It’s true that everything is communication.
Maybe they wanted me to know the horrific they had known. Maybe L__ just wanted me to know what her world was like, A__ just wanted me to know, H__ just wanted me to know, R___. (But what if they are liars?)
Maybe absolutely everything is communication. A piece of wood that was part of the building of a house, a brick, a rainfall, a sunny breeze, see what I can do, what I truly am, everything wants to be valued, everything wants to be believed. It’s like feeling the whole world. Except I’m a part of that world, and I have to make the choice of whether I’m a part of ‘everything’ or not, if I feel the same way or not.
__________
The idea, is to learn to be happy.
Oddly, the hardest part of being high all the time has been showering, grooming, etc.
It’s such a private thing to do. Usually I keep the television on, or the radio real loud. But the idea was to be happy in the horrific, more powerful than it, to be happy in the silence and stillness. I couldn’t break that.
Especially when I’m high, because my eyes don’t look quite right in the mirror. I know it’s not really my face, this shaving cream striped face, but in a way it its, because I‘m a soul. It’s hard to be Real.
I’m used to keeping a shaved or at least short-cropped hair style. When I let my hair grow out and afterwards shower, it feels like I’m a little kid again, taking a crisp shower because there’s no air conditioning and there was a drought that summer.
I cut my lip shaving, then burned it with the careful facial creams. I look at my face. It’s not so bad. Just little redness at the corner of the eyes, a glassy look.
The thing about not eating is your six pack stays intact.
__________
The thing about being Anonymous, is I never have to express myself, I just conform, I just Melt.
I never show my true expression, I’m never seen.
It used to be a crime committed against myself; now it’s a crime I commit against others.
I don’t wear clothes that express who I am, I don’t dress like Lady Gaga just as a point of principle.
I do the opposite, wearing what’s in style and universal, reserve my entitlements for the generations between my legs, square my shoulders, look forward, remain in waiting, remain silently Invisble, just as Ellison had described.
There were moments I was so Raw. My movements and expression so sexual there couldn’t be anything else going on inside of me.
I’ve had the adventure, the coming of age, the dark night with the soul, the mid-life crisis, the nervous breakdown, the primal rite of passage to what‘s between my legs.
__________
The beach trip is in a few days. I love the beach but I hate having my shirt off in public. At home I love my body. I feel like a guy in an underwear commercial. Confident, relaxed.
I feel bad for setting such a thick boundary between me and Br__ that I lied to her about my sexual orientation.
I think people need space. A little space with a salty air on a porch in relaxation. Maybe she just needs space, too. She wrote that she intended to drink.
I used to go on vacation anonymously with only strangers -- I traveled alone. Now it feels like I’m going traveling with a woman who knows she might always be a stranger.
After showering, and the redemptive creams I used had dried, I packed the suitcase, an old fashioned one I’d found at a thrift store.
I thought about all the things I came across in thrift stores, in shopping malls, that I think would be great for the beach, that I only own because one day I might go to the beach. They’re packed up now so I go through the boxes, finding the articles.
I set the camera aside; it’d be great to take pictures. I pack an extra set of running shoes. Running on the beach is supposed to be a big deal. There’s nothing wrong with living life hopefully.
__________
I saw this idea of how human beings interact. It’s all sexual chemistry. There’s this meter inside of everyone that regulates their behavior. The more platonic the relationship is, the safer it is for each gender to have that kind of chemistry going on. The kind of chemistry that leads to a deeper understanding.
__________
Funny how when I’m like this I can see the words on the page looking back at me, swirling up with my typing fingers, making me feel how I choose my own story by choosing my own perception, then fighting for it. Am I simply psyching myself out?
It seems too good to be true. Just be happy. It’s summer.
I remember how as a kid and especially a teenager how easily I believed the stories. A baseball game here, a group of teenagers traveling down country roads with the top down under a starry night. My one night as a teenager.
__________
It’s like I wanted to live life to its fullest one time on my own, even if it meant forfeiting having someone. I wanted to live it once that way first, and hopefully finish young enough so I could live it again with a companion. I wouldn’t let any would-be companion take that away from me.
I might be Raw, but I wanted to be Brave, I wanted the Tough qualities.
__________
Thursday 29JUL2010
Woke from a dream in which I shared the beach house with a guy and a girl. The girl was playing games, knew she had the upper hand. Finally she convinced the two of us to let her watch as we had sex.
We both knew how to make love, despite not preferring the same gender, we each knew what we Knew. As we did it, we each did it for her, the rest felt like entitlements.
__________
If I live honestly it can feel cold, calculating. Even if all I know is written down and forgotten. The fact that I work out, educate myself, watch myself, selfishly stay present, Tough, regardless. It can feel like I’m an island. It can feel like a debasing way to live, as if I really were Dexter, just a less likeable version.
I think when Apollo is too strong it can be frightening to people. Dionysius is the Raw one; he can be manipulated, communicated with, negotiated with and over.
__________
(sitting out on porch swing)
It’s not that I need to square my shoulders and be brave when I wake in the morning -- though I do -- it’s about remembering that I was always brave, about learning that my shoulders have been squared, my body braced with a relaxing tension, a long, long time.
It’s about becoming conscious, aware, remembering. It’s not about learning something new, or changing something about myself. In the moment the two can feel so similar it’s confusing. It’s about realizing who I always was, then being pleasantly surprised by how much better I am at it now.
It’s about remembering to the point of feeling the sadness implied in having been brave so long. Feeling the pain.
Feeling Brave on the inside.
__________
There’s nothing wrong with handling things in the intellectual realm. I understand why my little-boy-brain went there first. When the brave boy was calm, it seemed clean, dignified, allowing the other side the dignity of a defending argument. As opposed to just Knowing, to just Remembering without words to articulate it. Somehow I knew what an enormous accusation it was, what a enormous thing to do, to Know, to Remember.
I understand why the little boy decided to wait until he could intellectualize it. Waited until both sides had the dignity of a well-crafted argument. A__ and H__ were beautiful, innocent, teenage girls. And L__ and R__, were loved once.
I gave them some dignity for awhile.
__________
Head, Phallus, meet Tough, and Raw.
I didn’t know it would feel so physical. How the tensed relaxation in my bones will stem from that region. The feeling of being in my head, was the head, I suppose.
Can it be true that faceless things like phalluses could actually be the true players, the Real ones, all along, the rest just sheer imagination, every other piece of my experience just evolutionary gifts. Eyeballs, ears, opposable thumbs.
I watched the film Inception where Leonardo Dicaprio explains the volatility of messing with people‘s subconscious as opposed to dealing with them face to face: _The subconscious is emotion,_ he says, _The conscious, thought._
The Raw and the Tough. The Raw, the faceless one, the wordless, eternal Him.
In the film, sheer violence ensues whenever Dicaprio comes too close to messing with Nature -- the individual’s subconscious. The entire world itself tries to kill him, like some virus.
The film becomes a battle of Tough versus Raw. Dicaprio is Tough: well trained, well learned, well experienced, well intentioned. Meanwhile, as all the special effects allude to he is nothing compared to Raw.
To pure, sheer Him, or pure, sheer Her.
__________
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
5
Partying is intimacy. Like getting high with Adam, there’s an intimacy to inebriation. A cheap intimacy.
__________
You have to love this world to enjoy it.
__________
The memories help me to enjoy summer but I don’t need them in order to Know the summer.
__________
It’s like when I was little I sold my soul. I was a boy, I didn’t know any better.
__________
(coming back from grocery store) The better I get at this, the worse I am at handling the outside world. I could only mumble to the cashier. I’ve got to learn how to be this relaxed while doing both. There’s this great space of anxiety between me and the outside world.
I woke up to an alarm going off in another room. As I slept a piano piece was playing and the two sounds competed with each other as I dreamed, me focusing in on the beautiful sound and its implied perception on the dream I was having, despite the alarm’s hindrance.
__________
I don’t know how to describe what it was like to grow up with an incestuous sister, a year older than me. Well known for her attractiveness, her laugh, her trickery. Or an incestuous younger sister, all that over-cuteness, that wanting-to-be-liked flirtatiousness.
I was supposed to play back. Back when A__ played her tricky, incestuous game. There was supposed to be a winner, a right and wrong. But instead I chose to destroy her.
It became the most efficient way of dealing with them, destroy them by getting them to believe their own lies. If A__ were asked now, she’d describe that tricky game she played as if there was no incestuous-ness. But I’d see in her eyes she was lying, and she herself wouldn’t know she was lying. In that way I win.
If I had to do it over I’d be more coy, more confident. But I was a year younger than her the entire time. There’s no way I could’ve known then what I know now. All I knew without knowing was that I had already had sex, and she didn’t know it, hadn’t acknowledged it to herself.
_I killed who she could’ve been,_ said the child sexual abuser, the younger one, who continued a manipulative sexual relationship with an abused cousin three years younger than him since he was little. _I killed her. Just because she’s up and walking around doesn’t mean I didn’t murder her._
I found a way to kill back.
__________
I finished a full week of being high. Now, I’m up and about, working out daily, running errands. Last week I mostly slept and watched television.
__________
It’s like once the body has slept that deeply, it remembers.
__________
Hope. That was the dream. That everything would be made okay through story. Like in films, how everything ended perfectly and happily ever after was assumed. The past enemies become best friends, family dramas play out just right, everyone turns out to be so cool.
Hope now is different, should be different. Hope shouldn’t be wrapped up with Story. There’s nothing wrong or ugly about pain. Hope should be wrapped up with How; Hope in who you become, who you turn out to be, hope in how you handle things. Your attitude. Your qualities.
The story simply has to be a believed story. The story that everything really would’ve been alright in the end, it was just that those people, those terribly good people in the story, simply made too many mistakes, each mistake felt to them like an accident they didn’t mean.
__________
There’s a story in my head, where I turn out to have a different biological father. A Methodist pastor with two other sons, one a preppy football player ready to marry, the other a pot smoker with a wry humor, in my mind the two characters becomes the two young guys in the play Next to Normal.
The biological father still lives local and J__ and Ms J__’s family keep me on, so I go from having zero families to three (if you count the local A__, L__, and R__) in a short time. There is a young woman, which makes it four.
My character is one who says little, with a deep voice, and a small, muscular, tanned, hairy frame. He seems dumb but really he’s wise; he seems interesting because he can have an air about him like the lead actress in the show Weeds, how her eyes seem deadened they can be so dumb but in them you see a Shiftiness, as if she could be someone very wise and articulate, to the point of writing her whole life down and keeping the whole thing a secret.
The story plays out where the brothers and other family members become the center of the drama while my character remains an innocent sidekick that everyone is always talking about and reacting to.
A few obvious scenes play out, then there’s a shift, and I am the complete opposite character. I am at the center of the dramas. My voice is the one who says the words, this time, plays out the How, my frame and countenance watched.
It was like the story wanted to prove to me that the two were the same, each opposite’s opposite.
__________
I’m glad I decided to handle things this way. To smoke so much high quality pot in such little time in privacy. There are moments I’m glad I only know: like how I really didn’t know how to use a bowl at first, and how I didn’t really know how to inhale properly. Simple things, things teenagers know nowadays.
The highs were so seamless with not-being-high that I don’t really know when I was high and when I wasn’t.
__________
Change is Stress.
Improvement is Change.
Improvement (done Soulfully) is Evolvement.
The only way to battle stress head on is to square your shoulders and be brave.
Trust with a wry smile that the bravery is good enough to be health.
__________
Everyone has a hard time of it. Why make everybody talk about it? Why feel as if you’ve been lied to?
__________
It is pain .. Presence.
I like feeling my muscles from the inside, it used to be I could only feel that when I was sore, but now I can do it while I’m high.
