Fear

Today I heard something:

“The things that you fear have already happened to you.”

I thought about it. I am old. And tired. And still afraid. But the things I fear have indeed already happened; I remember them as different things, but have seen them all before.

The things I do not fear are those I do not know. I have only ambition, excitement, and joy in my heart and mind for the unknown future.

In this is a truth: we hold ourselves prisoner to the things we have been troubled by in our lives. Any and all fears are things we had the opportunity to let go but chose, willingly or otherwise, to keep with us. It is our fault. And the burden of this truth is something we all live with. Sometimes it is exactly this fact that turns us into hoarders: we become so afraid of our own lightness that we transform the fear into extra weight which holds us down.

But in this is revealed another, even more important truth: our nature is to be fleet of foot, light of step, to laugh loud and often, to smile broadly, to speak and listen and love well physically emotionally mentally and spiritually.

I am cleansing myself. Making my body and mind young as they should be. Removing invisible bars.

I wonder sometimes if it will not be 27: two primes….the ultimate duality of the YinYang….a perfect cube…..3x3x3=27.

333 is ever closer… thrice realized, thrice acted upon, thrice atoned for.

After

I just watched The Social Network, about two weeks after having downloaded it.

A few things to say….

I am so glad I followed my initial intuition and did not become a part of Facebook. As its popularity grew it was not my contrarian nature that turned me off to it, but something mildly insidious about the way people presented the idea and its appeal to me. If you’ve ever been asked to try coke or heroin, and seen that strange buzzing energy emanating from someone as they tell you how good it makes you feel…then you know what I’m talking about here. Or even, if you’ve ever been in a questionable situation and have felt peer pressure to do something that you had to pause and think about, that’s the same as I felt about Facebook from day one. As the movie attempts to portray and does a great job of showing, there is a price to pay for the realizing of one’s dreams ‘at any cost’. Somehow in the connecting of all this ‘social life’ a great deal of the humanity was lost.

And obviously this was not done by choice. If even 10% of the movie is accurate to reality, then it is safe to say that no one could predict the falling away of human decency in the face of such overt electronic voyeurism. But it happened nonetheless, as a structural side-effect of a massive social change: the shift from real life to secondary life, wherein what is blogged, reblogged, and electronically discussed becomes as or more real than what actually happened to get the ball rolling.

I do my blogging. But no one could accuse me of doing anything impersonal. I would even venture that the unpopularity and inaccessibility of most of what I write is a failsafe guard against inhumanity. There is no filter here. This is all me. All the time. And not through two or three different lenses: how I feel is what you see, but I always stand back from myself just far enough that I can see it too.

So. The movie was great. The acting was great. The story and its real-life counterpart are fascinating and wonderful. But the loss is undeniable, and the strange triumph I feel at having no pretension to such ‘heights’ of experience in my real life, and likewise to such fairytale expectations of my writing and my inner life, is boundless.

I see that I am free from even my own expectations. And in the distancing of myself from my Self, I am ultimately free. There is no greater accomplishment for me at this point in my life.

Someday maybe, I will create something outside of myself that is worthy of external note, that may changes a few minds and turn a few heads.

But for now I accept my evanescent meanderings in this World; it is after all the only thing I will answer to in the end.

And then I will be dirt, as will we all. Dirt has no use for any sort of network. Social or otherwise.

House Of Cards

…..Sometimes all these ideas of what I’m doing and what I want to be doing and don’t want to be doing and should be doing and other people and things and opportunities and neruiagbiughidganfvnjansxbaxpqw8tqr8ggbuiebibgiubdfgdgfbajkgbuib and I just say OK!!!!!

And it stops.

I sit here. Stare at the screen. Remember how awesome optics are, how amazing my eyes actually biologically functioning is. The refresh rate of the screen dazzles…I imagine I can see it as it runs from top left to bottom right…

I think to myself….the World is like this screen, see, because it is always refreshing itself, displaying new information in real-time to the best of its ability.

