Jackie Gleason owned three sets of wardrobes. One for the winters playing golf in Florida, one for his live show touring and one for his time spent working on television projects in New York City. It wasn’t for the sake of fashion, rather because of the horrible-toil of working, even work that isn’t digging ditches will still stress the hell out of you. Jackie was one-hundred-and-eighty pounds when relaxing in Miami, you see. Two-hundred-and-forty pounds while on nation-wide stage tours. And two-hundred-and-eighty pounds while in the pressure cooker of carrying entire television shows on his shoulders. His very corporeal form itself yoyoing under the awful strain.
We are so much more fluid than we care to admit, bags of mostly-water such as we are, truth is, we all shapeshift, we simply lack any non-gradual way to control it and the whole thing goes so slowly that we rarely ever know it. It all takes years to change the smallest things but our minds are forever stuck in the amber of the this-very-second so while we’re all quite slowly becoming something different, at any given moment, we’re what we’ve always been. Our same old selves.
Watching the cable-television channels slowly hollowed out from their mission statements under the weight of their own success and stock demands tells you a lot about human history. Someone has a good idea “let’s play music videos!” and over the years “Profitability” destroys it and it’s all just the cheapest reality garbage they can run. Living off a shell of what the good thing once was. Money does this to everything, eventually. Governments, religions, the good reputation of a dead person, anything. Greed colonizes and eats you away from the inside like a virus, from Athens to Rome to London to Manhattan. Down through the ages, needless greed devours everything good from the heart on out. MTV, The Learning Channel, America. The word of Jesus, the word of the Buddha, the word of Mohammed, whatever you like. Eventually these trust-fund economists will slit the golden goose’s throat, skin it and wear its corpse so that when they defecate, they can tell you to buy the crap because it must actually be gold, just look at the goose suit? It must shit gold.
We spend these brief dances on the head of a pin pretending we must maintain a rigid identity, no matter the context or situation, we wake up and go to sleep thinking that every morning’s another chance to take a side. But maybe every night when we go to sleep, the person died and you woke up new in their stead. Or maybe we regenerate gradually, as all cells live or die in the seven-year cycle, individual collective Ships Of Theseus, rotating through as we covert our Reeseus Pieceus into toilets of Fecesus. In the end, we’re all Jackie Gleason putting on different suits for different situations and that’s okay. It’s not the worst thing in the world to change. It beats the alternatives.
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