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Saturday 8MAY2010

In New York. I went running first, trying to figure the neighborhood out, since I understood I'd be coming up to stay in this hotel a lot.
After running I went to this Bagel shop run by Arabs. It was the first time I saw them and didn't think about Iraq and what they were like over there. These were New Yorkers, not Arabs.
I just want someone to talk to.
I went to the Guggenheim. When I first stepped in they took my bag. My intent had been to take sixteen pills and then wonder around the Met a few hours later, sipping on the rest of the Gatorade bottle full of Merlot. I wanted to have an experience, a true distraction, but I cut the time close because the Guggenheim had closeted my bag so I didn't have the pills with me whenever I went into a latrine.
Latrines are hard to find in New York. So I wasn't high when I got down the street to the Met. I ended up reaching into my bag while on the steps of the Met and taking the sixteen pills hopefully inconspicuously.
No dark drinks were allowed in the Met. The woman just inside the Met made me drink the whole Gatorade bottle of merlot as if it were purple Gatorade, her not realizing. I knew it was sacrilegious to drink decent wine this way. I had to be careful not to vomit.

I'm so high and drunk at the Met. I prefer the sculptures to the paintings. I prefer the materials for some reason. It had never been like that before. I had to sit down as the high's first wave hit. Just inside the Met they played bluegrass, good bluegrass. I'm happy in this moment. I'm waiting for the jarring switch of being high to end. It'll smooth out, I just have to relax.
I was on a train, a f_cking train.
I watched people walk by and started thinking it was funny. A new way of looking at people. When a woman walked by I didn't see her as a woman but a v_gina. And as a man walked by I didn't see him as a man but a p_nis. V_gina V_gina. P_nis. V_gina. P_nis P_nis. V_gina.
When people started wearing clothing that's when they started building the story in their minds of why they weren't animals, then they started building buildings to prove it, then they started building culture, writing history books, erecting
cities. They forgot they were going to die.
There's no escaping Reality. I'm in a room where a woman is holding out her hands to paintings and referring to them as Picasso's dark period: supposedly where he depicted scenes of the poor in London.
But I see royalty. That's what I saw when I first saw the paintings. A woman ironing, the shades of the painting in shades of grey and black. How can the others around me not see that? It's so obvious. How could it be possible that someone could see it any other way? Her absolute Bravery.
There are these tall wooden pillars with shapes cut into their sides. They are smoothly cut into but the structures look primal, archaic. Anything manipulated is art. Someone's hands touched it.
Made art is simply something other than it was. Raising a child can be art. Taking compounds and making them something other than what Nature had done with them. Manipulating them into a crude pillar with sharp cuts and etchings that maybe mean nothing but are different than how nature made the stone, or the wood. Art. Manipulating the compounds into a fine automobile. Art.
I have to sit as a wave of drunkenness hits. There's a difference between compounds and ions. I read it on Wikipedia. The world is made of both. They see a dead planet. Mars, Jupiter, Mercury. I can see the Life in it. There's two kinds of life.
She's holding on to this theory that there's such a thing as an evil child. That there's a such thing as a Bad child. It's still rape due to the vulnerability of the baby. Who rapes a baby? Only the lowest of the low.
It's like she was against us - that was the abuse. Break free, break free, the art is telling me. But you never break free, you are compounds for eternity.
She experienced us as if we were Bad kids.
I step through the Korean rooms, I go deep into the Soul place, back to the Mongolians way deep in my heritage: tell me something true I say to them. I feel the connection instead.
I just want someone to talk to. I want to tell the story of the train. That's too weird. That's too much. The person I am. And on Mother's Day weekend?
I gave her little respect I suppose. I didn't know it was Mother's day when I planned the last minute New York trip, I didn't even buy her a card. I set Ms J__'s plant on her front door step without a card, just drove off to the train station. I was in a hurry.
So art is how you can live forever. To make something so skillfully no one could bring themselves to throw it away, year after year, home after home, century after century, until finally it found its way into a museum.
Language is so primal I can hear it now. It's just sound manipulated by air and tongue. It seems to get down to that level ,down to the molecules and atoms. Am I still me even when the compound is that small? Yes. Just hold tight. What if all I am is just a sound? A voice? Be Brave.
The high will make my tongue seem thick, my mouth seem dry. The side effects can be rough.
Forgive me, for I am only twenty seven.
What do you see? I ask myself so the sway will stop. I see ions and compounds and the swinging stops and I accept the existence of live dust.
So yourself is a work of art, manipulating the physical into the soulful.
The soulful is what's Real. Tolle kept saying that. It's the one on the inside, experiencing this life, not the life itself.
No wonder they worshipped idols. Compounds respectfully made into art. The promise the compounds had: we will still be here long long after you're gone.
The physical world has its own holiness, their own eternal power. That building accosting me when House got me high at DeMob at Fort ____.
Certainly they knew the idols had no magic or power. They simply afforded a great respect to the point of bowing before them. The one bowing was an ion destined to die, the other was a compound eternal.
I think about my great grandfather's judgment of me. I did good. I never let it go, I always felt there was something important unfinished, something not legitimized or qualified by memory, just a strong gut feeling, just a something.
I listened to the Earth, I listened to my compounds instead of my story -- the one where I’m sixteen and can’t remember anything before the age of twelve -- and I didn't get lost in the clouds. I chose Him and the finality he implies. But I'm old now, and a bit of a mess, and my skin is scarred ..
I'm walking back from the Met still thinking about them worshipping idols. But being animals is easy, even debasing, why would they worship that? They're not, they're respecting it. Respecting the Reality that they are not compounds but ions. They're respecting Reality, the horrific final beauty of it.
Meanwhile they're trying to be Him or Her. To concentrate on their souls, so they can self-realize the part of them that lives forever.
That's worship. That's what they've mistaken worship for? Remembering that they are Hims and Hers.
So Him is what they've been calling God. But I am Him. So the whole time I was God. Is. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I am the Father when I'm older, the Son now, and the Holy Spirit when I'm dead and before I was alive. I wanted to laugh that the Christianity the sexual abusers had crammed into my skull amounted to such a simple concept.
So my home isn't here, mine is with the gods. There's more than one? Maybe; if so I am the god of Brave. And if there are more than one gods of Brave then I am their brother and my name is B.
Why did I come here? Become physical? Why did I leap out from the Who Knows place? You remember, because you wanted to be Brave; insisted you could do it and that it was your right to make that bet.
And what does God do? He writes the Bible. It's been written so many times, by so many people in so many cultures ..
I walk past a guy who looks like a gentler version of the model Ian___. He looks at me approvingly; I look away, embarrassed that he might have assumed I was gay. He smiled, as if it were funny, my embarrassment, as if there was something ignorant about it, something he could only brush off.
.. So I am all things, all stories, all ions, all compounds, alive and dead at the same time. Just like Tolle taught, and Chi. I can see the world through all eyes because it's all mine, not just my one story. When I Respect and Remember and say the words I am Him. I am the Son, just as was Jesus Christ and Muhammad, the world comes into sharp focus, every detail, each of my senses.
I know I’m high.
Turning out to not be Him is the fall from Grace. Forgiveness is what keeps each moment new: a blank slate, so you can continue on as Him. Continue on as your soul instead of an ion that’s going to die.
The world becomes as sharp and in focus as when R__ was raping me. It was like some promise I felt when he was raping me. I would stare at the fuse box, the one up high crudely painted peach. That R__ was not god. He wasn't the end all. He didn't decide the definitions. I wasn't god, because I was little boy and couldn‘t understand. So there must be someone else stronger than the both of us. I didn't know it was my older self; I thought it was a god like the Christian god. The reason why Jesus' life is not told until he turns twelve is because it's not until twelve or so that you begin to feel your Self.
.. so I'm holy.

