I mark the passing of Polythemia, the one-eyed wonder rat. She was the sweetest damn rat ever, and the giver of Hot Rat Ear Sex. She was a gift from the Woman, who had been watching her as an animal rescue, and my first rat ever. Not much else can be said. She lived a fuller life, considering she started out as reptile food. Mate to Sigmund, the hairless Rex, and lover of all people who handled her. May she come back as a really nice human being.

I've counted too highly on alcoholic sedation to induce better sleep this week, as the difficulty of last week works itself into the new week, but in this case, the lubrication has greased a rusting hinge to open a door. On previous posts, I remarked on how my dreams are mostly unimportant perceptual pastiche that I've assumed are just unspent mental stimulus leakage which does little but deny me deeper sleep. I've been wondering some if maybe I could use some of the strange images as source material for writing. All these things are true, but I think I've been missing the point, what overall my hyperself has been trying to teach me in my sleep, through the purity of dreamscape.
Last night, I had one of those television episode-like dreams, ones I usually discount because I'm not even within the dream, about a man (represented by an actor whose face failed to survive wakening) who finds himself in an antique barn where people's limitations, the attachments they refuse to let go of, manifest physically on other people, in a surrealistic and violent chaos, where only the man seems to realize what is truly happening when he confronts the source, who himself is only a player in this advanced thought-experience. It was a very wild dream, and I wish to the heavens itself I could recall with perfect detail. Still, that I recall the concept will make enough for an amazing story. It makes sense that it should be a story, because my fiction and symbolic-made-real in dreams share that same magic realism.
I've written so little recently because when I've looked at my former work, which are still good in their own way, and I see how unalive the writing is, with reliance usually on a single comedic gag, with a bare hint of real meaning, and because that is the axial point, everything else lacks in the spark of multi-dimensional and philosophical constructive discord that I think I'm trying to capture on paper. My writing lacks the passion of my full creativity. There, I said it. That is huge. That means so much more than just my writing, for my life, but what I've wanted in my life and what I've wanted to make of my writing are irrevocably interrelated. Passion. Creativity. (As usual, have to excuse if little of this makes sense, I have to get this down, but this is coming literally from mind to hands, in the need to record it before I lose it to the neural filtration system, just like what we see in dream is lost when it tries to cross into our waking sense of reality, with the perceptual detours of reality.)
I've been tearing my hair out, and falling into my unconstructive bitchery, about how I feel like I am lacking the naus, the centralized awareness, that links all the parts of my being into a cohesive and dynamic structure, and with zen-like reliability, it's been right in front of me the whole time. Creativity. Passion. Expression. Meaning. Purpose. Life. This is pretty powerful stuff. This is what the neural blockage is holding back, the creative drive, since this can't be easily filtered or controlled, and its passions are fraught with risk that can't be selectively chosen for exploitation without cost. Creativity that is a sum of past, present, and future. The thing that has to be awakened unconditionally and fully. All these experiments in removing blockage. The desire to learn meditative states. The want to open the perceptual floodgates. All these have been driven unconsciously by the pressure of my passions awakening too fully to be denied and filed away as some intellectual philosophical exercise. For all these years, it has been manifesting in my dreams, but I've shunted it to some side effect of my ADHD, that itself an invention of someone else seeking an easier definition for uncommon mental systems. This is the power of unifying elements, they effect everything in the mosaic of being, and I know I'm barely reading the cascade effect.
This is a good realization, even if it only makes me slightly less clueless about how I can crack the neural blockage that holds back the full focal stream of my creativity, with its powerful emotional and spiritual impact. But that's not for now, not yet at least.

I've counted too highly on alcoholic sedation to induce better sleep this week, as the difficulty of last week works itself into the new week, but in this case, the lubrication has greased a rusting hinge to open a door. On previous posts, I remarked on how my dreams are mostly unimportant perceptual pastiche that I've assumed are just unspent mental stimulus leakage which does little but deny me deeper sleep. I've been wondering some if maybe I could use some of the strange images as source material for writing. All these things are true, but I think I've been missing the point, what overall my hyperself has been trying to teach me in my sleep, through the purity of dreamscape.
Last night, I had one of those television episode-like dreams, ones I usually discount because I'm not even within the dream, about a man (represented by an actor whose face failed to survive wakening) who finds himself in an antique barn where people's limitations, the attachments they refuse to let go of, manifest physically on other people, in a surrealistic and violent chaos, where only the man seems to realize what is truly happening when he confronts the source, who himself is only a player in this advanced thought-experience. It was a very wild dream, and I wish to the heavens itself I could recall with perfect detail. Still, that I recall the concept will make enough for an amazing story. It makes sense that it should be a story, because my fiction and symbolic-made-real in dreams share that same magic realism.
I've written so little recently because when I've looked at my former work, which are still good in their own way, and I see how unalive the writing is, with reliance usually on a single comedic gag, with a bare hint of real meaning, and because that is the axial point, everything else lacks in the spark of multi-dimensional and philosophical constructive discord that I think I'm trying to capture on paper. My writing lacks the passion of my full creativity. There, I said it. That is huge. That means so much more than just my writing, for my life, but what I've wanted in my life and what I've wanted to make of my writing are irrevocably interrelated. Passion. Creativity. (As usual, have to excuse if little of this makes sense, I have to get this down, but this is coming literally from mind to hands, in the need to record it before I lose it to the neural filtration system, just like what we see in dream is lost when it tries to cross into our waking sense of reality, with the perceptual detours of reality.)
I've been tearing my hair out, and falling into my unconstructive bitchery, about how I feel like I am lacking the naus, the centralized awareness, that links all the parts of my being into a cohesive and dynamic structure, and with zen-like reliability, it's been right in front of me the whole time. Creativity. Passion. Expression. Meaning. Purpose. Life. This is pretty powerful stuff. This is what the neural blockage is holding back, the creative drive, since this can't be easily filtered or controlled, and its passions are fraught with risk that can't be selectively chosen for exploitation without cost. Creativity that is a sum of past, present, and future. The thing that has to be awakened unconditionally and fully. All these experiments in removing blockage. The desire to learn meditative states. The want to open the perceptual floodgates. All these have been driven unconsciously by the pressure of my passions awakening too fully to be denied and filed away as some intellectual philosophical exercise. For all these years, it has been manifesting in my dreams, but I've shunted it to some side effect of my ADHD, that itself an invention of someone else seeking an easier definition for uncommon mental systems. This is the power of unifying elements, they effect everything in the mosaic of being, and I know I'm barely reading the cascade effect.
This is a good realization, even if it only makes me slightly less clueless about how I can crack the neural blockage that holds back the full focal stream of my creativity, with its powerful emotional and spiritual impact. But that's not for now, not yet at least.

Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

I'm well into my fifth bottle of a six-pack of hard cider, and I'm taking a break from the required disaster film that comes with reasonable inebriation. I'm actually on the house's back deck availing myself of the house wireless to least make some kind of entry for what has been a less than spectacular week. As I told another friend, being unemployed gives one too much room for habits, such as kvetching as he said in reply, so I am doing my best to avoid falling into another cyber-whine. Simply, its been one of those weeks where a confluence of negative events come together to bow the legs under a considerable weight. I have had to deal with everything from my most beloved rat's fall into the illness of old rodent age, to my parents' travail with the oncoming of a powerful hurricane. I will spar details, and anything else that falls into the middle of that range, to comment that I am amazed how well I am handling all of this. I am a man who has always been very answerable to his fear, yet I have refused to fall into the expected panic that is a family legacy in such matters. It would be nice if I could feel the extent of this gain in my abilities to cope with what is no more than life, with all its troubles, but I'm not quite there yet. All I am left with is the broadening gulf between who I believe myself to be, and what I am actually doing. No wonder reality is so highly overrated at times. Again, I won't elaborate, as that would be another repetitive exercise in chest-beating that serves no purpose. How can I sit here under the chill of a starry night and draw up my further angst, when even my shrink states that he is amazed how well I am handling my affairs. All I would do would expound on limitations that are mostly of my own making. I will leave it at this status report then. Hopefully, in a more sober inclination tommorrow, I might have something worth adding to the chronicles of my progress.
Just a note, recently I noted that to progress, man must eat his own gods. I correct this, because deification is a manifestation of man's fear of the unknown in a great universe. So in truth, man eats his gods so that he can eat his own fear, and find that it is nothing but a mere trifle in the banquet.
I still hope. I'm good.

Onward, ever onward.

Ah, the golden age of communication where I can remotely connect a portable computer to a wireless internet server and confess openly my sins to an uncaring world. Yes, I am currently committing a serious breach of my lower sugar diet at the famous Top Pot Donuts. I am on the second of three donuts, washed down with a latte cup's worth of the house coffee. The only consideration given is that the sugar in the coffee isn't processed white. Aren't I so health-minded? The fun part is I get to confess my sin freely, and then tinge it with guilt, and my exhibitionism of my sordid simple sin somehow absolves me. Ah, to be an American. And these are really damn good donuts.

This really is guilt-eating in a way, as in less than two hours, I will be off to the Seattle branch of Jewish Family Services, where I will utilize the same job counselor, and look into what other services I might qualify for, as I did when I first moved here. There is nothing finer than qualifying yourself as a heretic, free of the hold of your birthright, and then go right out and exploit that birthright for all its worth. The same friend online, mentioned in my last entry, has been doing a fine job of indicting me on my need for my Jewishness, and I always hate it more when the indictment is correct. But really, I am less a Jew, than I am a narcissist, willing to use anything in my arsenal to get what I need without paying the greater cost for it. And this is an indictment I call down from the bench onto myself, because it is a wholly larger flaw in the supposedly anarchic set of "new rights" I am supposed to be living.
Oddly things like this unify me to humanity than remove me further, as I am finally realizing the immense power of cultural and religious identity that humanity uses everyday to find a way out of their suffering through emotional deflection of actual contextual reality. I talk about removal of identity to free one's self from the need for an absolute reality to some people, and I might as well be speaking in tongue and frothing about the corners of my mouth. Yet, I allow myself to be irrevocably identified, even if in a total secular way, with being a member of the Chosen People, forever cursed by God to suffer oppression and hatred, onto violence, to mark that covenant. You know what, look at the modern fundamentalist Christian, and you'll see a non-Jew who is a quick learner.
I wager that my blog entries of late seem to be some guilty confessional against things I am unwilling to act against, and endlessly repeat to myself, transmitted by word to others here, so to justify my individuality. I have no problem saying that there is truth in that appearance, which is all the more sad. But whatever happens, whatever kvetch and holler I scribe, I am still remembering my own personal convenant, made when I awoke in soft restraints at Ben-Taub's ER, with a day of my life ripped from my memory, that I will never stop confronting myself and questioning how I live, because there really is a better way. Of that one thing, I am sure.