And I am just a small bit of information in this World. And then each little part of me has the same relation to the whole of me as I do to the whole of the World. And so on, down and down till the little empty spaces between my protons neutrons electrons…quantum levels of crazed indeterminacy. All of the parts of things have relations to one another. All of the levels connect and stack like a massive constantly expanding deck of cards.

So maybe this is all just a big house of cards then. This whole deal we call life, the universe, everything.

Maybe just a giant house of cards moments before a strong wind…

Stillness

Two movies: The Limits Of Control(2009) and The Visitor(2007). Also if you feel like it, Redbelt(2008) and Mercy(2009).

In a search for stillness, you can choose to look outside and bring in, or look inside and push out. The first way is filled with things and people that take up your time. The second is lonely. The first requires a strong backbone, an open and willing heart, a less commanding mind. The second requires a strong backbone, a patient and sincere heart, an organized stable mind.

I vacillate between these two choices, having made neither but enjoying the benefits and the suffering the consequences of both. I walked into them slowly over time without knowing what I was doing as I was doing it. In that way I feel akin to everyone on this planet, because for all of us there are some things we walk into without knowing what we are doing.

Some of these things we quickly understand and accept, others we attempt wholeheartedly to reject: we go through this in some form nonetheless.

So my tone of voice and accent changes when I talk to someone for a bit. My attitude and word choice will begin to subconsciously shift. People are comfortable with me quickly. And it’s because in that initial encounter I have with someone, I don’t react to anything but how they are, how they hold themselves and seem to be dealing with me and the world they inhabit. I don’t react to anything else until later on, when I’ve already constructed a model in my head of who and how they are.

Another way to say this might be….I am not moved by anything but the essence of a person. And only after this essence has moved me do I move back.

A stillness of interactivity. Now I seek a stillness of mind.

Rollin’ Stone

One thing I have always loved about this world is the seemingly divine nature of music and its ever-more-apparent relationship to everything.

Every time I find myself going through some change, some new type of music or expression of a style already known rises up out of seemingly nothing to enlighten me and allow me a different mindframe and energy level with which I might consider the world.

Recently I have come across the Chicago Bluesmen of the Chess era…Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf. Credit is due to the movie Cadillac Records for being the obvious turn on here. But I swear, this music reignites many old hidden-away feelings in me as well as evoking entirely new ones.

A perfect fit for my life right now to be sure.

Contradiction…Again

I was jokingly challenged by a young and ambitious dude today to be perhaps the first and only person to enter “the system” in order to change it, without allowing it to change me. I declined his challenge, respectfully, on the grounds that many people of far greater integrity than myself have found themselves lost without hope of redemption in the snarls and twists of “the system”.

But I asked myself, throughout the day after this occurred, if I am really attempting to do anything else but this exact thing…

It is my belief, in short, that when confronted with the specter of fighting an immensely powerful foe that you cannot hope to defeat, the reasonable thing to do is run. I am not a martyr, I will not give up my life for an unidentified and uncommitted cause. So I am running from what I perceive to be the gradual mellowing of my existence into a thing that warrants no interest or attention beyond a passing glance and has no great impact on anything beyond the minimal local world it inhabits.

But in this running, I am not-so-secretly not really giving up. I am engaging in gradual guerilla warfare, slowly but surely attempting redefinition in the face of the abovementioned mellowing, with the ultimate aim of a sort of rebirth, personal, political, philosophical. At the bottom of this is the hope that I will, as I articulate it mentally, meet the people I am to become on the Road. And in meeting these people, I will pick up from them and become them to a degree, hold a bit of their essence within me and combine it with my own.

This coupled with a personal rebirth will signify the Road, the Running, and eventually the Fight, as the three stages of a hero-savior arc. I have grand plans for myself, but not at the expense of reality. It hurts me to be this person; it is not an easy or comfortable path to pledge myself to. However, the practical truth is that not doing it, or not at least attempting something similar, hurts more.

But this highlights my initial question: am I not, in essence, trying to sidestep “the system” while at the same time presenting an eventual formal challenge to it? By running from this foe, I am admitting that it is in fact a foe with power, and though I am not entering it in an attempt to change its nature, I am in direct opposition to that nature: the goal of that opposition being change.