It is literally pain. Like the way sex is literally pain but such pleasure.
__________
To feel deeply, you have to feel back in time, you have to know and feel your heritage. You have to feel millions of years old.
__________
__________
You have to love this world to enjoy it.
__________
The memories help me to enjoy summer but I don’t need them in order to Know the summer.
__________
It’s like when I was little I sold my soul. I was a boy, I didn’t know any better.
__________
(coming back from grocery store) The better I get at this, the worse I am at handling the outside world. I could only mumble to the cashier. I’ve got to learn how to be this relaxed while doing both. There’s this great space of anxiety between me and the outside world.
I woke up to an alarm going off in another room. As I slept a piano piece was playing and the two sounds competed with each other as I dreamed, me focusing in on the beautiful sound and its implied perception on the dream I was having, despite the alarm’s hindrance.
__________
I don’t know how to describe what it was like to grow up with an incestuous sister, a year older than me. Well known for her attractiveness, her laugh, her trickery. Or an incestuous younger sister, all that over-cuteness, that wanting-to-be-liked flirtatiousness.
I was supposed to play back. Back when A__ played her tricky, incestuous game. There was supposed to be a winner, a right and wrong. But instead I chose to destroy her.
It became the most efficient way of dealing with them, destroy them by getting them to believe their own lies. If A__ were asked now, she’d describe that tricky game she played as if there was no incestuous-ness. But I’d see in her eyes she was lying, and she herself wouldn’t know she was lying. In that way I win.
If I had to do it over I’d be more coy, more confident. But I was a year younger than her the entire time. There’s no way I could’ve known then what I know now. All I knew without knowing was that I had already had sex, and she didn’t know it, hadn’t acknowledged it to herself.
_I killed who she could’ve been,_ said the child sexual abuser, the younger one, who continued a manipulative sexual relationship with an abused cousin three years younger than him since he was little. _I killed her. Just because she’s up and walking around doesn’t mean I didn’t murder her._
I found a way to kill back.
__________
I finished a full week of being high. Now, I’m up and about, working out daily, running errands. Last week I mostly slept and watched television.
__________
It’s like once the body has slept that deeply, it remembers.
__________
Hope. That was the dream. That everything would be made okay through story. Like in films, how everything ended perfectly and happily ever after was assumed. The past enemies become best friends, family dramas play out just right, everyone turns out to be so cool.
Hope now is different, should be different. Hope shouldn’t be wrapped up with Story. There’s nothing wrong or ugly about pain. Hope should be wrapped up with How; Hope in who you become, who you turn out to be, hope in how you handle things. Your attitude. Your qualities.
The story simply has to be a believed story. The story that everything really would’ve been alright in the end, it was just that those people, those terribly good people in the story, simply made too many mistakes, each mistake felt to them like an accident they didn’t mean.
__________
There’s a story in my head, where I turn out to have a different biological father. A Methodist pastor with two other sons, one a preppy football player ready to marry, the other a pot smoker with a wry humor, in my mind the two characters becomes the two young guys in the play Next to Normal.
The biological father still lives local and J__ and Ms J__’s family keep me on, so I go from having zero families to three (if you count the local A__, L__, and R__) in a short time. There is a young woman, which makes it four.
My character is one who says little, with a deep voice, and a small, muscular, tanned, hairy frame. He seems dumb but really he’s wise; he seems interesting because he can have an air about him like the lead actress in the show Weeds, how her eyes seem deadened they can be so dumb but in them you see a Shiftiness, as if she could be someone very wise and articulate, to the point of writing her whole life down and keeping the whole thing a secret.
The story plays out where the brothers and other family members become the center of the drama while my character remains an innocent sidekick that everyone is always talking about and reacting to.
A few obvious scenes play out, then there’s a shift, and I am the complete opposite character. I am at the center of the dramas. My voice is the one who says the words, this time, plays out the How, my frame and countenance watched.
It was like the story wanted to prove to me that the two were the same, each opposite’s opposite.
__________
I’m glad I decided to handle things this way. To smoke so much high quality pot in such little time in privacy. There are moments I’m glad I only know: like how I really didn’t know how to use a bowl at first, and how I didn’t really know how to inhale properly. Simple things, things teenagers know nowadays.
The highs were so seamless with not-being-high that I don’t really know when I was high and when I wasn’t.
__________
Change is Stress.
Improvement is Change.
Improvement (done Soulfully) is Evolvement.
The only way to battle stress head on is to square your shoulders and be brave.
Trust with a wry smile that the bravery is good enough to be health.
__________
Everyone has a hard time of it. Why make everybody talk about it? Why feel as if you’ve been lied to?
__________
It is pain .. Presence.
I like feeling my muscles from the inside, it used to be I could only feel that when I was sore, but now I can do it while I’m high.
It is literally pain. Like the way sex is literally pain but such pleasure.
__________
To feel deeply, you have to feel back in time, you have to know and feel your heritage. You have to feel millions of years old.
__________
4
Imagination is sex.
Sex is imagination.
I’m still addicted to sex. That’s what coming from child molesters does to you. Makes you so sensitive to it, makes you so addicted to something horrific, but maybe beautiful, if I can just keep my psyche intact.
It’s okay that I’m not eating, I think to myself, it’s okay that I haven’t eaten in a really long time. This is my dark night with the soul, and my deep dark day, and my deep dark night ..
I over did it. I over sensitized, over-stimulated, lived too much, too many stories, too many _adventures._ Ran too far into safety. I should have been braver.
It’s okay to have a totally different existence than your children. They’ll be okay, you’ll be okay. It’s okay.
In this country, you can create your own world, then fight for it.
__________
(Thinking about moving, how hard it will be.)
That’s the price of being so Independent, you don’t know anybody.
I might be dumb, I might have pain, but there’s nothing wrong with me. My How is just fine and it improves rapidly. I could be living at the House right now and I’d be happy.
All I have to do is be stronger than that, more sensitive than that. I remember the play grounds she would take us to when we were little. Pre-school age, during the summers, when she wasn’t going to school.
The tough guys like K__ and Muc__, are making fun of it, making fun of themselves, that’s how they handle it, manage through to moving forward.
It is fun to live timelessly, as a shifter, but it’s also fun to live in the moment, to come all the way forward.
I have faith. That’s why it takes pot for me to feel this way, my faith was weakened. Maybe this is what Christians go through. They wake in the morning and at first sight pull into the negative (maybe), but then they have faith, and stay high by that faith.
Have Faith, and Be Powerful, are the same thing.
The reason I have to post anonymously is that I never want to say these words: I’ve been through a lot. Or a lot’s happened,
I want to be the Shifter. It’s hard to be and not be at the same time.
That’s high -- Western culture, one where it’s impossible not to be happy, it can be impossible to feel pain.
It’s like I was dying a little bit, with each day of my childhood, each incident.
I’ve just gotten shaky after all that’s happened. So much has happened, and I never really get to talk about it.
The time when I’m not high becomes the adventure, and whenever the adventure becomes too much, I’ll just smoke again, but I’ll keep them few and far between.
You can’t help but be happy when you’re a child, and you use imagination if you have to. At some point you find the pleasure in hurt.
What’s with all this pain? I’m just tired from all that’s happened.
It never occurred to me that I could live this long. To live past sixteen seemed unlikely.
I want to stay high until I’m sure there are no more deep dark secrets. I like surprises, but I don’t want nothing running my life but me.
You got used to it, was the answer back. You got used to not being present. You’re a creature of habit.
Not being high is all the way into the forward, where I can’t remember anything. That’s the place I couldn’t handle before. Now I’m ready .. I sat up from where I was sitting.
I don’t normally breathe deeply. I didn’t know you can breathe all the way into there.
This is the boredom part. I remember how boring the House could be, just like deployment, I had to pull interesting things into my world through books. I laid back into the recliner.
Let the boy do whatever he wanted .. I remember those days. I was healthy then. Shortly before I went back to work. All morning I’d watch the squirrel attack the bird feeders with acrobats.
Directors like to show horrific things in a dark way, never in a beautiful way. Spielberg did Schindler’s List in black and white, Halloween movies are dark and shadowy. But rarely do you see a horrific story on the backdrops of luscious sunsets and awe-inspiring views. They should, like The Color Purple did, because that’s the secret. To step away and see the beautiful photograph of it, to see the world soulfully.
I’ve always seen the world as a beautiful place, so beautiful I can’t possibly be a natural part of it.
I was all the way in the forward to the point I was drunk on it, I’d forgotten that I’d chosen to be there, I forgot I had a soul running everything, the Brave one, the one who knows how much it hurts to be in over your head.
You take the gift of mental illness.
What it offered me, what it got me through. Its horrific choice to remember the memories.
I wanted this, I wanted to experience this correctly, I’m the one who cut my experience short until I could. I wanted to document it as my own service, my gift back to the gift, but it’s over now.
I’m totally free.
I’ve been living the same life over and over and over until the child in me was done, then I was set free.
Others have been totally free this whole time. They don’t understand what it’s like. The pot heads think it’s cool, to be a Shifter, but few else.
It’s summer and I’m twenty-seven. That’s all I need to know.
I want to enjoy summer. I’m going to the beach in about a week; there’s no better way. I want to shower, and wash the dishes, and sit out on the porch, do all these things in the breathtakingly beautiful backdrop of summer.
Of course sex is an assumed option. Just as assumed as everything else in the simplistic twenty-seven and summer.
That’s the whole idea behind me smoking pot. To have an experience that has nothing to do with me. To learn to live that way.
It seems I’m trying to grow a beard. I haven’t showered in a long time. Just relax, I think to myself.
(watching The Cosby Show where Theo gets in trouble with the cops and the father’s exhaustion has double meaning.)
We are supposed to be rambunctious. We’re supposed to be kind of bad, overly free. It’s assumed that we’re mostly pretending to be Good, acting Good, when we’re manageable, out of the kindness of our hearts.
I saw this scene in my head, it had a glamorous tinge like that movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, it was someone playing me and another actor playing someone in my life.
_You know, Chuck, I watch you,_ the other guy says. _And I know you don’t talk much about your past._
He has a bar glass in his had, a little whiskey and ice, he’s leaning back in the boat, we’re on the ocean off of Italy.
_And most of the time you say you don’t remember much. You have a memory thing, you’ll say._
With this he leans forward, ready for the kill.
_I bet, you remember everything. I bet you remember everything all the way. Just as good as if you had it written down._
An hour later I had an answer for him: _That’s why I’m not afraid to forget._
The weed shows me how to be happy through anything, even this. It’s like it gives me permission. Just because I know how to be happy in the horrific, doesn’t mean I constantly have to practice happiness that particular way. I’ll remember how to be happy if I am ever in the horrific again.
I keep thinking I’m supposed to be learning things while I’m high, learning a new How, but what I keep learning is about how I already was Brave. How there’s nothing more because I haven’t realized I’m already doing it. Always was. I was a calm baby. No one could believe how calm I was, always commenting on it.
It’s like I can say to myself: it’s okay to be happy. You’ve already proved you can be relatively happy though the horrific. Just don’t be afraid.
Then it says you were brave, you just don’t see it cause to other people, from a different set of standards, you seemed quiet, affected.
It is a fact that a human being has to be very brave to go through the horrific and not lose their mind. You’ve always been brave.
I know the mantra is Remember Remember, but when I’m not high, I just remember remembering. I remember what it felt like. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
A lover doesn’t want to see the world through my eyes. They want to see me. That’s what I have a hard time with. The ‘everything is sex’ stuff is easy for me to understand. It’s the platonic stuff I don’t get.
