Month: May 2019

I will recur to my comment on my family a post or two ago.  I had an interaction, specifically, with my mother, the whole meaning of which I think I just figured out.

Where most people are concerned–and this will vary in truth depending on their level of personal integration and psychological health and maturity–there are three reasons for doing things: the one they offer others, the one they secretly believe themselves, and the real one.

Obviously, squared away people do not play games like this.  I don’t play games like this.  I may be a dick sometimes, but you know why.  There are no spider webs in my vicinity.

Where my mother is concerned, though, she first deceives herself–she is convinced, I think, that she is a meek and helpless, utterly mild person, when in fact she regularly pushes into the world large quantities of spite and venom–then she tries to deceive others, in that she attributes to others her secret motives that she won’t own.  Then she comes up with a cover story to tie it all together, seemingly.

Thirty years ago, some-odd, I was hearing phrases from therapists like “playing the martyr”, and “psychological blackmail”, and I really saw them in action for the first time in the reflective reenactments of the past two weeks I did in my mind today.

It is congenial and bland–even if perhaps most often correct–to assume that most things are what they appear to be.  That that nice old man is a nice old man; that that terrible criminal is a terrible criminal; that Democrats just want all of us to be happy and educated and prosperous; that to promise something means an attempt will be made to deliver it.

But people like me: I am like someone who grew up in medieval Italy–or as a modern Corleone in New York (I single out Italy by the way, but there is no reason to assume this was not ubiquitous the world over where large amounts of money and power were concerned)–where everyone was constantly scheming and planning and promising and backstabbing, and where you had to have a plan for all contingencies, and trust your gut when you assumed the worst.

It’s more work looking behind the curtain.   It’s more work being alert to people who are trying to fuck you over.  And most of the time–depending on who you are, what you do and where you live–that work is wasted.  Nobody is trying to get you.  You’re not on any lists.  The people you see around you would, most of them, pull you out of a burning car, and nearly all of them would stop by the side of the road to help you if you didn’t have a cell phone.

But the thing is, if you have this habit, and you allow it to run long enough, because you can’t help it, you DO start to see a lot of fucked up stuff the complacent people of the world take for granted they are protected from, that they assume will never affect them.

I won’t say we are on a precipice, but there are a lot of ways our system could break.  And what is CLEAR to me is that our national leaders are not even REMOTELY able to discuss these things with the sobriety, care, attention, and intelligence they require and deserve. 

It’s maddening.  But, then, I’m used to this situation.  I grew up with it.  

I went for a walk today–it is a splendid day, the sort that I like with mild winds, moving clouds, air ripe with moisture and the possibility of a storm–and it occurred to me that addicts–particularly opioid addicts–are really the Identified Patients of our national social system.

I mean particularly the people for whom the routine risk of sudden death is less to be feared than life without that drug, and all it provides.  People who feel so little a part of our common life that they are willing to play Russian Roulette across wide time spans, knowing that their time is likely to come.

Can we not call sick the culture which produces such people?  A culture where they feel unwanted, unclaimed, and purposeless?  This can happen to rich kids and street urchins.  I knew a woman in college–at Berkeley–who was the daughter of a psychiatrist who wound up living with her drug dealer in Oakland.  Perhaps he became her pimp too.  I lost track of her.  People fall off the grid like that all the time. I only heard about it long after the fact.  All I knew is she stopped attending classes.

But just as sick families produce people with obvious problems, can we not call The American Way of Life in some respects a dysfunctional, non-nourishing, bleak shadow of what is possible in terms of inclusion and the sense that life is meaningful (I just started Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, by the way, and fell in love immediately with the first two pages)?

Are not the completely related phenomena of increasing opioid addiction, increasing suicide, and increasing depression (especially among the young) all dead canaries in our collective coal mine? 

Where are the people coming up with ideas?  I don’t see it.  I see a bunch of fucking douchebags on one side trying to double the speed at which our culture collapses, and a bunch of largely self interested but also, in principle, principled people failing to see the problem.  You have one set of saboteurs, and opposing them people largely asleep at the wheel.  They push Christianity, but that is not going to solve these problems.

