What, exactly, is the real world right now? Let’s see…the volcano in Iceland is still pulsing lava fountains several hundred feet high, every five minutes or so. It’s hard to conceive of that much-molten rock on the move beneath the surface and straining for release. It’s not showing any signs of dissipating as of this moment, so engineers are trying to figure out a way to possibly divert its direction. They’re concerned about some nearby infrastructure, which seems odd since this has been going on for nearly six weeks now.

The GOP has lost its mind entirely. Marjorie Taylor Greene is obsessed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (which she pronounces the second name as o-k-sheo). She chased AOC in the halls of the Capitol, demanding a debate over the Green New Deal, claiming “the American people want a debate”. Um, no. The American people have a few other things on their minds right now…COVID vaccine issues, jobs, paying rent. Little things like that.

AOC has ignored the nice lady, which seems prudent. She did make a response to news queries today, though, and said Marjorie Taylor-Green seems “unwell” and professionals need to deal with that. I can’t say that’s out of line. Video footage from 2019 shows the aggressor yelling through the mail slot on AOC’s office door, calling her a baby and telling her to “face the American people who elected you”. I hope the professionals come quickly, armed with tranquilizer dart guns.

The Colonial pipeline was interrupted because…some hackers seized control of their network and held it hostage. It was a “ransomware” attack, and they shut down gasoline distribution across several states. One would think a gas shortage might encourage people to conserve gasoline, and possibly help each other out. But, no…despite being asked nicely to not hoard, not fill up or top up unless necessary, etc. people lined up at gas stations like it was 1979. At least here in NC, folks were filling up all of their vehicles, plus multiple gas containers, plastic bags, racks of gas canisters on pickup trucks, and anything else they could get their hands on. So much for not panicking.

With the long lines, supply shortages followed at individual gas stations, and then bad behavior was the name of the game. Fistfights, fender benders, hurling of invectives were the way to handle a crisis, real or imagines. I imagined that people who were going ballistic at the gas stations left there after filling up, then visited their favorite grocery store to purchase emergency supplies for any disaster that might be headed our way – bread, milk, and toilet paper.

Bread and milk, for some reason, are this areas designated necessities for all weather emergencies, so that supply always runs low when there’s a hurricane or ice storm within 500 miles of here. I’m not sure what good milk would do if power is lost, but what do I know.

I don’t much care for milk anyway, so they are welcome to it. Bread doesn’t really excite me if it’s not toasted, so that’s not what I would need to live on if power goes out for a few days. I’m more looking for protein bars or shakes, and non-perishable snack foods. I can hoard tap water in advance, so that’s about all I’m gonna need.

It’s not like I’m gonna be eating gourmet meals in an apartment with no power and no way to get out. Truthfully, I don’t eat gourmet meals in my apartment at any time. Everything else in the area will be out of power as well, so I just have to hold my nose if necessary and get into camping mode. It won’t last forever, so pucker up butter cup.

The toilet paper hoarding was kind of new, courtesy of the pandemic. Not sure what caused people to panic over toilet paper when things shut down last march, but seems like a lot of people got the memo. There was simply no toilet paper in grocery stores, drug stores, stores of any kind. Shelves were bare, and just like today’s gas supply issues, people were rudely hoarding what little they could find. Buying enough toilet paper to last for the duration of the apocalypse, I suppose.

When stuff like these crises befalls us, it seems to bring out the worst in people. As I said earlier, there were fistfights and car accidents today, courtesy of the gasoline shortage. At the beginning of the pandemic, when masks became mandatory, people rebelled and refused to mask in public.

Retail stores demanded shoppers mask, and the fun began – people quoted imaginary laws and policies that explained why they were exempt, cited health conditions that didn’t exist, stood in the middle of the sidewalk and threw massive temper tantrums. A 4×6 inch piece of fabric was going to be the hill they died on. But they’re still woefully alive and still refusing to mask, because this is the land of the free. And possibly the dead. But, I digress.

I was on a call the other night with some folks, and we were talking about race. It was an intentionally multicultural/multiracial/multi-theology group. One of the participants, who is a Black Christian woman, said she is tired of talking about race. She just wants to talk about fun stuff, every day stuff, stuff that shows how more alike we are than different. I was aware that I was having somewhat a reaction to that, but said nothing.

