Superpower

Still haven’t done a damn thing about moving, save for painting my new room, moving a single box of books & my compound bow, and thinking about what I need to do. A lot of thinking. Volumes of thinking. So much thinking that if I took the time that I’ve been thinking about what I need to do and were actually doing something about it, most likely I would be very close to done moving.

A lot to still do, besides, of course, only thinking about it.

Yesterday morning at the dog park there was a brief chat with the regulars about what super power we would like to have, and I couldn’t decide between flying and invisibility, obviously not really giving it much serious thought and choosing some common ones, especially because by the time I answered they were off onto a completely different conversation about politics or something.

I think now that I would change it to being able to think about something and have it done, with some special trigger like needing to cross my fingers on both hands in order to activate it, so I don’t have random thoughts popping in and out all the time. With the bizarre thoughts that *I* have, that would probably make for quite a mess if there weren’t a trigger. People could get hurt.

Yeah, I think that’s it. If I see them this morning, which is unlikely as it is now 4:15am and I still haven’t been able to sleep due to the thinking about moving, cleaning both spaces, and how I will set up my new room – I’m changing my superpower.

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Moving, forward.

Sunday Morning, August 26, 2012

I look around this room and count the days in my mind. Four and a half days to pack and move, one day to clean, and I’m gone. If I ever get my shit together that would be plenty of time.

Gods, I’ve gotten lazy.

Kerouac once said that “If you own a rug, you own too much.” As my eyes go from the dresser to the bedstand to the coffee table to the loveseat, the kitchen table that I never used as it was intended, the desk-thing from Xenodrome that Victoria gave me and finally, the rug, I am certain that I have acquired far too much for the simple life I wish to lead. It was so much more fun when I could pack everything I owned into my motorhome – just hang the clothes and costumes in the closet, pack the tools and other things in the overhead compartments and make do with what I had. Strange what is seemingly required in order to be able to call an apartment a “home”.

It never really was a home, but it certainly kept me apart.

In a few says I move into Victoria’s house. I can’t believe how quickly this month has gone by, completely catching me off guard as each day for most of the past month I’ve been practicing getting my talent at procrastination perfected. Downsizing to just one room of my own, keeping only a few pieces of furniture – the bed, dresser, nightstand, and of course, the Xenodesk-thing – and selling the rest. I’d like to somehow keep the coffee table, as it *is* pretty nice – dark wood, a good sized horizontal surface for collecting everything that ends up on it, and a couple of drawers – but that is yet to be seen. Seeing as the rug is only a hallway runner found on the SF streets and fits almost perfectly in my motorhome, I’m keeping that as well. It will go nicely in Vic’s hallway. My hallway.

There’s a level of excitement in the move, not only for the pain reason that Ruby will have a beautiful yard to play in, getting away from the sewer sidewalks of the Tenderloin, but for the first time in years (not counting the hospital & hospice stays) I’ll be living with other people; creative type folk. I can practice my archery & knife throwing in the backyard & garage, maybe even set up an easel in the space to try my hand at painting, seeing what comes out of this twisted noggin’ of mine…

It’s been over two years of focusing so much on staying alive, that I’ve let slide the reason that I wanted to. I am so fucking far from done. There is so much that I want to do, so much I want to create…

so much more that I want to be…

 

re-creation

Searching,

searching for a way out of this feeling

for a path that will take me away

from the me that I’ve become

this hollow shell

this empty heart.

This is not what I wanted

dreamt

fought so hard to stay alive for.

From the darkness of death

to meaningless life and

I wonder what there is for me now?

Where has the fight gone

and what do I fight for?

In this life without beginning

there were no roots to hold me steady or strong in the storms

storms I create inside my Self, my soul, so…

I did what I could to build a foundation,

one that was meticulously constructed inside

to bear the weight of the solitude walls

and then I tore it all down again

only to build them back up

folded up my dreams and hid them inside

unpacked the well worn soulless dead eye smiles

leaving myself on the outside of me.

Now, it is time

to bring it all crashing down again

and hope there is enough light

to once more, and once more, and once more

and again

dig through the shards and find the words

remember the language of a story

that could be true

gather my paste and bandages

my needle and thread

distinguish what is needed from what needs to be left behind

find our heart, our wings

look to the man on the table

see the well known scars

from so many times torn apart and reconstructed

stitch, paste, and bandage what I can

and again, look to the skies…

and fly

coming back to me

6:34am. Peet’s Coffee, a couple blocks away is the street I once lived on in my motorhome. A cup here today as I didn’t have time to have one in my apartment, just throw on my clothes, grab what I want for a couple hours and fly out the door. It could be an easy rush when I just needed to avoid the street sweeper, but now I have a puppy and those eyes looking at me, depending on me. I tell her I’m hurrying but she doesn’t understand, and we all know that feeling – every second an hour when you need to contort every muscle to hold it, just a minute longer. I knew I wanted to write today so the laptop was already packed up.

Is it possible to be homesick for the streets? The tight space in my RV, the sound and the way the motorhome rocked a little as cars went by a little faster, a little closer than they should?

Is it possible to be homesick for the uncertainty of it all, the adventure, the way every day changed?

It must be, because I am.

Because all of that is *who* I am – or at least who I was happy being. There’s a strange sense of freedom that I feel like I’m missing living in an apartment.

