Atomic mousebrain

Don’t wait for literal death to live actual life, said the little voice.

Wee words from a behemoth, a legend, a foundation myth of this particular brain.

I may end up spending a lifetime trying to understand it.

Shots

                Type.  Type.  Type.

                Where does it go?

                Depends, I suppose, on how many shots you’ve had.  Often I do this with none.  Today, nine…thus far.  Switching between green and clear, French and Greek, absinthe and ouzo.  Taking the brain out of its vanilla state into something more… flavorful.  Probably the first time I have ever deigned to that word in my writing, but it seems apropos. 

                I just put Alan Watts on as I type.  A curious long-snuffed voice.  I suspect I listen closer because of his accent.  Sounds smarter than me.  And, admittedly, that he has read and pontificated far more than me.  But that’s as may be: I have time to catch up.  Will I?  One can read and ponder to a phenomenal degree and manage to achieve little (or even NO) spiritual growth.

                I can’t help but accept the cliché that, as one ages, the days seem to pass quicker.  As we know, the body refuses to last forever (and that is a good thing), so as the end times – in our own case – approach, there is a strange and ever-growing need to feel one’s product is greater than one’s consumption.  We can take and take for the course of life and give little back, if in fact we have no higher calling.  Many people do.  But I find myself growing more and more compelled to DO something.  And by “do something” I mean leave a positive and measurable impact on the world before this tragic body decomposes and reconfigures into flowers (a much more useful form).

                Another shot?  Yes.  Hang on a moment.

                Back now.

                One could succumb to existential crisis if they fixate on the biological reality of the human form… a strange community of trillions of organisms that, at some point, is going to disband, disperse, and transform into other flora and fauna that has no recollection of its previous collaborations.  What Edgar Allan Poe was is now a bird in Japan, a flower in Iowa, a mealworm in Sorrento, and a skin fleck leaping off the eye of a Sherpa in Nepal.  Among other things, of course.  Maybe even a part of your eyelid, or your toenail.  The same dispersal of your body is coming up, no matter how much gold or prayers or defiance you throw at it.

                So, then, the question of what one’s purpose in this form serves is a curious one.  Need we answer it?  Since you know that this form disperses in such a way, do you cease to exist?  No, by some curious plan of the infinite, you continue in this form.  At least an aspect of you does.

                “I’m such an idiot,” we all have said at some point and in some way.

                Who said it?

                Clearly, someone capable of witnessing this figure and understanding their status of “idiot” and commenting upon it.

                Obviously, it is not the idiot that recognizes the idiot, regardless of any clichés that would say otherwise.  The idiot, if it were indeed the one talking, would just see its kin and considers it a genius.

                No, there’s a second consciousness there – a genius – who is capable of noticing the idiot and commenting upon it as such.  And yet, giving the opportunity to work from the consciousness of genius, we continue to take residence in the chair of the idiot, while being convinced we are captain.

                What’s the solution?

                To whatever degree possible, one must do what they call “cultivating the witness”.  Find yourself observing your life from that captain’s seat, rather than wearing the idiot hat.  Witnessing yourself as a being experiencing this thing called life.  Judgment free.

                For me, perhaps, I would watch the fat person trying to disappear into the crowd.  Being unseen.  Being a part of the world while drawing no attention.  By writing this paragraph I have done so.

                My definition of ugly isn’t a spiritual one.  Body is a container.  Put a diamond in a plastic bag or a velvet box, it’s still a diamond.  Same with a sandstone.  The sandstone doesn’t have any dreams of being a diamond, nor does a duck wish to be an eagle.  Someone outside of each may desire to see the one form transform into the other, but only if the diamond, the sandstone, the duck, or the eagle believes there’s some more preferable existence does there exist an idiot.

                The idiot may exist, in fact, as a catalyst for others, which makes the idiot divine by its existence.

                What does this have to do with the body?

                In my narrow-minded approach to the question, I have marked myself as the idiot.

