I was +50 before someone suggested to me that self-soothing is an option - that is not to say i simply whimpered to anyone who would listen the many physical calamities of my adult light, whining wasn’t well received where i grew up · it’s a hand-me-down generational kind of strategy. I know this because on long drives through the deserts of Nevada where ma grew up and later in the confines of her sheltered compound for old rich widows she would recount how her own father felt about complaint; according to her it went something like this, “if you want something to cry about, I’ll give you something to cry about.” This is consistent with a woman who would invite you out for a weekend holiday in the “Joshua Tree desert home”, where I would find a pile of gravel that had been delivered and needed to be spread across the access road to the house from the access road from the highway to the access road to the house that was to be given to my sister.
Understand this - lord love a duck as my witness · she is a grand dame and as devious as any three of you reading this put together, which i happen to know are not my siblings · they’d been warned off long ago and lack the intestinal fortitude to defy her; i was not so lucky. It became pretty clear as the marriage collapsed that someone had to take up the guilt, and what better than a 15 year-old two-eyed cyclops with poor social skills in a family of very pretty people¿ that is a question, sort of? Judging only from the text in the previous paragraph and one half, you can probably imagine how it felt to ma, at the time when all she wanted to do was say how much pain she was in, and to have a pissy, beaten-to-fuck man-child reply with the sort of heresy you are now reading; and still i love her, she is my only mother and i have no alternative but to find peace with that.
Sort of like living my most vulnerable later years on a planet being decimated by a handful of sociopaths so removed from the suffering they have precipitated as to render Hieronymus Bosch the graphic equivalent of Nostradamus - not that history needed anyone to accomplish that feat of synchronicity. So all that is left to me at this turn is some happy humor about the ineffable pleasure of hearing people laugh with abandon, and watching families squire the youngest safely from curb to curb. It didn’t have to turn out this way, and there is still enough resilience in what C.G. Jung described as the Archetype of the human species to accomplish a revival of our birthright - happiness and love, rather than endless war and greed.
I am too old to manifest something that grand, but because i have been yearning for it in my very being for my entire life there is nothing to say the momentum in some metaphysical way will not bring my hopes a little closer to fruition. Jung suggested our species resembled the rhizome that multiplies under the surface of the ground sending up shoots of new growth but continues to replicate below. I am sure he was referring to the cultural reality of human development rather than the anatomical survival of our threatened species, in which case i take heart that those aspects of my upbringing which allows me to absorb myself with the questionably constructive act of manically producing essays that are not read by a population that does not want to face its own doom may be propagated.
Within that thinking is the very real requirement that i find some peace in order to continue my quixotic pursuit of meaning even as my own mind through heredity and the self-inflected injury of a harder than necessary life narrows the capillaries that feed my mind, my fingers and my limbs i continue to grow in ways that i never expected or could have prepared for. Happiness is indeed a birthright to our species, but it cannot be found in conformity, acceptance or pursuit for the conditions necessary for such contentment reside in the embrace of that which you find yourself to be - miserable, alone, ecstatic or delusional. This condition is distinguished from acceptance which carries the onus of judgement · embrace is more the act of loving what you find, how you find it. My life has been comprised almost entirely of acceptance for i could not pluck my eyes out and ask for a new pair and the family i landed in had not the capacity to accept what even i do not understand about my existence - only that it is weird as fuck and then i die · oh boy .
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