Okay, I have to go, even if I didn't finish the third donut. Wastrel, I am. I'm going to try to talk to the job counselor without falling back into guilt and regret as the burden of my life. I make a lousy Sisyphus.

It was easier to tear myself away from the house today, beyond that the Indomitable I will be taking me for a much belated unemployment drunk later, because the wooden floors in the front rooms are being refinished today. Without that, the Woman's studio below is a zoological cacophony with the hungry cries of the pied crow mingling with the hysterical warbling of the jay caused by the presence of the Pomeranian that the Woman is dogsitting this weekend. Strange are the days in House D.

Again I should have written more this week, but whenever I attempted to do so, my words were a long repetitive whine about the injustice of it all. Things are looking up some, which is probably the only reason I can string enough words together outside of the usual kvetch about metaphysical crisis and unfulfilled longings. As it is, I'm getting the feeling that I am simply justifying the same kind of depressive collapse that always happens when I can't hold it together, with just a brighter and shinier logical set of complex parameters. The only still apparent truth is that whatever I need to do really is beyond me to generate, and I'll have to bide my time and do something unspeakable, trust in the universe that the probabilities meant to be will appear in my sensory field. I've been talking to an understanding friend online much lately, but his helpfulness is not in content, more in context. He is in his early twenties, redefining himself outside of his frame into a new modality of life, and I've ignored how much easier (a very relative easier, like the difference between sitting in an oven at 350 degrees, over 450 degrees,) to change your neurological baseline connections at that age, than at mine in the mid-30s. It's not that I am all that old, I've only hit the average lifespan mid-way mark. But I've not factored my age into the quotient of neurological conversion. Rewriting the neural software is a greater uphill fight, and my sense of my age is already askew, as I tend to count my birth from eighteen, after the Great Breakdown, than from my actual womb ejection. It's an important failure of perspective that I should consider, getting past my vanity of my self-awareness.
No matter how much I try to philosophically empty time and space of meaning and substance, I am still a creature that exists in this physical sense frame. More likely is that I'm subconsciously denying the power of my past, and the effect of that on my memory. I'm wondering if the reason my memory is as bad as it is, is not solely ADHD, but a psychoneural rewiring done by unconscious need to reject the pain of my past, and the stave off mental instabilities that would weaken my deeply held survival-living baseline. So much of my life has been focused on the task of holding on, less for my nobler belief that I always held a thread of hope, but more for my obstinate refusal to let my parents, and the world as the projection of them, to win. (Just a side note here. Fuck you, Freud. And now back to our regular deprogramming.) I've always valued how my childhood still lead to a fresh individual process of thought, but I've never fully examined the cost, because to do so would be to question the core control. So, I've hobbled along with constraints that remove a sense of time from my sensory perspective, as what came before literally vanishes from my reality. I feel unable to hold onto the accomplishments of my past, flushed along with failures from the memory. That itself is a fallacy, because I can't flush pain.
What I've done through my intellect to my own programming is simpler at the source code, due to the basic regularity of emotional input, and only complicates in execution to the response to continued experience. And now, those circuits established by the program are imprinted harder than I want to allow. It's no wonder that I seem to live one way, and think it to be a different way. The experience is more absolute, the internal response more relative.
Ego tells me that I should be able to self-generate the catalyst that cracks open the pathways and allow for the full rewiring I'll need to surpass the baseline stasis. Without ego, that still seems to be true, but then when am I without the supremacy of ego? I will have to accept that externality is much more necessary than I want to believe. But due to free will, I am still responsible for the openess to awareness/creation of the externalities that come along I might need to follow. In simpler words, this sucks because the process looks like it will take more time, and I'll have to be more patient, and not wait for the great occurence, but keep building experience until it pushes with overcoming force.
Then again, I could just be doing the same thing now that I've always been doing, which is trying to make something out of my control to happen in a manner I can control. Fuck it. At this rate, the revolution will probably come before any of this, anyway.

