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vaxjediI am tired. But I cannot sleep. I am always hungry, but I eat too much. I am lonely, yet I am constantly surrounded by people. Some people are just never content.
I keep talking about a lack of self. I think that is incorrect. I have a self. I simply do not have the energy to experience that self. I am so determined to meet my responsibilities, to be who I should that I spend all my energy doing that. My parents will have a heart attack when they realize I've been doing so much overtime. The concept that I would work too much is alien to them.
One of the worst problems I have is that I am not a cat person. I don't care for cats.
And everyone I know does. My housemates, my kids, my friends, my lovers, everyone.
I don't like cats. I like dogs. I grew up with dogs. Dogs were always very good to me. I had a dog when I was a kid. A cross between a black lab and a basset hound. Yes. Long dog, big head, huge paws. Short little legs. My Dad named him Kinky. Yes, my first pet was named Kinky. I miss that dog. He protected me. He loved me. He was always there.
You know what I dislike more than cats? Uppity cat people. Not the people who just love cats. But the people who love cats and insist on making fun of dogs. Everytime they start talking like that, I want to take a baseball bat to their throat.
Weird what makes us really angry, eh?
I need some more time to myself. Too much noise in my head, and it's not even from my head. And it isn't just from ambient people. It's from people who want my attention, who are giving me theirs. Family, coworkers, customers, etc. Attention hurts. Because it's like someone is lighting my brain on fire.
Answer: Sis boom bah.
Question: What is the sound a sheep makes when it explodes?
I grew up in Southern California. A desert with a blasted emotional landscape called an suburban sprawl.
I used to think it was a magickal dead zone. That's why I thought I had so many problems up here. Magick is more real here.
But the issue is it is a desert. Energy moves in hard, fast straight lines in a desert. Nothing t break it up. Reality is hars h and bleak in a desert. Add a grid of asphalt (essentially an artifical desert) and concrete and tract housing, you have hard and fast energy channeled through freeways, bouncing off mirrored-glass office buildings, tainted by smog and artifically sustained lawns and the smallmindedness of suburban life.
I think a lot of people in SoCal are magickally sensitive. But they/we are burnt out constantly. Their psychic synapses are frying all day long. That's why SoCal is so soulless. Our souls are being burnt away, a little bit at a time.
It's a desert. Who the fuck decided to put a major metropolis there?
I'm writing a RPG background. Well, what gamer isn't?
Maybe, someday, I'll actually run it. Or maybe I'll just run away to it.
It's late. I'm gonna hate myself in the morning when I go to work. But right now, I don't care. I have words I have to get out.
At what point does sacrifice stop being noble? When does it cease to be a virtue and become a problem? When does one have the right to ask that one's own needs become a priority?
I have such problems asking for what I want and/or need. I've gotten used to being the drain on all the people around me. And when someone asks for something, it often doesn't occur to me that I shouldn't give what I have. And then I find that I do not have enough for myself.
A friend of mine once said "The cool thing about real communists is that they will give you the shirt of their back. The annoying thing is that someone has usually already taken it."
You see me now the veteran of a thousand psychic wars.
I've been living on the edge so long where the winds of Limbo roar.
And I'm young enough to look at, but far too old to see.
Wounds are all I'm made of. I don't know if there is anything left of me.
Love does not conquer all. That has been probably the most disillusioning thing I've ever encountered. The idea that because you love someone, and they love you, that all your problems are managable is bunk.
I encountered this first with Lisa, Ryan's ex. I loved her. But, I couldn't stand her. She just annoyed me constantly. Love simply wasn't enough.
That's been a blow to me ever since. I've tried to rationalize around it. But I can't. Love isn't always enough. Isn't that depressing? It's like when you realize that life isn't fair. What's the goddamn point then?
There has to be a point. Otherwise, there is no point. Yes, that is a logical circle. But, without a point, without a hope, there is no reason to get up out of bed, except to avoid the pain of not going to work so you can pay your bills. I can't live like that. So, I won't.
I belive in magick. It's a world I choose. I could easily deny it, choose a different world. But without magick, there is no hope. Things happen randomly and randomly only. In that world, I don't matter. In that world, there is no reason for me to exist at all. And I want to exist.
