becoming again, again, again

The dawn comes in the window, slowly illuminating this place. My apartment, where I rest, where I still can’t bring myself to call ‘home’. Not being allowed to paint the walls, to create a space that is my own, a reflection of me & all my moods makes it difficult to see this other than a place to sleep, to give Ruby & myself comfort. I know how fortunate I am to even have this place, but still, it is simply a stop on the journey. Perhaps if the largest wall wasn’t concrete and therefore took a small demolition team to simply hang something it would make a difference, but quite honestly, I haven’t given that wall as much effort as I could. Perhaps I just don’t want to get too comfortable… and even more, it isn’t a hospital room. Count blessings.

New Years Eve, 2012. What an amazing few years it has been. Cheated death twice, just by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin, and after a lifetime of wondering, half of that searching, I found, at long last, the woman who gave me life.

I still don’t really think that has hit me with all the weight that it has, all the weight that it deserves – especially in this magickal life I have lived, so full of joy, of sorrow, of adventure and all that I have learned, and continue to discover. True, the past year has been mundane and somewhat dull, but then again, I consider what I have grown accustomed to, and feel grateful. Perhaps was a necessary exercise in Zen, of accepting what is and knowing that the present does not dictate the future.

Hells, you think I would have learned that by now, but when the present deadens the soul… when the present deadens the soul, it’s time to remember the caterpillar. Perhaps this time has been my chrysalis. Maybe it was needed, and maybe I didn’t use it as wisely or constructively as I could have… but that time has passed, and with it, slowly, the distaste for myself and lack of action.

So… what now? I asked M, and knowing me better than most, having a better feel for these things than most, she said that she could see me as a sculptor.

Though I didn’t disagree with her, I also couldn’t find a way to wholly agree – it just didn’t seem feasible. Not in creating the extravagant, larger than life things I’ve always pictured creating in my mind, especially without the necessary space or nickel-one to begin… but perhaps it planted the essential seed, and from that, a different world of accepted possibilities grew and became something that I can see myself loving to do, can grow with, and perhaps most important of all, has endless possibilities. And, not in any way a small thing, are needful things, and therefore can generate the funds to grow into something…. well, something. Maybe big, maybe not, but definitely self-supporting.

And then, something else. Something good. Something that I need to be careful with, to nurture, and try to be certain that this old fool with a child’s heart isn’t just dreaming again…

But that’s what I do.

I dream…

and somehow, someway, if the heavens smile as they have a tendency to do on me, the dreams held onto even in the direst of times will reveal their power when not forgotten…

or something like that.

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Full size bed & a friend.

Realizing that this is my first year in three not waking up in a hospital bed on Christmas day, but instead taking my beautiful puppy outside for a walk, enjoying the quiet and stillness which is so rare in this neighborhood, and coming back in to battle for bed space with her.
While deep inside I would much rather be on the road in my motorhome, in some anonymous town on my way to the next one, I must admit… this really isn’t so bad at all.

Now, back to sleep for a bit, then either laundry or out to the beach and after that the archery range in Golden Gate Park with Ruby.

Yeah. not so bad.

fighting words

12.19.12 2:18am

As is common these days with no schedule, I sleep for an hour or so then wake so my thoughts can get together and decide that it’s now that I should be considering what to do with my life and tomorrow. What my brain doesn’t seem to understand is that the more it prevents me from sleeping now, the less I’ll be able to accomplish what it thinks I should do when the rest of the city is bustling about with their normal productive lives.

I try to appease it, even wrote on the refrigerator in dry-erase marker what I need to do, but my mind doesn’t seem to trust me. I guess if I were my mind, I wouldn’t either, but at least I would understand that it’s because when the morning comes and the time to do things happens, my mind decides then that it’s a good time to sleep. It truly is completely irrational in the way it goes about things at times…

 

I called and left a message earlier today for my Mother, inviting her to come down for the Hobo’s Christmas. I think that the setting would be the perfect one – amazing people, great music, and if we want to talk we can sit in my motorhome. Nothing forced, nothing expected, as it might feel if we met for the first time in a one on one situation. It would be like… like we’re just old friends who haven’t seen each other in forty-five years.

My, how you’ve grown! She’ll say.

How I’ve grown…

 

It’s really not very considerate. If my mind is going to keep me up, at the very least it could do is let me write a little bit better. It seems to have a angle sensor in it – when my head is horizontal, only then does it come to life and think of clever things to say. Once I prop myself on the pillows against the wall, the words and ideas are drained out of conscious thought and I fight for each line.

I need to figure out a way to connect my brain directly to my computer, so it would simply write the thoughts I have when my head is on the pillow, while the battle for sleep is happening in the background.

away from and forward

12.17.12

When I quiet my mind, I hear it. Behind the noise of the city, beneath the streets, when I look at the stars, I hear it.

