One theory of truth claims that the battle is between hiddenness and disclosure rather than falsity and honesty. How this relates to an ontology of wholism versus the atomization within science and analytics is a question no one answered. What is real may not be compatible with existence as the prepositions “in” versus “from” suggest that paradigms are overshadowed by boundaries.

Projections on objects depend on the application of personal pronouns: “I am” versus “You are.” Being qua being can choose itself and gain itself only because it can also lose itself; this is a central premise of mindness. Authenticity is the mode of being qua being; self-relation understands itself and knowingly takes hold of itself. Inauthenticity loses hold of itself as being qua being because it is the “wrong” kind of being. The assertion of mindness is the process of being a self for oneself. Process implies time, but no one has asked the necessary question about the interdependence of the relationship between time and being, perhaps due to a likelihood that such a question cannot become coherent without obliterating whatever relationship may—must?—simultaneously occur and be continually.

Identity has no comprehensible ontology. Self-conception is independent of becoming, an expedient conditional and contextual choice of shape or form always subject to change. Being qua being requires an abandonment of role-based choices; the construction of identity is a compartmentalization narrowing the possibility of being’s infinite exponentials; an apt if limited analogy is to create a closet as the falsity of “I am” and thus rejecting the universe of authentically understanding self to knowingly (“awarely”) allow itself to become itself as infinite potentiality. Being qua being concerns itself with itself without succumbing to diminishing itself to that which is a fragment of itself (such as identity).

…

“I won’t hurt you,” said the man. “But Trump’s North Korea strategy could cause a famine,” said the woman. The two of them continued drinking wine and eating cheese in the deserted park.

“Where are we?” asked the woman. “Neither here nor there,” answered the man. The woman looked at the sky, noted the fluffy white clouds and the bright blue sky. “There’s no air pollution here. I must be far from home.” The man let the words sit still in the air. He spread brie on a cracker and took a bite.

“Did you know that twenty-two percent of North Korea is agricultural land?” The man swallowed his cracker and sipped his wine, a Chardonnay from Sonoma. “No, I didn’t know that. However, I know that forty-four percent of U.S. land is agricultural.” The woman nodded her head. “We see eye to eye then, don’t we?”

The man threw his empty wine glass into a stand of bushes. “Don’t rush to judgment. We may live in the blank margins of printed pages, but we’re only the same in the sense that we don’t exist.” The woman ran her hand through the trimmed green grass at the edge of the blanket where they were sitting. “Perhaps, but I have no memory of not existing.” The man responded, “Precisely. If you had then you would exist.”

The woman considered this as she scanned the park, seeing the trees, the empty walking paths, the slight slope of the hill where they sat. “This is a pleasant place. Peaceful, too. I have memories of existing, though.” The man sighed, “How do you prove a memory?” The woman could not answer. Instead, she looked down at the flowered dress covering her legs. Her knees were resting together, and her feet were folded up to the side of her thighs. She had to twist her torso whenever she looked at the man.

She felt ashamed as she didn’t know any answers to this question. She was thin in body and, she thought to herself, frail of mind. “Is it important to prove such a thing?” The man shook his head as he spread brie on another cracker. “No, not as far I can tell.” A thought occurred to her. “But I’m thinking and remembering, this much I know. I must exist.” The man crushed the cracker in his hand, leaned forward from his keeling position, his face inches from hers, and said, “That’s not existence.” He sat back on his knees, picked up a white cloth napkin, a fine linen, and wiped his hands clean.

The woman pondered aloud, “Am I asking the wrong questions?” The man shook his head again, but this time calmly. With disdain in his voice he said, “You’re asking too many questions.” The woman felt hurt and tears ran down her cheeks. “Why are you so mean?” The man sighed. “Another question.”

…

On ESPN there was an attractive woman, a former high school football cheerleader, who had become a real journalist. After watching an old man falling and breaking his hip while trying to dance, she found her inner Robert Altman, and became a homely but wise Radio Shack salesperson. She found a second job delivering pizza on the weekends and then a third on Monday nights as a jazz music DJ at a local radio station. Wilson Wise Wilson, upon hearing her voice on the radio, fell in love with her, but he was never able to muster the courage to tell her because he had been worn down by an anonymous comic who had followed him in public for years belittling him.

The woman interviewed a jazz musician on her radio show. His most memorable statement was that, “Jazz is about chill, cool, not the loud sarcastic arguments on Reddit.” She sprayed him with a squirt gun, and he became melted cheese.

She then told a story to her listeners about how her dad used to take her for rides on his moped up and down a desert road in central Nevada. He called her, “My beautiful girl,” but one day he left her in the middle of the desert as he rode away on his moped. She got a ride from a tall man in a pickup truck. He stopped a mile outside of Carson City and told her she needed to get out. She pleaded for him to continue driving her into town. He shook his head, reached across her, and opened the door. As she got out of the vehicle, he handed her a squirt gun and said, “This is magic. It will do what it wants when you squirt it. I have no more need for it.” She held the gun in her hand as she watched him roar down the road, weave into oncoming traffic, and smash head-on into a beer truck.

She delivered a pepperoni pizza to an old man who tried to pay her with a jar of pennies. She used her squirt gun again, but the old man simply got wet. Frustrated, she threw the gun on the ground and stomped on it, cracking the plastic gun and obliterating its magic. The old man scolded her, “That was a stupid thing to do. I will not pay you now.” Relieved, the woman gave him the pizza and returned to her vehicle. She drove recklessly through town, ran a stop sign, and shattered a porcelain woman who had been stranded in a crosswalk.

The woman stopped at the Radio Shack where she worked. The store was part of a strip mall on the main drag of the town where she lived. She unlocked the front door, turned to lock it again, and then walked to the manager’s office in the back. Her plan was to sleep just long enough to shake off the heebie jeebies. She was nearly asleep when the Ghost of Spock appeared to her. “Little one,” he said, “only smoke cigars with the windows open.” He vanished a moment later and she fell asleep.

…

Living in a car. “My aunt was a racist.” During the Vagina Monologues, Bill realized he couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Still living in a car, but I wandered about the library grounds near the river. Jenny is one of the locals. She doesn’t think of herself as homeless. I’m disgusted by her; she feels threatened by me. A thuggish 20-something boy-man masturbated next to a dumpster. White boy tweekers with Southern accents have been riding the rails. Now they’re fucking with my car. I’m pissed off. I calculate numbers in my head; not as strategy, but as a means to calm the rage.

Extrication, conversion, distraction. I drove the three of them to a showing of Clockwork Orange downtown. We didn’t have money, so we just sat outside smoking butts we found on the sidewalk. These guys had a happy cruelty vibe, a sense of hurting a helpless thing with glee. I dropped a dirty handkerchief to the ground and walked back to my car. I needed to go before a meter maid threw a boot on my tire. The guys? They’d lost interest. I heard one of them laugh about rectum prolapse. None of them used those words, though. The phrasing was “shit your asshole out your asshole.”

…

To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that as something of a miracle.