Although I again am doing battle with anxiety and the creeping formation of a migraine, I want it to be clearly recorded that today was a good day, for a single redemptive act. Although "Onward, Ever Onward" is my motto, I could be said to have an equally important credo, a triad of ideals by which the good life should be measured: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of a Really Good Pastrami On Rye (with half-done pickle on the side.) Some think this is one of my odd jokes, but there is a profound truth in it. For today, I can proclaim to the heavens that the last of that triumverate was attained. I had a truly awesome Pastrami on Rye today at Roxy's Deli in Fremont, an establishment I had noted in mere passing during my weekend stay on the houseboat, that was at the time closed for renovations.
After a mildly futile consultation about my meds with the psychiatrist, where my anxiety was palpable to him, I felt the pain forming again behind my eyes as I undertook a circuitous bus ride to the branch headquarters of my old security company, the same branch where I was ceremoniously canned two weeks ago, to drop off my uniforms and pick up the contents of my locker, since I am apparently too much of a danger to have retrieved them from the site. I had thought of that deli, since it was just across the canal from the branch office, and figured I might try eating there, even though I knew I shouldn't spend the money. But, we are talking about Pastrami, and nothing mundane as economic conditions could hold be back from my quest, especially since I never feel firmly established in any city until I know where to go for proper deli.
I carted my prior work belongings across the bridge (in a double garbage bag, showing the respect and consideration my prior supervisor had for me,) and shambled over to Roxy's Deli. I've come not to hold too high expectations, due to some incredible prior disappointments, but the outlook was better than I imagined. The pastrami sandwich was sold on the menu by then unknown name of Glick and Froyd pastrami, but naming the butchers was usually a clear sign of prestige, and it was sold simply on rye with mustard. And warmed. This is the most common mistake I have found in deli, is serving pastrami cold. A fatal error for which there is no forgiveness. Also many times have I had to ask, mind you, ask for other so-called delis to remove toppings from the pastrami, including the unforgivable addition of cheese. Blasphemy, thou name is cheese on pastrami. My dream was lifted again to the realm of the possible, because they sold Dr. Brown's soda, the kosher soda line that is like the perfect French wine for the five-course gourmet meal, the absolute necessary companion. Myself, I swear by the black cherry.
With hand over my aching eyes, and worry clenching my soul, I waited for my sandwich. When it finally came, I knew the moment was at hand. Not only had they made sure to overflow the rye, slicing the sandwich into two-halves (which is a requirement into itself,) but beside it was the blessed half-done pickle spear. All was at hand. Light glistened softly off the grease from the warmed pastrami and I had to admire the plate before me for a moment. But the true test was yet to be made. I lifted the sandwich and took my first bite. Transcedance. You may think this is wacky hyperbole on my part, but it isn't. The pastrami was perfect, salted without too much saltiness, chewy but lean enough to fall toward tender, and balanced by the spicy brown deli mustard. Praise be to the sainted Glick and Froyd, who only later would I know were devoted to bringing the perfect authentic cold cut from the East Coast to the West. My anxiety fell away, and again don't doubt my words when I say it nearly brought me to tears. From the cauldron of my troubles, I was lifted into a timeless moment of rightness in the universe. I have never needed a sandwich to be so good, so badly before.
I understand that this pastrami on rye could be construed as grasping for momentary physical pleasure to falsely uplift from pain, that this was a neurologically hardwired comfort brought forward from my childhood, and this is true, but only partially. The true value lies not in what the pleasure is, but how commonly it can be obtained, and how long you have gone without the given desire. The comfort of a pleasure is demolished by over-indulgence, and leaves the experience hollow and useless. Sure, the pleasure didn't last long, in my case, as long as it took to have my mother call me on my cel while I was waiting for the bus home, but even then the memory is cherished. I will still lay down since my head hurts, but after that miraculous lunch, my hand hasn't shook, and my spirit feels lightened for the consumption of the heavy meat. Yes, it is not some truly noble ideal, but neither is it stupid or meaningless to me. The gaining of one of my triad of ideals makes the others seem less distant and more obtainable. Time and space are redeemed, even if just by deli. This is the power of pleasures, that are both simple, and rare. Today will always be a good day.

I beat a migraine today, and I'm very hopeful this isn't remission, so even though the effort exhausted me, I figured I'd write. But that doesn't seem to be happening either without the pain behind my eyes emerging again as I try to find the words to describe it. I'm going to go to bed now. Times like this I can understand why Wilson followed Leary, why some cultures hold onto their brutal rituals of rebirth, and why the civilizations of the world are unravelling. Reality is a bitch. Learning who we are is the death of what we know. We have to eat our gods.

Sleep.