My plea would be this: can we at least try to pause the fucking destruction?  I know it won’t happen: too many careers depend on it, and too many wicked, sick people are pushing it with far too much money.  But that would be my plea.  As I shared elsewhere today, I see Trump mainly as a stopgap, as someone who is delaying the pace of the retreat, someone who is buying time for good people to come up with good ideas that may actually work.

I have ideas, but I’m just one fucking small person with a shitload of my own issues.

I’ll keep pushing, and eventually things will start to crystalize for me in ways I can usefully share, but I won’t lie and say I feel any optimism at all.

I spend a lot of time alone.  I don’t have an office to go to, and where I am doing my work varies week to week, as do the people I am working with.  I go to bars just to hear someone say my name who (sort of) knows me.  They know my name, at least.  Some bars, it goes a bit deeper.

But I have really been dipping into this solitude.  It is a rich, rich place, especially compared to what I will (perhaps arrogantly, and accuse me in your mind to your hearts content) call the stupid bullshit that preoccupies most people.

We are here.  We know we die.  We know our bodies are fragile.  We know people lie and seek power, and that all religions most likely have been deformed somewhere in the past thousand years, if not much sooner.  We know too many scientists today lie and seek power.  They are our priests.  It is not a new story: it is a very, very old story.

Wrestling with and coming to terms with Verworfenheit is the game, is it not?  Nobody is going to do it for me, and nobody CAN or SHOULD do it for me.  This is the heart of this thing we reify as “Life”.

Several weeks ago I realized, with a bit of panic, that the core problem with extended solitude is that I lack a mirror: there is no one to tell me I exist, to acknowledge that I exist, to say my name, to react when I do or say something.

What I am realizing today–and by the way, after getting drunk Thursday night I have fasted 44 hours, about which I will write more as I really get to know it better–is that there is a mirror.  We are or can be present to ourselves, but ONLY IF WE ARE HONEST.

Solitude punishes liars.  It punishes people who thrive on and live in worlds of self deception.  Solitude makes them feel like they don’t exist, that they are dissolving.  It fills them with nervous anxiety.

But I am finding that even with profoundly negative experiences, when they show up honestly, as they really happened, they are like old friends.  They are pieces of me which I had lost.  They enrich me, help me feel more complete.

I don’t really want to be a hermit, but I will suggest that solitude is one of the most profound truth serums you can take, if you are willing to do the work of listening.  And it is work.  It is evoked–or at least, you need to be ready when it comes to you unbidden.  You have to sit listening, ready to pounce. 

With respect to fasting I had read some time ago that the poet Hafez fell in love with some woman.  To get here, he fasted forty days inside a circle where he sat night and day.  At the end, he had fallen in love with God.  This is how I recall it, anyway.

40 days is a bit crazy, but I do wonder if in coming years I might not try something like that for 2-3 days.  Sufis in some cases call spiritual work “polishing the inner mirror”, which fits quite well with my own analogy.  Such works yields more of the real You, and makes competing possibilities pale in comparison.  This is why so many Tibetans, I suppose, die in caves.

Few of us in America have even begun to suspect what is possible.  Maybe some of the people who have used hallucinogens, but my personal view is that such things have to be placed in the context of a much larger, very sincere spiritual practice, and my own experience is that such a thing appears to be vanishingly rare.

I am no doubt still quite blind, though.  I must have missed things I might have seen.  I am trying to wind myself down and open myself up to this possibility, to go and do things I have viewed for some years with distaste, like visiting my local Buddhist temple.  Maybe they aren’t all assholes, even though I know for a fact at least one of the board members is.

My vision is spirituality with the F word, a firm grounding in reality with no bullshit, and a focus on basic sanity, which most of us lack.

Villains evolve out of the need all human beings have for hate.

Corollary: the hidden will always find a way to speak.

Context: I recently had some interactions with my family.  I try to avoid those, and since they live far away, it is not usually very hard. 

But without providing too much information, I realized something: I was forced, by the circumstances of my family situation, and my own seemingly congenital passion for truth, into playing the role of the villain in my own family.

Going back many years, I was what I guess some, perhaps all, psychologists call the “Identified Patient”.  This is the person, in a sick system, who manifest actual symptoms.  They are the ones unable to deal with Orwellian DoubleSpeak, silent emotional violence, profound coldness, and continual outright self serving delusion.  They become neurotic, not because they are inherently unhealthy, but because the system is unhealthy, and they lack the capacity for internalizing conflict–to make it outwardly hard to see–and to lie to themselves about their experiences.