I let her comments sit for a bit, and the conversation naturally flowed toward several related subjects. The woman’s comments were still rattling around in my head, though, but I still wasn’t entirely cognizant of what that meant for me. As we talked more about the current state of affairs with race in America, it came to me. I can’t ignore the ways my identity makes a difference when I’m dealing with people who differ culturally, racially, gender-wise.

At a more or less opportune moment, I injected my thoughts about that into the conversation. More clarity emerged, as I said that I understood her fatigue about constantly feeling that every conversation was about race, as though social interactions had become an occupational deliverable. I went on to say that where I couldn’t stay in that posture was in the case of systemic issues. When it comes to things like Ma’Khia Bryant and Daunte’ Wright, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland…and all the others…I often do not respond in the same way that members of dominant culture respond. My reaction is frequently more gut-level emotional, more visceral. I despise having to explain that, but it’s very real and usually worthy of explanation.

The rest of the group was quiet, thoughtful. I really wasn’t trying to have a confrontation, or a debate, I was simply letting people know how I felt. When everyone else went silent, I wondered if I had gone too far, erred in some way. There had been a moment when I had left the building, because I was emoting at such an intense level that I was consumed by it. I wasn’t angry, but I was…passionate. I was entirely “in” what I was feeling.

I glanced at the woman who’d first spoken, and wondered if she interpreted my comments as somehow disagreeing with her, trying to start a conflict. Her face had changed, there was an expression I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble with whatever she’d say next. And it looked very much as though she had something to say.

When the lady spoke, she was contemplative, and spoke more softly than she had previously. She called me by name, and said that when I mentioned Ma’Khia Bryant, she had to catch her breath. She related very personally with that girl, as I did, and she definitely couldn’t be similar to people who didn’t see that situation as tragic, and not right, and unfair. She agreed with me – that child should not be dead. She went on to say that she usually just couldn’t talk about that case with people not like her.

She got me. I got her. We connected on some binary of pain, of hurt, of despair that a 16-year old Black girl-child was dead at the hands of a white police officer who’d done nothing to save her. Done nothing to serve and protect her. Reduced her to a sentence in a training guide. There was no compassion there, no attempts to mitigate or deescalate the situation, which is what officers are paid to do. That child never saw it coming, and I pray she never felt a thing.

When that woman and I connected on our pain, I felt like this, right here, is the reason I’m doing all this work. This is what all the emoting and sharing opinions and reacting is about, getting to that point of connection where there’s emotion, where the heart is involved, where both people are on the pin-point of their respective humanity. That’s where religious differences, class differences, skin color, gender, size, intellect, sexual orientation, and every other difference, fall away. None of that matters when you’re at the crystalline point of connection, like a frozen water drop that begins to melt. It’s crystal clear, and solid begins giving way to liquid, and there is energy moving. There is flow.

I guess what we’re working for is flow, where the rigidity is relaxed and we can move between each other with ease, no inhibitions. But we cannot maintain that rigidity, that frigid structure that freezes everyone in their tracks. We have to warm up, treat each other with caring, and thaw our hearts. We have to un-freeze, somehow.

Perhaps seeing all of these horrific images of murders, the unfeeling and emotionally detached visages of murderers in uniform after they’ve fired their weapons, is what will thaw some of us. Perhaps. Some of us remain unmoved, but more and more are looking at this and showing emotion, frustration, anger. Anger cannot be where we stay, but sometimes it’s a reasonable place to start the flow. Begin the thaw. Allow us to see the connection points. Perhaps.

I am hopeful. That’s a big deal, because some days there seems to be little cause for hope. Hope is about the future, and the present moment seems heavy and dark and unforgiving. But, hope is a vent for release of the fog of giving up, the smoke of burning dreams. Often, I want to protect myself from having any hope whatsoever, because it feels like vulnerability, it feels like dreaming, it feels like prayer. It feels as fragile as a new sprout emerging from the soil…will it survive? That moment of “will it survive” is the one that is make or break for whether we stay at the table, when the risk is real.

