With the exception of the purchase of some plain white tees to wear under my fine new uniform shirt (with patches), I'm pretty much done for the day. I did buy the novel I wanted at the used bookstore on Broadway, but the internet cafe is still closed due to some electrical problem, so I came down to the Avenue. I'm sitting at the bar against the window looking onto University Avenue proper, and it's a good sign I'm watching the people going by with a writer's eye, imagining possible interpretations of them. But the reawakening of the eye has come at the price of the foot inserted into the mouth. I'm trying to be upbeat and all, since I'm employed, but last night I hurt a new friend, who had been there completely for me in the last few weeks, and in return, I wasn't there for him. We'll call him D, for now. A statement of my self-centeredness is that he uses my real name, and I'm not even sure I've asked what his real name is, in the first place. D says that my blog is a "sweet and sour" reading, as the lessons of my life recorded here are bittersweet comedies. That comes from the fact that I do learn most after I dove from the high board into the shallow end. I've been less than happy to record a loss from the same day I had a remarkable gain, but D is right, my life seems to be mostly sweet and sour. A tale of uneven vision, with one eye clear and the other, cloudy. I had been so needy from the second round of job rejections, that I failed to see how much D needed support in a time when he was working on a new story, being a writer too. I had failed to read his blog, even though he had been so uneasy giving me access, and I failed to read his story critically for him even though he had asked thrice. Even in the odd comfort of sharing this narcisstic blindness as a common human failing, I feel pain in my hypocracy as a torch-bearer for human compassion, since I seem to lack any until after I've abused another in the gain of my own comfort.
I won't lie, that he does read my blog, and I am weaving some kind of public apology to him. But I doubt that will do much, since this is confessional is clearly more for smoothing my own hurt than for cleaning his pain. I'm just terribly fond of him, and feel that something must be said somewhere.
So much the cost of living by experience, since this is a state where I live still by the shape of my present outlined by the lines of my past and future. Whether it is dysfunctional of me to feel worse for this state, because I don't mind what harm it heaps on me, only the hurt instilled in my wake on others. It make uncomfortably clear that Buddha was right, we can't help others, to help ourselves, unless we let go of ourselves to do so. There is gain taken from working your way through the crowd to get further up the line, but what good is getting to the head if you had to elbow and scratch others along the way. The more I desire freedom, the more damage I do as I try to gain it, blindly and unintentionally. You can't gain liberation for yourself unless you desire liberation for all, even if they probably not liberate themselves. To live free is the best way to teach freedom, without being reserved and selective. I have alot more to learn about being sincere.
Or least if I have to eat my foot, I should bring along some Tabasco.

"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." - Goethe