11

(Friday, 25JUN2010)
　
(sitting on the floor of the train station, leaning against the wall)

Mostly what I see is people I’d never do.
So families are truly separate, I think to myself. Each family is its own world, with its own perception of what’s good looking, what’s successful. Each family only allows a choice few into their world, their culture, their race, their religion, what the truth is for them.
When a man gigs or insults another man, he’s insulting more than just the individual, but his whole family, and lineage, and heritage, all the way back through evolution. I get that now.
It’s like the others aren’t a part of the human race, since obviously they inevitably won’t be. Careful, I think to myself, this is the road Hitler went down to never return.
I know I’m still high, one way or another.
So life and death is happening all around. With each person who walks by: No. No. No. Maybe. Yes. No. Yes. No. No. No. Yes. It’s not just sex, it’s the qualities, the way they walk, the way they handle themselves, their How.
Why is it so much harder now? I ask myself. Because things are getting more and familiar as you make your way down South. Switch it back, b, switch it back. It’s like I’m silently casting a spell, silently enacting each rule until, until .. And there it is, the world flips to true again.
I take my seat on the train and drift to sleep intermittently. I have these half dreams where I’m acting Italian or Sicilian like in The Godfather movies. I’m acting all the way Male, aggressive, loud, like a bull in a china shop, and the New Yorkers around me respond. In the scene it’s like I’m doing some kind of crowd control in a burly thick Jersey accent.
This version of me I see on the other side of my eyelids is a hot head. Quick to laugh, joke, and fight. The me I am now is calm calm calm, disciplined with my muscles tensed to the point of constant relaxation. I’m quiet, letting my movements, manner, and ways do all the talking.
I’m more attractive kind, strong, Him. As opposed to the aggressive version I keep seeing when I close my eyes.
So it was a natural choice to repress, to take control, to choose who I was. It was a natural choice to not allow one ugly quality to make me less attractive.
I raised myself to adopt a certain manner, a certain way of moving my eyes and lips to express myself, an attractive way, the opposite of the ugliness of the House. Huh.
Anger, hate, those negative passions -- ugly ugly ugly. Back then I understood that Good and Good Looking were seamless and the same thing, two sides of the same coin.
The memories are strong but also the awareness of how I took advantage of those memories. Like how I knew to read the Greats in secret while being abused -- I knew how to make the story clean again, advantageous to me again, even if the only advantage was to grow up and be able to say: I come from horrific, and have lived a tumultuous existence, and no matter how long I live it will always be a Brave existence, time will never change that.
I remember when I was in the chow hall with W__ toward the end of the deployment, how I referred to my past as a tumultuous existence and he said he wished he could say that, and he seemed to mean it, as if he’d give his right arm for the privilege to say it.
My easy acceptance of the Abuse and my casual, instinctual, intuitive dance with it make me seem just as bad as them, how I fought back as if it were all so natural. I know I was horrific to have survived it, I just hadn’t realized or remembered that easy-horrific-dance until now.
So the forgetting, the repression, the numbness, were all horrific choices I made as part of that dance. I had thought up till now they were things that had just happened to me, as if my body and its survival mechanisms were somehow separate from me.
I really hadn’t known this stuff. It’s a miracle: that sixteen year old who couldn’t remember anything before the age of twelve.
A miraculously horrific choice to forget, because only the grown me could’ve handled this knowledge, these memories.
I made horrific choices in order to sustain my self. Apollo IS the Toughness, that’s for sure. I was him for a long, long time, until I felt the tug to be Raw instead, like how K__ is, effortlessly Himself.
Turns out Dionysius had more than just raw emotion, raw self expression, but raw memories, too.
It’s hard to admit that I knew exactly what I was doing, dancing so gracefully, as if the horrific were not separate from me, as if it were just as natural as me. I did this on purpose, raising myself so brutally.
So I don’t need to change. I became this person on purpose, according to the rules and wordless poetry that evolution knows and follows.
So the question is, did it work? Yes. What do I have to show for? I wonder about my quick answer of yes. I can’t see how it could’ve been any other way. I did my best, even subconsciously, and instinctually, and intuitively, I did my best. There was nothing else I could do, evolution and Nature was running me even when I didn’t have the age or strength or intellect to run myself.
Every choice I made was the most advantageous one, so I had to make that choice that way. It’s like all along I was just being compelled by Nature, owned by its rules, an experiencer along for the ride, able to actually take credit for little, while trusting he has nothing to prove, because he is Brave.
Am I even myself? A soul at all? Or just the latest product of evolution. It seems that every choice I’ve made, every thought I’ve ever had has all been to ensure my own happiness which translates into procreation.
But I remember that the Soul came first, it chooses the perception and creates the physical, not the other way around.
I was first. Him was first.
Me; then this life.

__________

　
I savage the roaches and roll fresh joints in the train bathroom. Adam said it would take awhile for me to learn to roll descent joints, but here I am, the floor moving wildly below me, and my fingertips steady, ginger.
I want to smoke before dealing with J__ and Ms J__’s family, got to, but I can’t get in Ms J__’s van reeking of pot, I just can’t. So I got to go over the rules again, hold onto them with much less help.
Just be Brave, B, I think to myself, as I look in the mirror. Switch the world back to the truth, flip the stories and your perception, and hold it there, all on your own. You can do it, Baby Boy ..
It’s getting to the point where being Brave and being high are becoming the same thing. The weed helps, teaches me relaxation and makes me familiar with how an anxiety-free existence feels, but I can be Brave all on my own.
When the train arrives at my destination I tell myself that the rules will be more difficult now, will be more important, because I’ll be in familiar territory surrounded by people who knew me before I Remembered. You just have to hold on.
Looks like I’m going to a cookout tonight, celebrating a family member‘s graduation from high school.
The unmarried sister is a hard one to navigate around. She implies through texts that it’s a family gathering but really it’s her trying to come across to others as my girlfriend. It’s all so awkward ..
Ms J__ picked me up from the train station, then asked me if I had a woman in New York and that’s why I was going up there so much.
_I meet a lot of people up there,_ I replied.
At the cookout I avoid the circle of adult talking by saying yes when one of the kids asks me to play outside with them. Before, I thought the adults in this family cheery and immature. Now I see they’re simply in genuine to each other.
Turns out there’s a lot of bad blood in this family, especially between the sisters. Due to the status quo they’re not really allowed to dislike each other openly, to openly conversate, resolve issues.
Instead they just make these scenes that are intended to embarrass the other person more than communicate with them.
The cookout is fun but I feel behind. I’ve got three little notebooks full of need-to-be-typed writings, and I know there will be more because I have more joints in my bag.
I feel like if I don’t keep up with what the high teaches me my brain would fry, my original psyche lost forever, replaced by this generalized stoner one.
It’s the same way I feel about stopping writing in general. It feels detrimental, like I would lose my connection to the holy spirit world; I would just remain completely physical and happy and in the moment, death and holy spirits only a rumor I run across every once in awhile.

__________