I’m thinking of covering my goofy eye with a patch - as if i need more distinction from the herd · Based on the warrior/scholar/scientist/engineer history that has been thrust in my lap, it is a purely practical notion. From as long as i can remember i have tried to be “normal.” This was a Doctor Spockian notion popular during the age of my birth, mid 50s ‘merica; same fucking conventional wisdom that told the my parents to stay away from me when i contracted pneumonia in my 1st year of life and was hospitalized for two weeks. I never had a shot at normal in the conventional sense, and now 65 years later, i’m still winging it wondering if a patch to make me a proper cyclops instead of the emotional kluge with which i hazard the roads of the currently quiet hamlet in a Southeast Asian nation where i remain healthy largely due to free access to miles of flat roadway and an inordinately courteous driving public. I am flat fucking lucky by any means or measure - whether i can convey gratitude adequate to my circumstance, seems to be my only responsibility.
That and finding a loving squeeze who is not completely revolted by my heinous exterior and undaunted by my ingenious invisibility. There are so many human beings i shrink from on a daily basis it makes me wonder about the warmth of my own heart, for an instant. I can viscerally remember playing footsies in the sand with L_______ O/H_____ a deeply wounded Basque vixen one summer at 15th St in Newport Beach, CA - i couldn’t have been 15 years old if i was a day. We moved from there to her condominium with the same gaggle of kids and played “spin the bottle,” probably the 1st and last time in my convoluted teenage experience. L______ and i established a strong bond that lasts to this day and i wish her well with the new love interest she ignited at our 40th high school reunion. She taught me much about love - the feeling · not so much the preservation thereof. It seems my love fate was to lay in the hands of faith - a lesson i am still trying to understand.
I am far less impatient about that reality, if indeed there is a “reality.” Master Thich Nhat Hanh is very clear about his reservations toward romantic love. I would like nothing better than to be a good student, but my wayward heart is what it is and wants what it wants. Perhaps that is the lesson - desire born of ego can never fill the reservoir of the soul · My family was a very pretty group, and then there was toi. Even after 65 ravaged years it is sticks in my craw to imagine myself as attractive, though compared to some of the faces i have looked into over my life, i understand ugly better than most. I seem to inspire repulsion, sort of like “Beauty and Beast” or “Cyrano de Bergerac” were written expressly as an object lesson for me, however narcissistic that might sound. I can still hear ma querulously objecting any time i use the personal pronoun “i”, but then she has the same fixation on anytime i use the determiner “that,” or the color of my teeth, or my nose hairs, or my tattered raiment . .. ··· etc., etc., etc.,
And i love her still, because there is no alternative. If i cannot surmount my own mother’s objections to my existence, what fucking hope is there for a warm loving relationship in my life? - that is a fair question, but as the goddess of paradox would have it, it is not an answer for my dear dying mother to answer - but for me to reckon with. So be it, i do what i can to stay open hearted within parameters of good counsel that the spiritual masters far beyond me i am able to hear. My hearing defect from a ruptured eardrum makes for some distortion in what i can hear, so sometimes i think i hear “oh fuck, that feels so good, do it to me some more”, and sometimes i think i hear, “if you touch me again, i will scream to the gods that your testicles be pulled up through your throat.” Most of these conversations take place late at night when i am trying to quiet the anxiety in my soul which manifests as pain in my joints or pressure in my lungs - but that is my problem, not yours.
The best it seems that i can do for you is to keep track of the paragraphs, in the unlikely event anyone is reading, after all these aren’t called the “Extinction Chronicles” for nothing. The psychiatric term, i had to look up recently is “reaction formation.” I am dying, as are we all, and my reaction to that inexorable fact is to reflect as openly as i am able; to remain healthy and happy as long as i am able; and to render you strangers as much aid and love as i am able. This only gets to be complicated when i accept that people who know me shy away - i kid you not · my eldest brother has trouble touching things i have touched, and my youngest brother cannot use my name, Joseph; my sister - bless her heart - straight up replied to my question, “no, I don’t like you.” These are good decent people you’d be lucky to have in your corner, while once again Madame Paradox has made it my good fortune that they not be in my corner. If anything i have said herein offends, i apologize and hope you may take the love i can offer and travel your path in peace - the same i bid my blood ·
jts 13/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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