Sometimes, when I am confronted with such a moment, I ask myself what’s the worst that can happen? In all honesty, what might I lose? Will I survive, or will my fragile new growth be trampled and eradicated completely? This is the moment of choice, no matter how unnoticed it may be, no matter how miniscule. This is the moment there is a hint of a choice to either revert to our default posture of “me, mine” and feel safety in the status quo, or move past the discomfort of the risk and see what happens. I suppose that is hope – waiting to see what happens, with a hope that it won’t be a disaster. It’s very uncomfortable, but I am not sure we can live without it.

Refusing to face that moment of vulnerability, and uncertainty, is what keeps us in this unending moment of hating each other because of our differences, of being so afraid of each other that we have to kill. This is what keeps us tied to status quo, because the discomfort of not knowing what comes next is so frightening, so unnerving, that we prefer to remain in thrall to the tried and true, no matter how inequitable and unfair and unsatisfying it may be. The devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

I suppose we have to deal with our fears, honestly and truthfully. What exactly is the fear present when you are at the top of the heap, and there is movement below? Do you fear that you will lose your position? And if you do, what does that loss mean to you? Does it mean that you will die, that someone else will die, or does it simply mean that you will not get what you want, or be able to keep what you have? Be clear on that, because it’s important to know why you do what you do. Just taking action because everybody else is taking action, or because that’s what your ancestors did, is not good enough. Just like good intentions are not good enough. There has to be intention, and intentional action. Otherwise, the stream remains frozen, there is no clarity and there is no flow when the water thaws.

We are thirsty. We are thirsty for the water of life, for the flow, but there is so much water around us. Some of it is frozen, and so we can’t drink it until there’s a thaw, until there’s warmth and molecules unclench. Some of it is blocked, by impediments we’ve constructed ourselves, often to prevent others from having a chance at drinking. Some of it has been poisoned, again by circumstances we’ve created, and unsafe for anyone to drink. We need to see our part in that, metaphorically and quite literally, before the water can flow and before we can drink.

Most of the Earth is water. Most of our cells are water. It would seem there is a message in that, and we’d probably do well to reflect on that. Clarity in water is important, it usually signifies the water is safe to drink, but not always. Sometimes, we have to be aware of the source, and understand where it comes from to determine if it’s salty or fresh, and what contaminants may have been introduced. Once we know that, we have ways to ensure our safety, or we can choose another source. We have choices.

Having the choice to engage or not engage serves us well. We often do not make good use of that, because we simply react. Make me angry, and I don’t like how that feels, so I retaliate. Steal from me, and that makes me angry, so I react and maybe kill you because, well, it looked as though you might kill me, and besides, everybody knows stealing is against our laws. Or maybe it’s because you made me angry enough that I decided you should die. We need to know the difference.

I hope that I know the difference. I feel that I do, but I also know that when rage or abject fear is involved, my mind can go numb and my reptile brain can take over. The reptile brain, as it’s called, is only really concerned with survival. It’s small but very powerful, and takes control of our instincts to act in any way necessary to prolong our lives. That’s the root of the familiar chant defending police officers who have killed unarmed suspects – they were in fear for their lives, so their shooting was justified. I contend we need to delve further into that, and figure out if that’s true in all cases. That’s the source of protests over killings like that of Ma’Khia Bryant, and Daunte’ Wright. Exactly whose life was in danger in those situations, and did the officer really have no choice?

Choice is important. We have many choices, and we have to understand that with choice comes responsibility. We can make incorrect choices, and we have to make amends for any resultant harm that is done. Sometimes, we can’t make it right. Sometimes, the damage is irreversible, and it can never be right. When a person is killed as a result of your actions, you cannot bring them back to life. So, what then?

I am not a huge fan of the penal system, because it offers no hope of rehabilitation at this point. I’m also not a fan of “putting people away” in order to bring them into “normalcy”. This is what we do with the mentally ill, and the elderly. Institutionalizing people doesn’t work, and they usually transition out of our lives in the same condition, we just don’t have to deal with it. We pay other people to deal with it, and that is problematic for all involved, even us.

