Month: April 2019

You know, Captain America got everything he wanted, and Tony Stark lost everything.

Comic Kismet.

I already feel like I would like to watch that movie again.  There were a bunch of fucking kids chattering that kept distracting me.  Yes, it is a comic book movie, but I take my made-up myths somewhat seriously.

I was watching them, though, and wondering again how any fucking intelligence at all survives when our old people die.  The young have no impulse control.  They have grown up consuming media nearly full time.  They don’t know anything.  They possess no capacity for critical thinking, even in their own interest, I suspect.  They are simultaneously stupid in all the ways that matter, and utterly convinced of their own righteousness (because that has been the goal of all the propaganda they have been exposed to, starting somewhere around kindergarten.)

This was a bittersweet ending, was it not?  With Cap in the past, of course, we can perhaps expect some 1950’s Cap, which we saw in the comics, along with Agent Carter.  That’s not an unreasonable expectation.  Certainly it is possible.

But not this team, like this.

It’s only a movie, but it really speaks to impermanence.  It’s a funny thing: we are creating our future as we roll along, but we are also creating our past in terms of what we remember, what stays with us.  It’s not all there.  We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we also can’t fully remember what HAS happened.  It’s all cosmic tragicomedy.

I was laying in bed last night, just feeling Life, and found myself sobbing.  All humans wrestle with this strange condition, where people come and go, most of us do not get enough love, we grow old simply by not dying, and where we buy what confidence we have through faith alone, often without realizing we have done so.

But I feel this energy ebbing and flowing, and when it comes to me, I feel that all moments can be magical.  There is a sort alchemical reaction possible which makes all of this OK, and even beautiful.  Why, this energy asks, would you ever want it any other way?  I am perhaps influenced here by Vonnegut’s “so it goes”, but even without fatalism aging, sickness and death remain.  We do not have to belief in a deterministic universe to understand that these await all of us.

There is something else, though.  Our feelings really constitute our side of our conscious reaction with What Is.  If they can learn to deal with a higher or different What Is, then they will change and adapt to that new reality.  This is perhaps the core task of what we call spirituality.

I was fixing my lunch just now and wondering if Buddhism involves “clinging to the Present”.  Is that a useful word for a religion which otherwise denounces attachment?  If you cling to the present, are you not abandoning your clinging to the past and future? 

I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  My work continues.

I dreamed I was a baby last night, with the feelings I felt back then (bad).  I also dreamed several people I know who are very grumpy were participating in Holotropic breathwork.  I think my legs activated, my right for a good long while, but overall it wasn’t bad.  Not bad at all by my standards.

285 this morning.  I remembered, and one beer.

It occurs to me that part of personal growth involves the ability to grow beyond useful lies.  There are times when we have to lie to ourselves.  We have to lie about many things.  I won’t make a list, since those who know what I am talking about can make their own.

I will comment though that I think admitting you cannot control something is often the first step to controlling it.  This is, if memory serves, the first Step of the 12 Steps (Ten Steps?  I’ve only been to one meeting.  They gave me the book, but I couldn’t get over how many people were crying inside over their lost friend).

The goal is gain control through truth telling.  Me, I feel rage and fear.  They do not originate with me.  They were planted there long before I could speak, and I have spent my life pretending they did not exist–or perhaps at times that I had them under control, that I had and have my emotions under control.

And I will comment too, as I have periodically, that none of my political ideas are going to change, I don’t think.  I have reasoned my way into them.  They are not dependent on emotional noise.  What I expect to change is my skill in persuasion, and my patience when dealing with people who I view as idiots.  Patience wins, where intelligence alone fails.  That might make a good motto.

I’m reading “Slaughterhouse Five” and finding it therapeutic.  As I remember commenting some time ago, perhaps a year or two ago (who knows: maybe I recycle this idea at precisely 276 day intervals and have for the past ten years), small doses of pessimism and even nihilism can be therapeutic.

I was actually daydreaming today about a clinic filled with slogans in groups of three, that people could pick from.  1) Winners never quit; quitters never win; 2) Winning is overrated and a lot of work; focus on fun; 3) Most winners are assholes and I’m sick of sucking up to them.  Something like that.  I could come up with better triplets, but that whole notion seems vaguely Vonnegutian.  Vaughn uh GOOSHUN.  Shit man, if people are thinking it, they trust you more if they see it on the wall.  If you can’t meet people where they are, then where are you, and why are you pretending to be somewhere else?

You know, humor and curiosity are linked in some way I will have to smoke on.  I will need to buy some smokes first.  I love my cheap cigars. 

My world is getting better, and it feels really, really weird.