The Enchanted Forest is calling me back, back to find myself again, back to visit the sacred sites, the graves, The Grandmother Tree, the memories of the past and future.

I say The Forest is calling me, but more realistically, it is the road. There is a romance that is generated as the wheels spin, when the destination is unknown, when the city shrinks in the mirror and there is nothing ahead but the night and solitude, the broken white lines and blackness as distance passes by and the future is closer than the past with every passing mile that rolls underneath me.

 

I need to go. Somewhere, anywhere – just away from and forward to the beauty of the unknown…

12.14.12

12.14.12

A day like so many others but one that no one wants to remember, at least not fondly. If we enjoy a day like this, find some happiness in it instead of crying and wailing and professing our outrage over and over, we feel as if we’re in the wrong for doing so. I use the universal ‘we’ – one that means the others, the general public, the media pawns. The ‘we’ that I seldom include myself in; not because I’m better in any way, just, perhaps, different in what I see, what I’ve seen, and therefore how I choose to be affected by atrocity.

The outrage, the outrage, the confusion… the innocents have been killed and the media makes the killer a celebrity. Why? Who was this person? Troubled, deranged, mentally ill… the questions will forever go unanswered, only speculated on. Gun control. Mental health care. Everyone pulls out their soap boxes, dusts them off, and stands  as tall as they can. The outrage. The outrage. The Outrage. Fuck that – it’s the media’s fault, and always will be until the focus isn’t on making the killer a star but instead pulling the glory away and naming, over and over again, the ones killed.

Every single person, every day, all around the world. Would things change then?

Weary of the pawns, of everyone saying the same thing over and over and over to no avail, I turn away. Not because I’m ignoring what happened, but because I’m ignoring the reaction. I don’t need anyone else to tell me what to feel.

 

I look at my puppy, and wish that my life could be as simple as hers…; What’s he doing now? Putting on the thing that means he’s going out the door, wrapping it around his body. Grabbing the other thing that means I’m his, that attaches me to him. Outside! We’re going outside!

She zigs and zags, all the smells, must find them all and taste them. Everything new, everything wonderful and fun and bouncing, and we play a game. I call it training, she calls it something else entirely. I run, stop, run, stop – she runs and tries to figure out when the next stop will be, watching me, letting me guide her in this glorious new game. I laugh, she forgets all the smells and just watches me, smiling, her tail wagging, run, stop, run… and everything else – the drug dealers, addicts, trash and atrocity – everything else goes away.

Five Minutes

12.13.12

1440.

If the math in my head is correct, there are one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes in every day.

Day in, day out, rain or shine, birth or death, asleep or awake, one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes.

I do my best to ignore most of them, and in doing so hope that they don’t see me as they go by. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand; if I’m asleep, they won’t notice me. So I can feign ignorance as well.

It almost works. I look in the mirror and see only a shade of who I am, who I want to be. A shadow, an apparition, a ghost, the fire that once shined so bright and explosive now no more than fire worms as they eat the last of me, the story that once was so beautiful now reduced to ashes as the worms have their way.

I’m certain that I’ve felt like this before, we all have – so why does this time feel so unique? I’m older? Perhaps, but an absurd rationalization. Weaker? No… but it feels as if I have nothing lift to fight for. I fought death and won, twice or more. Though we still have never met save for a few minutes, I found my Mother and thanked her, which is all I really needed to do for me. I’ve done many, many things, but… what now? All I can do is put on the old, worn out false smile, and… and do my best to get out in the world, try to find something new to be.

What pains me the most is how tragically seldom I write anymore. Writing was once my therapy; it found answers inside where I didn’t know where to look, was something that I did well that brought me happiness, and when I fell into the abyss of loneliness or sorrow, it has always been my friend. The one friend that I knew would just listen, let me talk without guarded walls, and in doing so, find my own answers.

So today, I begin a practice which I will do my best to keep up for at least thirty days, hoping that I find discipline again, praying that I find me.

Five minutes. A commitment. Every day, beginning today, 12.13.12, five minutes of writing. I’ll begin there, and more than likely, the words will seed and grow; seven minutes, ten, fifteen. Something. Anything. Just to remember – because I remember the times before when the words saved me.

For anyone reading this, I apologize in advance for times where the words might seem trite, might be redundant, might be mundane, and I have little doubt that they will – but that’s the thing. Once was a time that I could make the mundane beautiful through words…

For anyone who reads this, please refrain from commenting, as this way I will hopefully let go of the desire to please people through my writing – or piss them off. That is, of course, unless it is something absolutely necessary, or if I request it – something like creative work. Something that will give me a reason to pull my head out of the sand, and greet the minutes as they come.

And so it begins.

Incomplete Insomnia

a few days, about 20% of my thoughts…:

The book I’m reading now and again after many times before was born in 1968. The words in it received the right to have themselves, and only themselves, placed in that particular order in 1964. That must have made them feel special.