Why is it necessary to have to talk about things? If it has nothing to do with the lover, than what’s going on? It’s the price you pay for mental health sometimes.
Haven’t you wanted to feel things deeply, I think to myself, how are you going to once you let hurt go?
I’ll just feel it the sexual way, instead.
And to feel it sexually is to feel it all the way in the forward, to be brave.
I have these images of being a part of a family, or even a few families like in Parenthood or Modern Family, why not share them, make them real, let other people have some of the other roles. What does it matter if it’s temporary? Live all the way.
It’s not about who I am .. that’s already been covered. It’s about me not believing who I am.
__________
It’s a scary thing to trust that I am perfectly trained for what I’m intended for. Considering the kind my specialties are.
__________
Sex is imagination.
I’m still addicted to sex. That’s what coming from child molesters does to you. Makes you so sensitive to it, makes you so addicted to something horrific, but maybe beautiful, if I can just keep my psyche intact.
It’s okay that I’m not eating, I think to myself, it’s okay that I haven’t eaten in a really long time. This is my dark night with the soul, and my deep dark day, and my deep dark night ..
I over did it. I over sensitized, over-stimulated, lived too much, too many stories, too many _adventures._ Ran too far into safety. I should have been braver.
It’s okay to have a totally different existence than your children. They’ll be okay, you’ll be okay. It’s okay.
In this country, you can create your own world, then fight for it.
__________
(Thinking about moving, how hard it will be.)
That’s the price of being so Independent, you don’t know anybody.
I might be dumb, I might have pain, but there’s nothing wrong with me. My How is just fine and it improves rapidly. I could be living at the House right now and I’d be happy.
All I have to do is be stronger than that, more sensitive than that. I remember the play grounds she would take us to when we were little. Pre-school age, during the summers, when she wasn’t going to school.
The tough guys like K__ and Muc__, are making fun of it, making fun of themselves, that’s how they handle it, manage through to moving forward.
It is fun to live timelessly, as a shifter, but it’s also fun to live in the moment, to come all the way forward.
I have faith. That’s why it takes pot for me to feel this way, my faith was weakened. Maybe this is what Christians go through. They wake in the morning and at first sight pull into the negative (maybe), but then they have faith, and stay high by that faith.
Have Faith, and Be Powerful, are the same thing.
The reason I have to post anonymously is that I never want to say these words: I’ve been through a lot. Or a lot’s happened,
I want to be the Shifter. It’s hard to be and not be at the same time.
That’s high -- Western culture, one where it’s impossible not to be happy, it can be impossible to feel pain.
It’s like I was dying a little bit, with each day of my childhood, each incident.
I’ve just gotten shaky after all that’s happened. So much has happened, and I never really get to talk about it.
The time when I’m not high becomes the adventure, and whenever the adventure becomes too much, I’ll just smoke again, but I’ll keep them few and far between.
You can’t help but be happy when you’re a child, and you use imagination if you have to. At some point you find the pleasure in hurt.
What’s with all this pain? I’m just tired from all that’s happened.
It never occurred to me that I could live this long. To live past sixteen seemed unlikely.
I want to stay high until I’m sure there are no more deep dark secrets. I like surprises, but I don’t want nothing running my life but me.
You got used to it, was the answer back. You got used to not being present. You’re a creature of habit.
Not being high is all the way into the forward, where I can’t remember anything. That’s the place I couldn’t handle before. Now I’m ready .. I sat up from where I was sitting.
I don’t normally breathe deeply. I didn’t know you can breathe all the way into there.
This is the boredom part. I remember how boring the House could be, just like deployment, I had to pull interesting things into my world through books. I laid back into the recliner.
Let the boy do whatever he wanted .. I remember those days. I was healthy then. Shortly before I went back to work. All morning I’d watch the squirrel attack the bird feeders with acrobats.
Directors like to show horrific things in a dark way, never in a beautiful way. Spielberg did Schindler’s List in black and white, Halloween movies are dark and shadowy. But rarely do you see a horrific story on the backdrops of luscious sunsets and awe-inspiring views. They should, like The Color Purple did, because that’s the secret. To step away and see the beautiful photograph of it, to see the world soulfully.
I’ve always seen the world as a beautiful place, so beautiful I can’t possibly be a natural part of it.
I was all the way in the forward to the point I was drunk on it, I’d forgotten that I’d chosen to be there, I forgot I had a soul running everything, the Brave one, the one who knows how much it hurts to be in over your head.
You take the gift of mental illness.
What it offered me, what it got me through. Its horrific choice to remember the memories.
I wanted this, I wanted to experience this correctly, I’m the one who cut my experience short until I could. I wanted to document it as my own service, my gift back to the gift, but it’s over now.
I’m totally free.
I’ve been living the same life over and over and over until the child in me was done, then I was set free.
Others have been totally free this whole time. They don’t understand what it’s like. The pot heads think it’s cool, to be a Shifter, but few else.
It’s summer and I’m twenty-seven. That’s all I need to know.
I want to enjoy summer. I’m going to the beach in about a week; there’s no better way. I want to shower, and wash the dishes, and sit out on the porch, do all these things in the breathtakingly beautiful backdrop of summer.
Of course sex is an assumed option. Just as assumed as everything else in the simplistic twenty-seven and summer.
That’s the whole idea behind me smoking pot. To have an experience that has nothing to do with me. To learn to live that way.
It seems I’m trying to grow a beard. I haven’t showered in a long time. Just relax, I think to myself.
(watching The Cosby Show where Theo gets in trouble with the cops and the father’s exhaustion has double meaning.)
We are supposed to be rambunctious. We’re supposed to be kind of bad, overly free. It’s assumed that we’re mostly pretending to be Good, acting Good, when we’re manageable, out of the kindness of our hearts.
I saw this scene in my head, it had a glamorous tinge like that movie, The Talented Mr. Ripley, it was someone playing me and another actor playing someone in my life.
_You know, Chuck, I watch you,_ the other guy says. _And I know you don’t talk much about your past._
He has a bar glass in his had, a little whiskey and ice, he’s leaning back in the boat, we’re on the ocean off of Italy.
_And most of the time you say you don’t remember much. You have a memory thing, you’ll say._
With this he leans forward, ready for the kill.
_I bet, you remember everything. I bet you remember everything all the way. Just as good as if you had it written down._
An hour later I had an answer for him: _That’s why I’m not afraid to forget._
The weed shows me how to be happy through anything, even this. It’s like it gives me permission. Just because I know how to be happy in the horrific, doesn’t mean I constantly have to practice happiness that particular way. I’ll remember how to be happy if I am ever in the horrific again.
I keep thinking I’m supposed to be learning things while I’m high, learning a new How, but what I keep learning is about how I already was Brave. How there’s nothing more because I haven’t realized I’m already doing it. Always was. I was a calm baby. No one could believe how calm I was, always commenting on it.
It’s like I can say to myself: it’s okay to be happy. You’ve already proved you can be relatively happy though the horrific. Just don’t be afraid.
Then it says you were brave, you just don’t see it cause to other people, from a different set of standards, you seemed quiet, affected.
It is a fact that a human being has to be very brave to go through the horrific and not lose their mind. You’ve always been brave.
I know the mantra is Remember Remember, but when I’m not high, I just remember remembering. I remember what it felt like. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
A lover doesn’t want to see the world through my eyes. They want to see me. That’s what I have a hard time with. The ‘everything is sex’ stuff is easy for me to understand. It’s the platonic stuff I don’t get.
Why is it necessary to have to talk about things? If it has nothing to do with the lover, than what’s going on? It’s the price you pay for mental health sometimes.
Haven’t you wanted to feel things deeply, I think to myself, how are you going to once you let hurt go?
I’ll just feel it the sexual way, instead.
And to feel it sexually is to feel it all the way in the forward, to be brave.
I have these images of being a part of a family, or even a few families like in Parenthood or Modern Family, why not share them, make them real, let other people have some of the other roles. What does it matter if it’s temporary? Live all the way.
It’s not about who I am .. that’s already been covered. It’s about me not believing who I am.
__________
It’s a scary thing to trust that I am perfectly trained for what I’m intended for. Considering the kind my specialties are.
__________
3
(Monday evening)
There’s less words this high. Maybe it’s the new snake-bowl, maybe the music. The path is the same, just faster.
Once it gets to the memory game part it proves to be a dark high, like the ones House had me on in the beginning. Everything is just as familiar, just as full of more memories, but scarier, requiring shifting with more bravery.
The music is great. When I’m high it changes, becomes like the performers are actually here. Despite my body knowing it’s coming out of a plastic box the high can trick my body into believing the music. I jump around to Punk Rock.
All paths are good, necessary. Everyone tells their own story -- rationalizes.
Everyone is the winner? The one who’s genetics are best? No, everyone just believes each other.
Love IS Understanding. Forgiveness. Loving yourself is understanding yourself, which is taking the time to learn about yourself, instead of just judge.
The three of us would play without clothes, in diapers, and they liked it. Liked it in a different way than I did. A__ and H__.
When I’m here, it’s like that movie Frequency. I’m standing here in the past, the body in here with me, and the laptop is the future, which I type into to let him know.
Maybe as you get older, your senses deaden. (As the Him and Her gain strength on the way to eternity.) So if you grow up fast, you’re senses deaden faster (and your soul awakens). Unless you’re strong .. Becoming more and more sensitive while still staying cool.
I went in P__ and S__’s direction, my uncle and aunt, L__’s younger brother. The young adults. They were my only example. They were always my favorite age group. That’s why I’ve hated them. Because I loved them. Their age group, their lifestyle, sreamed of Independence. But they ignored the Abuse, the House, and fostered and adopted other kids out of social services instead.
Back then, I wouldn’t even call her Mom, danced around the word. Could get through whole hours. That was mean to her. But it didn’t feel mean at the time, I wasn’t being mean, I just couldn’t say the word, I wasn’t doing it on purpose, my lips and tongue refused to make the sound anymore.
All this writing .. All this judgment .. I’m judging myself. When you’re all on your own, that’s what you do, because you have no one else.
If I FOCUS I’ll move forward. It feels the opposite of what I’m supposed to do. To move forward without moving forward. If you move forward in spirit, the body will figure out what it needs to figure out. If you move forward in body only, you don’t really move forward at all. It’s merely different when you’re a child; only the adult mind can sort things out, so things get twisted.
Understanding is Sympathy.
There have been times where I had too much sympathy for myself. How could I not? I was young, I couldn’t understand myself and didn’t know how else to react.
I judged myself for living adult life so badly the first time. I know I was a child but I didn’t experience it that way. I was me and the House was the challenge before me. I did do well, I just get stuck on the details: things that happened in public, in front of relatives, the judgment I’ve felt from others for not being good enough when I was six and living an adult life.
__________
(Tuesday)
I feel close to forgiving them, so I perform the same routine as yesterday. Go over the notes, makes sure I know them, and light up again.
Just because I understand and forgive L__ doesn’t mean I’ll ever end up with a woman like that. It means I was already with a woman like that.
I love my mom, and my sisters; R__, even, he seems so pathetic in the end. But at some point a line had to be drawn, a boundary, as far as what was acceptable or not. On one side is horrific, and the other the generations between my legs.
Everyone knows what everything feels like. That’s the true way human beings communicate, not by words but by the feelings the words allude to, the wordless poetry. You just have to trust that others have felt the same way you have.
The best part is I can show my expressions and emotions on my face and still feel safe because there’s no way anyone could ever guess.
In that house, I was so dumb, and they knew me so well; there’s a shame in it, people who know you that well can twist everything about you into a bad thing and then make you believe it. They could get in my head.