I don’t have any sure answers for this, but lean toward the making of sincere amends, acceptance of responsibility for the actions that have caused harm. No groveling, no excuses, no please for understanding, just a sincere acknowledgement that you have caused harm, and pain, and that you at least have a desire to make it right. Restorative justice uses that model as a foundation, where perpetrator and those impacted by their crime meet to negotiate accountability.

Restorative justice practices have shown promise in the educational system, and in some lower-level niches of the criminal justice system. It’s not perfect, but it’s a small way to make small changes. Aside from deterring incarceration for some who commit non-violent crimes, this modality gives those impacted a way to reclaim their voice and participate in a justice system that hears them. The perpetrator is not exiled from the community through institutionalization, but remains a part of the process and participates in re-establishing good relations.

Justice is a tricky thing. As state previously, in some cases, we resort to eye for an eye forms of simple punishment. It would seem there is no change to status quo in that modality, only a Calvinistic rendering of punishment. There is no growth, or opportunity for redemption, only punishment. The incarcerated learn nothing about the true impact of their crime, and those impacted are left to their anger and powerlessness. They, too, are left out of the criminal justice system’s process, of which they should be the most integral part.

The economic benefits of the prison-industrial complex for the State are legendary. Prisoners are used for cheap labor to perform various manual labor tasks, and the number of guards and service contracts involved to manage the incarcerated population makes tremendous opportunity for private sector profit. In some cases, it appears there is little incentive to keep people out of jail, and every incentive to keep them IN jail. When police entities are incentivized to make arrests for low level crimes, the number of people subject to incarceration rises exponentially. What good is that?

I suspect it is of no good whatsoever. So many lies, so much energy wasted on stereotypes and creating the boogeyman over and over and over. And the boogeyman is always a Black man. That’s insidious, and so incredibly erroneous, because as I have told people many times, I am way more afraid of crowds of drunken white frat boys than anybody on the face of the Earth. I have seen what they do, I have seen their cruelty, I have seen their depravity. I keep my distance, because I’m generally afraid of them. They make the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end.

I was reading something earlier that was discussing the Big Lie of election fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, and whining about election fraud has actually been going on for decades. In 1993, they were attempting to pass bills that amounted to voter suppression, mainly suppressing traditional Democratic voting blocs, but many of those bills were challenged and didn’t succeed.

But they have kept trying, and now we have this utter dumpster fire, inside an erupting volcano, while a tornado is forming overhead. If it wasn’t so dangerous and sad, the efforts to suppress the vote would be funny. But it’s not funny, and it is dangerous, and it’s very sad. And they are not going to stop.

It occurs to me that all of this bull dung about election fraud and destroying faith in the election process is just covering up something else that’s in process. This could very well be a distraction for something even more heinous, like trying to get a Constitutional Convention in order to amend the Constitution with some form of disastrous and democracy-damaging change. I don’t put it past the previous guy and his minions, and now that the GOP has declared their undying loyalty to him, above party and above oath of office, nothing would surprise me. I don’t for a minute believe that nothing is going on behind the scenes.

So, hold on to your hats, boys and girls. This is going to be a rough ride, but it will be the thrill of your lifetime. Make sure you don’t have anything in your pockets, and make sure you hold on to your eyeglasses and dentures, because we’re going to be upside down a couple of times, downhill at high speed, and it’ll all be a blur. Don’t say you weren’t warned, and make sure you keep the safety bar latched at all times, and your arms and feet inside the car until it comes to a complete stop.

For some bizarre reason, I was just musing about the recent phenomenon of resistance to status quo by accusing agents of change of implementing “cancel culture”. This seems to be primarily a tool of dominant culture, utilized when there is some innovation or change to routine introduced by non-dominant culture or those who align with it. This is the school-yard tactic of answering criticism with “I know I am, but what about you?”

The dishonorable Marjorie Taylor-Greene attempted to chase down Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the hallway of the Capitol to make some point or another…something about wanting to debate AOC about the Green New Deal. Last time I checked, a debate was a choice. The former guy made that choice for one of the scheduled debates with Joe Biden prior to the 2020 election. Everyone agreed that was his right to do so, even though many speculated he was simply afraid to get his butt kicked. Regardless, he did that, and nobody chanted anything like “cancel culture” relative to that, even tough presidential debates have been a long-standing tradition in our nation for over a century.

