7

(Wednesday, 23JUN2010)

I chose to walk the forty blocks to the Museum of Natural History because my mind was still processing the highs of the last few days and I thought a long walk with my notebook might help clear it out.
The weather in New York was ridiculously beautiful these past few days -- breezy, cool, refreshing. The breeze smelled of ocean salt. It was why I stayed in the flea markets on Saturday and kept playing with Adam’s kid outside. Anything to be outside.
I didn’t know that all the words were alluding to the physical. That what the spiritualists called ‘centered’ was actually the tightening of the buttocks, then abs, causing your energy to relaxingly flow from your center.
The word was alluding to the physical all along. It takes discipline, feels disciplined. I didn’t know that this is what the Drill Sergeants were alluding to always talking about discipline, harping on discipline, as if it were something impossible to explain or teach, but was something we as young privates would find out about one day, now that we were in the military.
I didn’t know that grounded meant being physically aware of your feet against the ground, the ground and its presence as a companion you can’t escape. It’s like me and the ground are having a dance. I can feel its pulling hard against my feet, especially after so many blocks of walking. A hundred and seventy five pounds of pressure pulling on the soles of my feet.
No matter what, we live off the land, off the ground, off nature. It keeps us alive, sometimes like a gift, and other times like a ball and chain.
I stopped at a coffee shop that turned out to have the best burgers so far. I continued to write as I ate. I have to save my life, no matter how unique I look.
There’s a guy my age sitting near me, reading. Everyone’s always reading when they eat alone, I have yet to see someone writing. Their latrine was in the basement and seemed rarely used. I smoked another joint. New York is regulating my weed intake by not allowing many opportunities to smoke.
Another thing about being stoned is I’m not a slave to weather. I’m always comfortable. People around me are commenting about how hot it is when it’s not.
It’s like the buds make me brave enough to relax. Brave enough to be happy. Confident despite Horrific.
The rules I follow for being high are the same rules I follow to remain high, so that they are the same rules I follow when I’m not affected by the weed, which makes it all the more seamless.
The other ones, the boys, they have traits and likes and senses of humor I find challenging to honor while being Him. Like how the preteen likes classical music, which doesn’t seem masculine, but if I gave it a minute, and try, the masculinity is always there.
The young man wants to see the ballet, now that he prefers physical art like sculptures and automobiles. Ballet dancers are probably aspiring to be shadows like the ones I saw and watched during the Addams Family musical. Maybe that’s true.
The littlest boy likes stories. It scares me, all the fiction I used to understand the truth. It’s scary that what seems true is just what I’m mistaking for the physical, when the physical is created, perceived, and decided by the shadows. To me ending up a writer is worst case scenario, I don’t really know why.
I didn’t fight A__ and H__, I fought as little as possible, and they lost respect for me. That’s always been our dynamic. I didn’t fight because I was testing them, not them testing me. I had nothing to prove, identity wise. It couldn’t be that the truth was decided by bullies. I refused to accept that idea when I was a little boy.
They were winning fights and assuming they were Good because no one stronger had come along to stop them. I didn’t want to live like that. It’s a CHOICE to not abuse your children, to not bully, and they didn’t see it that way, didn’t choose anything, they were out-of-control; crazy.
What A__ and H__ didn’t understand was you don’t fight for right and wrong, but truth. At some point you have to self-reflect, be self-aware, or all is lost. Evil wins. At some point Apollo exists, at some point Apollo is required.
It’s ironic but makes sense that women’s culture -- the culture we have today since women are free here -- encourages the concept of live and let live. A society that is forced to act right isn’t as evolutionarily valuable as one where humans do right because they want to. Hence, live and let live is the ultimate test.
It feels like murder to know that the not-Hims and the not-Hers are supposed to die out, exited altogether from human evolution. I remember the first time I got high on weed, how it felt like I was murdering House by allowing the memories and my true perception, my true identity.
I’m in Central Park now, crossing to the other side where the museum is. A naturally attractive guy just ran by shirtless. You’ll meet someone, B, I promise, and they will be so beautiful, and you will be so attractive .. It’s hard to accept the fact that I’ve always been athletic and good looking. The Abuse allowed little chance for stories to validate those qualities. Yet it’s true and always has been.
When I get to know someone and I still perceive them as unattractive, it’s like I’ve subconsciously thought to myself: This person is beautiful, I just can’t see it, because they haven’t matured enough to blossom.
So I’m on the West side of Central Park .. the Momento-voice says in my head, That’s the game today, I guess, figuring out New York.

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The theatres in New York offer films I’d never see any other way. I stopped by one called the Lincoln Place Cinema and chose a foreign film that was about to start. It was called The Secret in their Eyes. It was an Italian film set in Argentina, I think, about a woman murdered and the man who killed her. It was an affecting film, so I had to write notes in the dark, especially considering all that the highs had been teaching me as I learned to become more and more relaxed.
The film had some emotional moments. One reason I regulate my Dionysius side is because I refuse to cry.
Focus, concentrate, b, if you have little imagination then you shouldn’t be watching a film -- that’s the secret to Experiencing: you have to believe.
It’s hard to enter all the way into a film, as if you were a fly in the story, because of the patches of blurriness around what is in focus. I know there are limits to what a moving camera can do. At first the patches made things unrealistic, but then I learned to play along with the film, only focusing on what it wanted me to focus on, and I entered the film all the way again, like a fly on their imaginary walls.
_I can’t look at the past,_ the lead actress says, _I have to go to work everyday, I have to keep going, moving forward._ It’s like she’s numb, no color to her perception, no love.
_Justice is an island,_ one man says.
.. One created to appease women’s hearts but men know it isn’t real. I first learned that while leaving the police station after reporting R__ to the police. There’s no such thing as justice.
I like that foreign look where the inside of homes is built with materials usually used for the outside of buildings. That’s how it was overseas in Iraq and ______. It looks fresh, natural, like you’re always outdoors even though you’re in air conditioning.
I like how the director ensures the timelessness of the film by going back and forth from age to youth and back again as seamlessly as the character turning a corner in a hallway, his movements as seamless as the beginning of the film The Hours, where it’s like three women from three different time periods are one.
I understand timelessness, learned it awhile ago. Trevor didn’t die all the way, same as the husband’s murdered wife. So it’s not strange for the old man to have the picture of the twenty-something year old wife on the mantle. Physical age isn’t real.
The film banks on this understanding, encourages it. Especially in the scene with the final jail cell. These are souls interacting, fighting, loving, and life is just the setting, the playground. It seems so simple one might mistake it for insignificant. Life is where the gods come to live. Real men know this, if not Real women.
_Stop thinking about it, letting it haunt you,_ the husband says to the lead actor. _You’ll have a thousand paths and no future._
The film is turning out to be the perfect film for right now. The lead actress even said something affecting of a moment her and the lead actor share in the film, but have different perceptions about:
_If that had happened, then why didn’t you take me with you?_ She pauses, then smiles. _Dimwit._
The film was about rape, the culprit an unworthy Him with a huge penis. He knew if he could just get it inside of her, she would concede, agree, no matter the violence required. I remember that from the first times I got high and started reckoning with the truth about sex. Difficult memories ..
The music of the film was the best part -- the violins and cellos and piano -- and it stayed with me. After the film I started learning how to allow the music around me to become my own background music, to become aware of it, pulling it out of the city noise and experiencing it properly, accepting it into the moments of my life.
All these little ways of un-numbing ..

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