I was so vulnerable, so dumb. Hiding my emotions was a survival technique. It’s nice to show honesty, people like to see it, even if they could never guess the story behind it.
Allow yourself to be happy .. A deep sadness comes over me as I allow it .. It’s a beautiful day is the beginning .. It reminds me of so many other beautiful days .. This is the memory game again .. There’s a beauty in the horrific, to the point where the two are the same, and the memories flip to that, flipping all over the place as each item and feel and sight reminds me. Take it all in. Pull into you all the beauty around you. This is all my life is, absolutely no identifiers, and I’m so happy ..
_You never remember past arguments because it was never about what the argument was about,_ Oprah just said.
_If you’re healthy, you never remember the arguments,_ replied Jerry Seinfeld.
The world was beautiful in the spring. Shortly after House left and before I went to back to work. I wasn’t high on anything, wasn’t drinking, the world remained beautiful.
__________
Had a dream where I was apologizing:
_ It was just that I had a mother just like ___’s,_ I said to her. _Except worse, so I’m sensitive to you. ____ (my friend) loves you, he can see all the way down to where you’re a good person and all the rest is just you trying your best. I was trying my best too. The way I was back then, wasn’t the true way that I felt about things. I was acting out._
I’ve remembered many sharp memories; I’ve gotten used to what they had to say. I remember the soft memories, more and more, so soft I’d almost forgotten them entirely.
Like the way the breeze from the open window felt against my wrist as I sat in the corner chair of the parlor and my sixth grade teacher was on her way to visit the House. It’s amazing to remember your childhood that strongly, so strongly it’s like you’re there again, just with a different mind.
The people who stay and never leave their hometowns, they’re the most forgiving. That’s what this bubble-like existence in America enables, a refusal to forgive. It is possible to eject people from your life.
Things repeat, things repeat, the story of the Gods repeat. Hence, you remember. You’re a cycle, a half circle. A one of two.
You end up so grateful for those people. For every single person cause you’re so grateful for the things you’ve learned.
‘Settling down’ is relaxing. Relaxing down, settling in, getting comfortable. A young man tends to not be settled down, is all over the place, in spirit and body.
__________
(Wednesday)
I watched a little of Dr. Phil. He’s actually on the money, he’s just terrible at explaining it. I’m bad at explaining it, I’m sure, but I’m better than him.
I’m over expressive -- not on my face, but inside, because I’m trying to know who I am as I am it. Like I’m doing everything doubly. If I’d trust the other person, just allowed them to make their own idea of me, no matter what it was, no matter what they needed, and not be afraid because I already know and believe the truth, if I’d just allow myself all the way forward and into wordless poetry, everything would balance out.
I dozed off and shifted to where I was in this scene where I was in one of those trippy films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adam’s wife had had exactly as much weed as I had and had known all the same things I did, and she recognized me as someone abused by the mother and she knew that she was someone abused by the father and we knew each other, and started talking about it, casually, on a beach somewhere, in real life, while Adam and his son played in the water.
The she turned into an actress I’d seen on TV and I said, So we don’t ever work it out. Me and you, the battle of the sexes, we never have that relationship where we’re meant for each other, and every moment has its Two.
_No,_ she said.
_So we never marry? Have children?_
_Maybe, if we had turned out that good, that disciplined._ She sat up more, inspecting something on her bare toe.
_I don’t get it. I thought I was supposed to forgive the mother to the point of killing the father and marrying her._
_Doesn’t mean you have to._ she said, while fixing her hair slightly. _We know way too much about each other._
Her expression softened, as if on purpose, like she was trying to get the nerve to say something, while also saying it properly. _You wouldn’t even sleep with me,_ she said, not looking at me. _You slept with E__ but only because you knew she couldn’t have children and you didn’t even come the first time. Some would’ve gone much farther. They would’ve lived everything out in Real time, instead of through fiction. They would’ve had Real relationships, and children would’ve resulted, all over the place,_ and she smiles deeply, then continues: _You wouldn’t even sleep with me._
I say nothing, remain unwaveringly innocent.
_Go find yourself a girl from outside this path, this whole path, from outside our cycle, from way outside this cycle, then you’ll have an adventure. You’re done with me. You know who I am, I know who you are._
She turns her face, to look back at the waves as I back away from her. After a moment she turns again and says, _You could’ve at least loved me a little, at least found something about me attractive._ she sighed. _Let me give you a hint, as a loving gesture. Enjoy the adventurous woman, love each one from outside our cycle, and don’t freak out when you start to wonder which one I was all along. It‘s okay to be closer to me than to her. You‘ll just have to be closer to her the wordless way._
With that the dream ended, and I shifted back to the wake world.
So I get to live like this, all the memories stamped to my soul. Yes, it’s like being alive times two.
I only know how to do one thing, (sex). The rest, I really don’t.
_________
There’s less words this high. Maybe it’s the new snake-bowl, maybe the music. The path is the same, just faster.
Once it gets to the memory game part it proves to be a dark high, like the ones House had me on in the beginning. Everything is just as familiar, just as full of more memories, but scarier, requiring shifting with more bravery.
The music is great. When I’m high it changes, becomes like the performers are actually here. Despite my body knowing it’s coming out of a plastic box the high can trick my body into believing the music. I jump around to Punk Rock.
All paths are good, necessary. Everyone tells their own story -- rationalizes.
Everyone is the winner? The one who’s genetics are best? No, everyone just believes each other.
Love IS Understanding. Forgiveness. Loving yourself is understanding yourself, which is taking the time to learn about yourself, instead of just judge.
The three of us would play without clothes, in diapers, and they liked it. Liked it in a different way than I did. A__ and H__.
When I’m here, it’s like that movie Frequency. I’m standing here in the past, the body in here with me, and the laptop is the future, which I type into to let him know.
Maybe as you get older, your senses deaden. (As the Him and Her gain strength on the way to eternity.) So if you grow up fast, you’re senses deaden faster (and your soul awakens). Unless you’re strong .. Becoming more and more sensitive while still staying cool.
I went in P__ and S__’s direction, my uncle and aunt, L__’s younger brother. The young adults. They were my only example. They were always my favorite age group. That’s why I’ve hated them. Because I loved them. Their age group, their lifestyle, sreamed of Independence. But they ignored the Abuse, the House, and fostered and adopted other kids out of social services instead.
Back then, I wouldn’t even call her Mom, danced around the word. Could get through whole hours. That was mean to her. But it didn’t feel mean at the time, I wasn’t being mean, I just couldn’t say the word, I wasn’t doing it on purpose, my lips and tongue refused to make the sound anymore.
All this writing .. All this judgment .. I’m judging myself. When you’re all on your own, that’s what you do, because you have no one else.
If I FOCUS I’ll move forward. It feels the opposite of what I’m supposed to do. To move forward without moving forward. If you move forward in spirit, the body will figure out what it needs to figure out. If you move forward in body only, you don’t really move forward at all. It’s merely different when you’re a child; only the adult mind can sort things out, so things get twisted.
Understanding is Sympathy.
There have been times where I had too much sympathy for myself. How could I not? I was young, I couldn’t understand myself and didn’t know how else to react.
I judged myself for living adult life so badly the first time. I know I was a child but I didn’t experience it that way. I was me and the House was the challenge before me. I did do well, I just get stuck on the details: things that happened in public, in front of relatives, the judgment I’ve felt from others for not being good enough when I was six and living an adult life.
__________
(Tuesday)
I feel close to forgiving them, so I perform the same routine as yesterday. Go over the notes, makes sure I know them, and light up again.
Just because I understand and forgive L__ doesn’t mean I’ll ever end up with a woman like that. It means I was already with a woman like that.
I love my mom, and my sisters; R__, even, he seems so pathetic in the end. But at some point a line had to be drawn, a boundary, as far as what was acceptable or not. On one side is horrific, and the other the generations between my legs.
Everyone knows what everything feels like. That’s the true way human beings communicate, not by words but by the feelings the words allude to, the wordless poetry. You just have to trust that others have felt the same way you have.
The best part is I can show my expressions and emotions on my face and still feel safe because there’s no way anyone could ever guess.
In that house, I was so dumb, and they knew me so well; there’s a shame in it, people who know you that well can twist everything about you into a bad thing and then make you believe it. They could get in my head.
I was so vulnerable, so dumb. Hiding my emotions was a survival technique. It’s nice to show honesty, people like to see it, even if they could never guess the story behind it.
Allow yourself to be happy .. A deep sadness comes over me as I allow it .. It’s a beautiful day is the beginning .. It reminds me of so many other beautiful days .. This is the memory game again .. There’s a beauty in the horrific, to the point where the two are the same, and the memories flip to that, flipping all over the place as each item and feel and sight reminds me. Take it all in. Pull into you all the beauty around you. This is all my life is, absolutely no identifiers, and I’m so happy ..
_You never remember past arguments because it was never about what the argument was about,_ Oprah just said.
_If you’re healthy, you never remember the arguments,_ replied Jerry Seinfeld.
The world was beautiful in the spring. Shortly after House left and before I went to back to work. I wasn’t high on anything, wasn’t drinking, the world remained beautiful.
__________
Had a dream where I was apologizing:
_ It was just that I had a mother just like ___’s,_ I said to her. _Except worse, so I’m sensitive to you. ____ (my friend) loves you, he can see all the way down to where you’re a good person and all the rest is just you trying your best. I was trying my best too. The way I was back then, wasn’t the true way that I felt about things. I was acting out._
I’ve remembered many sharp memories; I’ve gotten used to what they had to say. I remember the soft memories, more and more, so soft I’d almost forgotten them entirely.
Like the way the breeze from the open window felt against my wrist as I sat in the corner chair of the parlor and my sixth grade teacher was on her way to visit the House. It’s amazing to remember your childhood that strongly, so strongly it’s like you’re there again, just with a different mind.
The people who stay and never leave their hometowns, they’re the most forgiving. That’s what this bubble-like existence in America enables, a refusal to forgive. It is possible to eject people from your life.
Things repeat, things repeat, the story of the Gods repeat. Hence, you remember. You’re a cycle, a half circle. A one of two.
You end up so grateful for those people. For every single person cause you’re so grateful for the things you’ve learned.
‘Settling down’ is relaxing. Relaxing down, settling in, getting comfortable. A young man tends to not be settled down, is all over the place, in spirit and body.
__________
(Wednesday)
I watched a little of Dr. Phil. He’s actually on the money, he’s just terrible at explaining it. I’m bad at explaining it, I’m sure, but I’m better than him.
I’m over expressive -- not on my face, but inside, because I’m trying to know who I am as I am it. Like I’m doing everything doubly. If I’d trust the other person, just allowed them to make their own idea of me, no matter what it was, no matter what they needed, and not be afraid because I already know and believe the truth, if I’d just allow myself all the way forward and into wordless poetry, everything would balance out.
I dozed off and shifted to where I was in this scene where I was in one of those trippy films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adam’s wife had had exactly as much weed as I had and had known all the same things I did, and she recognized me as someone abused by the mother and she knew that she was someone abused by the father and we knew each other, and started talking about it, casually, on a beach somewhere, in real life, while Adam and his son played in the water.
The she turned into an actress I’d seen on TV and I said, So we don’t ever work it out. Me and you, the battle of the sexes, we never have that relationship where we’re meant for each other, and every moment has its Two.
_No,_ she said.
_So we never marry? Have children?_
_Maybe, if we had turned out that good, that disciplined._ She sat up more, inspecting something on her bare toe.