Cancel culture indeed. As I mentioned, those words seem to be tossed about by members of dominant culture whenever they can’t get their way about something, or when they’ve been bested by reasonable arguments that prevent them from getting something they want. This is ludicrous, because the only real cancel culture in this nation was implemented by the forebears of these same people – European-Americans who were rooted in white supremacy and Christian bias.

The cultures that were unapologetically cancelled in America were, of course, those of the indigenous people already settled on our lands. The First Nations people. Native Americans. Their culture was quickly deemed as “savage”, and in need of Christianization as well as population reduction. Colonization attempted to do both, and Native Americans began to die. In large numbers, over a long period of time.

In the very early days of the British colonies, when the population of colonists was still low, there may well have been some neutral of even positive interaction between colonists and the First Nations. When the colonial structure gained a foothold, however, they brought out the European colonial playbook and began claiming land for themselves, in the name of the God and the Crown, not necessarily in that order. Neither the King nor the Christian God had any relevance to indigenous people, but their land was relevant, and that was the root of conflict that persists even to this day.

Over the centuries that Americans have occupied land in what is now the United States of America, they have forged across mountains, hills, dales, plain, swamps, and bodies of water to expand. Or something. Moving out from the original landing in New England, Europeans claimed ground that was already settled for themselves. They even sold land they did not own to each other – the French sold land to the Spanish and the British; the British sold land to the French and the Spanish sold land to the French and the English. Even the Dutch had a finger in the pie, and the Belgians. All of them European nations that believed they were the first relevant settlers on land already occupied.

Ownership is a different concept in the indigenous cultures than in European culture. In European culture, land is owned and has a financial value. The financial value is everything. If the land is fallow, that decreases its value, and without value there is no reward due the owner. In the indigenous cultures, the land was valuable because it was the land, and it was for everyone. If it was fallow, they cared for it, or relocated to more fertile soil. They understood that land could become fallow for several reasons, and so they continued to care for it so that it could be revitalized and produce again in the future. Land ownership was not held by one person, or family, but for the benefit of the tribe. It was common ground, quite literally. The yield was also common, so that all would benefit.

This concept was unheard of in most European cultures, but the colonists believed their way to be far superior to that of the First Nations. Because of their presumed superiority, and their possession of more sophisticated weaponry, European settlers forced their way onto more desirable land, by any means necessary. When the Native Americans began to fight back, more died, either by guns or by infliction of disease or by deprivation of natural resources. This continues even today.

Our national narrative holds our country to be the greatest nation on the face of the Earth, with liberty and justice for all. Most Blacks, People of Color, and Indigenous People (BIPoC) find that to be a nearly comical statement. Liberty and justice for all, in the experience of most BIPoC, translates to liberty and justice for European-descended Americans alone. “Cancel culture” was so rampant in the early days of this country that liberty and justice for none was the experience of all but the Europeans.

When Native Americans asserted their rights to live on their ancestral lands, they were not only murdered, but their way of life was destroyed. Their style of building villages, encampments, and shelters was disparaged as primitive, and during conflict with colonists, those land-friendly structures were routinely burned. Trees were felled in large numbers simply to provide lumber with which to erect the cabins favored by the Europeans, which did not coincide with the First Nations’ spiritual posture of conservation and abundance. That sacred and deeply spiritual part of Native culture was, effectively, canceled.

Aside from differences in their relationship to the land, Europeans’ superiority manifested itself in other parts of Native culture. They found long hair, bare breasts, unfamiliar Native language to be signs of primitivity and ignorance, and so they took steps to change it. They took steps to force assimilation n a culture that did had no choice in the matter. Europeans presumed from the start they had “conquered” the indigenous people, and they did what conquering forces do – they began to “cancel” the culture and the spirit of the vanquished.

Over the time of European occupation, Native cultures have been largely divested of their spirituality, their way of dress, their way of life. Capitalist economy was alien to them, but their ways of ensuring the common good has virtually been eradicated. Christianity was forced upon them, their native lands were suddenly occupied by whites, along with their sacred burial grounds and holy places. When there was resistance the tribalists were killed, in the name of God and country.

