When it comes down to it, I feel like I let myself down. I’m disappointed in myself and it hurts my feelings to receive that. So I’m a big ball of let down, disappointment and hurt feelings all on my own without anyone else’s outside influence.
Intense introspection and measuring up.
I should have been more prudent.
I should have been less me.
Oh, and that too: why do I have to be so overly ambitious and moving all the time? Am I scared of sitting still? Am I afraid to die? I will probably die if I sit still. In fact, sitting still is death to me. Restriction of any of my energy is dying.
So I’m good at moving. I know what I want and I’m always on my way to it. I know only passion. In life, I’ve known no goal and have never set one. But a life comprised of wants has no gives. Passion has focus only on pleasure attained. I am an insatiable, reckless pleasure monkey and I let myself down today.
Communication is kind of sacred to me. It’s like sharing space, but the space is in my and your head and our heads are so vast – it’s divine when you really can get a feel for someone you’ve never met (or maybe you have) through this communication connective tissue. Shoot, I don’t watch tv or listen to the radio or read any news sites or magazines. But somehow I am ultra current and cutting edges. I’m an edge cutter. Because I listen. You know, tap into that collective unconscious. I share my mind space with any mind that is open. The more open, the easier it is to share more. It’s sacred to write and converse and to support others ideas and growth. Everyone grows. Until we don’t anymore. And then we’re dead. Dead is not growing and not changing. But the mind is always changing and growing and it’s really something to have virtual intellect jamming with little words or big words. Just soul and idealism. Idealism and soul. Bring me your open mind.
The first man to take an artistic stab at my new short locks! The talented Clay Sheff has featured my likeness in many of his comic strips and retablos. His most recent piece here is a striking black and white with blood red – the Halloween-inspired witch in me is mesmerized. Last weekend was my birthday and I’ve been going through so many changes, of which cutting off my dread locks is only a surface expression. I decided on my birthday that the next year’s momentum had revealed itself to me as LEVITY. Clay seems to somehow known this before I:
In some shiny, horrible land the water took my life. I tried to rise, but could not stand. The water took my life. It shred my lungs – don’t understand this “peaceful way to die”.
Your mother, the ocean, the lake, my betrayal. You float I sink. You play I flail. The air that breathes me leaves me. Pale.
With time to morn myself die. The water took my life.
My new doll. Shes dreadlocked bag of bones.
Sometimes you just gotta get away.
Of course when I say ‘you’, I really mean ‘I’.
Sometimes I just gotta get away. Is it something specific to my personality or is it specific to all humans and I am just joining in that race. The human race.
Where are we racing to? The finish line is the only real deadline and from here it looks like Death. Racing toward Death we humans us all. Then again, maybe it’s just me trying to get away. Trying to forget my personality again and again. Because deep down, I know that identity is a shape – a code we use to communicate with others. Identity is communication. My identity is not me. ‘I’m’ not me. Knowing that gives me the freedom to roam throughout personalities, changing quickly and often just for fun.
But I don’t feel like being someone specific right now. I don’t feel like pretending to have an identity. I don’t feel like communicating at all.
I am at a pool party in Tampa, Florida, where I have been brought in as a featured guest for Fetish Con. I see women playing alter egos, I see men playing servants, I see hotel staff playing bartenders and convention staff playing security. It strikes me as odd that all of these people actually believe they are whom they say they are. The way I see it, even the security man is playing a role. We’re all role playing all the time.
Some costumes are more fun than others.
I’m bored with my personality(s). I’m tired of everyone else’s identities. And I wonder to myself if there is any way to communicate without identifying at all. This lonely heart wants to connect without buying into my or someone else’s person. But this keyboard, even now, is what I’m buying into and this keyboard, even now, is getting in the way. To write this at all, I am buying into a perspective as if it’s mine. As soon as I stop typing I am not communicating anymore. My identity of writer is forgotten.
And I guess all that’s left to do is be quiet.