_I don’t get it. I thought I was supposed to forgive the mother to the point of killing the father and marrying her._
_Doesn’t mean you have to._ she said, while fixing her hair slightly. _We know way too much about each other._
Her expression softened, as if on purpose, like she was trying to get the nerve to say something, while also saying it properly. _You wouldn’t even sleep with me,_ she said, not looking at me. _You slept with E__ but only because you knew she couldn’t have children and you didn’t even come the first time. Some would’ve gone much farther. They would’ve lived everything out in Real time, instead of through fiction. They would’ve had Real relationships, and children would’ve resulted, all over the place,_ and she smiles deeply, then continues: _You wouldn’t even sleep with me._
I say nothing, remain unwaveringly innocent.
_Go find yourself a girl from outside this path, this whole path, from outside our cycle, from way outside this cycle, then you’ll have an adventure. You’re done with me. You know who I am, I know who you are._
She turns her face, to look back at the waves as I back away from her. After a moment she turns again and says, _You could’ve at least loved me a little, at least found something about me attractive._ she sighed. _Let me give you a hint, as a loving gesture. Enjoy the adventurous woman, love each one from outside our cycle, and don’t freak out when you start to wonder which one I was all along. It‘s okay to be closer to me than to her. You‘ll just have to be closer to her the wordless way._
With that the dream ended, and I shifted back to the wake world.
So I get to live like this, all the memories stamped to my soul. Yes, it’s like being alive times two.
I only know how to do one thing, (sex). The rest, I really don’t.
_________
2
I keep hearing sounds, they scare me, I keep thinking they’re from downstairs but then realize they’re coming from the television.
The paranoia’s kicking in. I’ll just be Brave and maybe it will open up for me.
When I allow the sound the way I first heard it I imagine a stranger coming up the stairs with a weapon.
All it is, is a shift. You’ll act appropriately, you’ll be Brave and Good, if a man were to come up the stairs with a weapon. So the paranoia is just a scary Shift. The marijuana is always teaching me to be brave, one way or another.
Just relax. You’re from horrific, every scary thing is familiar. Be happy in the horrific. No way. It was impossible, wrong even. I had to pretend to be smart, to be older, to scare them. That’s how I felt back then. Not how I feel now. Just remember then.
Sex shows up as always about this point in the high. I look in the mirror and figure out that Timothy (and other people, regularly) glanced at my stomach because the six pack does ‘stick out.’ It’s flat but the muscles still stick out. I always wondered about that, thought it was something bad they were glancing at.
I’m switching from not dominate to dominate.
No, I’m switching from boy to guy to man.
Gay, Bi, Straight.
Oh, I get it. (sexual abuse)
I dominate now because I’m a man, now.
I keep forgetting I’ve been having sex all my life.
So just start the sex life (the sex all my life) at twelve, and keep everything a secret.
I’ll tell the truth anonymously, then I’ll choose to forget again.
Just say you’re from horrific.
Remembering is forgetting. You choose to put it in the back of your mind, (which is Forgetting).
Once you Remember -- all the way, meaning dealing with it -- than you put it away. And you dumb down.
Being high is exhausting on the body. As my limbs began to feel like lead and my eye lids started to droop I could see all these mirrors, how every one I knew was just a mirror, every scenario, every situation, W__, K__, Adam, Timothy, J__, Ms J__, Br__, M__ .. People find who they need to, it goes both ways.
People stay because they need to, they go down paths because the people they need to know and reckon with are down those paths, it’s how the whole world functions, loves, befriends: needs.
Needs seeped in deep reasons and secrets, most forever unarticulated.
__________
I woke up Sunday afternoon, after having stayed up till the late early morning.
There was a film on starring James Caan where he played a widower in a romance with a divorcee. I had forgotten how in the eighties women had to be so skinny ..
This high took me down the same path as always, just faster. I played around with the timing of the joints. The pain of having it peak and then slowly move down is so physical. To feel how much pain I’m always in. It’s wonderful.
(watching an old sitcom called Amen, where a parishioner is always trying to get her man, the preacher, to finally marry her.)
The other person is the one who tells the story. They do it naturally, on their own, in their heads, like how I do with my friends. I believe them, give them the benefit of the doubt, rationalize for them. So Two is one.
The other person believes their partner’s story. It takes Two for one to live fully. You love yourself when you know your story, instead of just feeling it.
Right now, I am my own brother. I go so out of my way to be my own protector, my own defender, because I’ve been on my own since I was a baby.
So this is church. So if you can always live in church .. If everyday could be Sunday.
I remember each instant I first chose to be good.
The memory where I chose to be fair (playing card games), the memory where I chose to be gentle (the dying mouse), the memory where I chose to be violent, etc.
It’s like they’re dead. L__, A__, H__ and R___. When I think of them that way it’s easier to see them with love.
When they’re not dead I can see in their eyes that they can do so much better, be so much better, could have been so much better, but when they’re dead I understand that they did the best they could, the very best they could.
When I think of them as dead, it’s like I’ve murdered them, fought and won the soul fight, just like I know I already have. So they’re dead, and you chose not to kill them, out of forgiveness, and time not being real ..
Wear your pain. It’s like wearing sex. Allow your body and face to express. The How would be scary but you’re Him and know How.
When I was a boy expressing was dangerous, could look like self-pity in public overly-truthful in the House, but now I’m older, I have the intricacies right.
Difficult memories arise. Moments in my past behavior want to make me cringe but I see it differently now. That’s what it’s like to have mental illness. That’s what it’s like; those moments were simply what it was Really like.
I remembered a Sergeant I came across while deployed. _Extreme child abuse .._ he’d said, _Well there’s some books that have come out recently about teenagers who have PTSD,_ he said suddenly excited, as if he found it fascinating, _Yeah, they used to think that only soldiers could get PTSD, but now they’ve found that kids who have been beaten and abused so badly they when they become teenagers they’re already suffering PTSD --_
At the time I found him so annoying. But I didn’t know PTSD was this difficult, was so difficult for me as a teenager. No wonder he was in such awe of it.
I had a mental illness.
What PTSD does, is it makes you into a boy again, as if maturity never happened. It erases everything you thought useful. It demands a new set of definitions, wordless ones. It demands more out of life, its definition, and the definition of the Soul living it. It requires more. It offers more.
I started feeling sleepy but then got a burst of energy and decided to smoke another joint.
The idea was to see how fast I could get down the path: the fear, than the bravery, then the new concepts and ideas, than the memory game, etcetera, etcetera.
__________
(next morning, waking up not high)
It’s hard to get out of bed lately. It’s like the not-high self has to be remember and be comfortable with what the high one discovered.
Do you feel like Him? Do you have that much self respect? Can you be wordless? Live wordlessly? If the answer is no I have to make a plan of what has to be learned, I’ll get high, and go back to church.
So I wasn’t in love with K__. I would just get confused sometimes, so I thought I was, because everything is sexual chemistry. I had no boundaries yet, didn‘t even realize ones were needed. It’s okay to know that I would’ve been with people in another time, another place.
So I’m still in church, just the longer part. Where I round out the direct sentences I wrote while high. Add the words a layman needs so the Boy I am will understand.
The smell of pot reminds me of House, pulls me back to those sweet post-deployment days of shifting, shifting.
When I show my How, when I show myself, when my true expression really is on my face, that’s How. It’s my most intimate thing. No wonder no one can see me.
There’s nothing wrong with being the extraordinarily sensitive one between the Two. It’s an amazing, impressive thing, to feel life so wholly. There’s nothing wrong with being the non-dominate, because in the end the dominate one is in such awe of the other, the other becomes the dominate.
Thoughts in my mind, processing things.
__________
The paranoia’s kicking in. I’ll just be Brave and maybe it will open up for me.
When I allow the sound the way I first heard it I imagine a stranger coming up the stairs with a weapon.
All it is, is a shift. You’ll act appropriately, you’ll be Brave and Good, if a man were to come up the stairs with a weapon. So the paranoia is just a scary Shift. The marijuana is always teaching me to be brave, one way or another.
Just relax. You’re from horrific, every scary thing is familiar. Be happy in the horrific. No way. It was impossible, wrong even. I had to pretend to be smart, to be older, to scare them. That’s how I felt back then. Not how I feel now. Just remember then.
Sex shows up as always about this point in the high. I look in the mirror and figure out that Timothy (and other people, regularly) glanced at my stomach because the six pack does ‘stick out.’ It’s flat but the muscles still stick out. I always wondered about that, thought it was something bad they were glancing at.
I’m switching from not dominate to dominate.
No, I’m switching from boy to guy to man.
Gay, Bi, Straight.
Oh, I get it. (sexual abuse)
I dominate now because I’m a man, now.
I keep forgetting I’ve been having sex all my life.
So just start the sex life (the sex all my life) at twelve, and keep everything a secret.
I’ll tell the truth anonymously, then I’ll choose to forget again.
Just say you’re from horrific.
Remembering is forgetting. You choose to put it in the back of your mind, (which is Forgetting).
Once you Remember -- all the way, meaning dealing with it -- than you put it away. And you dumb down.
Being high is exhausting on the body. As my limbs began to feel like lead and my eye lids started to droop I could see all these mirrors, how every one I knew was just a mirror, every scenario, every situation, W__, K__, Adam, Timothy, J__, Ms J__, Br__, M__ .. People find who they need to, it goes both ways.
People stay because they need to, they go down paths because the people they need to know and reckon with are down those paths, it’s how the whole world functions, loves, befriends: needs.
Needs seeped in deep reasons and secrets, most forever unarticulated.
__________
I woke up Sunday afternoon, after having stayed up till the late early morning.
There was a film on starring James Caan where he played a widower in a romance with a divorcee. I had forgotten how in the eighties women had to be so skinny ..
This high took me down the same path as always, just faster. I played around with the timing of the joints. The pain of having it peak and then slowly move down is so physical. To feel how much pain I’m always in. It’s wonderful.
(watching an old sitcom called Amen, where a parishioner is always trying to get her man, the preacher, to finally marry her.)
The other person is the one who tells the story. They do it naturally, on their own, in their heads, like how I do with my friends. I believe them, give them the benefit of the doubt, rationalize for them. So Two is one.
The other person believes their partner’s story. It takes Two for one to live fully. You love yourself when you know your story, instead of just feeling it.
Right now, I am my own brother. I go so out of my way to be my own protector, my own defender, because I’ve been on my own since I was a baby.
So this is church. So if you can always live in church .. If everyday could be Sunday.
I remember each instant I first chose to be good.
The memory where I chose to be fair (playing card games), the memory where I chose to be gentle (the dying mouse), the memory where I chose to be violent, etc.
It’s like they’re dead. L__, A__, H__ and R___. When I think of them that way it’s easier to see them with love.
When they’re not dead I can see in their eyes that they can do so much better, be so much better, could have been so much better, but when they’re dead I understand that they did the best they could, the very best they could.
When I think of them as dead, it’s like I’ve murdered them, fought and won the soul fight, just like I know I already have. So they’re dead, and you chose not to kill them, out of forgiveness, and time not being real ..
Wear your pain. It’s like wearing sex. Allow your body and face to express. The How would be scary but you’re Him and know How.
When I was a boy expressing was dangerous, could look like self-pity in public overly-truthful in the House, but now I’m older, I have the intricacies right.
Difficult memories arise. Moments in my past behavior want to make me cringe but I see it differently now. That’s what it’s like to have mental illness. That’s what it’s like; those moments were simply what it was Really like.
I remembered a Sergeant I came across while deployed. _Extreme child abuse .._ he’d said, _Well there’s some books that have come out recently about teenagers who have PTSD,_ he said suddenly excited, as if he found it fascinating, _Yeah, they used to think that only soldiers could get PTSD, but now they’ve found that kids who have been beaten and abused so badly they when they become teenagers they’re already suffering PTSD --_
At the time I found him so annoying. But I didn’t know PTSD was this difficult, was so difficult for me as a teenager. No wonder he was in such awe of it.