                Whether my consciousness arrives at the captain’s chair level or not, the body will pass.  The only question there is – how do I extend its presence?  Do I need it at all, or does consciousness transcend the body – and if so, what exactly is the purpose of this human experience?  Do slugs ask themselves this question?  Does a dog care?  What is the purpose of a psychopath?  Do we propagate the species as a way to continue the question?

                For some, religion is a blanket definition for these questions.  For some, all that they’re given is the capacity to question.  For some, the material is the highest aspiration.  At the end of the day, questions lead to questions because, to our great dismay, one recognition leads to a billion more.

                In an infinite universe, there’s no reasonable point at which to rest.  Depression is just being tired.

The rose-colored glasses are fashionable.

But they manipulated the reality, as the old cliche goes.

This was just fine as nature designed it.

Addiction

Faced with the reality that someone close has been humbled by addiction, and knowing I should have had the clarity to see and do something more, I reached a point of understanding where I decided to witness my own addictive nature and what it would mean for others, who rely upon me, if I were to truly address these weaknesses with more than just lip service.

At a younger age, when I was someone else entirely, my habits were subject to a number of substance cravings.  Drugs of some sort, alcohol, whatever I needed to change my state or distract me from my real issues.  Food was always a peripheral player in this, and the plain fact of overdoing it with food is the easiest of all.  It’s not illegal.  In fact, it is very much encouraged (since everything in this culture is monetized).  Cigarettes were another, and after 13 years of that, I was able to effectively turn the habit away (I could no longer justify the pain and expense of it).

Drugs and alcohol lost their charm as I began to take a more “spiritual” approach to life.  Not religious, mind you.  Religion is limiting, and likely would have encouraged further distraction via substance.  Whatever the distinction, I found myself left with a single addiction remaining... food.  Simple carb-Salt-Fat mixes that trigger the dopamine.  It’s an addictive mix and one people are only too happy to indulge you with.

For a private person like me, and one who has - through various life experiences and reactions worthy of a whole series of journal entries - learned to distrust and distance people from him, there is still a desire for socialization.  It’s a human need, though one’s personal threshold may vary.  Food is a great MacGuffin for getting together with others, and the resulting dopamine from the food and the interaction tend to strengthen the hold the act of eating can take.

Etc. Etc.

The point is, while I can easily speak from Uppercase Me in this journal, it’s lowercase me that’s out there, stuffing burritos, pizza, sandwiches, sugars, and so on into a sickly body.  Constantly.  Dopamine junkie.

Staying at a hotel, I am subject to the view of my body under fluorescent light when preparing for the morning shower.  Nothing is more shocking that seeing what your halogens at home have covered up.  It is not a surprise to me that I have a fat, sick body.  But under the stark lighting, I can see its sickly colors.  This negative tone is a dangerous one to internalize.  It is important to be realistic about what your choices have done to you.  But it can be counterproductive to linger on the feeling I had in that moment: is it too late?

Depression has been a constant companion in my life, and I can’t be sure whether or not it came about because of negative thoughts of my weight, or if the negative thoughts about my weight came about through depression.  I think reality is that both are true.  Worse, the notion that I let it go so far because depression has negated my joie de vivre... and a result of that is that I do nothing to fix the body because, well... why?  What is there to hang around for?  Just eat something to trigger dopamine.  Distract myself from numbness.  Create numbness by joylessness which came about as a result of self-destruction.  Catch-22.

Uppercase Me has no advice, it’s just an observer.  It wants to see lowercase me, who has access to a basic understanding of how neurotic this all is, do something besides just feed the kill-me routine.

When considering the hurt and fear I experience when I witness someone else’s addiction, somewhere inside, I am compelled to presume that someone else wants me to make the right choices.  To snap the line of addiction as I was able to with cigarettes 11 years ago.  To go into this new effort knowing that the temptations are going to surround me, constantly.  To know that years of habit - years of conditioning myself to relying on legal libations to alter my state of mind - will be popping up in my thoughts strongly and unconsciously, all the time.  To know some of the damage may be irreversible.  To know that the fate of others, whom I love, will always be outside of my control - and my reaction to this reality cannot be to drown it in carbs and fats and salt.

