Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Well, I have to sadly announce that no new posts will be added to this blog, as I have moved my operation all over to LiveJournal as one_realm1 there. I want to see if I can expand my readership. This blog will stay up.. as an archive. Thanks for all my Blogger readers.

Monday, January 09, 2006

Enough with the singing, already....



     I don’t know why I am trying to write tonight, as my leg infection has segued into the head cold, brought on courtesy of intentional living, that is making my brain feel like a moistened sponge forced into a silly putty egg. Usually being ill is the worst time for me to write, when I get the most, well… Jewish. No matter how far I stray from the doctrines, when I get sick, I turn into 80 year-old man from the Bronx. I wander around, shuffling droopily, and mumbling loudly about whatever part of me is unhappy at that moment, as if no fate is worse than mine at that moment. With a pardon to my boundless humility, some wax eloquently about their suffering, but I turn into a regular Shakespeare. Melodrama aside, I really can’t complain (too much,) as a head cold is peanuts compared to the whole mess with the leg. Or the kidney stones before that. Or the flu before that.  Damn, I am an 80 year old man from the Bronx.

     I feel like as ass right now, as it is, for two reasons. Firstly, how much more sickness and pain right in a row will it take to get me to treat my body better than I do. I was doing good after the kidney stones, but that didn’t hold. If I keep this up, my body is literally going to fall apart before my eyes, like someone who recklessly drives a car for several years, and never changes the oil, or checks the tires. Secondly, like tonight before I left for work, I’ve not truly participated in Sunday family dinner, either due to being ill and bed-bound, or being so damn tired after sleeping off work-related grief. With J in the house, there’s been another up-swing of connectivity between members of the house, and I’ve been in a few episodes of that. Still, I feel a distance growing between myself and the House, with none of the responsibility on the House. And this is the time I should feel the need for them the most. Not just for physical support either, but also for social support. I’ve taken a lousy job with even lousier hours, and my social life beyond the house walls is just about zip, since the serious tank it took with my unemployment. But my dynamic, like most of my relation to the world around me right now, seems to be just off-center enough to cause this kind of unease. Christ on a pogo-stick, I still can’t believe I yelled at NP over a coffee-maker.

     But when you put a lot of the pieces together, with the increased vulnerability to sickness, the social disjunction, the anger surges, and the external withdrawal, some image does emerge. The problem is I’m so lousy at knowing where I am at now, because I’ve pushed further out from the known that even I can properly measure, that I’m most likely to misread this. Or I’m reacting to an internal shift that I can’t, or won’t recognize, at this point. Every once in awhile, I get up a good reflect on myself, more intuitively working through stuff, and I start wondering what would it be like if I suddenly acknowledged where I am really at. Then I get that fearful feeling, you know, when you feel like an unseen hand just grips your essence, and squeezes. And I drop that line of questioning really fast. Then, after the Great Freakout of ’91, I’ve known well that there is a line, so thin to be nearly invisible, between momentous epiphany and abject terror. In the end, I bet it will be like in the Zen stories, where someone will say something to me that sounds wrong, but is received right, and I will find illumination. It happened before, on a lesser scale, as an Irish guy patted me on back after I vomited all over myself at San Bernardino’s only British-style pub at the time. But that’s another story.
(at this point, I will recognize that DayQuil is a very good thing indeed.)
     
It’s not like I expect right now, I will get my whole act together, la-dee-dah, but I should listen to my own words in my last few journal-style entries, and just find the means to clear the Ways and Means enough to have a reasonable clarity within and a sounder agreement without, and not for myself alone, too. I’ve never been as close to writing again as I am right now, mostly through my relationship with D. Not just that we’re planning a collaborative effort, i.e. tag-team writing, but simply because D keeps reminding me that I have something to say.  This is one of the know/feel issues. I know that I have something to say, but I have never really felt like I have something to say. He makes me feel like I have something to say. And if I start writing, in any capacity, then I might stop considering writing some obtuse hobby done while I find a “real job” in the “real” world, and start feeling that the lousy job I am on now, is just the means to support myself, so I can write. It’s a simplistic turn, but to me, it’s probably the closest thing I have to an real aspiration.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to get in a better space, and write more, so I can return to the honest exploration of a heretic’s journey that this blog was meant to be, not repetitive ramblings of some shmuck who can’t see his true nature for the life of him, and keeps to religious/cultural neurosis as a crutch.