It is no exaggeration, I don’t think, that I spent, even in my youth, more hours on the therapists couch than the rest of my family put together.  It ripped me apart, because at that time I had no advocates, no one in my corner.  Shrinks don’t count, because they are (highly) paid friends.  They’ll side with whoever is paying the bills.  That is my honest opinion, with regard to most of them.  It’s more than a little a whorish business.  You can’t make money if people don’t keep coming back.

And what I am feeling now is that people who feel emotional violence on the inside will regularly find ways to make enemies who justify their own violence.  As I have commented before, I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say the British Empire was made necessary by their inability to speak emotional truth, and to be open.

And, again, this speaks to Trump Derangement Syndrome.  They had to make enemies of us, in order to justify their own inchoate rage.  We all need boundaries.  We all need defensive barriers, places which are us, and outside of which the world operates separately. 

And the essence of Leftist practice and ritual is the denial of self, of family, of place, of country, of religion, of history.  Nothing is sacred.  Nothing is valuable.

Any animal, denied all this, will become mad with anxiety and defensive rage.  Where does it go?  At us, at “normals”, of course.

This anger is not even approximately proportionate to anything Trump has ever in his life said or done.  It does not come from him.  It has virtually nothing to do with him.  Its source is elsewhere.

The thing about being cut deeply is you learn a lot about your own emotional anatomy, and there is no reason in my view to fear generalizing much of my own experience to the world as a whole.  I am not put together differently than anyone else, in the end.  If I am different, it is only because my particular environment evolved me in a particular and unusual direction.  That, and I was blessed with a relatively high degree of native intelligence.

War and conflict are the truth of the human form.  To transcend them, one must transcend the human form.

True?  Not True?  How would one answer that question? 

Might it be the case that trying to answer that question would itself involve a struggle?  Can we gauge the quality of the human life by the caliber and level of the conflicts?

Without war, are we mindless sponges?  With war, are we perhaps also mindless sponges? 

Just talking out loud.

When someone is telling you a story about a decision they made in the past which they plainly continue to wrestle with, always assure them as strongly as your constitution and persuasive ability permit you to that they made the correct decision.

Last night, I heard some awful stories.  Today, more.

Last night someone was telling me about losing his son to suicide.  The whole thing was a mess.  He was a combat veteran himself.  He had–and I will differentiate these–at least Traumatic Grief, Traumatic Guilt, and probably PTSD.  He felt keenly the loss of friends, and felt keenly the murders he had committed in war.

His marriage fell apart.   He lost the ability to protect his son.  Bad things were done which, some 15-20 years later, caused his son to kill himself.  He was wondering if he should have footed the bill for intensive long term therapy after those things were discovered and he got sole custody, something he could ill afford, and at a time when he himself–for eminently justified reasons, in my view–thought little of therapy and its value.  He chose not to pay for the therapy.

I wish I had been more emphatic that he made the right decision, that it would almost certainly have made no difference.  That is actually my view, but in any event the past is past.  What is done is done.  What is present still is his self doubt, his worry, his grief, and his pain.  That is all anyone like me need worry about or attempt to assuage.

Tonight, someone was telling me about losing two babies, both roughly the same way: his wife dilated and started “leaking” about five months in.  The second baby he was thinking maybe he could have kept.  Even at five months, he thought, maybe a child could have emerged, even if one requiring lifelong daily care.  I told him I did not think that child would have lived, in any iteration of the story, which matched what his older brother had told him.  He has obviously long wondered if he should have trusted his older brother.  My honest opinion is his older brother steered him straight.

Now, he considers adopting.  But my God, the things most kids being put up for adoption must have been through, now.  You can’t heal Developmental Trauma without Neurofeedback, and that continues to be a backwater, forgotten relic of something non-professionals tried and which sometimes worked, but which lacked enough of BEING GOD to be of long term interest to “trained professional”.  (I have beer and gin in me, by the way, but all booze ever does is amplify me.  I go to 11, when I might have stopped at eight and a half.)