Long road, with every step watched and assaulted by the hobgoblins of habit.  A weak nature, in need of fundamental reprogramming, my only weapon in the fight.  With a higher purpose that has historically been repressed and anesthetized...none of this sounds any fun.  Not even a little.  But worry about someone else has made this goofy mind imagine that someone else might be worried about me as well.

All they do is grow leaves they intend to drop

What’s with the trees anyway?  Year after year, the same damn thing.  Grow the leaves, drop the leaves.  Wait a bit.  Start over.

They do rise superior to humans, in this regard, however... they live their dharma and don’t ask why.  And no one, except the argumentative by nature, questions why.

I do have a routine.  Wake, shower (wash all parts in the same order), prep myself for work (each grooming step in the same order), drive to work and clock in, do the same steps every night, feel the same boredom each time, go home and attend to the pets’ needs in the same order, go to sleep in the same spot.  Wake early at the same time, lounge around in a half-awake state, fall back to sleep a couple hours later.  Four days in a row of this.

Saturday arrives and I am hankering for the road.  Often, the same trips as before, as the wife has only one day off and we can only go so far in a single day.  I do the trip under the guise that I am adding variety to my life, but a step back from that allows me to see it is a routine as well.

If I didn’t look deeply at this, it may end up changing, and that’s just crazy talk.

But... just in the interest of talking crazy...

What exactly am I looking for?

In a previous entry, I admitted revisiting sites to maintain a record of their decay, and to relive, a bit, those days of shared adventure with passed-on friends.  I stand by that.

New places we never reached, I continue to seek for my own edification, perhaps.

Or to share with Mrs. Travel.  Show her things she doesn’t have the same interest in.  Her reason is to spend time together.  Ultimately, that was probably what started me at all this, so it’s an admirable reason and I respect it.

I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to just inject something new into a life of dull routine.  Maybe an old haunt with 2018’s leaves is enough to make it seem like an adventure.  I think my dharma may be to do more than just shuffle through a routine?  Now that... that’s crazy talk.

Dismissed

17 years of digging through the American dirt, primarily the southwest.  I have followed stories, personas, vague clues.  Pre-Google maps and post-Google maps.  Post road-trip companion.  I have been to the ancient world as well, as an observer, discovering nothing but appreciating all.

The photo above is flotsam and jetsam at a place called Canyon Diablo.  The initial town, a violent abhorrence at the end of the growing railroad, 1880.  Dried up and blew away, mostly, within 2 years.  Some settlers and buildings lingered on for decades as an important rail stop.  Now no humans reside there, aside from curious Nuevo-explorers like myself.  The buildings that stood are piles of stone now, littered with old rusted metal cans and shattered glass.  I have found artifacts from a canyon side home dating to the 1950s, nothing newer.  So, nearly 70 years have passed since anyone made it their backdrop.

In the 17 years since I first visited these ruins, with a friend that himself no longer walks the earth, I have seen this abandoned old place collapse into a greater decay.  I’ll spare you the metaphor that this makes for life itself.  I can’t help but feel, however, that I am to many as these ruins are to the progress of time.  That’s the damnable misery of life, I suppose.

I have no personal connection to this old town, aside from sharing its first fall upon my eyes with a friend I miss.  Yet I discover, as every stone falls from the broken wall... as every rusted can tumbles across the plain in the wind... as every footprint I leave is washed away by the rain... so too is my vivid memory eroded.  My friends don’t care about these places in the same way.  I don’t even know why I do.  But I still enjoy my strange mornings, meandering the forgotten streets, stepping over the timbers akimbo, strolling unknowing over many a wicked man’s earned grave.  I’ll probably linger here longer than the spirits that built it and fell here.

Damn right

"Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.  When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about." -- Rumi

The difference between the itchy and the starlight

They say men my age are more likely to commit suicide, spurred on by general dissatisfaction with life.  Having reached this age somehow, I can at least say I can empathize with the feeling.

