Author: White Whale

What if we chose sex partners based on our perception of their ability with respect to pillow talk?  Women, I think, may do this often, but men, we–I, historically–only think through to the orgasm, after which–ugly as it is–the woman often becomes a nuisance.  I don’t deny this is pretty awful, but I doubt there are many people, male or female, who truly have no idea what I am talking about.

For me, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, I pulled myself out of circulation a long time ago, and will not go back in until I feel I have become a better person.

What if, though, pillow talk is the best part of the whole thing?  What if we made it the focus?  I think where it is good, those people become lovers for a long time.  That moment is a good time to feel heard, deep down in your bones.

Je T’aime, Je t’aime, Je t’aime.

I am just thinking out loud.  I am realizing I am a product of our popular culture.  I was taught next to nothing by any adults in my life that was worth a damn. I inherited stubbornness from my father, and neuroticism from my mother.  They had little else to give me.

It’s so hard, in mid-life, to learn new tricks.  Far from impossible, though. As I grow, though–and I’ve said this often, I am aware, but sometimes you need to speak things over and over and over to make them feel true–I realize how much I have lost.

If I might reference Buddhism again, Duhkha is losing and not realizing you are losing, not seeing it, not seeing open paths you might have taken but could not see for blindness, want of looking, or lack of flexibility.

Growth involves feeling this pain.  But it is a good pain, a real pain, a truly redemptive pain, and one well worth the effort. This pain is being tickled with a feather, not being smashed with a hammer, or cut in a thousand places.  That is what you can leave behind.  What you are leaving behind is being an object, an object which feels, but which cannot control its destiny.

I don’t know if I am brilliant, crazy, absurdly arrogant, or some combination of the three.  It is most likely the last, though. Still, my words are my own.  My thoughts are my own.  What you do not often see here is me discussing other peoples ideas, although I do do it.

I live alone.  I live in silence.  Sometimes it is hard, but it is real.  And the world comes at me here, in silence.  It is never out there.  It was always in here.  I have simply eliminated the noise that prevented me from seeing and feeling it.

Who knows what my destiny is?  Whatever it is, I feel increasingly open to it.  If there is a purpose to life, then I am fulfilling my purpose, as well as I can at the moment, which is not well, but it truly is the best I can do, when it rains pain as often as it does.

So often we get stuck in loops, where the only goal is to make it through each day.  You make it, then reset somehow and do it again the next day.  You can cross a life like this, and learn very little.  But I feel it is very common.  Very, very common.

Spiritual teaching is teasing, perhaps pulling, people away from their petty manias.

It occurs to me a big advantage of having two parents in the picture, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and the like, is that that child emerging into adulthood has many models, and can adopt, consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter, the models that fit them best.

I was thinking of my own children. They combine, I think, the best aspects of both of us. They have my emotional intelligence, passion and curiosity, and their mothers stability. I am many things, but stable is not one of them. Self regulation, obviously, is something I am still working to master.

Conversely, if you only have one parent in the picture, I suspect the temptation to draw from mass media becomes nearly impossible to resist, and movies and music and TV are largely lies.

A richer society would be one more geographically stable. I think we all sense this. There is a time and many reasons to go see the world. But it is important to be from somewhere, and from people you can name.

I was thinking last night that the feeling I am getting as far as the Left is that it is too quiet.  In the past, I would get fought on every political post I made.  That is no longer happening.  I assume I am still blocked from HuffPo, but the feeling tone is a bit different.  I am getting the feeling most parents get when the screaming from the kids in the other room disappears, and silence takes its place.  Especially if dealing with boys, it usually means they are up to something.

These people, the core, are fanatics.  Their politics and their self image and self worth, and notions of themselves as good people, are all tied together in a quite undisentangeable way.  It’s a Gordian knot whose only continual command is “FORWARD!!”‘, whatever the fuck that means.

Where can they go?  They’ve abandoned efforts to claim the universal high ground by shouting down their opponents, or so it feels to me.

What they have left are voter fraud, certainly, and a continuation of violent censorship.  What they no doubt FEEL they need is something like a Cultural Revolution, something like large masses of kids screaming about what must be done to “save” the culture, to protect the weak and weary, and to make the world a better place, even if it takes mass murder to do it.  I suppose the stuff going on in Britain would qualify, in tone.

Murder they are not quite up for, just yet.  They are manifestly quite willing to dox people, to assault the characters of good people, and do everything they can to pollute our public dialogue with lies, anger, half truths, and noise.  They are willing to stop the flow of traffic, and disrupt tens of thousands of lives to be heard, to achieve relevance, even if in infantile ways.

Who knows if what I am feeling is accurate?  I grew up living in the shadows, but keenly aware of everything going on around me.  People like me, I think, are usually right about things like this, but all of us are sometimes wrong.

It just feels like there are schemes being hatched out there, by people for whom an open honest life has been made impossible by a long set of choices and derelictions of actual duty.  All of these people need to grow up, but none of them believe that two marshmallows are out there anywhere except in the rhetoric they internalized some time shortly after nursery school.

And I think at root they don’t even believe their own lies.  Most of them just want to see death and destruction, decay and decline.  There are no marshmallows, even in the present, so just burn it all down.

And I got inspired last night to go get a bunch of healthy food.  I’m going to make a huge portion of saag, some kale chips, and I bought a bunch of good protein, a lot of fish, some beef for beef jerky, and a bunch of apples.

Sleep.  Oh what can I say?  I’ll be doing fine, then some monster from the deep will come up and bite me.  Then I got back to sleep, and it’s mostly OK.  One or two episodes like that a night is not so bad.