__________

It's the next day and I'm sitting in CityField watching the Mets/Giants game. _Well, anything's better than Shea stadium,_ I overheard someone say. I like this side of town, they act normal here. I thought that shows like Sex and the City were full of caricature versions of Northerners. I didn't realize they actually acted like that in real life. But this side of town the people are normal.
I like New York, it's age, that connection. Not like the modern cities, cheap in their newness, as if the city were bought at a Wal-Mart. In New York the floors creak, the stairs groan.
(watching baseball players) A strong imagination lets me be the batter as he bats, lets me be the pitcher as he pitches. .. movements I could feel in my bones.

__________

The day after the baseball game I took the train back South. There’s nothing glamorous about Penn station, though it’s only a few blocks from Grand Central.
When I stepped off the train eight hours later it turns out there had been drama while I was gone.
I had beat out all the daughters as far as Mother’s Day gifts went; I bought her a potted plant of yellow roses. But I also had dropped off the Jeep at the last minute, without much explanation but a voice mail to J__ who works twelve hour shifts and doesn‘t cross paths with his family regularly.
I didn’t think it a big deal but the family was insulted that I had taken a cab from their house to the train station and that I had intended to take a cab from the train station back to their house. I should’ve asked them for a ride, they said. I was too independent, they said. I was rudely independent.
I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings.
They said they know their family is mostly women and they know I treat women the same way I do my mother -- casually, freely, with no hint of obligation or conformity to a family structure.
I was high and didn’t know it. I had taken the sixteen pills days ago but they were still in me.
When I know it, it’s fun, because I have to be so present to pull it off and not get caught being high. When I don’t know it, it’s terrible because I’ve failed yet again to be present, to pay attention.
Ms J__ asked me about the random voicemail I’d left for J___ about how my biological mother had been on the train and it was too weird, like something out of a movie.
I told her it was nothing out of the ordinary, but I talked a lot; I didn’t know I was still high.
I smoothed things over, I suppose. Ironically that night they watched a movie called Night at the Museum, a comedy about the Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The baby started crying and I picked it up. It stopped crying. I've got a way with kids, J___ said.
I know it's kind of obvious but I didn't expect it to be articulated out loud. It seemed like an unfortunate trait, considering my history.

__________