This isn't a cry for help, put the text-message window down.  I don't lightly tread in this territory, what with friends in the past having gone through with the snuffing of their light.

Where this problem is rooted is in the Western ideal of counting trees.  In other words, the philosophy oft-quoted by Wayne Dyer, when he still had physical form: "In the East, they contemplate the forest.  In the West, we count the trees."  And, here again, I consider this truth from my dual-personality: the capital-M Me - a "higher level" unconcerned with the finite game - and lower-case me, the one who plays the finite game and measures his success in numbers (and often against others).

Western society (America in particular) is designed as a counting game.  He who has the gold makes the rules (and never so defined as during this #Trumpsterfire administration).  So, as lowercase me compares what material belongings I claim and my social status, by those measures alone I could say that I have not achieved much.  In comparison to many in the world, of course this "average" take is considerably more than others could expect.  But the outlook for this "reality" (always just a personal judgment) is not promising... a couple more decades of the same, then sit around collecting a much smaller check until my body drops dead.

Capital-M Me, of course, recognizes that the material game - a finite one - is a poor standard by which to define oneself.  The highest of the economic/social classes can look at the same budding flower as the "lowest of the low" and take the same beauty from the experience.  The social construct - the culture - does not reward those who value these experiences, unless they serve a material purpose.

Having grown up in this culture, and allowing my thought processes to be shaped by these judgments, by all means I think of my current status as "a fail".  (This doesn't include or imply anything about the people in my life: if you are here, I am fond of you and value you.)  The truest self-actualized person isn't concerned with these things.  This person lives in the moment, does not presume "the wake of the boat" (the past) is what drives it forward.  The moment you watch the ant at its work or the bee diving into a honeycomb or a wave crash the shore... you're present.  Past is not important.  Future not promised to anyone.  No amount of material wealth or social significance makes a difference in that presence.

So, lowercase-me looks at my measurable material/social status, and sighs sadly.  The book publishing thing, by which I produced five different self-published titles, has proven a material flop.  There are a couple encouraging voices, but for the most part it is largely ignored and, no doubt, unrespected.  When one publishes their own things, there also seems to come with each the notion that "anyone can publish themselves, so it's not like you impressed anyone enough to print your work."  In other words, no one will take you seriously if you're forcing the work out there.  Even if people like what you do, there's no urgency in it.  I know this is true, as my photography, music, and other creative works are treated similarly.

Lowercase-me sees very little genuine interest, and thereby puts a lower value on the work as a response.  Even I think it's not very good, if it doesn't generate real excitement.  So there's no longer urgency to do more, no matter how many well-meant encouragements are sent to me.

Capital-M Me, rather altruistically, says "Write it, and they will come."  They = readers.  They=publishers.  There is some nobility in this outlook.  If what I have to say is not significant, it'll never generate a significant audience.  Self needs to be at peace with that.  Lowercase-me despises the idea of just being an insignificant cog in the machine; capital-M Me isn't at the wheel, so my "failure" becomes palpable and soul-killing.

The emotionless aspect of lowercase-me says "don't place faith in the fickle" and get two things going: new words into new work, and go straight to the people who can bring it to a new level.  Fuck humility... in this case,  Don't count on being carried by those who feel obligated to; let yourself be carried by people who choose to.

Capital-M Me reminds me to smell the roses, and the dandelions too.  And the grass, no matter how itchy it is on the feet.  Think of the billions of eyes staring back at you from the stars, and the billions of eyes you're looking back into, whether you know it or not.  And when you get THAT, you know the support you crave is, in comparison, quite insignificant itself.

Kill, cubed

For years...indeed, most of my conscious life... I have been bedeviled by a psychological malady which has either manifested because of, or caused TO manifest, a physical one.

To briefly define the two: psychologically, I have taken on some pretty rabid sorrow and self-doubt pertaining to my body weight.  The medical term for my physical malady: morbidly obese.  It has negatively altered 'me' in many ways, as far as I can tell.

