Without a Plan
Hope, fear and a lack of knowledge
By Charlie Isaacs
I remember listening to my older brother in complete disbelief as he described a day without recess. I remember watching him do his homework, and thinking, I’ll never learn how to read or write. I remember there being hope, fear, and a complete lack of knowledge about where I was headed. To some extent, I still feel that way.
Picture me now, burning holes in all these various blueprints for the future. I am a man that cannot make music. I am a man that once blinked my eyes and said, “I was born to make movies.” My dad is a doctor, so I can’t do that. Might as well go to law school. Try to run this country someday. Right?
In college, one of the things I learned to do was to rip paper with words. I used words that were destructive to construct vivid images. I said my child-self would “kick my ass if I disappoint.” Well, kid, am I letting you down? I’m a philosophy major searching for inspiration. I’m itching to prove a theory that continues to accommodate the ideas of greater predecessors. I try not to observe time. I try not to observe decisions. I focus on choices. I focus on the moment at hand. Forward-thinking with a whole new meaning.
And also, no meaning.
Recently, and by recently I mean a year and a half ago, I started believing in government for the first time since sophomore year of high school. I figure, these people can actually make differences. These people can, in fact, make progress, even if nothing is perfect or ideal. I used to think it was bullshit. But there is nothing bullshit about feeding people.
Law school means politics. Politics mean a harsh existence with the possible payoff of standing far away from the world and saying, “wow, nice job.” But would it really be me moving the world? I could help. Okay, that might be good
enough. But what does that mean? My dad was a doctor. He had patients. I can’t imagine having patients. I can’t imagine doing things on a person-by-person basis. But is there really a way to help all the people at once? Not without
the gamble of long hours in a lab coat in a room without windows, conducting experiments the results of which you will never know and the meaning of which you may never find. Maybe there are other ways. Maybe it’s on a chalkboard, cracking solutions. But I’m afraid that if I were given a chalkboard, I would start drawing pictures.
Someday that’s going to happen. It’s inevitable. I will revert back to my youthful spirit of sitting on my knees in front of the television drawing dragon after dragon after dragon and naming them. And then building after building, plane after plane, city plan after city plan, planet after planet, shark after shark, and so forth and so forth.
I’m a philosophy major. Really? I step into a room at age 12, an academic summer camp, because everyone did summer sleepover camp and I wanted to be like them, so here I am, in this room, taking a class called “Philosophy” and I don’t even know what that means. Mom says it will help me improve my vocabulary. So what does the teacher do? He yells at me. He yells at me for looking up the definition of “justice” in a mini dictionary. And that’s when I realized there are no easy answers. Not even when the crazy old guy with a white beard asks, “what is just?” and you look it up in a dictionary.
Philosophy means love of wisdom. More than that, philosophy means treating ideas like women: I get turned on when they play hard-to-get, when a chase is involved, when I get rejected but welcomed back in and then treated strangely and then sent home empty-handed. The only difference is that I soon enough realize there is no answer to the question. But hey, there is a woman in front of me. I’m not lying about that.
A lifetime, eh? A lifetime of chasing down the meanings of words, trying to pin them up on a billboard and tie them to other points until I get some strange constellation. And then I’ll take a few feet back and realize everything. That moment will happen. It will, as they say, “hit me in the face.” None of these points matter. Perhaps that’s it. Maybe it’s a cycle I’m bound to undergo, returning again and again to the same systematic elimination of concepts from my belief system. I don’t believe in time. I don’t believe in meaning. I don’t believe in purpose. Good. Right. Knowledge. I am a person that does not know anything, and yet, anything can happen. Thank you, quantum physics. The obliteration of my future. So now, whatever I do, it won’t be out of any affair with an ideal way of life. It will be something stupid and practical. Nice going. From moderate nihilism to heavymetal pragmatism.
Let the music bleed into my skull and I will like it. And I will have a wife and kids and the rest will be history. I don’t know what I want to do. Maybe my true, true calling is not yet something apparent to me. Maybe my real shot at life is something nobody else has ever done before. Or maybe I’ll just settle for something ordinary. And then, people can always say, he’s smarter than he looks.
So it’s back to helping people, with a special emphasis on gaining credit for things. But what’s that? Okay, how about movie-making? But everybody tells me, if I can imagine myself doing anything else, I should do that instead. But I can always imagine myself doing anything. That’s been the problem. And I never fail. I failed miserably only at two things: making a movie I thought I could make, and finding the secret to life that I thought I could find. And the music thing. I could never make music. So where to now? I have no idea. I don’t know anything. Like I say at cocktail hours and Thanksgiving and dinner parties, “I’m taking suggestions.” Mom says architecture. She’ll say something else if I start doing that. Dad says that whatever I do, do it the best way possible and in the most prestigious place possible and not in California. Unless it’s San Francisco. A weight trainer told me to combine what I love with what makes money. My brothers don’t know. My sister says I’m special. My philosophy teachers say, “become a professional philosopher” and then they laugh.
Hahaha.
My friends say “Don’t do law school.” My advisor in high school said “economics.” Someone else said “psychology.” I once said I would dance for a living.
Hahaha.
I guess I do not know, but I will always write, and I will always love writing, and I will always analyze the hell out of something until I confirm that it, too, does not matter.
And most importantly, I think I’ll take three pieces of advice with me. First, an old friend told me to grow and stay afloat and never let the water get over my head. Second, my grandfather said I should just make choices and do what I want. And finally, one of the last things he ever said to me, “Fear not.”
I am a man without a plan.