Aside from infliction of Christianity, and the accompanying mindset thereof, Native American cultures were decimated in other ways that were designed to force compliance with the conquerors’ vision. This took many generations, but it was a steady drain on the spirit of the indigenous people – forbidding certain cultural expressions, like the Ghost Dance, broke the hearts of the tribes. Other blows to the spirit of the indigenous people included forbidding certain modes of dress, like feathered headbands and face paint was devastating; forcing Native male children into boarding schools, for their own good, of course; forcibly cutting the hair of male children in school was routinely done in the early 20th century. The only rationalization and justification for this was…the sanctity of a Christian God that assured Europeans of their sovereignty and superiority to all others.

So, perhaps in today’s environment, when European-Americans are complaining about “cancel culture”, perhaps I should understand. Their ancestors were the ones who came up with that notion, so it’s literally in their blood. Plus, if you’ve had the privilege of sovereignty all your life, I suppose having to share that with others must feel as though you’re losing something, and that could make a person cranky.

The American colonists canceled not only the culture of indigenous people, they also canceled the culture of the people they brought here from Africa. Those folks not only had no choice about being on this land, they were not seen as having a culture of their own, or agency over their bodies or their lives. They were immediately perceived as not equivalent to the European version of a civilized human, and so they were not civilized humans. They were property, much as cattle and sheep were property.

There was no consideration of the life experience of enslaved people brought to this country from other nations, no thought of a culture or a way of life. Most notably in the case of Africans, but also South Americans who were enslaved, there was indeed a vibrant culture in their native lands. Upon arriving here, however, enslaved people were stripped of their names, their language, their spirituality, and their tribal way of life. Their compliance with European tradition was a matter of life and death, and like other conquered peoples, they assimilated because they had to.

The problem with forced assimilation becomes the lasting resonance of the native culture in the souls and bodies of the vanquished. When the Holy Roman Empire conquered the Gaelics, they remembered their original culture. There was bloody conflict for generations, and to assuage the rebels, some of their traditions were renamed but reflected in Christian traditions, e.g. May Day is the Gaelic tradition of Beltaine, which marked the beginning of summer.

Many indigenous cultures recall their festivals of abundance, and changing of the seasons. Descendants of those people who came to America have those markers in their souls. Africans, and South Americans, in particular remember the bright colors and syncopated rhythms of their native lands, and they were prohibited from expressing those while enslaved. Likewise, Native American cultures were denied the opportunity to express their traditional life rhythms in their attire, their spirituality, their dance and music and celebration. This never goes well, and it certainly has not gone well in America.

In the 21st century, the highest rates of alcoholism and drug addiction can be found in BIPoC communities. This is not an issue of moral deficiency or lack of will power. It’s an issue of being forced to march to the beat of a drummer whose rhythm is not the one you feel. A drummer who is disconnected from your experience, from your soul. A drummer whose song is not yours. Everybody has their own song, and if you’re forced to sing the song of another, you’ll be out of step forever.

This whole notion of superiority on the level of culture is fascinating. I don’t know how or why Europe became the home of that as a cultural base. It seems that warmer and sunnier climates did not adapt that model of community. Now, it seems to be enculturated in European-descended Americans. Many of us are starting to feel this can’t be changed. That drum beat is strong, and we confuse it with the heartbeat of the nation.

Our nation beats the drum for superiority in many ways, and that’s not always a bad thing. We tell the world that we are the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. But if people want to come here to be part of that, we have problems with granting them entry. We tell the world that we’re a democracy, and that’s the greatest form of government, because it grants all citizens life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But many of our citizens feel their democratic voice has been silenced, and there is no liberty, and quite often there is no happiness. I am not of the opinion that happiness is the sole outcome of democracy, or that happiness is purely an individual measure, but whatever it means we are not happy.

