I think not.

There is method in this mentality.

A while ago, I attended the viewing of a neighbor who had lived next door to us as I was growing up.  So many people from my old neighborhood were there.  One lady hugged me and called to her husband, “Honey, come see who’s here.  It’s little Joni Jacobson!” 

Well, the years were peeled back with such velocity, I actually experienced wind shear.  How long has it been since I was little Joni Jacobson?  I forgot I haven’t always looked like “Yoda, the Ancient One.”  It was surreal.  You know, there’s something catastrophic about adulthood. Sometimes I think that old age is wasted on the geriatric.  I have invested decades on refinement, soul embellishment, structure and beauty.  All because of resolutions that symbolize the deep perfection of life.  Where’s the wisdom in that?  And where is the me I used to be?  Lost in the swift passage of becoming transformed, that’s where.

Oh, I know the weak must bank on mercy, but, seriously, where is the joy in flawlessness? Isn’t it our very imperfections that stain us with character?  Shouldn’t we just put the things right we can put right today – not hobble ourselves with long-range visions of divinity?

Ah, the days of my youth, before time and good intentions genetically modified me into a revolting geriatric Gumby; before I became the sum total of all my insufficiencies; back when I was organically capable of only the most elementary reactions, and did not agonize about things that I could not change or control; back before I had a repository of spare tires around my midriff that mimic the circles around my eyes.

Those days are no more.  I am now the Universal Moral Fatwa, perched atop the summit of the Perfection Pyramid, in mortal fear of foot-tons of force from Biblical vengeance and liability, a beacon of the “Light and Fluffy,” as if I am the natural consequence of an explosion in a meringue factory.

That’s not real perfection. No way.  I think we should honor the true meaning of perfection, with all its flaws, instead of using the lack of it as ammunition.

Were all my resolutions realized, I would be transformed into a disrupted and poorly proportioned soul, not an ethereal being. 

 Ergo, in an act of defiant self-preservation, I’m having an elective perfection lobotomy.  I’m returning to those sunny days of malfeasance in adolescence and channeling my inner brat.  I’ll hie me to a yurt in some vast tundra where I can renounce my flawlessness without disruption, and with jerky little steps, regain my natural integrity and hang, like a chad in the wind, free of guilt and regret.

My resolutions?  I’ve got ‘em. They are as follows:

1.     I will explore and discover a means by which I can return to the asylum of my former wart some self

2.     I will endeavor not to let my personal magnetism get out of control.

3.     I will renounce any redeeming qualities that only have ceremonial significance.

4.     And I just may consider defying gravity with the Brazilian Butt Life.  The thought is inebriating!

5.     I renounce all moral pustules.

6.     I may become a Hasidic hedonist. 

7.     I will mold myself into the configuration of my memory foam imprint when I was young, to see beyond who I ought to be and remember who I am.

8.     I will joyfully resist the temptation to master my impulses.

This will, hopefully, trigger the brain circuitry to revolt and ruin the possibility of perfection with its inherent predatory tyranny forever.

Who knows, I may just live out my life smugly unsullied by oozing virtuosity.  A Noble Savage.  Maybe this is what perfection is really all about.