I went to a public forum of sorts yesterday, and watched four speakers who were not idiots.  This is not something I am used to.  There is at least a 20-30 IQ point difference between me and most of the people with whom I interact, and generally more like 40-50.  That does not mean that I am not frequently the less emotionally intelligent of the two of us, but it does mean that where abstract analysis is concerned, I am usually able to see things most people cannot.  So, in any event, is how it seems to me (granting as an abstract principle that we are all stupid at unknown intervals, for unknown periods of time, for unknown reasons, and that none of us are stupid on purpose.  It just creeps up on us.  I am human, ergo prone to this.  I also have a substantial amount of personal data to back this up.  As I have likely shared, I imagine stupidity flying around like Cupid, and shooting us with arrows of idiocy, and the thing about idiocy is that it is never obvious when we are infected.  So be careful, be very, very careful.)

Be that as it may, I’m walking back to my car, in a crosswalk, and some stupid motherfucker in a truck stops so close to me that one of the homeless guys in a blanket thought he had hit me.  I came very, very close to being hit hard by a truck going at least 20-30 miles an hour, because the fucking imbecile was in the habit of driving fast everywhere.  Why?  Because, you know, that’s how he always drives.

But I didn’t get hit.  Not a scratch.  So me being me, I’m wondering what God might have intended this to mean for me.  “Don’t waste a moment”, maybe?  The End is Always Near?  Be grateful for your blessings?  These are truisms.  This is the sort of shit you are supposed to say.

As it happened, I had about a ten block walk, due to some stuff going on downtown, and I pondered it in a light rain.

Here is the thing with me: my belly is filled with naked terror.  If I were thrown suddenly into the next life, what I would carry with me is this terror, and rage that I have had to carry this all this time, with no fucking comfort, no fucking support, and nothing really good happening to me, no good times to recall.

It’s not that I have had no good times.  I have had some wonderful times with my kids in particular, but because being with them allowed me for short periods of time to put all my shit aside.  But in memory, that terror floods back in and ruins everything.  I don’t get relaxed, pleasant moments where it’s all good, and I felt perfectly relaxed, and it was the perfect day.  I get relative moments where things are working, and I’m screaming at myself just a little less.  I have memories where I can honestly say I did my job of protecting them from all the stuff I carry, and gave them genuinely positive memories.  I firewalled my pain, and created something good for them, at an unknown cost to me.

And I thought of the Book of Mormon and the song “Fuck you, God”.  I felt genuine rage, genuine anger.  I understand people who want to curse this life, curse any Creator responsible for it. I understand people who want to hurt other people, who want to bring blackness with them wherever they go.  I understand the opposite of love.  Some people are gifted with an easy knowledge of love, but I am not one of them.

I of course get moments in the other direction.  This was a blackness which descended on me which I will not feed.

But if there was a point in that occurrence, it was to awaken me to these latent feelings.  This is the root core sensation underlying my self destructive tendencies. I feel rage, and when I am the only one in the room, the only one I can hurt with impunity, then I do.

Edit: this here is the truth.

My goodness, I just spent the last hour convinced it was Monday.  This is not something that happens to me.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t get drunk last night.  I usually get drunk on Saturday night.  I only had 5 beers.  That’s a binge, the “experts” tell me, but light drinking by my standards.  I did forget my teacup.  I weighed 286 this morning.  I had a gooey calzone–2 actually–which is a mess of melted cheese and butter for dinner, but other than a small thing of natto, that was all I ate all day.

I think I am slowly getting in touch with my stomach.  That is where the energy I need to release lives.  As long as it is a repository for nervous energy, I will feel tension and I will feel the relaxation of that tension when I overeat.

Quite often, lies live in mansions, and truth lives in a simple shack.

I think this literally true, often–at least, too often–but it is the figurative element which most interests me.

All I will say is I wish I were stronger.  I have excellent ideas.  But I am not yet fully human.  I can feel it coming, but I am not there yet.  There is still frost on me, frost in my breath. I merge easily with darkness, and cannot yet feel the light.

I have found the great cavern within our world, and it occurs to me to deduce there must be flowing air, flowing water, and light, which I currently cannot feel.

I live easily in the realm of Form. I am at home there.  But Form has roots which are vastly richer, more nourishing, and more useful.

My work continues.  I will one day be a blessing.  This is my life’s work.

First, I forgot, 287, and the other half of the bottle of vodka. I am sore from this week’s labor.  My back hurts.  But I otherwise feel good.

Kawaii is a Japanese word meaning cute, cuddly or lovable.  In other words, something which makes you happy for a moment.  Puppies and kittens are obvious examples.

I am reading about Tokyo in National Geographic, and it is interesting to speculate how the fact that the Japanese equivalent of perhaps New York and Los Angeles rolled into one has been destroyed twice in the past century has affected their consciousness.  That sort of thing leaves scars.  Modern Americans have no equivalent.  We have no equivalent to the sufferings of most of Europe in the two World Wars. 

Our closest thing, I guess, is the Great Depression, that great failure of governance, that great failure of our leaders to do the right things.  That was our flirtation with Venezuela, and we “accomplished” the same result.

Small wonder the Japanese are not having children.  Small wonder much of Europe is not having children.  The scars of war are in the grandchildren, and the redemptive power of religion is largely gone.  They have not replaced it with cuteness, but it is perhaps a sign. In large tragedies, one seeks comfort in small things, and small things very often deliver what is needed.