My self-confidence is low, because I took seriously the gazes of strangers.  Because I took personally the back-handed compliments of friends.  Because of this low opinion of myself (founded in the idea that I could fix this... I know the routines... but did nothing serious to that end) I feel I have taken on no meaningful challenges and my material routine is floundering, keeping me from the resources that would allow me to do more for myself that I would like.

I know what it's like to be mocked so well, in fact, that I got into the habit of doing it myself before anyone else was able to.  Beat them to the punch, so to speak... but I was punching myself.

The better part of me understands that the body is just a receptacle.  The "soul" or whatever you want to call it... let's go with consciousness... is inherently valuable.  This should be the point of this human experience.  How many people "challenged" in any of a countless number of physical or mental ways is able to live with happiness, a grander sense of purpose, a dharma?  How many people hundreds of pounds heavier have been taken hold of by inspiration, and brought their bodies back from the dead?

I suppose that inspiration hasn't quite taken over in me yet, or not in any form I recognize.  While I have been overweight to varying degrees over the past 30 years, it has had little effect on my energy levels.  I have had plenty of mental and physical stamina.  I have had plenty of dexterity, being a little more light on my feet than most my size.

This has changed.

I am finally tired.  I finally feel no good.  Like my body is deteriorating.

And I am worn out, mentally... spiritually... physically...

The hardest thing right now is to muster up the energy to do the right thing.  But life is not worth living in a state of decline.  Although I know it is never too late to change, I realize that doing so - getting on the path back from whence I came - requires a change of identity.  I can no longer be that passionless one who watches the erosion with indifference.

I'm sick.

Loud silence

One thing I am not accustomed to - keeping my focus on the positive.

While we like to cling to the idea that the wake of the boat is driving us forward (that is, the evidence of our journey and not the motor propelling us forward) the plain fact is, once you recognize a pattern that is detrimental, you can act against it (or, better yet, just act some other way - get resistance out of your thoughts).  In most cases, the average person will continue in the same self-defeating behavior because, gosh darnit, "the past" and what-not.  I certainly have embodied this, and in many ways still do.

There is nothing keeping me from doing better, other than laziness/habit/being too deep in my head.

I do have one question, though.

How does one sow a joie de vivre?

It's an essential foundation to doing the right thing.  I am, like that unfortunate Fisher King, 'sick with experience.'  The joys in my life are brief and fleeting.  I have my successes and failures like anyone.  I certainly cannot complain that I have a roof over my head, am well-fed (far too well fed), have enough money to feed the kids, have a loving wife.  I've had wonderful travel experiences, I have fairly good health (although I have certainly abused my body in recent years).

My friend count is low, as I have about a 10:1 loss to gain ratio there.  I keep people away as I have taught myself to trust very few.  This is a mistake of ego, of course.  But it is what it is right now.

Very little excites me nowadays.  The routine I am locked into (by my financial and familial obligations) holds no mystery for me.  Nothing new is learned from it.  Whenever I'm on my deathbed, I won't look back upon it because it is insignificant.

The routine needs to change, and not by focusing on the negatives.  All energy needs to be directed toward the desired result.  Negative begets negative.  Being angry with the current conditions doesn't make them better, make them go away, or make your reality improve.  Expressing constant anger, passive-aggressive distaste for those not holding you aloft, or even the "well I don't care" bullshit admissions that only vocalize because you DO care - all of these self-aggrandizing tactics just make people, who once cared, go away.

I write because I want people to like me, to validate me.  Eventually to finance me.  But one can't market to friends, who figure they've paid enough by giving you verbal support.  They think buying from you is somehow just giving you money.  The sales that matter are the strangers, those people with no obligation to you, who part with their money because they want a piece of your human contribution.

But that joie-de-vivre lack... or the stifling of it somewhere along the line... that's what seems to have a stranglehold on my creative voice.

I'm focusing on positives because that's where the voice must be.  If you go looking for brown, you certainly can find it.  I have enough rods-and-cones on my retina to see as many hues as I can imagine.  Somewhere along the path, I hope a fundamental joy implants itself, because it's slow-going until then.