Not much of a show here for a man supposedly switching priorities to place writing over all other things. But then, according to the Washington State labor code, even if I qualify for unemployment, my "misconduct" by gross disregard for the will of my employer means I have to not only wait ten weeks extra to start getting my stipend, but also earn ten times my stipend at some kind of employment before that. That is if I do qualify, and/or have to appeal which tacks on another month, and try to find someone who worked with me and is willing to risk their own job to testify against management. Ah, the political mind. Logic is apparently reserved for anyone with a law degree or political connections. This basically means I have the chance of a Grand Dragon at the Sammy Davis Jr. Bodybuilding Memorial to get anything decent when I start hunting for work, even if I am trying something relatively new, which is to trust in The Big Plan, that I will benefit from believing that I am following the Blueprint. It's hard because I tend to fry to buy, but so far, in retrospect, it's been a truth in my life. Gauntlet of fire and all that. Anyways, when I consulted my supra-instinct through the runes, that is basically the message I delivered to myself. Get ready to get pummelled again, but that's what is necessary. It goes against what I thought I was working toward, finding a way to make the gains without the brutality of crisis, since only I can be bringing this down on myself by the choices I make, but I'm wondering if those choices had to be made. Still, it's hard to lean on that without calling it some kind of dramatic self-induced predetermination, justifying the difficulties brought on by Ego reliance, in an after-the-factness. It's too soon to tell, really. It's always that way with a future than only exists in probabilities of memory and stimulus combined to drive the engine of choice. Mostly, I'm tired of second-guessing myself, which keeps my head from fulling percieving the choices needed now, so that I limit my possibilities, and definitely lengthen the journey on the unscenic route.
Anyway, I am at a coffeehouse on University Avenue, thinking about my future again, because I just came from the university campus where I went through some advisement on transfer enrollment. I have a chance. The big question mark rests in getting into the creative writing program which is has competitive admissions, meaning I will have to prove my moxie before they will let me in, even if I get general acceptance to the university. My parents are on my ass about how undefined I am about what I will do in college, but I'm less undefined in that idea than I am on finding a way to make it working shit jobs on the outside, and selling chunks of my soul wholesale. It is a bitch when not only your best friend (The Ghetto Superstar,) but your mother catches you on your shit. She truthfully noted that if I was really serious about writing, I would have taken opportunities past to write and submit for publication. GS is closer in the end, noting that I should start now, and not wait for university, while my mother is not understanding, as she and father never understood, that none of that was really possible before I proved to myself that I can be my own person. With identity, can come purpose. And trust. I'm sweating by the gallon now, trying to understand this, and put it into action, but the more I work at what to do next, the more I know that philosophy makes the room for environment, not the other way around. This is Heeb thinking passed onto me by my folks, that I am unwilling to reject. Just as I am unwilling to truly reject my parents as the core axis of my life. I'm beginning to wonder if there is a way to keep them in my life like I seemingly want, taking their help, and at the same time, seperate my identity from their acceptance, and push past the ideal of always playing it safe. I'm really not sure.
Whatever needs to be done, I know I am still not doing it, that is for certain. In some ways, I am trying to hold onto life as usual, desiring what I feel is best in my life without paying for its cost. Worst is that I am clearly risking the increased pleasure I have in the house and its denizens I live with. I feel like a total ass for how little I appreciated and failed to enrich myself fully of the experience of just sharing my life with others in simple ways. Last night I had 75% of the house in my room to watch The Daily Show, most of them on my bed. I try to understand that who I have been made me as blind as I was, that I still can't see this was the kind of thing I desired so greatly when I lived alone, that it would ball myself up on the bed and weep for the want of it. I have to summate my life into a powerful statement application essay, and I know I can't because I can't see the power in my life. Yet, because I am asking these questions, I am stripping away the blind spots, and when I strip all of them away, I pray to no God in particular, that I will fall apart. Imagine that you were confronted with a million piece jigsaw puzzle, that you know you have all the pieces for, but you can't do more than great the borders from the flat-edges because you lack the key totality on the front of the box holding the puzzle. This is how I feel just about everyday. This may be a flawed metaphor, in that only I can make the image that the puzzle will create when put together as I go, but either way, I ache for the solution.

But for now.... chop wood, carry water. I think I might walk home.

Arranged a morning pickup for tommorrow. All that is really left to do now is to read my runes, and see if I can drag some insight from myself with a little hook to my higher intuitive sense. I've enjoyed all this, even if in a way, I am no closer to resolving the question of what to do next, least in the materialistic sense. But then, that may be a point I have yet to fully grasp, that there is no difference between what I do, who I am, and what I believe. I've always been wary of that, since danger does lay this way into narrowness and zealotry, but then I've been acting like a frothing maniac at times when confronted with views outside my own... Crap. Anyways, there's alot to do, but least I feel back on track more. So much of what I believe really focuses on the multi-dimensional nature of human motion, the metaphysical push of experential momentum. I don't know where the money is coming from, but I really want to try yoga now, and after being here, I'd like to learn to row. I get the oddest urges, for a lazy man.

Anyways, I'll leave you with something from the last chapter of the Diamond Sutra, or The Perfection of Wisdom:

"Furthermore, Subhuti, if a fearless bodhisattva filled measureless, infinite worlds with the seven jewels, and gave them as an offering to the tathagatas, the arhans, the fully-enlightened ones, and a noble son or daughter grasped but a single four-line gatha of this teaching on the perfection of wisdom and memorized, discussed, recited, mastered and explained it in detail to others, the body of merit produced by those noble son or daughter as a result would be immeasurably, infinitely greater. And how should they explain it? By not explaining. Thus it is called 'explaining.'

"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this."

All this was spoken by the Buddha to the joy of the elder Subhuti, the monks and nuns, the laymen and laywomen, the bodhisattvas, the devas, humans, asuras and gandharvas of the world all whom were greatly pleased with that the Buddha had said."

