Haunting Past Is Misnomer

Easy for me to think that the past is back there, frozen, both in time, somehow, and geography.  I don't go near my indiscretions, physically, that is, for fear that somehow I'll find myself there, stuck in some endless loop, and the only true solution to such a mercurial discovery would be both murder and suicide.  I'd have to kill that version of me, thereby committing a kind of suicide.

Which is intrinsically sad, no?  Thinking not of suicide, but that the past is somehow frozen back there, and that the place and people inhabiting that place are also locked in--that is: locked into your egocentric perambulations of shame!  Because so long as "you" left the past, then, well, that past can't possibly move about, grow, change, frolic, or even whither up and die on its own, even without your overwhelming urge to go and kill it!  It might already be dead without your constant semi-nostalgic-semi-religious treatment of it all these years.

So I do have a few words that are not designed for the faint of heart.

And they hurt.  But once the hurt dissipates, there is an ultimate freedom in smallness and regularity, and a spirit in the everyday that can actually overcome wildly dramatic fits and starts to one's life.  So let's try to live small for a bit.

Letting Go -

The need to control is at times (for some of us) quite strong: social situations, other people's thoughts, patterns of activity throughout the day, and what have you.  Flexibility, in other words, can be quite low, even and especially for people who profess verbally to be quite open to new experiences, people, things, places, or ideas.  In fact, I'd wager that most of us are a lot more rigid than we allow.  Just think of the list of things that pisses you off, for instance, about other people, particularly in regards to politics or social policy or any other idea based conception.  Why would it be that normal living standards, habits, norms, and routines, run counter to this base intuition--that "I" am fundamentally correct in what I do, and others are basically, to the extent that they differ, incorrect.

Anyway, there's ways to break this a bit.  One is to try really hard not to come to conclusions based purely on intuition, or even if you have, to try to understand that others have come to conclusions based on their own sense of intuition, what is right, and what they think should be.  It is difficult, it is said, to reason with someone who hasn't reasoned to get to the place they are, wherever they have been.  It is doubly difficult to see your own blindspots.  And not always necessary, either, but crucially important at times.

The Club

Wherever you wish.  Film it, if you can, and we'll pawn it later, to fund our first house, raise kids on the royalties, and denounce the puritans who rarefy all that is bad with everything we don't like.  How sweet it could be--can't you see?  At least they'll know where they came from, right?  No more wondering about it.

Slither into my energy, my peacekeeper, and find a hollowed out grave for safe keeping for your valuables, where we might appreciate them through the process of fermentation, make them sweet like kombucha and honey.

Filter out the rinky dinky little thoughts of panagyric fantasy, blessing yourself with a smite bit of delusion and, shall we indulge? - ecstasy.

I loved you, once upon a time, in a world that we inhabited.  I loved you, and you were more than just a drug.  I promise you that much.  There are no conclusions when worlds slowly shift, disintegrate in such a fuzz of synth.

So much for the tears.  So much for these long and wasted years.

Dramatic Change

Personal self-induced dramatic change (say, from the cessation of using alcohol), is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I wish it wasn't, naturally.  This doesn't preclude change, it just means that we don't become entirely new people just because we put down the bottle.

In fact, we alcoholics are probably so self-centered that we think the change that occurs from not drinking is equivalent to something more than it is, simply because it happened to us.

I'm not trying to take away the somewhat amazing accomplishment of sobriety from anyone who has achieved it.  That's not my aim at all.  I'm just saying, in short, that being sober is a necessary condition for certain people to live relatively normal and non-horrible catastrophic lives, but it is not a sufficient condition, alone, for those same people to excel.

It is nice, but it is not everything, see?  A foundation of sorts.  If we don't wear clothes (and often times specific clothes), we can't go to work.  See, but if we don't wear any clothes, we can't really go to work (and be allowed to keep going).  Simple as that.  Wearing clothes by itself isn't special, but it is for us, people who have a problem conforming, perhaps, to the "uniform" of whatever it is that normal consists of, or to carry the analogy off the deep end, people who just love to be naked no matter the costs.

We, the naked ones, who pretend so hard to be vulnerable, exposed, groomed, and otherwise mature, and yet, can't manage to just keep our clothes on!

I'll tell you this much, and I won't tell you no more.  Not today.