What to do about this? I don’t know. I suppose that I can only do what I can do for myself, and maybe that will radiate outward. For myself, I am not happy at the moment. I don’t feel as though I am making any kind of valid contribution to society in general, and that feels as though it’s part of the definition of “common good”. To change that, I have to work on myself. Unfortunately, I have to participate in the systems that our nation has set up to govern our interactions with one another. It would be nice to be able to opt-out of some of that, but it’s really not practical…or legal.

What so many in dominant culture are describing as “cancel culture” is just people disagreeing with them. It’s just people saying they want a change, that dominant culture’s status quo is not working for them. It’s telling them we want a voice in how this culture actually works. It’s not canceling unless there’s a physical death, so for the love of your God and your bank accounts, stop with the “cancel” crap already.

So, my strategy for today is to do no harm. I try not to make things any worse. Right now, I’m having a hard time with this whole health insurance debacle and health issues and finding a job and…stuff. But hopefully, I won’t take out my frustration and downright rage on other people, at least not today. I’ll try very hard to comply with the rules, so that I can eventually pass “GO” and get my $200, and more to the point, so that I don’t wind up in jail. I don’t mind living in the slums of Baltic Avenue, but I have other choices that might put me in a different position.

Being on a journey doesn’t mean you are comfortable with the mode of transportation, that you are comfortable with your travel mates. I was on an airline flight once, and my seat mates loudly negotiated when to breast feed their infant, who was in arms next to me. They agreed that it was time to “give the little one the boob” and the female half of the couple did just that. I was enthralled (NOT). But, I got to my destination safely (a little ruffled) and have never seen those people again. The point was…I paid my ridiculously high fare, and I got to my destination, and then I went on with my life.

Being able to control the nuances of my journey did not detract from my end goal, which was to arrive safely at my intended destination. Sometimes we get distracted by our comfort level. I was plenty uncomfortable with “the boob” popping out right next to my left elbow, but … I survived. They survived. We all got to our destinations, reasonably unscathed. I believe that’s more the point than whether or not I was happy during the flight.

I’m sitting here, writing because…I don’t quite know what else to do. Things are still not quite OK in my world. I’m still not feeling settled, comfortable, safe. I’m telling myself that everything will be fine, but it feels as though I’m whistling in the dark while going past the graveyard, wondering if there ghosts are just scary stories or if those are really footsteps you hear.

I am hearing what sounds like footsteps, but my brain wants to tell me there’s a rational explanation. It’s been a while since I’ve believed there’s a rational explanation for everything, so I don’t know if I should listen to my brain right now. I am trying to sit in this feeling, and I don’t like it at all. Not one bit.

The feeling is unwelcome. It’s fear, the kind of raw fear that makes you swallow deeply when there’s nothing in your mouth, makes your hands sweat and your heart feel as though it’s going to pound a hole in your chest. That’s fear they talk about when explaining fight or flight i the DSM, the fear that makes people desperate. Desperate people do desperate things. I will not do a desperate thing.

I am sure there’s a Burger King uniform big enough to fit me, so all is not lost. If not the King, Mickey D’s will take me. Or Starbucks. But I would get fired from Starbucks the first day for telling off some snarky caffeine junkie when they want their 3-year old to order an espresso-based drink for them. So, no Starbucks.

In all honesty, i should be able to figure out something a little better than Burger King, but it’s feeling just that scary right now. We’ll see. I got a response to my second inquiry to the UUA about this job, and the same nice lady said they’d contact me if I was granted an interview. It’s been well over a month since they posted that position – April 9th to be exact. I have to figure that if they have not contacted me yet for an interview, they are not going to. She assured me they have my credentials in hand, so they were obviously not impressed enough to reach out, so…that’s that. Very disappointed.

The UUA job is the kind of job I am looking for, not one where I have to write blog posts and articles for people to sell them something or make them want to buy something from a website. That seems more or less meaningless to me, way more than less. I’m not knocking that, and if somebody offered me a sure thing in that arena right now, i would be more than happy to take it. I just really don’t know if I would be all that good at something like that, and not for a long term. But, I could be wrong.

My spirit wants me to believe that whatever’s for me is for me, and that I should not abandon ship just yet. Yeah, well, a little bit of encouragement from the Universe would be nice, just a little. I am torn between putting all of my energy in scouring online job postings or submitting some of my drivel for publication. The publication avenue will, more than likely, not pay but at least it would be a resume’ bullet point.

