the elaborate contortions of …
.. of a heart that dares to go to the most strenuous x-tremes to protect itself from even the faintest wisps of abandonment.
… of a heart that deflects and negates and strategizes and schemes and conjectures and portends.
… of a heart that is inclined to veer away from inconsequentiality.
… of a heart that seems to have run out of sleeves. at least for today.
looking forward to the day when i am reunited with my life
gosh, how unfamiliar this place looks. it’s been such a long time since i’ve visited, i can scarcely remember where the light switches are, or the lights, or the walls that house the switches and the lights. it’s so dark in here and i keep walking into the closet door instead of the bathroom. and i can’t find my shoes. the other shoes. or my red wool cap. or the October issue of Vanity Fair that’s usually on top of the toilet.
the refrigerator is filled with foods i don’t recognize and condiments i have never even heard of. it’s humming at a pitch much lower than i anticipated. it makes everything vibrate a bit more.
i’ve been away far too long.
congestion of head became congestion of heart mind spirit psyche. yet my resentment towards those who have more or less rejected me (but did not have the grace nor the courage to explain why) is gradually tapering off, becoming more moot and more mute.
soon they will not matter in my life. soon i’ll be moving on and this place i can barely remember will become even more threadbare as a memory. i sense the sky opening up, and with it, vaster perspective, and with that, a new dog.
Who are these angels and where are they leading me and why do I not know their names and why are they able to reveal certain things but not all things and why are certain things unveiled so clearly while certain other things are cloaked in mystery and when I seek answers and guidance they are sometimes there while other times I am left to my own foggy devices and why would I even question any of this especially since I have the good fortune of being alive to ask these kinds of questions and type them into my iPhone simply because I spilled water on my MacBook for the third time in the past 3 months? Who am i to question any of this? I am not any one.
i am thinking of you. thinking of you in ways that have no meaning because these thoughts are all astray. but unfortunately, there is no funnel to gather them, no container as their destination. they are powerless. and deluded. these thoughts. they are arrogant. they assume that because they have volume and mass that they can control who hears them and how often they are heard. their need for attention stifles their content.
it is humbling to think about you. but not in a power way. humbled in the recognition that my thoughts of you have no real function. they do not reach you, or impact you, or anger you, or inspire you, provoke or entertain you. these thoughts i have of you, for you, actually have absolutely nothing to do with you at all. i don’t know what they’re for. they certainly are not there for me. my body just happens to be the machine that churns them out.
they need a container, or an ashtray. otherwise, what happens to them? where do they go? what becomes of them? i really can’t say. Somehow, I have to just ride them out.
i have to tell myself, it’s ok
it’s ok not to say anything
silence can be a good thing
you don’t really need to say anything all of the time
sometimes it’s best not to
and it’s really ok
it doesn’t mean you are a nitwit
it doesn’t you are a snob
it doesn’t mean you are shy
it doesn’t mean you are elusive
it just means you don’t always have to feel the need to fill space with words
nothing bad will happen if you don’t
trust me
even if you’ve never trusted me before, ok?
a day of vast contrast. the heartbreak of seeing my mother in such a frail state following surgery (i know she will have a swift recovery, but still… ) and then dealing with the spoiled, entitled little frat’ish boys at work. i just wanted them to all go away. it’s not a feeling i enjoy, but i just didn’t have the stamina to feel much else. i try to take the attitude that it’s not their fault that they are the way they are. it must be my fault.
I visited the Chinese herbal acupuncturist recommended by 2 different friends who have never met, although they are both licensed social work counselors. His name is Dr. Feng. He kind of did this speed-reading scan of my body, and he knew exactly which needles needed to place where. And just the right amount of this oil like substance to place on my forehead to open up my blockaded sinuses.
And I lay there for 30 minutes in this drably sparse room, no incense candles or massage music. Trying to focus on breath and presence and conversations going on all around me. Another moment where I thought, well if I happened to die right now, that would be ok. Not thinking about death in a morbid sense. More in the sense of trying to understand such things as consciousness… how you know when you are alive versus how do you know when you are dead? And is there a difference?
And then I read the news about the atrocities of the worlds, especially in the Gaza Strip… the collateral damage of deaths, civilian and non-civilian. i can’t even begin to fathom these horrors.When I read or hear about these casualties, they are clumped together as data: 140 deaths 130 civilians, 12 children. Just the word itself, casual-ty. It’s too much to comprehend. I want to know about each of them, the forces in their lives that brought them to such horrific ends. I want to know something about each of the people impacted by each of these lives. I don’t want to be numbed, but sometimes numbing is a protection against drowning in it. I guess that is what data and statistics are for.