I’m continuing to try new things.  When I have a magic recipe for me, I’ll post it.  I’ve gotten tired of posting all the things which COULD work.

I had a bit of an epiphany today: part of the task of feeling safe in this world is learning to how navigate people.  Not just manipulate them, but win them to your side, to your way of thinking, to be the sort of person they genuinely like.  Or conversely, be the sort of person who is genuinely interested in THEIR way of thinking, and their side. 

So much of my worldview runs through conflict, through a felt need to fight in many ways at many times on many fronts.

Think about this, though: the highest and best life is one lived in harmony and deep soul level connection with a variety of people, while doing useful, challenging and engaging work, all while growing as a person steadily across a lifetime.  This is the end aim. 

War, obviously, is a failure in this end. War is sometimes necessary, but even in war we need to look to the end state.  It has become a commonplace to speak of “the warrior spirit”, but in truth when we are only speaking of war, aggressive sociopaths with high pain tolerances arguably make the best killers. 

Warriorship, if we are to value it, must come with the arts of peace, and specifically diplomacy.  You need to know how to hold a line, but you should not be afraid to bend.  I think Donald Trump has struck an outstanding balance in this respect with Kim Jung Un.  He showed him he was not afraid of him by mocking him, but at the same time, when the timing was right, he was genuinely cordial, warm, and friendly.  At some point, I think he is going to make it easy for Kim Jung Un to enter into a permanent peace, with all the prosperity which will go with it, for him and for his people.

And it seems to me one of the most obvious principles should be that there is never any call to make unnecessary enemies.  This is the first step to preventing war.  All wars which are prevented are won, provided nothing truly important is given in exchange, and preventing the beginning of a cycle of hatred should be an important skill all warriors learn.  The connection of etiquette with Bushido is I think a good example of this.  Of course, the Japanese are also notoriously short tempered when etiquette is breached.  Americans, in contrast, rarely even realize they, or someone else, has behaved rudely.  They just say “I’m sorry brother.  Let me buy you a beer.”

Be all that as it may, I am going to dig up my Dale Carnegie and I’ve bought a book on etiquette.  I eat like a hungry caveman, all too often.  You should have seen my family at the dinner table.  My mother mildly excepted, we all did.

I had more to say, but it went wherever ideas go when they get tired of hanging out in the waiting room.  They may be out back smoking a cigarette and return momentarily.

But for me, this idea is liberating.  People are a knowable quantity.  My reaction to a variety of behaviors is under my control.  I can learn to expect better reactions if I learn to be human better.

4 beers, I think, a whiskey, then a bottle of champagne, and a six pack of 6.7% beer.  I forgot to set my alarm, but I woke up anyway.  Got to hit the road at 6am.

Woke up thinking about Gallagher and smashing watermelons.

Edit: I did remember.  I will mention as well that I don’t get hangovers.  It would likely be better for me if I did.  I am foggy for an hour, then I’m good.  I get a bad cough sometimes when drinking hard liquor–the liver and the lungs are connected–but that too disappears pretty quickly.  As a practical alcoholic, I’ve figured out methods of dealing with it.

Still, I can’t help but feeling this morning that good things are on the way.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps because I am right.  That’s always one of the options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CdY1DQWh08

Can I nostalge (that’s a useful word, is it not?) about times when the “meaning of life” was a thing?  Can I not ask the same questions Burke asks?

We all have these questions in us, do we not?  There’s nothing unique about me.  My questions, I think, are questions everyone would ask if they took the time to be silent long enough.

My life, my soul: they are not exceptional.  I’m just a guy who says what everyone should be saying, who barks when all the other dogs should be barking.

Yeah, so I broke.  My work today left substantially every muscle in my body hurting, and I went to one of my watering holes, and uh, watered myself.  They charged me for 2 beers and a whiskey, but I’m pretty sure it was 3-4, and I stopped at the liquor store on the way home (after getting the drift and leaving a 30-35% tip, after which I think management gets suspicious).

So I was going to talk about mystical stuff, which I could, but I feel vaguely ashamed, so I won’t.

I am a fish.  I am an aquatic animal.  I do live in many directions and angles and depths in a typical day.  I see things you cannot see in an ordinary sunlit world.  I lay on my back sometimes and watch the sun from 15′ down.  I feel the currents around me.

But I’m not talking at the moment.  I’m going to listen to something loud and cool on Spotify, watch Jeopardy, then go pass out on my futon.  Good times.

I will have more to report in a day or two.  Progress is being made, outward self reported appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

I realize, as I slowly try to build a behavioral line for myself, that it is quite possible, through will and habit, to constrain the expression of traumatic residue to certain contexts and times.

People like me, we learn to do 8 to 5, more or less, or 6am to 6pm, or whatever is needed. We mostly seem normal. I am a bit rigid but I have a good sense of humor (on most accounts).

But it is EXHAUSTING acting normal. Once I done playing my role, I want to numb all that tension and grief into oblivion.  The day is act 1. The night is act 2, and this can be repeated across s lifetime.

“He was so quiet”, we hear of the latest mass murderer, or guy who had someone locked in a closet, or whatever. Two lives. Two segmented lives. Act 1 and Act 2, the second hidden.

Often soldiers are like this. Keep them in a container of duty and they function fine. When leave the service though, they may just want to buy a shipping container and 40 acres in back of the back 40, and hide from the world. Some of our best soldiers do this, I am told, by someone in a position to know. The long term accumulation of fear, based on first hand knowledge of what is possible, just adds up and sinks them. Maybe they are happy, but I think happier is the better word, relative to all other options.