Those stories last night messed me up.  I bought a bottle of gin to drink, and chose not to.  I had something at work to finish today, and I finished it.  Good on me.  Tonight, I am giving myself this small blessing.

I will share some dreams.  Several nights ago, I was dreaming of living in the sea, and coaxing shy, very sensitive sea creatures to come out.  A crab came out from under a sofa.  Some sea eel or something similarly soft came out of a box.

And I remembered I was intensively soft at one time.  I was a very sensitive child.  I literally would not harm a fly.  When we moved where there were a lot of mosquitoes, it literally took me several years to get over my guilt for killing them, even when they were biting me.  I didn’t kill bugs or anything else for any reason.

There remains, apparently, still within me a nearly infinite tenderness, a reactive capacity, a seeing capacity, a feeling and empathetic capacity.

And I do not know how to reconcile this with the part of me that can FEEL a well made knife in my hand.  I think I posted this same line recently, but I’m not sure.

How do sane people reconcile, on the one end of the continuum, infinite sensitivity and reactivity and compassion and love, and on the other the sometimes need for physical, emotional, intellectual and social violence?  How do both live in one mind?

Magic.  That is my answer.  This is my mystical power.  Maybe.  Although I remain uncertain if it is an actual power, since it is unmanifest.

Last night I was dreaming about being homeless.  I felt how people, when they first lose their homes, are brave.  They put a brave face on.  They say “it won’t be so bad”.  But with time, they lose that bravado, and with enough time they lose the ability to care outright.  I felt all this.

Then I felt being sufficiently emotionally organized to actually deal with the Powers that Be, and the assholes behind them, to actually do useful work to ameliorate their condition.  Me, without losing my patience.  Me, without quitting when the going gets shitty.  That’s new.

My God what a fascinating thing this life is.  I feel it.  Life is in the feeling.  When you are doing, there is a shield in front of you.  Life is happening to the shield.  You can, of course, do with feeling, too, and that is the task most of us need to learn.

What really makes sense to me is that trying our best–which of course is almost never our best, but always feels like more than we thought we were capable of–is really what is asked of us.

I used to tell my kids–and I’ve likely shared this thought here–that God is not a fucking idiot.  God feels us, sees us, knows us.  There is no need for or point of pretense.  Be how you are.  Speak your truth.  Know that you have most likely fucked up seriously and often in ways you were too fucking stupid to see.  And know that what is infinite will be infinite with you, too.

There is a thousandfold the compassion any of us need in any inch of this universe.  If we can’t find it, it will eventually come to us.

I am going to assert that Helen Keller was braver than Miyamoto Musashi, even though the latter faced death many times.  Musashi was a master in dealing death, but I don’t think it can honestly be said he was a master at dealing life.  He was a warrior.  He pursued the warrior’s craft consummately.  But he dealt death.  This is what warriors do.

I’m continuing to negotiate my shadow.  I find myself wanting to buy a really good knife.  I keep looking at this site: https://www.zombietools.net/shop/felon/

Bowie is like .45: classic American.

Somehow I got to thinking about martial arts tonight.  I studied what I think most afficionados would call Koryu for some years.  And I remain damned impressed how clever those Japanese were.

And I remain vaguely sickened by how many ways I know how to break bones and kill people.

Here is the thing: you can’t live forever.  Not in this form.  And we all have destinies and fates.  It is right and proper to have basic self protection skills and tools.  But obsessing about it is a form of dereliction of duty.  This is what I am telling myself.

Kum Nye is not athletic.  It is not badass.  It can’t be competitive, since it all involves subjective internal states.  But it gets very close to the core purpose of human life, and as such is the single activity–or one close to it–worth pursuing.

This is me processing some old truths, old ideas, and how I have interacted with life in the past.  My past is gone.  It is not coming back unless I continue to invite it, and that leaves no room for what is really fucking cool in this world.

I’m rambling, but I think there is some use in this for me.

Edit: We all want to be badass, or at least most men do.  I did.  But there is no end to it.  It can become an obsession which takes away life.  I have known men who killed other men in conflict.  It leaves a scar that does not make that man richer in any way.  What they can say is they did what needed to be done, and carry no regrets.  But that is not enrichment, on balance, not how I see it.