Raining again. For awhile, I was losing hope the rains would come. The forecasters were being as wishy-washy-cover-their-metereological-butts as usual, and scattered showers meant raining anywhere but here. But finally a few hours ago, those fecund dark clouds gathered and down it came. There is something so amazingly peaceful to me about being someplace dry and safe when it rains, and listening to the sound of water falling from the sky onto the roof above. Since the ceiling of the boat is just the underside of the top, I knew I would finally hear something long missed. The last place I lived where I could really hear rain on the rooftop was the little back bungalow in Redlands, California, which was also the last place I lived where it really rained, with powerful thunderstorms and torrential rains. It's a whole native Houstonian thing, you know, growing up in a city that didn't have a winter, it had a monsoon season. Must be the way the neural memory works, a combo of stimulus firing the right cocktail of sensory output to recreate a conditioned desire for something that bestows that simple serenity. Many days, after getting back from school, especially on the hardest sessions of the peer inquistion, I would be thankful for the relative comfort of my room, where the sloping roof above in my first room especially, I could listen to the steady minimalist symphony of pattering rain, like a shield of steady sound that held back the pain. If I was lucky, there would be lightening to flash-bulb my room, and thunder to rattle the windows. But mostly, I liked the rain.
I remember so little of what went on when I was younger, having later built this near-impenetrable fortress to broadly scythe away the bad experience in with the vast mosiac of memory. Names of my few friends. Come back rarely. I can't recall teachers or schools, I can only remember one summer camp counselor. My connection to my past is little more than a incomplete academic history built from fragments, like some archeologist trying to rebuild a dead civilization from a few pottery shards and folklore. Unfortunately, this response did little to cut my connections to the self-contained delusional sphere of gnawing pain and bewildering loneliness, where a fertile imagination created something like the Chinese of Hell of Angry Hermits. But I always loved the rain. That much I haven't forgotten.
So I waited all afteroon for the rains, and when they came, I wasn't disappointed. For alittle while, it rained harder than it usually does around here. (Seattle's infamous rain is like God's broken sprinklers. A little pissing moisture and unhappy dampness.) I climbed up to the loft space, and laid on the cool wooden floor to listen to the rain drumming as the boat rocked underneath me. I don't remember the last time I was that peaceful, as if I could let go of my suffering and just reside solely in the timelessness of the present. And then I promptly fell asleep. But even that was good, because I didn't dream, and when I awoke I didn't feel tired or heavy as I usually do. If I gained anything from this weekend's retreat, it was that moment of pure rest, so rarely gifted onto me.
As I finish this entry, the rain has stopped again, but the faintness of the day's last light promises possibly more to come. I feel this hope inside than when I return home tommorrow, the rain inside will remind me how to keep my life drenched in meaning.

Damn, that was corny. Like Deepak-Chopra-New-Age-Feel-Good-Self-Help corny. Fuck it. It's true. So what if it's corny.

I feel dizzy now. Swimmy. I think I'll have a nap.



"The value of an identity is that so often it comes with purpose." - Richard Grant

The coffee was a minor mistake. I thought the energy spike might could help with my focus, but I forgot how iffy riding the spikes have been since I cut down on my sugar content. I really should, in principle, back off to herbal teas and juice, again. The last thing I need now is polar wobbling. I wound myself up tightly, and the force of the stress pushing from all directions took over, and I spend a couple hours worrying about my future, mostly in the short-term and in a monetary nature. I read too much on the Louisiana disaster from online news, and I was overridden by a desire I've had lately, to figure someway to get to Houston, and talk my parents into hosting me while I volunteer at the Astrodome. I've been honestly evaluating it, but that is not where I want my head to be right now. Rational thought like that is more an illusionary front for my desire to both make a difference, but run like hell at the same time. The attraction is made all the more powerful in proportion to my repulsion of subjecting myself to meaningless work and another uniform-cum-straightjacket. I thrust myself against the seemingly impermeable wall, not unlike the one I nearly fell to pieces breaking through only a few months ago, and I was over-reaching myself dangerously. I turned to combined power of sitting on the loft's edge, looking quietly out the upper windows at the boats, followed by a lengthy application of heat to my back and neck, while finishing the The Diamond Sutra (just the sutra itself, being only a few pages, while the commentaries go on for hundreds more pages.) My anxiety loosened its grip somewhat, but I still have a driving want to froth here about my frustration with finding a job and all that.
I am fighting the momentum dragging me downward toward the thoughts of how little I feel like I belong in this world, a world I was never meant in which to find peace. The solution is so apparent, to make my own world, but even that rings hollow and incomplete. So much of my life can be summed in my fruitless quest to install my meaning over an unaffected world, to somehow adapt enough to fit in, and to undermine where I can. There are no more real gains to be had with this. It's still fear thinking. I've turned to relativism to attack the objectivity of the "way things are," but I've come to believe dogmatically in the objectivity of my subjectivity, a zero-sum game. I have to face the deep flaws in the means by which I evaluate my choices in life. Those too, are a zero-sum game. A precarious balancing act of rationally balancing gain and loss to minimize hurt and maximize survival. It's really a lousy way to live, since I've turned my fear of risk of loss of self into a formulaic means to avoid sticking my neck out. Yes, I've taken some major risks in my life recently: moving to San Francisco, leaving college, holding down a full-time job, moving again to Seattle. Yet these risks were inescapable to me, under the current way I think, and I could overcome them. Now... I'm not so sure anything more is possible under the weight of my intellectual logical fallacies born of pain and ego.
Tuesday I am supposed to begin looking for work, since I really don't have the time to wait for unemployment. My reserve funds are dwindling much more quickly than I expected, and I have yet to pay my monthly bills. But, I'm not ready. I'm nowhere near ready. I need time to let the breakthrough come, to finally let myself completely shatter. I can't see any other way to change unless I accept the total disengration of self that has been necessary a half-dozen times to make the progress toward what is really my most supreme dream, and my most awkwardly simple, to feel anything. I've wanted to believe there is another way than to keep having to hit bottom before I can climb up, but it doesn't feel possible right now. I barely held my act together when I slammed my way through the last wall. It took everything I had to ride out the hours of nausea, the days of total vapor lock, and the weeks of blind emotional havoc, including striking out against anyone in my path. Maybe I'm wrong, and this is not what has to happen, but what else do I know to expect? It's hard to explain to anyone how soul-clenching is the question, "What do I do know?" Sometimes I want to cry, but when I do, it is not sorrow, but mostly hysterical anxiety. I don't even really know to cry, really. And I really do not know what I am going to do. I already owe rent for September.

