It may be that the most useful information the internet has ever provided me is a quote from Albert Einstein - “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe” · What i like most about this quote is how much internal disquiet to which it opens my calcifying mind. I can recite any number of mantras and discipline to pacify my fury until i’m blue in the face, but which side of the fulcrum i rest the weight of my choices may well determine futures i cannot comprehend. Nor is facile denial adequate to the task - i hurt when people are cruel to me, and many are; i’ve come far enough in my own journey to understand those many are often oblivious to their own pain, much less the consequence of their behavior (just as i am); which leaves me again sitting in a corner with Lao Tzu whining about what i should do. There is no choice: just as there is no depriving death its due. I guess the question is what do you wish to have on your mind as you pass - “wasn’t that fun¿” or “why wasn’t that fun?” ·
I have been amongst friends to the degree i know something about who is, and who ain’t. What i don’t understand is how and why so many feel the need to fake it - including myself. I understand from my own loneliness that i am too ready to see friends everywhere i go in every face i find; i also understand more and more that friendship is rare and my hunger for kindness and fraternity is not a useful guide. What is not clear to me as i wander in search of my tribe is how not to harm the capacity for likeminded strangers i meet to find their tribe but for whatever reason have fallen short of my admittedly, too severe criteria for trust and confidence to be included in my too, too exclusive company. The conundrum, as always, is that same criteria is always a dagger pointing at my own heart, and the rejection i employ is always to some degree a rejection of that part of my self i find repulsive and, to quote, Albert Einstein - “hostile” ·
It may be that Madame Paradox and her offsprings “t’is & t’ain’t” is some emotional sleight of hand i use to abrogate the anger i feel toward a negligent parent who lay dying; i don’t know, but suspect it is so. Those troublesome aspects of my anima which peer into the souls of all i meet, while useful in fantasy, are not always useful in interpersonal relations. Ma, by all accounts has had real difficulty with boundaries, and was not what you might call the example for mirroring youngsters to themselves. Again, i don’t know - i do know that she has confused boundaries about what she feels to constitute reality and what i know to be true about myself. I don’t mean this observation as a defamation about someone who is not here to defend herself, only as a metric for understanding my own assumptions about what i perceive about others vs what can be an entirely different reality to them - most especially siblings, who logically are behaving the same too much so to be comfortable.
But back to the, as Frank Zappa remarked so well, “crux of the biscuit,” is my world friendly or hostile¿ When it involves my own company and i am able to reflect quietly about exchanges, i find i error on the side of “friendly,” but when faced with what i understand to be an intractable exchange, i revert to “donkey mode” and as my last wife demonstrated in her European fashion dragging her hands down across her face to her lap declaring “closed,” i understood her meaning all too well. The challenge is temporal, for nothing, most especially this chimera of emotion we wallow in that reflects the larger arc of transformation we pass through every second of our existence - my bladder fills, i pee; my hunger, or emotion grows, i eat; my fantasy intercedes and i run like a rutting pony for the panoche - but none of this describes the dwelling mind i knew as an infant/child trying to understand a harried human female towering over me with 2 other squalling children demanding that she look at them instead of me.
Yet even the Gaia “she” in my constellation of fixed fantasies is waning as my own life force is ebbing on a planet searching for renewal. I do not know how to reconcile those real conditions with the tenuous future i want to cast as a sea anchor into some sort of comfortable death, preferably with copious amounts of nudity, erotic drawings, searching application of a lifetime of aesthetic contemplation salted with nutritious meals and romping tunes compacting comforting composure into the very nether cavities of my soul - is that too much to ask¿ I have no one else to blame, and find no percentage in seeking justification for such scabrous behavior within what i am coming to understand as my own native innocence; Yet how a ribald character as i’ve discovered my “self” to be could ever expect tolerance, much less acceptance is beyond the scope of even my fervent imagination - but what fun envisioning a life like that · it’s enough to give one hope, however audacious that hope may be.
jts 20/11/2020
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