My jagged work continues.

It’s hard for me to believe the Democrats are STILL on about Russian collusion, which was investigated for two years by a patent partisan hack, and the origin of the story of which we now know to have been an illegal attempt to sway the election, using the CIA, and FBI.

I reading the comments on the latest, and wondering just what the hell is wrong with people.  I can’t imagine myself that stupid on my worst day, and I do have some bad days.

Then it hit me: they are like Richard Gere, in “An Officer and a Gentleman”, when Lou Gossett Jr. asks him “WHY ARE YOU HERE?”, and he replies, crying, “I have nowhere else to go.”

So really all this is good news.

What did the Democrats NOT do after the 2016 election?  Ask themselves what VALID reasons were present which ensured their loss, both in the Presidential election, and in many Congressional and State elections.  They did no soul searching.  They made no effort to connect with voters they lost.  They made no attempt to learn from their failure.

Rather, being Leftists, and thus immune from learning, they blamed anyone and everyone but themselves, their message, and the way they delivered it.

That this whole Mueller thing is still going on means this process STILL has not started.  It may never start.  If that is the case, and absent major fraud–which I hope Trump is taking steps to make between difficult and impossible–then Trump is a shoo-in in 2020. He can’t lose. 

In 2018 it was still possible to be informed and believe that something might come out of the Mueller investigation.  Now, it is not.  No sane person believes anything is being hidden except means and methods of intelligence gathering and the names of the people involved.

And I can’t help but wonder if all these attacks on Barr and Trump will not embolden them in their investigation–really, their COUNTER-investigation–into how Mueller got put into play in the first place.  How could these games not make both really, really want to shut these assholes the fuck up?

It is time to see Hillary in handcuffs.  I really believe this.  I would like to see James Comey in handcuffs.  It would do the reputation of the FBI a world of good.

I think all God really asks of us is that we participate.  Show up, in life.  If you win, if you lose: it is all good, all progress, all time well spent.

I will add that I think we need to think of God as a metaphor.  For what, I don’t know, but something real.

The actual racists probably do vote for Trump, for the same reason that the actual Communists vote for Democrats: neither gets what they want, but it’s closer than the alternative.  It’s not hard, really, to understand why a self respecting white person would vote against the party which is by and large proclaiming being white to be a crime.  No complex psychological analysis is required.

I would add that it is interesting watching the endorsement of David Duke as a barometer.  My understanding is that he has endorsed Kamala Harris because she is his kind of anti-Semite.

On that note, I will add that I visited the Indiana State Museum a few weeks ago.  First: did you know that the word comes from “Land of the Indians”?  There were many tribes there.  We signed treaties limiting white settlement, then broke them as soon as we had the numbers to resist the Indian war which followed.  That is what I recall, in any event.

Secondly, though: the second iteration of the KKK was largely founded not as a particularly anti-black party, but an anti-immigrant party.  They opposed Jews, Italians, and I think even Catholics, which is to say Irish, Polish and others.

In this regard, what needs to be said is the obvious, which is that Trump does not oppose legal immigration.  Neither do I.  I think nearly everyone who has studied the issue has concluded that economically, immigrants are a HUGE bonus for America.  They come here bringing fire, passion, ideas, and a fierce work ethic.  Many, many important companies were founded by immigrants.

But legal immigrants are people we invite.  They ask to come here, and we say yes.  Trump has not really affected this process, other than to, for the time being, ban people from countries where a sizable part of the population has experience dealing terrorism, and which hates us.  Not cool bringing those people here.

People we do not invite, who sneak–and sneak is the word–in here without asking permission, without seemingly CARING about permission: those are the people who we all should be concerned with.  They break our laws the moment they come here.  A very great many of them wind up on welfare and in jail.  The numbers are night and day legal versus illegal immigrants.  By and large LEGAL immigrants use less welfare and commit considerably less crimes than people BORN here.  Illegal immigrants, of course, invert this.  I read something approaching 50% of the people in our Federal jails are people here illegally, who subsequently committed other crimes requiring incarceration.

That our national conversation is disrupted in damaging ways daily by most of our media is really beyond dispute.  What they take from this, why they do it, why they find it acceptable, I continue to wonder.