The water is quieter than I expected for a Sunday morning. The weather is unpromising, but this is Labor Day Sunday. There are boats out, certainly, and a good number of rowers, but I thought it would the nautical equivalent of bumper to bumper traffic here at the mouth of the canal leading to the locks. Maybe it just early. I tend to forget that alot of Americans really do go to church dutifully. I don't mind really. I ate my yogurt on the bench, and enjoyed it. I have to call to make sure the OJ isn't coming here tonight. I think he said it would be tommorrow night, which is what I hope. I'd like to stay another night, even if I miss Sunday dinner. Maybe moreso because I will miss Sunday dinner. I love family dinner, I do, but much of the socialization, especially after dinner, is not something I can join into, and when I am in a mood to be solitary, it's near impossible on the volume-high dinner night. It will be a nice change of pace to have a quiet Sunday night. I guess I will see. Time to walk for some coffee. I should think more on trust issues today. If I'm very brave I will think about what I need to do to free myself from my Jewish identity, which is parallel to my paternal connections. Now for coffee.

I find myself questioning much of things I have resisted over years, the acts and thoughts that I held as concretely impossible or philosophically diametric to who I am, and the limitations I had to respect. Now I wonder about my nearly violent opposition to poetry, a form that I feel I can't understand, and I can't express myself. Okay, I might not like poetry. That might not change, but why do I fight so strongly against, and my make my antipathy so well-known? What is poetry really? Nothing more than a painting in words, a verbal sculpture, encapturing a singular moment, not in objects, but in emotions or unconventional thought. It holds not only the moment described or imagined, but the perspective of the viewer of those moments. Don't I desire to capture that same unified vision, of the viewer and the viewed, and create images in words whose complexity is confounding in their simplicity?
I finally finished reading my blog from begin to end, and many of my most powerful entries are the least crafted. I let go into a stream of consciousness, trying to express on so many levels the experiences of the questions of my life. I'm uneasy, because because maybe I rail against poetry because I distrust my perceptions, unwilling to couch them by more pure means. I sat on the bench on the back deck of the houseboat, watching an old black and white cat serenely use a planter as a litterbox, with the most peaceful look of release, as tiny wake waves rock the boat beneath my subtly, and I continue to mistake the sound of vehicles passing over the grates on the huge bridge nearly above me like distant rumbles of thunder. A boat airhorn squalls tenor in demand for the smaller bridge, off to my west to draw up and let it pass. Isn't that poetry? What do I find so wrong in allowing these perceptions to simply exist as ephemereal moments of life unbound? These perceptions are my reality, not the preconceptions. If I can trust myself to accept the uncontrolled input of the world around me, why shouldn't I trust that anything I do to express them is honest? I've come so far, and I understand so little about what I need to do to follow a dream woven blatantly into my blog, the dream to write and to trust what I write with joy.

Excess energy fools with my spatial perceptions all the time, making me feel like I'm walking in a tilted world, or that sending any myriad of phantom sensory input. On the houseboat, least I can say when I feel these odd wobbles, it is probably the boat moving. It's nice to have a solid reason, now and again.
Since being productive, in some materially measurable way, is not the point of this retreat, I can attest that it is going along swimmingly. I've taken some of my own advice and read my blog since day one, nearly three years ago, up to just after I arrived in Seattle. Things I've wrote made me laugh out loud, and that is freaking weird. I don't usually laugh out loud at other people's material, especially when alone. I've napped some, and I'll read more.

The problem with not leaning on the supernatural, is I lose the easier outs for procrastination on more serious contemplation. I am now on the OJ's houseboat (which is simply comfortable and plainly pretty) and I could have been here yesterday, but I kept putting it off. If I was given to the mystical skein, I might have said that the time wasn't "right" yet, that the "energies" weren't in proper convergence, or many other statements about meaningful time or metaphysical destiny. But without the supernatural fristfroppery, I have only myself, and my laziness, to blame. Still, here I am. In the nearly two years since I moved to Seattle, I have forgotten what is it like to have anywhere to myself. Not that I have minded mostly, I am not given to looking wistfully on the decade and a half of endless solitary living, waking up and going to sleep with a hollowness that made each tommorrow slightly less desirable. But I have missed the chances for real solitude. Things have been strained at the house, due to some unfortunate events, and continuing drama, and a closed door to my room does not make for the seperation I've wanted of late. I do know myself well enough to expect I will be hungry to return, to the domestic mania of a household of eccentrics, after a couple days.