I certainly don’t feel that the way I am living now is leaving much of an impact… in the sense of making a difference, in the sense of being able to protect and console people, even within my own sphere. I want to make a difference, but it takes a certain kind of courage which I struggle to find.
congested thoughts of a congested body.
i returned to this city after my vocal cord surgery was temporarily aborted due to this virus that has hit me rather hard.
… and that’s when it occurred to me that maybe sometimes the best response is no response. the answer to the question i had never bothered to ask.
if i could have asked the question, maybe i would have used the words what is one to do with all of these real and imagined slights, indignities and feeling of disgrace, of betrayal?
it’s one of those questions that i hate to express, but not asking it doesn’t make the experience of the question less real.
maybe the only real indignity is the mind that insists on cultivating these kinds of questions, until they wear a person down.
the real question is whether i can rise above the real and the imagined (even though it’s all imagined) and find a new way to live in a place one has almost always lived…
or is it better to start off in an entirely new city where i know not a soul and can begin with an entirely blank slate. which would be more challenging? how does one blossom and where is the place to do that?
i’m beginning to like the blank slate idea. but it’s also tempting to have this surface foundation from which to build a new life. i’ve never really invested in or embraced living in the same city where my body resides.
i really have no idea what i want, nor what i am doing.
holed up at a doubletree hotel in the city of the Mayo Clinic… on the verge of my final vocal cord surgery, i had the misfortune of breathing in germs that do not belong to me. i know it was not anyone’s fault. but still, anxiety about being sick, on top of surgery anxiety … well, you are not reading me at my best. the best i can offer is my intention to hydrate hydrate hydrate and rebound as quick as quick can be.
and listen for the soft clamor of figs. if you can hear them, all you have to do is listen. what could be more simple than that?
i think i saw my first UFO tonight as i was gazing out my window while talking to this woman in Toronto i may have met once, over a year ago at the train station in Windsor. there may actually have been 2 UFOs. a pair of bright lights shooting up from the lake to the tops of the city, with another pair of lights trailing slightly behind. at that moment, the Toronto woman used the word “bifurcated” in a sentence, which was odd, because i had spent a large portion of the day contemplating the word “bifurcated” and the concept of bifurcated reality… hoping to find out what that meant… with the intention of writing about that tonight.
i thought if i wrote something about bifurcation, that might distract me from writing about my latest thoughts and experiences, which are not all that much different than my thoughts and experiences of yesterday and the day before that.
tonight, as i sit here alone ingesting a cup of vanilla goat milk yogurt, i find peace in imagining myself splayed out on an antique chaise lounge in an opium den somewhere. instead i am here, with yogurt, just about depleted since i began writing this post.
not doing a very good job of avoiding thoughts about my mortality, invoked from yesterday’s scare.
12 hours earlier, i was walking through an alley… where i saw a well-dressed middle-aged white man urinating at the edge of a fence next to a dumpster. as i passed by, he looked back at me and said, “i am sorry if i have offended you.” i wasn’t sure quite what to say, but i replied, “quite the contrary. i admire you for your lack of restraint. i think this takes a certain kind of courage, which i have been missing of late.”
And i walked on, barely missing the train.
all in all, a very insular existence today. as if i am protecting myself from something that doesn’t exist. like immediately deleting a job rejection email without reading it, even though it was written by a friend.
i wonder what it will take to change me.
something is happening but i don’t know what it is. why my blood pressure has escalated so very very high these past few months. up until June, i was perfectly healthy. But today, while getting my wrist examined after last week’s plunge to the sidewalk, the physician’s assistant informed me that my blood pressure was 160/100, which she said was at a “critical” stage, which of course, scared the lights out of me. so i called my regular internist, hoping he would tell me that I was just a little tense, but nothing alarming. But he alarmed me, too.. ordering to get myself to his office immediately.
My catastrophic mind went into hyper-overdrive and I imagined being ambulanced away to an emergency room and I was all prepared to demand my hospital of choice, if there is such a thing. Fortunately, he just put me on some meds…. but just the thought of the possibilities probably spiked up the blood pressure another few notches.
of course this is another reminder that as hard as things can sometimes be, i’m not ready to go yet. there’s so much i haven’t done, places i haven’t gone, so much more blossoming to do. i feel like i’ve lived less than half a life. that my maturity age is no larger than my shoe size. this is just not the time to be going anywhere. if i am going to die, i would prefer it to be my shamanic death.
i mean, dear reader, we’ve only just met. it would be tragic to disrupt what might become a splendid affair. i promise i will not leave you now.
i am afflicted by blandness today. and i don’t even feel like talking or writing about it very much. just kind of coasted with no highs or lows. at least in my corporeal body.
i don’t feel as if i have given anything to anyone, and i hope i have not taken.
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The Lost Pedestrian 