I had a mental illness.
What PTSD does, is it makes you into a boy again, as if maturity never happened. It erases everything you thought useful. It demands a new set of definitions, wordless ones. It demands more out of life, its definition, and the definition of the Soul living it. It requires more. It offers more.
I started feeling sleepy but then got a burst of energy and decided to smoke another joint.
The idea was to see how fast I could get down the path: the fear, than the bravery, then the new concepts and ideas, than the memory game, etcetera, etcetera.
__________
(next morning, waking up not high)
It’s hard to get out of bed lately. It’s like the not-high self has to be remember and be comfortable with what the high one discovered.
Do you feel like Him? Do you have that much self respect? Can you be wordless? Live wordlessly? If the answer is no I have to make a plan of what has to be learned, I’ll get high, and go back to church.
So I wasn’t in love with K__. I would just get confused sometimes, so I thought I was, because everything is sexual chemistry. I had no boundaries yet, didn‘t even realize ones were needed. It’s okay to know that I would’ve been with people in another time, another place.
So I’m still in church, just the longer part. Where I round out the direct sentences I wrote while high. Add the words a layman needs so the Boy I am will understand.
The smell of pot reminds me of House, pulls me back to those sweet post-deployment days of shifting, shifting.
When I show my How, when I show myself, when my true expression really is on my face, that’s How. It’s my most intimate thing. No wonder no one can see me.
There’s nothing wrong with being the extraordinarily sensitive one between the Two. It’s an amazing, impressive thing, to feel life so wholly. There’s nothing wrong with being the non-dominate, because in the end the dominate one is in such awe of the other, the other becomes the dominate.
Thoughts in my mind, processing things.
__________
Past, Present, Future, Colliding, 1
(arriving home late Saturday night)
A lot has happened, some I can’t wrap my brain around. In the past, it would take a lot of writing to hash it all out, as opposed to being stuck with the flow of emotions my psyche can’t understand.
It’s hard to allow myself to act the way I really am. I go out of my way to act intelligent, as a defense. It was the fact that I was dumb that I fell right into child molesters’ schemes. I’ve always been on the dumb side of things, my whole life, always had to fight harder than everyone else. I know I’m from horrific and there’s nothing harder but that’s no excuse. I’m Him, I can shift to anything and still cooly keep a smooth How. I know I can.
__________
I had helped J__ for two days with his landscaping job at a local church. There are some things that have to be done once a year -- trimming, putting down straw, shaping hedges -- and he needed my help to catch up. I spent the night at their house so through face book I let someone I’d deployed with know I’d be in that town that night, in case he wanted to grab a drink.
The first night we couldn’t do it, because the baseball game he was at ran late. So the following evening, after all the landscaping was done and I would soon be on my way home, we met at a franchise sports bar.
He was one of those twenty-somethings who looked like he was nineteen. He wore a sleeveless shirt and necklace that he had gotten while in Puerto Rico post deployment.
During deployment K__ made fun of him a lot, considered him a cocky, insecure loser. I don’t know why I was in the cool group and Timothy wasn’t as far as K__ was concerned, but because we came from the same town I kept an eye on him during deployment.
After what happened with Adam, and how bad his post-deployment period was, I felt the need to check on Timothy. I basically told him that, when we first sat down, by telling the story of what had happened with Adam, and how his whole family had fallen apart right in front of me, mainly due to the deployment and their lack of age.
He seemed so on edge, he made me feel on edge. He would rarely look me in the eye unless I made him laugh; he kept stealing looks at everything around us, especially people walking by and attractive girls. Thing is, he was on edge before we actually deployed, he just has one of those personalities that’s really cocky and is always hiding behind cockiness. The lack of honesty inherent in that setup makes clicking with him difficult.
I remembered how earlier that day J__ had mentioned House, and I asked him how he knew so quickly that House wasn’t a good idea to have around.
_The way he wouldn’t look you in the eye,_ J__ had said, _He had a kind of act he played, a kind of routine, I knew he was trouble._
_They why couldn’t I see that?_
_Because you wanted to like him._
He was good looking, young, healthy, seemed to have everything relevant going for him. It was as if at some point he’d been hurt so badly that he remained on edge ever since. He seemed to treat Life as a challenge to be overcome, something to be kept at bay and fought against instead of lived, the living to him was in Being, and he couldn’t see anything beyond that. At least, that’s what I saw.
After pleasantries we exchanged post-deployment stories. He said he’d come back and everyone in town had been gracious. I noticed how he wore tattoos signifying that he was a veteran, and how easily he’d tell people he’d just gotten back from deployment.
He said the low point was when he’d had a hard time finding a job, and that at one point he’d gotten into an argument with his dad and his dad had kicked him out.
The way he described his parents they didn’t sound so great. Things started looking up when he got work, he made a deal with his parents and was allowed to move back in. His main identifier was that he was a veteran from Iraq, and he held on to that, and that’s how he fit in to town and the community. He threw the first pitch at the local baseball game on the fourth of July.
_I had a girlfriend from October when I came home on leave, to March. That’s not bad, that’s a good run,_ he said. He was like W__, one of those guys who’d use sex with women as a kind of measurement of his successfulness in life.
I told him that my main problem post-deployment was that I couldn’t get inebriated after deployment, and got as far as coke. I didn’t explain to him that once I’d gotten as far as coke and saw on a chart online what a dangerous drug that was, I then trusted myself.
I didn’t tell him about the shock of getting high at customs, and remaining high all through deMOB, and all the shifting, shifting, shifting, from one flashback to the next, even weeks after having gotten off the bus to Ms J__ and Br__, was so stunning that I had to fight hard, fight to remember everything, fight to get a hold of myself, fight to keep my psyche from being murdered by horrific memories.
He wanted to know if we had any mutual friends in town. He asked me what high school I’d gone to. I told him I never went to high school. What middle school then? I never went to middle school; the last grade I completed was sixth. It’s nice being able to tell the truth and still remain Him. It requires a certain sense of humor, a certain roll of the eyes, like isn’t life funny how harrowing it can be ..
He told me he was allowing his military contract to run out, which surprised me. Then I understood. The military had done him wrong, as it had most of us. We were young guys so we had wanted to be soldiers. While we were young we experienced soldier-hood properly, but when we got older we couldn’t help but see through the American military, being the wealthiest, being the most overpowering in size and strength on the planet, attracting a superficially-oriented leadership.
It was one thing to be a soldier, it was another to be a soldier of a middle-class country ran like an empire by a wealthy elite.
Afterwards we went to Best Buy, to look at televisions. He wanted to show me the difference between an LCD and an LED, which he bought post-deployment. I’d bought a plasma. He had to be the guy who Knows More, he liked being in that role. I understood that someone like him would only feel safe in that role.
We talked some more but finally it was time to go. On the drive back to J__’s where I was to pick up my bags before driving home, I felt the anxiety in me rising. It bothered me to see him so on-edge. The second person I’d met post-deployment was also doing just as bad as the first. The military, deployments, the idea of war, is a lot for the young to deal with while their psyches remain intact. I remembered Joe from when I was in Qatar, W__ when he got back from the first deployment and even still now.
When I got to J__’s house only Ms J__ and Br__ were still up, so it was easy to grab my bags and say good night. Ms J__ wanted me to spend the night but I said I couldn’t, and she easily allowed that.
I tried not to think on the ninety minute drive home, tried to just drive and drive only. The plan was for me to go home and get high, so I could make sense of things without having to slowly write it all out.
__________
Joseph Gordon Levitt (from 500 Days of Summer) is looking in the camera. He’s hosting Saturday Night Live but whenever he has lines he looks into the camera as he’s trying to be funny. None of the other players do that, they look at the audience, in the direction of the camera, but still at the audience.
This always happens when I get high, the television opens up for me. It won’t be long before the stream of important, yet random thoughts starts up, and I’ll have to concentrate to pay attention.
I wanted to flip the channel at some point, but didn’t, because Minday Calin (the Indian girl from The Office) is hot to me, so I continued to watch SNL.
I loved television. Back in the House, it was one of the few escapes. I knew the names of the writers, the actors, the heads of networks. When I had access to films I loved them, too. I watched the Rosie O’Donnell show and felt at home with her love of television and films. She had used them the same way. Television and pot go well together. I need the miracle of it. That these people are actually in my life, that there’s a real connection, like how there is when you see a Broadway play or go to a lecture.
At some point I’ve got to see how I hold myself back on purpose, so I’ll take the time to document what was previously undocumented back when I was in the House. It’s a selfish thing. To document what it’s like to be born in the House. What it’s like to recover from Abuse. Plus I have an adventurous-streak, a need to be in an adventure, one so adventurous it’s still interesting even when written down. A buffer between me and that final definition of life -- dust. It’s not true anymore that I write because I don’t trust myself to remember.
Timothy -- why did he have to be smarter than me about televisions? See how the high is fixing it. Feeling you need pot, IS a feeling; there’s nothing wrong with being dumb, killing the words, living like an animal, (sex sex sex).
Oh .. I was dumb. A slew of memories hits, like my life flashing before my eyes except I‘m shifting to them. I was slow. I remember how hard it was to learn to walk, the tricky feel of the area rugs, developing so slowly. I was easy to abuse .. This is all a strategy to survive. All this over education, all this defense, all this intellectual knowledge before I can self-trust. I was the Dumb one in the House, hence I was hurt the worst by the abuse, I remember now.
It’s strategy: that’s the final word. Evolution meets How equals Strategy. I can feel that. These sentences are my attempt to translate it into words. Life is a fight, and a fight is strategy.
So I’m dumb, and always was. That’s not so bad, it’s not impossible to live with. There’s a wisdom in being so dumb. Like how in the old westerns with Clint Eastwood, how with reverence he described the seemingly-dumb Native Americans as knowing the Old Ways.
It was Pride that refused me as Dumb. My reaction to the idea was sheer violence. Child abuse preys on Dumb, sexual abuse relies on it. I reacted to my own innocence, my own Dumbness, with sheer violence, hate, rage, self-destruction.
I don’t trust the dumb one. The Dumb Masculinity I used to chase, the Him I used to feel was me but taken from me.
So this is church, then? These marijuana sessions.
__________
A lot has happened, some I can’t wrap my brain around. In the past, it would take a lot of writing to hash it all out, as opposed to being stuck with the flow of emotions my psyche can’t understand.
It’s hard to allow myself to act the way I really am. I go out of my way to act intelligent, as a defense. It was the fact that I was dumb that I fell right into child molesters’ schemes. I’ve always been on the dumb side of things, my whole life, always had to fight harder than everyone else. I know I’m from horrific and there’s nothing harder but that’s no excuse. I’m Him, I can shift to anything and still cooly keep a smooth How. I know I can.
__________
I had helped J__ for two days with his landscaping job at a local church. There are some things that have to be done once a year -- trimming, putting down straw, shaping hedges -- and he needed my help to catch up. I spent the night at their house so through face book I let someone I’d deployed with know I’d be in that town that night, in case he wanted to grab a drink.
The first night we couldn’t do it, because the baseball game he was at ran late. So the following evening, after all the landscaping was done and I would soon be on my way home, we met at a franchise sports bar.
He was one of those twenty-somethings who looked like he was nineteen. He wore a sleeveless shirt and necklace that he had gotten while in Puerto Rico post deployment.
During deployment K__ made fun of him a lot, considered him a cocky, insecure loser. I don’t know why I was in the cool group and Timothy wasn’t as far as K__ was concerned, but because we came from the same town I kept an eye on him during deployment.