I won't be using Avram much since the wireless connection (yes, a houseboat with a wireless server. Seattle. 'Nuff said.) is unstable, mostly as it had just been installed, but luckily, the houseboat's desktop is DSL and OJ said I could use it. It'll make for more interesting writing, knowing that I will be able to instantaneously post it, and those at the house, among others, will be following the narrative as it develops. But for now, I'm off. I need to lay in some more supplies, since I don't want to have to go out anymore once I settle in, and I have yet to really decide if I will fast or whatnot, while I am here. I'm leaning against it, and toward eating light and meatless. The walk to the store might help clear my mind.

"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self." - May Sarton

I am now officially drunk off my ass. So shall it be written, so shall it be said.
Amen.

Beyond the cutting and pasting I've done to send selections of this blog to J the Elder (who I apologize for not sending the next packet for some time, when he sees this,) I have really not gone over what I've written in this blog. I've always thought that would interfere with some free consciousness immediacy, but when I use that many syllables in a reason, it's a bullshit excuse, really. I should sit down and read my old entries, and look for the threads of struggle and success woven throughout them. Even if it was just some odd section of a book, or a rant on how people deal with transit, everything in this blog had enough meaning for me to overcome my reluctance and record it so that posterity could probably forget it quickly, and work on all the blogs about Michael Jackson and the stolen presidency.
I've spent so much time, post-meltdown, trying to disown the power of my past over me, that I've taken a hatchet to a sunflower. Yes, the past doesn't exist anymore as we could understand it, but if our minds affect reality, what is the power of memory? How can I preach the high qualities of human reflection, without allowances for how memory is still foundational to present perception. I've done alot to intellectually isolate concepts that I don't want to deal with, and now they are coming back to bite me harder in the ass. The problem with putting your past behind you, is that it is still following you. I can't shake it. There is so much in my life I have believed I made peace with, but I only compromised to make ignoring them possible so I can keep moving forward. Least it makes me feel like a true American, since I have done so well calling what is inefficiently thrown together to work under the short-term circumstances, and socially expedient and necessary. I really am a true patriot. Who knew?

Might be a day earlier, but I guess I should celebrate the deathknell of this job in the same place and manner as I celebrated the demise of another work week. The German tavern, it is. Spaten Optimator and spreadable meat. Anyway, as just my basics burn away my meagre savings, this little beeranalia is my last great blast before I must commit to living more economically. Also this time tommorrow I might be starting a fast at the Other Jew's houseboat, mattering on when I get myself out there. I've been unsure if I would still do my solitary retreat, amongst the newly born chaos of job loss, but I will even if I don't pull off the "great" works I had hoped to generate pre-termination, since it might be wise to simply reset my head and heart, and keep the base philosophical cadence. It's a unhappy statement of how I still seperate the abstractions of my self from the "concrete" material functions of my "real" life, as if there were some division that could be held. I am sadly so much my father, and definitely much more of a Jew than I can write off in jest. I have alot more work than I could delude myself into believing I didn't have to do, to still have to do. There are no words to express how much I fucking hate this. I think it's just that much worse for the awareness that I really can't percieve what will come next. All I know, is for all the talk of employment possibilities, it's all bunk. I could care less about another service industry job, functioning blindly as a meaningless cog in a malfunctioning mechanism that only holds those who can take the end product important, and dehumanizes those living off the dregs of residue.

I'm going to have to face the laughable falsity of my pragmatism. I keep saying that I can make the system work for me, gaining the practical from the absurd, and gain the glory and majesty of the intellectual, when I am no more than another waste product of an artificial human system more concerned with bringing in, than letting out. How I can expect to gain freedom from something hard-wired to take away individual freedom is a massive and unteneous flaw I can ignore, as I appease myself in my short-term gains. Once, after bruising myself on my fall to bottom, I needed to value these near-future gains, to hold my present together without self-destruction, but now, I am growing beyond that, and what kept me going must become what I dreamt to be.

Yes, this is how the world works, and if I don't play the game, I probably will starve on the streets. I could stand by my principles without acting to create my own space, and that is probably. And then all I will have is the emptiness of the pride in principles that are comical to the Powers that Be. I have to answer the challenge to live true to my non-conformist beliefs without dying to prove their truth, whether that death is a living death or a true martyrdom. This is the time on the line between heresy and hypocracy. I've known for awhile that sooner, more than later, I would have to come to this place, and stand before the two paths. I know which one I have to take, I just don't know what it truly means. I have had all these ideas, for so long, of where I thought I might go, and none of them could produce something substantial because the aspirations and desires were personalized materialistic off-spins of some subconscious acceptance of my father. I told my therapist a deep deep truth, I cannot yet understand apparently, "How can someone really unconventional ever live conventionally and be happy?" I am Pellinore, always in pursuit of my Questing Beast, but never able to but sight my target, since I have become too enamoured with keeping the chase up as it always has been, or not finally sitting down in the shade of a great tree and let the beast keep running. Let alone that I fail to truly comprehend the meaning of my quest.

How can I capture myself if I follow someone's motion. Life is motion, and I must be moving, but still, what good is that unless I know the joy of living within my own motion.