 

There is little peace inside of me these days. An insistent feeling that I didn’t fight so hard to live for a life like this; a mind that not that long ago – only a few years – was quite active and pleased with the constant challenges, even through a fog of constantly being drunk. Hell, maybe that’s what made it fun; trying to keep the gears turning and coming out with new things to entertain myself and others when the oil was so thinned with cheap whiskey… Alas, I sure as hell can’t go back to the three liter plus a week habit that I had – at least not until I’m done with all this and *really* want to write down the story of this life with no holds barred and the brutal honesty that is so under-appreciated and misunderstood by so many these days.

Fucking Facebook & Twitter. Fucking texting. Fucking lazy people (myself certainly included) that don’t bother to use creativity to make the twist of the blade more pleasurable to the people who feel it, instead accenting every idiotic thing they say with emoticons or the ‘lol’ and it’s cousins that have poisoned the English language. Fucking swearing when it’s not absolutely fucking necessary.

I feel that there should be a test before people are allowed to use social networks, and everything else mentioned above. That is the only thing that might save us; save people like me from being so disgusted with what passes as language that they go off on rants like this when I was thinking of something else entirely… jeezus.

Let’s get back to where I was, yes?

I need to break out of this haze. I need to start creating again, getting my mind back from its little decay vacation. Amazing what almost a couple years in a hospital & hospice can do to a person. It doesn’t matter what you go in there with, if you are strong enough to get out, it seems like that’s where the fight really begins…

the fight to remain human. The fight to bring back the person you were when you went in. It’s lost somewhere if you aren’t meticulously careful, watchful, aware. Lost with having every tiny freedom, every small responsibility taken from you, making you feel over and over and over like they don’t believe that you can take care of yourself.

Lost in the way the time fucked with your head, lost with saying goodbye to each friend you made that didn’t make it. For every candle lit by a book that has a few memories and farewells in it, for every room or bed that is empty when you wake the next day.

I am not who I was.

I’m angry. I’m tired. I’m bored as hell – but now I see it, now I know it, & now I am aware of what I need to do.

 

I just need to figure out where to start again.

a new chapter

Sunday, August 05, 2012

Outside my window, three floors down, the rattle of hundreds of aluminum cans and clink of glass bottles begins, and will probably go on most of the day if past experience dictates today as well. It’s that time of the month when the little Asian lady sorts, and spills, and sorts her spoils from her work a couple buildings over.

Ruby is looking at my fingers, head cocking from one side to the other as she lays with me on the loveseat and tries to figure out if this is a game or not. It’s almost overwhelmingly adorable. She decides either that it isn’t, or that she’s just too comfortable to move the few inches to my fingers to bite them with her barracuda puppy teeth, and resigns simply to rest her paw at the joint of my right wrist and hand.

I’m falling more and more in love with her every day, and she, I believe, with me. It took us both a bit to get here, to this point, and admittedly at first I was concerned. When we first met and for a few weeks that followed, I did love her – but it was a guarded love, incomplete, with walls built by the past preventing me from giving all of my heart to her. Perhaps she felt the same, but with much less of a past.

Is complete love something learned?

I wonder what it’s like for domestic animals, the majority of them taken away from their mothers, as I was taken from mine. Do they feel the same loss? Distrust? Emptiness? I anthropomorphize, but in a way it brings me closer to them, regardless of what they might think or feel. I invent what I need to.

I invent because I need to. Adoptees are self-invented as a necessity. There is an absence, a void at the very beginning of our lives. The first few pages of our existence is violently gone; instead of being aborted ourselves, our entire family was. The entire world is ripped away, everything we know, trust, find safety in – her heartbeat, smell, voice… The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves, and it can’t, and it shouldn’t – because something *is* missing.

It depends on the child how we use this; having no one to dictate who we are or who we become, we can use it to destroy our lives (and in many cases, the lives of others) – or create them. We make it up as we go along. I decide who I need to be, with no lines to tell me where the color should or shouldn’t be. I trace the space of what might have been in an imagined Braille like welts raised on the flesh. I rewrite the emptiness. I add color or take it away. I become who I need to be for a time then become someone else. Cats and their nine lives ain’t got nothin’ on me – I’ve lived that many and more, taking the pieces and people I like from each one and storing them in my heart as I continue, hopefully forward. One piece is simply a coffee mug that I keep from a girlfriend I had ten years ago. On it is a blue wolf with a golden crescent moon, but inside it is full of beautiful and tragic memories.

I keep the bones of past lives in small boxes, the ashes of who I was, Once Upon A Time…

There is no end to the change, and I would not have it any other way. Sometimes I leave who I was behind willingly so that I can become who I need to be. Other times it is not so much my choice – at all. I am, however, one resilient bastard if ever there was one – and this is one of the things I truly love about myself. It’s all just a game, and I don’t play to win – I play to keep playing. To keep changing, to continue, to always become yet prevent arriving as long as I can. Take off on new roads, jump off of higher cliffs… re-create and find new passions.

There are times I forget that this is what I need, and when that happens I can rely on my heart to speak up – I become inharmonious, antagonistic, uneasy, what I think I should be happy with conflicting with what I require. When I finally remember to hear what my heart is trying to beat into me, inevitably it is due to a passionless existence. I need to create. I need to perform. I need to delight, bring wonder, bring smiles to others’ faces and hearts in order to fill my own.

It is not enough for me to stand by and read the lines already written.

I am the author of my life, I create and re-create as needed, and now,

this is where the story begins.

Again.