It has the warming earth smell that only a book that has lived 44 years and spent most of its life mostly being either held by adoring hands or lovingly hugged by other books can have. It’s a nice smell, and I frequently find myself inhaling it’s comforting scent.

I think since they’re made out of trees, after a while a book that hangs out with other books in happy places like used book stores begins to get nostalgic, and thinks warm thoughts about when it was a tree with the earth and the animals and the birds and the forest where it came from, and that’s why they smell the way they do. I also think that they’re probably happy to be a book now, especially if the words in it are put in ways that keeps it being carefully held and read, even again and again by someone like me.

 

~

 

I haven’t heard laughter so light in a long time. It’s as if it were made of feathers dipped in helium, finding their way to me over the seas, out the earpiece of the telephone and infecting my face with a smile that my heart made whole.

 

~

 

I do my best to be me, to not offer what I think you want to hear. I search for what I need to say and say nothing less…

because there are too many games, and there is far too much bullshit. The rivers cried are seldom mine anymore, though I have travelled down their agony; at times breathing in death, at times becoming the rainbow that the mist created…

It is not a simple fight, but it is worth it

and my past clings to me, and everything makes me more than the magick of now.

To Begin Again

The wind outside of my third floor apartment whistles through the windows. I leave them open just enough so it does.

I find the sound calming, letting me know all I need to about life still happening outside. I realize that I don’t really need or want to know all that I can – not in the way most people think they know things these days, anyway.

I don’t need to know about that video, that funny or stupid thing someone I don’t know did, or even the picture of the cute and adorable anything. Though I venture over to the place with those things from time to time, the whistle, the rain, the sunshine or a good walk with the cute thing that I *do* know are enough, at least for the most part.

Sometimes I get really sick of the flat little people on the screen spouting all that they possibly can out of their flat, immobile mouths and minds.

Too much information has clogged the paths to intelligence and creativity, wrapping itself around our minds like soap and hair in a shower drain. We forget that the world isn’t full of little flat people, the horizon of our computer screens pushing us back to the days before Eratosthenes. (Not Columbus – who not only stole the global credit in most flat history books, but oh, so much more…)

I think that, somehow, books should be round. At least the good ones. It sure would make it a pain in the ass for libraries though, having all of those books rolling around.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

I don’t know how it happened, but lately I have been cursed with perhaps the most ridiculous and pathetic of maladies – writers block concerning my own life. It seems as if, for a while now, I had nothing more to say, nor the inspiration to say even the little one-line thoughts that came into my head. I’m trying to remedy that now.

Once I had found my mother, talked to her… the foundation that I had built the thing called ‘me’ on crumbled, bringing down all the things that made up my identity. The monster I devoted my life to destroying had been destroyed. My Everest has been climbed. My white whale is now perfume, lamp oil and scrimshaw…

and I don’t know why I am anymore.

Finding my mother was everything in my life. I never stopped to think about what would happen when – or if – this quest was accomplished. Perhaps because there was no way of knowing how I would actually feel when I found her – if she would be accepting, or if I would be abandoned again, this time forever and without hope.

There was a point years ago when simply the thought of finding my mother brought me to tears, a crumbling mess of a child’s heart in a man’s body, and so I believe I expected myself to explode with uncontrollable emotion when she was found – but that didn’t happen.

Of course, I can’t describe the happiness I felt when she was found, nor how overwhelmed I was reading her first letter to me, or our first conversation – but it’s almost as if it were too easy, too calm.

Over the past weeks I’ve been looking inside of me as well as I can, searching for the abandoned child, the broken boy, or trying to determine if these pieces of me were shut away again.

It really *can’t* be this calm inside of me, can it? Me, with the barrel of my .38 pressed against the roof of my mouth; Me, the actions of a fool not caring if I lived or died; Me, up to my ears in abandonment issues; and Me, needing so desperately to live, if only just to find her, to know her, to have a Mother…

Have I become a man, without the perpetual abandoned child eating away at my heart? Conquered all of the things I once hid inside of myself? Walked through all of my hells and come out the other side complete?

Honestly, I don’t know – although I’ve searched, and found nothing hidden.

 

Yet the question remains – who am I now? My identity, the reason for my existence has, in a way, been wiped away. Everything I was, everything I did for as long as I can remember had somewhere buried inside of it either the hopelessness of trying to make my adoptive family proud of me, or becoming someone that my Birth Mother would accept if she was ever found alive.

I’ve wisely given up on my adoptive family, and… although my Birth Mother seems to actually care, somehow, about the son she hasn’t known for forty-five years, I’ve got a feeling that she simply wants me to be genuinely happy.

Never in my life have I truly felt that before. Nor have I ever felt like I was beginning again, completely from scratch.

I have the ingredients to make anything I want out of the pieces of me I have… I just need to remember how to heed the wind, and follow the direction it blows…