G'Quon wrote, there is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities. It is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope. The death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.
That's why I continue. I am that soul. I have lost my way. Maybe, when I have found it again, I can help other souls find their way.
That was my calling. Little did I know my first real test would to lead myself out of the Chapel Perilous.
I still believe in love. It doesn't conquer all. But it's the best monarch to serve.
I had many names in High School for myself, for various parts of my personality. One was The Vagabond. I am the Vagabond when I am talking to people, listening to them, moving from person to person. "I experience myself by experiencing other people," said the Vagabond. That was in one of my journals (which I destroyed a year or so ago).
I have found as I talk to people, I find out who I am. I do not comprehend what I know until somene asks me to explain something. I do not know what I am capable of (or incapable of) until I do it. I do not know who I am, until I explain it to someone else. I do not exist until I explain myself.
Now it's time for me to go to sleep. My world is ending, like it does every night. A new world is created every morning. Every day is an eon. Every person is an event of Bibilical proportions. And they all die when I close my eyes. And then I dream.
Yeah, the one with the sun god robes and the screamning naked women throwing little pickles. Why am I the only one that has that dream?
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Date: 2002-05-06 08:06 am (UTC)Let these hands be the
Hands of forgiveness, so to
give, not to take.
Let this voice be the
voice of kindness, so to
leave happiness in it's wake.
Let this body be of one
ambition, to live for
other peoples' sake.
Let this teacher teach, so to
mend and heal,
not to break.
oh,
I just remembered yesterday,
How the curve of your head fits
the curve of my waist and the curve
of your smile fits the curve of my mind.
I can't remember exactly what was going on, or what I was thinking when I wrote the first poem. But I remember reading it a couple of times after and thinking it was a noble idea. At another time, on page 129 (Notes on Life and Humans), I wrote "There can be no greater cause than that of a stepping stone. -A.G." I have always felt like I hurt people all the time. That goes back at least to when I was seven years old. But I always wanted to help people instead.
It's only in the last few years that I've truly understood that, for all the nobility in those words, self-sacrifice isn't a virtue if it's all you are, at any point in time. Taking is important - the soul needs nourishment and grounding and sometimes you do need to take the time and the space that will be yours, that will be you. "If I am not for myself, then what am I?" -I can't remember who said that. It was in the collection of quotes we used for Thought of the Day back at Grinnell.
What I didn't realize is that there are two things that go hand in hand - the ability to say no and the right to ask anything. When I was the most caught up in the idea of water brothers I felt in my soul (as honestly, I do now) that any of my water brothers could ask anything of me and I would do it. But the corrolary - that I might ask anything of them (you)? Well, I would hardly think of it. The one time I can remember in school when I broke down and cried - cried my heart out in Janann's lap after asking her to come to me - that was so special and felt like such a gift and yet if I did that sort of thing for someone - when I gave pieces of my self all around, I didn't recognise the value of those gifts. But more, I didn't recognise the value to me, the portion of friendship, that is asking for and receiving gifts like that - a value I have all too often missed, which leaves me so lonely now. And I didn't realize that being willing to say no sometimes, or knowing that the people you love will sometimes say no to you, is part of what makes it possible to open up, admit to and ask for what you think you need, and explore that together.
It's a goodness (one of those oddly good things) to know I'm not alone in figuring out when and how to make my own needs a priority. And I'm here for that, because one of my needs is to connect.
All in all, the second poem is so much more real and applicable to life. The curve of your smile fits the curve of my mind. Blessed be, little brother.
no subject
Date: 2002-05-07 12:01 pm (UTC)For the longest time I thought that I could heal my own soul without anyone eles. I became Isolated and depressed. Then circumstances forced me to reach out a hand. I could see the bottem coming and was sure that I would no longer be able to continue. I cried out to my friends in a wisper. And to my suprise they ran, cheering, to help me. Those whom I had neglected and ignored because I was burnt out was there to save me.
It is my own story and I am not sure that it helps at all. But swear there is a point. It is only this: To give you must have. Make sure that you do enough for yourself that you have things to give. And, Help often times comes from places where we thought the bridge was burned.