Who

Mostly me—that lump that moves when they call Brad Borevitz. There is, or so I have heard, a Buddhist exercise wherein the question, “who am I?” is asked and answered until exhaustion. The enlightened result, I'm afraid, is still a mystery to me, having been unable to sustain the query beyond the repetitive strain of its boring recurrence and into that metaphysical realm where all notions of self are somehow gotten beyond.

So while I have the utmost respect for the mystical, and the monastic, and especially for the Sisyphean, I will spare the reader a dialog with a demented bot and a bottomless database of potential answers to the SQL query "SELECT answer FROM foo ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1;"—For the less technically inclined, SQL is the lingua franca of the database, and the code demands that the answer field in the table called "foo" be returned for one entry at random—and cut to the chase.

But can I? While I will eagerly abandon the finality that comes from thoroughness, I cannot likewise abandon myself to the thoughtlessness that arrives prematurely at convenient answers to questions no matter how trivial. So this is who I am … (intone these words, if you will, in a manner slightly accusatory and also just slightly revelatory) … I am that one who refuses provisionally, to agree to anything, and arrives after a time, at answers that are still inadequate, but nonetheless, accepted, although contingently, because the labors of cogitation have softened my resolve and resigned me to the limbo of the tenuous.