After what happened with Adam, and how bad his post-deployment period was, I felt the need to check on Timothy. I basically told him that, when we first sat down, by telling the story of what had happened with Adam, and how his whole family had fallen apart right in front of me, mainly due to the deployment and their lack of age.
He seemed so on edge, he made me feel on edge. He would rarely look me in the eye unless I made him laugh; he kept stealing looks at everything around us, especially people walking by and attractive girls. Thing is, he was on edge before we actually deployed, he just has one of those personalities that’s really cocky and is always hiding behind cockiness. The lack of honesty inherent in that setup makes clicking with him difficult.
I remembered how earlier that day J__ had mentioned House, and I asked him how he knew so quickly that House wasn’t a good idea to have around.
_The way he wouldn’t look you in the eye,_ J__ had said, _He had a kind of act he played, a kind of routine, I knew he was trouble._
_They why couldn’t I see that?_
_Because you wanted to like him._
He was good looking, young, healthy, seemed to have everything relevant going for him. It was as if at some point he’d been hurt so badly that he remained on edge ever since. He seemed to treat Life as a challenge to be overcome, something to be kept at bay and fought against instead of lived, the living to him was in Being, and he couldn’t see anything beyond that. At least, that’s what I saw.
After pleasantries we exchanged post-deployment stories. He said he’d come back and everyone in town had been gracious. I noticed how he wore tattoos signifying that he was a veteran, and how easily he’d tell people he’d just gotten back from deployment.
He said the low point was when he’d had a hard time finding a job, and that at one point he’d gotten into an argument with his dad and his dad had kicked him out.
The way he described his parents they didn’t sound so great. Things started looking up when he got work, he made a deal with his parents and was allowed to move back in. His main identifier was that he was a veteran from Iraq, and he held on to that, and that’s how he fit in to town and the community. He threw the first pitch at the local baseball game on the fourth of July.
_I had a girlfriend from October when I came home on leave, to March. That’s not bad, that’s a good run,_ he said. He was like W__, one of those guys who’d use sex with women as a kind of measurement of his successfulness in life.
I told him that my main problem post-deployment was that I couldn’t get inebriated after deployment, and got as far as coke. I didn’t explain to him that once I’d gotten as far as coke and saw on a chart online what a dangerous drug that was, I then trusted myself.
I didn’t tell him about the shock of getting high at customs, and remaining high all through deMOB, and all the shifting, shifting, shifting, from one flashback to the next, even weeks after having gotten off the bus to Ms J__ and Br__, was so stunning that I had to fight hard, fight to remember everything, fight to get a hold of myself, fight to keep my psyche from being murdered by horrific memories.
He wanted to know if we had any mutual friends in town. He asked me what high school I’d gone to. I told him I never went to high school. What middle school then? I never went to middle school; the last grade I completed was sixth. It’s nice being able to tell the truth and still remain Him. It requires a certain sense of humor, a certain roll of the eyes, like isn’t life funny how harrowing it can be ..
He told me he was allowing his military contract to run out, which surprised me. Then I understood. The military had done him wrong, as it had most of us. We were young guys so we had wanted to be soldiers. While we were young we experienced soldier-hood properly, but when we got older we couldn’t help but see through the American military, being the wealthiest, being the most overpowering in size and strength on the planet, attracting a superficially-oriented leadership.
It was one thing to be a soldier, it was another to be a soldier of a middle-class country ran like an empire by a wealthy elite.
Afterwards we went to Best Buy, to look at televisions. He wanted to show me the difference between an LCD and an LED, which he bought post-deployment. I’d bought a plasma. He had to be the guy who Knows More, he liked being in that role. I understood that someone like him would only feel safe in that role.
We talked some more but finally it was time to go. On the drive back to J__’s where I was to pick up my bags before driving home, I felt the anxiety in me rising. It bothered me to see him so on-edge. The second person I’d met post-deployment was also doing just as bad as the first. The military, deployments, the idea of war, is a lot for the young to deal with while their psyches remain intact. I remembered Joe from when I was in Qatar, W__ when he got back from the first deployment and even still now.
When I got to J__’s house only Ms J__ and Br__ were still up, so it was easy to grab my bags and say good night. Ms J__ wanted me to spend the night but I said I couldn’t, and she easily allowed that.
I tried not to think on the ninety minute drive home, tried to just drive and drive only. The plan was for me to go home and get high, so I could make sense of things without having to slowly write it all out.
__________
Joseph Gordon Levitt (from 500 Days of Summer) is looking in the camera. He’s hosting Saturday Night Live but whenever he has lines he looks into the camera as he’s trying to be funny. None of the other players do that, they look at the audience, in the direction of the camera, but still at the audience.
This always happens when I get high, the television opens up for me. It won’t be long before the stream of important, yet random thoughts starts up, and I’ll have to concentrate to pay attention.
I wanted to flip the channel at some point, but didn’t, because Minday Calin (the Indian girl from The Office) is hot to me, so I continued to watch SNL.
I loved television. Back in the House, it was one of the few escapes. I knew the names of the writers, the actors, the heads of networks. When I had access to films I loved them, too. I watched the Rosie O’Donnell show and felt at home with her love of television and films. She had used them the same way. Television and pot go well together. I need the miracle of it. That these people are actually in my life, that there’s a real connection, like how there is when you see a Broadway play or go to a lecture.
At some point I’ve got to see how I hold myself back on purpose, so I’ll take the time to document what was previously undocumented back when I was in the House. It’s a selfish thing. To document what it’s like to be born in the House. What it’s like to recover from Abuse. Plus I have an adventurous-streak, a need to be in an adventure, one so adventurous it’s still interesting even when written down. A buffer between me and that final definition of life -- dust. It’s not true anymore that I write because I don’t trust myself to remember.
Timothy -- why did he have to be smarter than me about televisions? See how the high is fixing it. Feeling you need pot, IS a feeling; there’s nothing wrong with being dumb, killing the words, living like an animal, (sex sex sex).
Oh .. I was dumb. A slew of memories hits, like my life flashing before my eyes except I‘m shifting to them. I was slow. I remember how hard it was to learn to walk, the tricky feel of the area rugs, developing so slowly. I was easy to abuse .. This is all a strategy to survive. All this over education, all this defense, all this intellectual knowledge before I can self-trust. I was the Dumb one in the House, hence I was hurt the worst by the abuse, I remember now.
It’s strategy: that’s the final word. Evolution meets How equals Strategy. I can feel that. These sentences are my attempt to translate it into words. Life is a fight, and a fight is strategy.
So I’m dumb, and always was. That’s not so bad, it’s not impossible to live with. There’s a wisdom in being so dumb. Like how in the old westerns with Clint Eastwood, how with reverence he described the seemingly-dumb Native Americans as knowing the Old Ways.
It was Pride that refused me as Dumb. My reaction to the idea was sheer violence. Child abuse preys on Dumb, sexual abuse relies on it. I reacted to my own innocence, my own Dumbness, with sheer violence, hate, rage, self-destruction.
I don’t trust the dumb one. The Dumb Masculinity I used to chase, the Him I used to feel was me but taken from me.
So this is church, then? These marijuana sessions.
__________
7
(Saturday, 10JUL2010)
_It s hard to introduce someone to coke,_ Adam was saying. He had already been doing lines in another room with Jimmy s roommate, another young drug dealer. _Some people just can t let go of the experience once they ve tried it._
It didn t take me long to understand that Jimmy s roommate was trying to make an addict out of me, hence all the free coke. But I have my own qualities, so I wasn t afraid.
I did four lines in each nostril, through a rolled up twenty that had to be set farther up my nose than I had thought reasonable.
It was challenging. While the weed is a depressant, pulling me down from the feeling-too-much numb place, coke is the opposite. The coke simply undid what the weed had done, and I was back to my normal self, lots of words in my mind, a strong curiosity, an adventurous tendency. I felt my heartbeat quickening, and understood what the coke was doing, but it didn t last more than a couple of hours, and I was fine again.
Finally, Jimmy acquired the quarter pound; I paid, then said goodbye to all the potheads I desperately did not want to become, and drove to a parking lot.
I took some time to wrap each ounce well in one sealed plastic bag after another, then unscrewed pieces of my car and hid the bags inside. Then I started the all-night drive home.
__________
(Sunday, 11JUL2010)
I have this vague idea of getting high as little as possible, as regularly as possible. So I roll nine joints, set my laptop near me, and begin watching television on the fifty two inch plasma I got after deployment.
Mental damage is extra on the mind, the high showed me. Once it s damaged off, the mind is clean again. I didn t know that s how the word 'damaged' worked.
I went downstairs and played the piano well for awhile, as I sipped on Guinness. It was maybe the best I ve ever played.
The high had me wondering about Autism, how my parents told people I had it, how those with Autism develop a very unique perception of the world, and have a strong knack for music.
The thought process never really went anywhere, and the piano music took over.
__________
(Monday, 12JUL2010) coming down..
In New Jersey I would ve felt dirtied by the experience, but I knew I d write out the true perception, my perception, and this would just be an experience I experienced. The _I_ stays Him.
Writing is my secret supplement. I m supposed to believe the words I write because they re true. If I believed them easily I wouldn t have to write them down. But when I wake in the morning from nightmares I always see the world through a negative lens.
Smoking is the sharpest, quickest way to make the switch, but I can also make the switch with my mind, if I concentrate, and remember the rules, and the world switches to the true one, the perception so different and strong it s like I m now living in a different context, and always have been.
This is what it was like when I was younger .. First out on my own, seventeen and eighteen years old. Sweet freedom. Unsustainable because my way of sustaining it -- not-remembering -- was naturally an immature way of handling things.
The side effect of the negative perception is always Fear. So to make the switch I always have to start with Brave.
It’s a terribly new sensation, to not only acknowledge each example of Being Brave I’ve lived, but to feel Brave on the inside. To feel my Soul on the other side of my skin.
I didn t realize that one word could change your life so completely. It s hard for me to know which word it is: it begins with Brave, but always ends with Confidence.
On the Brave end of the spectrum is a person fighting alone, against all odds, in the worst life has to offer. On the other end is this happy, easy, laughing, person.
I don t have any desire to smoke. It gets easier. And the marijuana I ve acquired is my security, in case something goes terribly wrong. I know that I will not fall into the depths, but will hold on, even if I have to supplement.
It s working.
__________
I watched Oprah incidentally as I worked. It was about the book Women Food and God. She had a hard time explaining what the book was alluding to.
At one point she tried to explain that holy moment that a human being has with him or herself, where that human being realizes their true self.
My moment was post-deployment, in the throes of the Shifting. I didn t know others had had holy moments, too. I wonder what they were like.
Meanwhile it makes me feel more natural that the human body is set up for the horrific; that it requires that much to self-realize.
I wondered about the people who hadn t self-realized yet, some of which were eating themselves to death because of it. All that pain they are expressing by doing that.
__________
Tuesday
I slept fourteen hours. The electricity went out during a long, violent rain storm in the middle of the night. I have no neighbors, and live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-style château, so it was like being in the Wild, or at Walden.
It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front my face. I had been in the middle of making marijuana tea but without electricity getting high was on hold.
I had to change my perspective a few times in order to remain Brave. When memories come during silence and stillness -- that has always been the worst. I know that it will have to become the best.
People don’t like to reckon with nature. It’s too real. So they have the TV on, or the radio, play and reckon with a game of business or finance or law, but not nature, because it’s too real to be a game. It is scary to be this alone in this much nature.
It’s why people allow themselves to be led. The leader deals with the real world, while the ones who follow have that much of a buffer between it and them.
My perspective switched to Nature being the Real world, and all the rest unReal, and I stayed Brave, like the guy from the film Into the Wild.
