Guy
Guy dusted off his sweater. Snow and bits of dry bark still clung to the wool. The logs were loaded and secured, he had his food, gas, propane, anything else he would need for the trip. Checking his watch, he had plenty of time to stop somewhere and socialize before getting up to the cabin and starting the day’s work. The airy snow on top of the stone-frozen earth grounded him again. It had been a very long time.
Guy Manasseh had come up here to an old plot of land deep in the bristols as the locals called the woods up there. He was hoping for some time to live more simply, have some time to reflect, live a bit closer to people with more real lives.
Guy worked with a pen instead of his hands and he worked in a city. Can you really even call that working? Could he even manage a real job? He could never really determine if he had any right to respect himself, and that was why he was out here, either to prove himself or to just get back to a more tangible way of life.
The bar only solidified what he had always felt. He walked in, took a look around at the husky locals drinking, then turned and walked straight back out. He’d sat alone at a bar before, he wasn’t going to do it again. He’d grown in awareness, he knew it was because he hated himself, if you hate yourself why wouldn’t anyone else hate you? You’re always stuck with yourself, you know best if you’re not completely deluded. Guy dispelled his delusions, but he still hated himself. Why?
Guy pulled open the heavy log gate that separated the right-of-way from the road. The heavy wood had stayed solid all these years, but the metal hinges were rusting. Still though, he got it open, brought his truck over the threshold onto the land, carefully over the gully that ran underneath, then began up the slope.
Up through the woods, the snow compressing under the tires and building traction over the petrified ground, through the gray trees, over the white earth, under the gray sky, the whole world retreating into itself and putting forward a pale front. Looking to his side, Guy saw a white speckled deer watching him through the treeline, a rare sight. No doubt, he was right to come up here at this time.
Soft snow absorbs sound; mounded snow keeps people off the roads and turns the animals silent. Snow clouds shade the sky. The whole world turns inward in the winter, and so Guy came here to turn inward himself.
He arrived at the camp. He started the sausages – purchased locally from a butcher his father used to bring his kills to – gave thanks for the safe trip up then ate before beginning the day’s tasks.
The axe came down hard. The log did not split like Guy hoped, instead the head stuck shallowly in the wood again. Still though, he hefted the log right back up, adjusted his hands on the neck, then brought it down hard once again, this time managing to split it. He’d never been terribly athletic, and he had never quite learned the art of splitting wood, but he still let the axehead fall hard each time.
Guy recounted an old lesson he had realized in a faraway place. “If you do something without confidence, you’ll always do it wrong even if you’re doing everything else right. You have to settle on what you think is closest to what’s right, then execute with as much confidence as you can muster, and if you do it wrong then you adjust as needed and strike again with greater confidence. If you do it without putting confidence into it, you’ll always fumble.”
He would have saved himself a lot of trouble had he learned that sooner, but he had far greater issues back then anyway.
24 years of age and still struggling with cutting wood like this though. His father would have been practically a master at it by this point. If we aren’t the men our fathers were, can we truly respect ourselves? Can a man of this rotten generation ever respect himself?
Guy sat on the steps of the cabin. Maintenance, taking account of everything, being sure nobody had been wandering around while his family was away, being sure the people who promised to check up on the land hadn’t flaked out, and a whole lot of catching mice. He’d already started a fire in the woodstove and prepared the evening meal. Now he had time to sit and think.
Grains of snow hung in the air and touched his skin as he walked by. The world began to fade to gray. Night was always when Guy wrestled with himself. Nothing more to do, nothing more to see, the whole world fades to black and you’re forced to face in on yourself. If you’ve got an internal conflict going on, that was when the fight had to peak, when you could no longer distract yourself.
Thoughts of himself tore through his mind in his sleepless night in that stuffy little cabin. Thoughts of what he had done, the people he had disappointed, how he had torn himself apart. How other people had wronged him, driven him to that point, deprived him. Thoughts he had been over a thousand times before that, still tormenting him, no matter how far he came. He was still the same person, no matter how much he changed he still was that same failure he had always been.
He sat up. That wasn’t right, he’d come up here to work himself up. He’d signed up to face himself, he wasn’t going to do it sleeping.
Grabbing his axe, grabbing his sweater and boots, he stepped outside into the frozen night air, beneath a brilliant canopy of stars too few people in these deprived days know, and he began to walk through the snow looking up into the sky.
He laid it out to himself, he’d overcome himself, grown out of the cancerous seed he’d been and built a normal human life, but he still felt inferior. He didn’t respect himself. Why was that? Other people seemed to respect him enough, but he still saw the same failure.
He had been taught two things since he began adventuring. If he is not deluded, a man can trust what he feels, and a man always feels rightly about himself because he is always with himself. Delusion is just distorting your own senses and beliefs so you can live with something you really should not, so if you are an honest person, you can trust yourself to judge honestly. Your only point of failure is if you lack the wisdom, and an honest man can always answer “I don’t know” or “I’m not so sure.”
Guy plodded down trails his mind remembered hazily from his youth, illuminated by the uncharacteristically clear night. He knew these forests well enough, and he was safe to let his mind wander.
He was here because he did not think he was someone you could really respect, and if he did not think he was someone he could respect then, trusting his judgement, he really was not. Then the question becomes, who is someone respectable?
Guy cut it down to, who is it that I respect? Capable people? No, because there are many capable people who he considered to be among the worst kinds of people. Respectable people he considered capable because people who act rightly and honestly typically become highly capable people. That was it, respectable people are people who demand honor for who they are. What is respect but deference to a great man?
So then, why did he not deserve respect? It was obvious. For everything great he did that people saw and gave him a little honor for, he knew internally it was just because he wanted to stop suffering. Any animal wants to stop suffering, that is not what a great man is, someone great needs to go higher than that.
To be greater for its own sake, something not strictly practical, maybe even outright useless, was the nature of someone who deserved respect. That was why he was not respectable; he was still just surviving.
It had nothing to do with his father anymore, and it had nothing to do with his generation. He was determined to cross the threshold for nothing else but its own sake. The limits of a human being had nothing to do with it, only desire.
Guy reached up and turned on a floodlight. Training it on the stump, he hefted a log, placed it down, and brought the axe down. It had nothing to do with needing more wood, had nothing to do with his father, had nothing to do with his generation. He wanted to get a clean cut, so he was going to get a clean cut.
Guy, pissed, stormed out of the bar. What a load of garbage those people were. One old guy was wearing a skirt, the bartender girl had been fired and rehired twice for doing coke out back, the owner of the last bar took half the money and ran, then got into a DUI. The only real person he knew at that bar was an old dude from the mountains who did time for fighting the cops. The whole thing was so offensive to him, he had done so much just to match these people and now he saw they weren’t worth anything.
He realized how silly he was being. Again, he had let survival creep into his mind. He was doing what he was doing for social acceptance, and now he felt scammed because he had become the only real person in the whole room. That was not excellence. Still, he had a bit too much self-respect to be visiting those kinds of people now.
Suddenly, he shuddered.
“That was the girl who’s hand I kissed when I was a teenager. What was I thinking?”
He got in his truck and drove off.