The Last Laugh (Part 1)

My paucity of recent posting testifies to the slow brewing of ideas. It was Dave Howey's fault; he started it off. He did it without realising, and won't know until he reads this! Anyway, the scale of the process has become great and as such, like Dickens I intend to post in installments - I think 4 should do it...

Dave confustigated my thinking as he commented on nothing less than this very Blog here. He sayed:

"But Joe, your Blog is so serious, and you're never normally serious"

...and thus started the process at hand, (This pre-dated the Fish and Blind People posts, which were experimental - intended to not be serious; writing for an audience) in order to investigate what is ME, what is NOT and what is IMPORTANT.

The inconsistency can be described thus - I appear to not be generally serious when with other people, in fact the opposite, but when on my own I appear to be very serious, and not very funny at all. My thinking initiated thus - I rarely spend much time with any one person; either at work or at home or in London, or somewhere else... none of which involve the same people - a patchwork of loosely joined mutually exclusive events. This is what makes up my coat, my outer layer - Joseph's coat; which is aptly both amazing and technicoloured in nature.

Having a technicolour coat for an identity is quite easy, as it is self-sustaining, and formed as it is from a multifaceted illusion with respect to any individual, it is self-conceptual. Survival is simple within a cocoon. Who was Joseph with his coat? His father's favourite son. And without it? he was a slave - a man not known, at least for a few years. This dispossession deprives Joseph of his inherited identity - his bloodstained coat represents his death to his father, and his lack of coat makes him unremarkable.
Now, Mark Twain once said (before being plagiarised by Freud) that inside each man there are really 3 men;

1. the man he thinks he is
2. the man other people think he is and
3. the man who he really is

And I would redefine the third as the man who God has made me to be, which makes sense. The first two of these can overlap to varying degrees with the third and also with each other.

Identity has become an bit of a buzzword - I think people talk about much about "my identity" without understanding what they mean by that: it encompasses not only the 3 ideas listed above, but also the relationships between these. Small wonder people use it so liberally indeed. I prefer to think in terms of the individual ideas, y'know... for clarity. This is what I shall do.

If I start to dissimulate the ideas of who I appear to be along these lines, then what happens and what am I left with? At least partial answers and much more in the next episode... to be continued.