Just a final note, I’m thinking of moving KPC to LiveJournal. Except for J the Younger, no one else I know, uses Blogger, and so I miss out on the friend networks that build on LJ. It’s just a thought, I’ll decide sometime soon.

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

I-Don't-Knowness



     The recent dearth of entries hasn’t been for the lack of things to say, but most the lack of coherence with which to say them. I’ve attempted several statements on something going on in my head, only to lose them when I couldn’t hold the center. There lies the crux of my condition, the serious absence of a centering right now. I’m in this pronounced state of “I-don’t-knowness,” for the lack of a good big word.  Sometimes the hardest thing is holding steady when the fit hits the shan, because tension can trigger old behaviors so much easier, and I’m all the blinder of it. So I try to hold two conflicting behaviors without some central resolution, and wonder what happened when I finally notice my blunderings. After losing so many workdays to my infected leg, I thought I was relieved to return to work, when I wanted to be relieved to return to my personal stuff.  As I read more, and think more on the way I do things, I’m still falling back on my job as the near totality. “Long as I am working, I’m fine. Why should I do much else?” Mind you, I don’t think that. I ended up doing some serious neural hermeneutics to pull that coded line from the greater script. I’ve not noticed how twitchy I was, and how I was (and am) placing unreal expectations for others to meet, until after I had two verbal altercations with the Native Pagan, upset J, who moved into H’s old room, and got ready for a cold war with NP over a coffee filter in the new coffee maker. Not just that I was being damn petty, I was also wrong, and NP was right. In general, I’ve fallen back onto a playground of resentments that I am at a loss to say what really reopened it. Amongst the chaos of the last few months, I guess I’ve let some things I had pushed back for better headspace, creep in, for no reason but the irrationality borne of a tough time.
     I’ve been turning to the older dualism, with the “old” me and the “new” me considered as separate parts of me, but right now its hard to not use the language. So much of my negative behavior is neural triggers so deeply entrenched into my circuitry, that they seem to work independent of the newer reprogramming I’m hopefully rewriting into me. The “I-don’t-knowness” might come from the false emotional and intellectual echoes bounced off the older program, itself a trigger of mistrust of myself at a visceral level. I’m carrying it better than before, but I can’t remember when the last time I was loaded with latent anger. I was outraged when I got fired, and had a knee-jerk reaction that fired up the old victimization engine, but even that was narrower. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be reframing my current approach as intellectual, emotional, or even spiritual, but instead as political. I’m still trying to compromise two states within myself, vying for network space, when the only way is to make a political alliance of convenience between the two systems. Then I get to practice what little faith I have that the alliance will hold. It frightens me sometimes. I mean, I think about WWI when some poor noble shmuck got shot and the ripples of badly-made treaties and gentlemanly national agreements led to an all-out war that no-one really won. It’s like I’m patting myself on the back for creating an intricate philosophical means to not be responsible for my actions and get something done by not trying to control everything so much. What I’ve created is a real mess of compromises in which détente is held at the cost of acceptance of any meaningful long-term solution. This solution is one that would insure my own sense of freedom in the environment I live within, and acceptance that I can’t have freedom at the cost of others’ freedom.
     At least I’ve gotten to the point where, like now, I know when I should shut up, because I’m done saying what I’ve hoped to say, without drowning it too heavily in analysis.

     Of course, I could just be having fits because D has been sick all week, with food poisoning. We’ve exchanged a few e-mails, but I really haven’t “talked” to him for days. I’ve said, and more thought, some stupid things about our relationship, a lot to do with that problem of expectations, but when the fog clears, I miss him because he makes me feel better. When I chat with him, I feel like the world isn’t so big and my life isn’t so small, and I matter because I matter to him. I’m awful at this whole love thing. I generally am getting a little better at the whole friendship love thing, but I’m so lost with this kind of love. I can’t remember if it was Ovid or if it was Horace who said that love is two mad people made more made for the want of each other. Hell, it could have been Susan Sontag, for all I know. But I like the sentiment. I don’t need to know I love him. I just do. For whatever the future holds. So I guess, I’m least being uncompromising in one place. I’ll take it.