Some people say they find peace in the silence. But ‘I’ didn’t find anything at all.
I remember how the electric light naturally shone across the unpainted wall. I didn’t then and still don’t have a concept of angels, or much need of one. But the pattern that light stretched across the wall – it looked like an angel, if I ever saw one. Like a card in December with glitter for wings and snow.
The moment I thought it – that there was an angel in my wall – there you were, in my mind, in my heart. Alive and present, though I hadn’t seen you in years. Like you were standing at my shoulder with a love feeling even then. You were alive and I felt you had visited through the light.
Of course, I made art. With a magick marker I drew across the wall. Make permanent. The shape of an angel per chance this memory – in hopes we keep meeting like this. We’ll have to keep meeting like this.
Years later, what was permanent became purple with two coats of paint. What I wouldn’t give now to hold your sweet face again. But not through some trick of light nor a memory. But like before, hand in hand, giggling laughing, teasing hugging, growing dying, only once in this lifetime. Maybe never again. Maybe forever now.
When I remember, I live for us both.
It’s a little death every day. It’s a little dying and then one day you are changed. Reborn and grateful for the clarity, the perspective, the motion. During the dying, though, you are faithful for, rather than convinced of; rebirth.
We have faith in the rebirth if we are smart. And we are. We see all around us what blossoms after wither, what sprouts in the ashes, what is the next season. And it doesn’t take me long – no, not too long at all – to know: I’m about to wake up and not recognize my reflection either because it looks like someone else or because it looks like me.
Just when the caterpillar thinks the world was over,
she sprouts wings and flies.
Wa wa. Cry me a river about ground water pollution and rising gas prices. The cost of health care and internet neutrality.
In fact, cry yourself to sleep about solar flares and reptilian Masons. Weak dollars and single parent families and lack of quality programming on your satellite locatable, internet accessible, Bluetool compatible communication device.
And just plain shut up about black female candidates of twenty twelve when?
There’s an Ice Age comin’ whether we reuse our drinking water bottles or not and if you are not gonna let that get you down, then I suggest doing what you are doing anyway while the WGA is on strike and urea is the integral ingredient in Mercede’s Blutec engines – in the face of your created conspiracies … fortify what is precious and live the best way you know how. Without relent, live now with full conviction, full idealism, full passion because one thing is for certain; ain’t no one gonna make it out alive.
We all die next month or next decade or sometime in this or the next century by some cause for some reason at someone’s hands indirectly or directly maybe our own. We all die and the only thing left to do is live it now. Like you wish it had always been. Like you wished it ever could be. This may be the single most important thing you can do in your imperative, insignificant life.
I’m not saving the world here. Everything will be as it evolves and I’m personally banking on a little epigenius. There is nothing to save. Ice Age comin. In fact, it’s a little over due in spite of our efforts to speed it up by altering weather patterns with global thermics. Sometimes the realization of impending Death is the ultimate motivation for true freedom.
Come alive. It matters.
Come alive.
I’d have to disagree with Freud, the creative genius inventor of psychoanalysis, that repression – specifically sexual repression – is the defining motivation to our personalities.
Now, I might be psychoanalyzing myself here, but I think it’s Death. It’s not some opposable digit, biped motion, or language capability that separates us from our hairier four-legged counterparts. It’s that somewhere in human evolution we were there watching another of our species die and instead of simply feeling despair or triumph over their plight, we had the lightening flash that: I, too, will die.
A random, accidental event births “ego”, solves the missing link and instigates all sorts of historical repercussions including insanity, violence and the need to obsessively use right angles in architectural design (you can’t walk down the street without it, people).
Me? I just choose to think about Death every day. I won’t expand too much except that I’ve come to the realization that to every yin there is a yang, every coin has two contingent sides, and the complimentary opposite to Death is not Love, as some might expect and neither is it birth. It’s sex. Sex and Death are exactly the same only completely polar.
Sexual repression and mortaility repression: maybe Freud was closer than we thought.