Such vagaries and confusion in my life right now, even as I treasure every minute of it.

23

There is something just so sad about this all. There was always…is always the chance that things will go this way. But whether it’s my innate stubbornness or some egoic fantasy I just don’t believe the World sees it fit yet to allow me peace. Not for any lack of trying, nor ingenuity in the endeavor, I simply have not been able to find it yet in a consistent fashion.

And so, as I said recently during a strangely prescient LSD conversation, my life remains a big sad happy important thing.

And that is all.

Apparantness

Two things occurred to me just now that may seem to most people to go without saying….though usually (but not always) things that go without saying are dangerous and should be looked over with great scrutiny…..

1. Love and adoration are not the same thing.

2. Communication is a two way street internally and externally.

To explain….When you fall into a position that seems too good to be true…beware! It may in fact be as it seems. However, the apparentness of such things must be investigated either way. Too much is often at stake to just accept that a thing is what it claims to be. And in this we can see the double-two-way-streetness of communication: if a person tells you that they feel a way for you, they must say it to you in such a way that you feel they mean it and that you understand it…..but they must also have an understanding of how they feel about what they are saying…and where it comes from inside of themselves. I suppose it boils down to trusting the source…..does this person display a complex understanding of their internal workings and thought patterns? Is there a great gap between what they say and how they portray themselves?

And now here is the difference between love and adoration: someone says they love you….but it is clear from their actions that they do not love themselves. In fact they adore you: that thing that stands in for love when one has not learned to be sufficiently open and trusting of themselves and in turn others. That blind thing built only from variegated emotional bits that do not form a coherent whole. Adoration is love without thought.

The apparentness of a thing and its truth can be different. And the more obvious a thing is, usually, the more reason to question it.

But you might say of someone who adores another, “It is so apparent that they are starry-eyed….filled with love!”

Perhaps not.

Veil

So I had this big thing written up just now about how capitalism invades our brains and makes us think weird without realizing it.

But really I was just writing cause…..I need to write. I need to have a fucking conversation with myself, somewhat out loud, somewhat on this screen. I guess I feel that the things going on in my head and heart right now are too tumultuous to contain safely without at least some release.

And I don’t know. Sometimes I remember being younger, feeling so full of despair for various reasons and having no idea what to do with it. And now here I am, not filled with despair but nursing a fairly large portion of it, having some but admittedly little idea how to proceed.

I suppose that my only solace and guiding light currently lies in that exact contrast: were I who I used to be, this would stop me up a great deal more. But I will wake up tomorrow and have my tenacious hunger to learn and experience intact. At times through the day I will no doubt be troubled more than is comfortable or convenient, but life will go on fairly smoothly.

Some lingering doubt always remains: will I ever really find an equilibrium that I can sustain and be happy with? I do not know. But I can be sure of one thing: it is sometimes better to be surprised than it is to know.

Counterintuitive

With all this anti- sentiment I’ve had for the last eleven months or so, be it towards superficiality, structure, capitalism, or anything else, only one thing has really been consistent: I have been avoiding an important truth.

Unless your problems and concerns have been entirely forced upon you by the world outside of yourself, something which rarely if ever truly happens, you must claim and accept at least some fairly large portion of responsibility for your predicaments. This idea seems simple enough, but sometimes in life it can be back-breaking to look in the face.

For example…..I have in the last eleven months come to feel, and clarify with thought, that I absolutely need to leave this place (at least Florida, if not eventually the country) in order to learn and grow so as to avoid feeling as though I’ve wasted my life.

The problem here is….I have not been living to my full potential. The solution seems to be to get out there and live it up. The counterintuitive situation I find myself in comes from an application of the abovementioned simple truth to my current circumstance: I am at least partly to blame for my having not utilized my full potential, and going anywhere will not allow me to escape this, myself.

I am the problem I have been fighting against.

And I have very little idea of where to go from here.