Trying New Things [and] Killing What You Love

I know you think you know what I'm going to say, that there's a way to abscond from our base desires, to heighten our meditational stance against the warring forces within and without, and just climb over past blights as if rock solid foundations, reaching new heights and then, well, the zen-buddhist stance goes on into a beautiful cycle of constant renovation through dismissal and letting go and all that, and it is all true.  I mean, it is all as true as you want to make it.  But it is not what I'm going to say.

I just tossed the header together, since I think there's a serious tension between trying new things and trying to hold on to what it is you know you love.  And here I don't mean people, not explicitly anyway, although there's nothing quite as sour as the obvious reality of a relationship going south and the awareness that it is occurring, all the while both parties try to preserve it in a weird way that makes me think more of paternal suburban inauthentic cliches than it does about (actual paternal instincts or suburbia), and so what/  The point is more about trying to get into words a little bit of a lived experience, a reality that we know and one that we, individually, and mostly to ourselves, have trouble totally coherently talking about.

See, that's the thing, really, some sort of accuracy, that's the thing I like, or want, or think I want even as I really want what I really want instead anyway, like all of us.  And yes, there's a bit of me smeared all over the highway there and you too, because we're dancing this accident out, in a kind of slow-mo booty call late into the night when we should be back in suburbia, living remote lives, buying creamy drinks, falling into patterns, and habituation of interactions and all the rest that yes, I admit, drives me in a way that also disgusts me.  And that simultaneous understanding, when truly understood is indeed enough to crack better men than me, i.e. it is enough to crack me, and i.e. by the way, I have all sorts of cracks, for better or worse, and microscopic or relatively major, and life sober is not easy because it is very hard to stay sane without alcohol, no?  And yet.  And yet.  Life with alcohol is not exactly manageable.

See the thread of impossibility runs through so many currents that it is impossible for me to walk away from this place.  Basically everything I think is related to alcohol or something about alcohol, or something about alcohol is related to everything I think or experience, and that's fucking scary, and not because I'm an addict or alcoholic, or obsessive in a genuine almost need to be medicated way, but also more importantly, in the way that thoughts can merge and form synergy and find a way into brand new not just version2 thoughts, and realizations and insights, and what's simultaneously happening is that these great new insights are working on themselves, too, like bleach left on the counter, working to disabuse themselves, finding a way to crack, and fling mud and over-modulate right into the rough texture of incoherence, again, at the same time that they find a way toward foundational stability.  And that's what it is, really, a live wire, one that is in constant tension, just balanced there with a lot of energy on either end, in all directions, and that's it, right, the thing I mean to get out here, and with that, I will go and eat a delicious baked in a slight layer of coconut oil sweet potato and go on trying to believe in myself, because I need to, for the base fact of going on.

I Can't Stop -

I guess I just can't stop posting here.  I thought I was done, but every now and then a thought pops into my head, and I'm obliged to follow it through, and then, well, there's only one place for it, a place unfettered by the dogma of mindless social anxiety or forced interaction, or all of the filters and layers and endless sputtering that one must put up with to actually try to have a decent conversation; and that place, well, it turns out, is right here.

So I'm not quite back, but I'm not quite leaving, either, and that means I won't try to stick to a rigid schedule; I'll just post what and when I feel like (um, that's not quite different or anything, but a re-affirmation never hurt).

Because this is a bit of my identity, whether I like it (or want to walk away from it) or not, and I can't quite deny it anymore, even though I've sort of aggressively embraced it, I underestimated the need to stay strong in a low-volume way, and in a consistent way.

Yours always and truly, constantly striving to make headway into the nether regions of our collective addictions,

Offbooze (and off everything else).

Being Honest -

It is okay to just think the thoughts that you have and follow them, and know that they are not purely your own thoughts, and that those particular thoughts at that particular time don't determine everything about you or necessarily define you for all eternity.  They could even be meaningless, inconsequential, flighty little things that don't hold much more water than the most recently passed flatulence.

Faith

It has become evident to me that faith is paramount to life.  It is a thing that religion gets fundamentally correct, at base, and it is important that we all see the more abstract notion of faith, divorced from any baggage of guilt or the sabotage of our personal histories regarding what we've been told to think, or reacted to, regarding religion.

Faith is vital.  We must believe in the future.  We must come to an emotional or philosophical, or even a hold-me-by-my-hips kind of need or want to aim into the future, not for personal gain, for laziness, sloth, etc., but because we can fathom a future of betterness, improvement, constant development, and where we matter. --

Not where we tell ourselves we matter, or where ambition flouts about for ambition's sake.  But a future that we somehow fundamentally believe in, because it matters.  Because it matters without a because.  It matters.  That's the faith part, at once intoxicatingly simple to say and disregard and hideously difficult to practice and hold steady and strong.  But that is what we need, make no mistake, and we will go about trying to find it.  Better to be clear about what we're looking for first, before embarking.

Push Toward Flat

I have a tendency to build hyperbole into everything I do, think about, react to, or experience.  It is exceedingly difficult for me to experience, to live, accurately, flatly, neutrally.  I'd prefer to have some pinch of feedback to know that I'm alive.  As if life's meaning is flat because life is flat.  Because there is no drama.

I'm also intensely self-aware, which, when combined with the need to have drama, or seek action, really pollutes my own feelings of contentment or the possibility of peace.

I also don't think I'm alone.

So what?

So nothing.  Deal with it and development within it too--a much harder task than the constantly bounding mania that so often fueled the exegesis of anything and anyone who would listen.

Death On My Mind

Constantly.  That may sound strikingly myopic, or abnormal.  Perhaps I am indeed deranged in some fundamental way, or just wrong, deep down.

Or perhaps not.

Regardless, I do maintain what I believe in is a healthy respect for death, for darkness, for the reality and need to heed that flavor of our basic existence.

It is hard not to sound quaint or even cliched at this moment, this point, and I don't mean it in a way to evoke some weird kind of nostalgia or even any reflection whatsoever.  It is more about me getting to the basics of accuracy. I experience life with a chronic understanding of death.  It isn't bad, necessarily.  It just is. Before we get to bad, we get to what exists.  In short, I have a certain awareness of vulnerability.  I don't think it is bad, per se.  I think it is perhaps helpful.  You may think that my concurrent problem of never being able to relax, to "settle" into my life, as it were, was closely related to my chronic fatiguing ever present awareness of death.

You'd be right, possibly, but I don't exactly care because I know the more entrenched reality is that you likely care less than that.  My thoughts are almost uniquely inapplicable to you, average person, and your thoughts to me likewise.  It is truly depressing, that sort of relentless unhinged nature of modern life, but I do stare it down with as little distortion as possible.

The point is that death isn't funny, and it isn't intriguing and it certainly isn't something that can be used lightly.  It is scary.  Scary because of its permanence.  Permanence is a concept that takes some time to get used to, since it is easy to hold traction of such notions in conversation, and much harder in the waves of isolation, or even habitual every day life.  Permanence overlays lot of things, the concept of it, a nice little ancillary sub-death thought.  I believe that we make decisions that stick with us, and maybe I'm wrong, but then again, the chance that I'm right is what worries me more.