I catch myself asking What story are you in? in order that I know how to act. If I simply stay in the correct perspective, I’m always in the correct story.
The true perspective is that I am the Boy and regardless what comes my way I’ll be Brave, because I never had a choice, seems like, whether I know words like Nature, or UnReal, or not.
__________
When I feel this relaxed my first impulse is to get ready for bed, then go to sleep. Now that I’m this relaxed all the time, I have to think a little harder, learn how to live while not high on self-imposed adrenaline.
I’ve been living with high adrenaline pumping through my veins throughout the House, and the years after, but now I don’t need to be in such a survival-mode. I’m not a kid anymore, I’m an adult, I’ve got this.
Since doing coke I wonder if what I’m going through is the same as what someone trying to lose their addiction to coke is going through -- learning to function while relaxed.
I noticed that when I come down what used to feel like fear feels like pain instead. I feel my heart hurt, I know which new memories caused the pain, and I’m not afraid of the pain. That way it’s like I don’t really come down from the high, my body does instead.
I notice the marijuana has been good for my complexion.
So this is happiness .. Allowing yourself to be happy IS happiness.
The two shifts are a choice I can make while watching TV whether high or not: believe the acting or watch the actors.
In the end it’s like I was repressing desire. It’s the soul’s language but I felt mine might be tainted. I know that testosterone is the hormone of desire. I know my evolutionary properties, and how I am who I am regardless. I have to trust the world to continue molding me into an ever-present Him. That’s a difficult trust to ask of me.
There is no such thing as a machine. Presence is required always. That solves a lot of the mysteries in life.
Maybe that’s why Adam says my highs are so different. I never lose my psyche, or the ability to articulate. I feel like there is a value in presence. He told me he smokes to get inebriated.
__________
I got this email from the unmarried of the five sisters, Br___:
Hey.......so I got kinda a weird question for you. Would you like to go to the beach with me June 30 -Aug 1? Just for the weekend .. I'm checking to see if the house we usually rent is available that weekend. It's a 3 bedroom older house, so you'd have your own room. I really need a break from life and I don't particularly want to go with any of my friends (seems like everyone is having drama with their husbands and I'm not feeling drama right now) and I need a break from the family. And I guess I'm a p-ssy cause I don't really want to go by myself. I'll pay for the house, you wouldn't have to worry about that. Think about???
I felt cornered, like I always do concerning her. So I sent her this back:
Sounds cool, I've been in the mood for the beach lately anyway. Meanwhile, I'm gay. I didn't know if you had picked up on that already. If I tell people too late I will hurt people's feelings by accident, while if I tell people too early can seem very not-self-honoring.
She sent this back:
LOL.....r you serious? before i say anything stupid, your not playing a joke on me r u? .. anyway, I kinda had a feeling you were .. I'm cool with that. I really hate labels .. so I don't define myself as gay, straight, or bisexual, but I mostly date women. i just assumed daddy had talked to you about me. does anyone in the family know? daddy? ma?
I don’t believe her all the way. I’ve met lesbians before, ones with girlfriends and everything, and have still been hit on them by them. Plus there’s that time when I was helping her dad move her out of her apartment. That night I was to sleep on the couch but then she came downstairs and told me I could sleep in her bed if I wanted to. I declined .. So it’s careful treading.
Now I’m the gay guy even though I’m not. Plus I’m going to the beach with a lesbian who thinks I’m gay. It seemed the only way to handle things, but now feels a little ridiculous.
I’m helping her dad, J__, tomorrow with a landscaping job. I’m going to spend the night at their house tonight so we can start early in the morning. It’s all a bit bizarre.
__________
_It s hard to introduce someone to coke,_ Adam was saying. He had already been doing lines in another room with Jimmy s roommate, another young drug dealer. _Some people just can t let go of the experience once they ve tried it._
It didn t take me long to understand that Jimmy s roommate was trying to make an addict out of me, hence all the free coke. But I have my own qualities, so I wasn t afraid.
I did four lines in each nostril, through a rolled up twenty that had to be set farther up my nose than I had thought reasonable.
It was challenging. While the weed is a depressant, pulling me down from the feeling-too-much numb place, coke is the opposite. The coke simply undid what the weed had done, and I was back to my normal self, lots of words in my mind, a strong curiosity, an adventurous tendency. I felt my heartbeat quickening, and understood what the coke was doing, but it didn t last more than a couple of hours, and I was fine again.
Finally, Jimmy acquired the quarter pound; I paid, then said goodbye to all the potheads I desperately did not want to become, and drove to a parking lot.
I took some time to wrap each ounce well in one sealed plastic bag after another, then unscrewed pieces of my car and hid the bags inside. Then I started the all-night drive home.
__________
(Sunday, 11JUL2010)
I have this vague idea of getting high as little as possible, as regularly as possible. So I roll nine joints, set my laptop near me, and begin watching television on the fifty two inch plasma I got after deployment.
Mental damage is extra on the mind, the high showed me. Once it s damaged off, the mind is clean again. I didn t know that s how the word 'damaged' worked.
I went downstairs and played the piano well for awhile, as I sipped on Guinness. It was maybe the best I ve ever played.
The high had me wondering about Autism, how my parents told people I had it, how those with Autism develop a very unique perception of the world, and have a strong knack for music.
The thought process never really went anywhere, and the piano music took over.
__________
(Monday, 12JUL2010) coming down..
In New Jersey I would ve felt dirtied by the experience, but I knew I d write out the true perception, my perception, and this would just be an experience I experienced. The _I_ stays Him.
Writing is my secret supplement. I m supposed to believe the words I write because they re true. If I believed them easily I wouldn t have to write them down. But when I wake in the morning from nightmares I always see the world through a negative lens.
Smoking is the sharpest, quickest way to make the switch, but I can also make the switch with my mind, if I concentrate, and remember the rules, and the world switches to the true one, the perception so different and strong it s like I m now living in a different context, and always have been.
This is what it was like when I was younger .. First out on my own, seventeen and eighteen years old. Sweet freedom. Unsustainable because my way of sustaining it -- not-remembering -- was naturally an immature way of handling things.
The side effect of the negative perception is always Fear. So to make the switch I always have to start with Brave.
It’s a terribly new sensation, to not only acknowledge each example of Being Brave I’ve lived, but to feel Brave on the inside. To feel my Soul on the other side of my skin.
I didn t realize that one word could change your life so completely. It s hard for me to know which word it is: it begins with Brave, but always ends with Confidence.
On the Brave end of the spectrum is a person fighting alone, against all odds, in the worst life has to offer. On the other end is this happy, easy, laughing, person.
I don t have any desire to smoke. It gets easier. And the marijuana I ve acquired is my security, in case something goes terribly wrong. I know that I will not fall into the depths, but will hold on, even if I have to supplement.
It s working.
__________
I watched Oprah incidentally as I worked. It was about the book Women Food and God. She had a hard time explaining what the book was alluding to.
At one point she tried to explain that holy moment that a human being has with him or herself, where that human being realizes their true self.
My moment was post-deployment, in the throes of the Shifting. I didn t know others had had holy moments, too. I wonder what they were like.
Meanwhile it makes me feel more natural that the human body is set up for the horrific; that it requires that much to self-realize.
I wondered about the people who hadn t self-realized yet, some of which were eating themselves to death because of it. All that pain they are expressing by doing that.
__________
Tuesday
I slept fourteen hours. The electricity went out during a long, violent rain storm in the middle of the night. I have no neighbors, and live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-style château, so it was like being in the Wild, or at Walden.
It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand in front my face. I had been in the middle of making marijuana tea but without electricity getting high was on hold.
I had to change my perspective a few times in order to remain Brave. When memories come during silence and stillness -- that has always been the worst. I know that it will have to become the best.
People don’t like to reckon with nature. It’s too real. So they have the TV on, or the radio, play and reckon with a game of business or finance or law, but not nature, because it’s too real to be a game. It is scary to be this alone in this much nature.
It’s why people allow themselves to be led. The leader deals with the real world, while the ones who follow have that much of a buffer between it and them.
My perspective switched to Nature being the Real world, and all the rest unReal, and I stayed Brave, like the guy from the film Into the Wild.
I catch myself asking What story are you in? in order that I know how to act. If I simply stay in the correct perspective, I’m always in the correct story.
The true perspective is that I am the Boy and regardless what comes my way I’ll be Brave, because I never had a choice, seems like, whether I know words like Nature, or UnReal, or not.
__________
When I feel this relaxed my first impulse is to get ready for bed, then go to sleep. Now that I’m this relaxed all the time, I have to think a little harder, learn how to live while not high on self-imposed adrenaline.
I’ve been living with high adrenaline pumping through my veins throughout the House, and the years after, but now I don’t need to be in such a survival-mode. I’m not a kid anymore, I’m an adult, I’ve got this.
Since doing coke I wonder if what I’m going through is the same as what someone trying to lose their addiction to coke is going through -- learning to function while relaxed.
I noticed that when I come down what used to feel like fear feels like pain instead. I feel my heart hurt, I know which new memories caused the pain, and I’m not afraid of the pain. That way it’s like I don’t really come down from the high, my body does instead.
I notice the marijuana has been good for my complexion.
So this is happiness .. Allowing yourself to be happy IS happiness.
The two shifts are a choice I can make while watching TV whether high or not: believe the acting or watch the actors.
In the end it’s like I was repressing desire. It’s the soul’s language but I felt mine might be tainted. I know that testosterone is the hormone of desire. I know my evolutionary properties, and how I am who I am regardless. I have to trust the world to continue molding me into an ever-present Him. That’s a difficult trust to ask of me.
There is no such thing as a machine. Presence is required always. That solves a lot of the mysteries in life.
Maybe that’s why Adam says my highs are so different. I never lose my psyche, or the ability to articulate. I feel like there is a value in presence. He told me he smokes to get inebriated.
__________
I got this email from the unmarried of the five sisters, Br___:
Hey.......so I got kinda a weird question for you. Would you like to go to the beach with me June 30 -Aug 1? Just for the weekend .. I'm checking to see if the house we usually rent is available that weekend. It's a 3 bedroom older house, so you'd have your own room. I really need a break from life and I don't particularly want to go with any of my friends (seems like everyone is having drama with their husbands and I'm not feeling drama right now) and I need a break from the family. And I guess I'm a p-ssy cause I don't really want to go by myself. I'll pay for the house, you wouldn't have to worry about that. Think about???
I felt cornered, like I always do concerning her. So I sent her this back:
Sounds cool, I've been in the mood for the beach lately anyway. Meanwhile, I'm gay. I didn't know if you had picked up on that already. If I tell people too late I will hurt people's feelings by accident, while if I tell people too early can seem very not-self-honoring.
She sent this back:
LOL.....r you serious? before i say anything stupid, your not playing a joke on me r u? .. anyway, I kinda had a feeling you were .. I'm cool with that. I really hate labels .. so I don't define myself as gay, straight, or bisexual, but I mostly date women. i just assumed daddy had talked to you about me. does anyone in the family know? daddy? ma?
I don’t believe her all the way. I’ve met lesbians before, ones with girlfriends and everything, and have still been hit on them by them. Plus there’s that time when I was helping her dad move her out of her apartment. That night I was to sleep on the couch but then she came downstairs and told me I could sleep in her bed if I wanted to. I declined .. So it’s careful treading.
Now I’m the gay guy even though I’m not. Plus I’m going to the beach with a lesbian who thinks I’m gay. It seemed the only way to handle things, but now feels a little ridiculous.
I’m helping her dad, J__, tomorrow with a landscaping job. I’m going to spend the night at their house tonight so we can start early in the morning. It’s all a bit bizarre.
__________
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