An actual musing

I'm having trouble with my identity. I can't find it, see. I used to have one, and was moderately fond of it, work in progress though it was. But I seem to have misplaced it. I swear it was right here, and I can't imagine where it could have gotten to. Those pesky identities. Take your eyes off of them for one second, and they up and disappear. I seem to have become the type of person whose kitchen table is cluttered with books and bills and unopened mail and notes. I remember tacit tolerance of such pointless clutter as being quite contrary to my identity. But I don't have it right in front of me, so I can't check to make sure. I could get a new one, and in fact many people suggest that in that respect this is more of an opportunity than a conundrum. But it's one of those catches (not a catch-22, which is, in reality, an extremely specific kind of catch, and is reported to be the best catch there is) in which you have to have something to get something. It's easy to search for identity when you know that at the end of the day you've got one waiting for you at home. It's like a job that way, or a car. And it's terribly annoying. I find myself, in the interim, having to construct a makeshift identity out of whatever happens to be handy, like putting up printouts of paintings by Egyptian abstractionist Farouk Hosny, or sleeping on the couch for no reason other than that I can, or reading poetry by Dylan Thomas and Mark Svenvold. But sometimes all that is handy is something horribly un-useful, like staying up too late or drinking beer or buying pizza, and those things are very cheaply made and don't last very long at all, and I just end up having to replace them. I think that maybe my identity ran away and I need to go find it. I think that maybe it ran off to Austin, because that was its first home, or it might have taken off to Seattle, because it always talked about one day moving there. Sometimes I get the weird feeling that it's hanging out in Dallas or Portland or New York, or Houston, but it would only go there to make me mad because it knows how much I hate that place. I wonder if I should go after it, but I would really hate to go to all that trouble just to find that it's not really there after all, or that it had already moved on by the time I got there, or that while I was going out to find it it decided to come back. What a comedy of errors that would be. Maybe I should just wait, you know, to play hardball with it, or set it free because that's what everyone says to do with something you love. But that advice has always sounded suspect to me, because what kind of a way is that to show that you care about something? I think it sends mixed signals. But then, what kind of a position am I in to be giving advice? I can't even keep up with one little identity.