I have avoided television this afternoon, but did manage to take a nap. That was a good thing, and I believe it helped a little. I wasn’t even realizing how little sleep I got last night, probably about 3 hours total. That’s really not quite enough for me to be less than dangerous out in public, and I had to go to the chiropractor today. Fortunately, that was noneventful and I came right back to the apartment. It was raining anyway, so I really didn’t need to be out and about on the roads with people trying out their bad brakes and bald tires.

The volcano in Iceland is still reflecting my mood quite nicely. The lava river has a very healthy flow, and the lava fountains are burgeoning as high as 500m. A portion of one of the rocky walls in the cone collapsed, and that was pretty incredible. One layer of it literally slid off, because it was melting from the nearly six weeks of incredible heat and continuous bathing in lava.

It is so hard to imagine anything that hot, anything hot enough to melt rocks all day long. That sight fills me with awe, and wonder, and I cannot imagine being there to feel the heat that must radiate out for an incredible distance. I wonder if this is what life is like on Venus, or Mercury. I can only imagine there could be some kind of life there, some kind of life for which we have no frame of reference. Who says the rules of life are only the ones we know? We’re living in the princess zone, I suppose. I don’t think every life form does.

Anyway, I am dodging people today. Just not feeling up to talk with anyone, not feeling that I want to talk about any of what is happening in my brain, in my world. It will be different tomorrow. I have at least a couple of calls to return, and maybe should go to a 12-step meeting on Zoom. I didn’t go to the 10pm meeting last night, and not sure if I want to go tonight, either. We’ll see.

Life. What a beautiful choice. I’ve decided that hedonists truly distress me, believing that life is only here to produce enjoyment and fun. I just can’t buy that. That’s as unbalanced as pursuing a life of intentional deprivation for some kind of spiritual purification. Balance, grasshopper. We must have balance. That is our work. Excess is easy, but balance takes more effort. Seriously. Wear life like a loose garment, I have been told. Well, right now it’s a little tight around the middle, so I’m guessing I’ve gained a little unnecessary weight. Either that, or I’m holding my breath for too long.

If I could have genetically reproduced, or wanted to, I would have spawned this dog. She is me, and I am her. She is a short, chubby, anxious little beast with a bark much more potent than her bite, which she reserves for me alone.

She makes a lot of noise, just for the hell of it, just to hear herself talk. She is oppositionally defiant, needy, and frequently pushy about getting her needs met. There is never enough, and she always wants more. She notices everything, hears everything, and can sniff out something out of the ordinary at unfathomable distances. Once she has the scent of the object of her affection, she will cry like a human infant and scream at the top of her lungs. She is 15 pounds of willful and reckless abandon, taking a plunge long before looking, goal directed to a fault.

What I’ve learned from the wily canine is how to make the most out of a less than optimal situation. I lack ritual in starting my days, and do not consider myself to be a morning person. In fact, I generally consider myself a menace to living things before 10am and a couple of cups of coffee. Left to my own devices, I would stay up late and sleep until noon, but the tiny bladder that is my dog has other plans.

She has taken to sidling up on my stomach shortly after sunrise, when the light begins to filter through venetian blinds and traffic noises have picked up on the street below. If I don’t stir, she begins to whuffle, a distinctive cross between a sneeze and a sigh. If that doesn’t get my eyes open, she begins to whine, then escalates to crying and near-howling, and finally barking. Some days, she will stand with all four feet on my chest while barking.
This is great fun for the little cur, and she makes the best of having a bad mommy. She makes waking me up a fun routine for herself, and she gets what she wants to boot.

When a dog has emotion, positive or negative, their reactions are immediate. If she likes something, she demonstrates happiness by dancing, barking, tail-wagging, jumping, and even smiling. Yes, smiling. Canine body language and mannerisms are more complex than most people comprehend. There’s a planting of the front paws on the ground, rear up high, tail wagging that means let’s play. There’s a hind-leg stance that means she wants me to come here, and there’s a one paw held up that means she’s confused. And those are the same signals every time. Consistency is a lesson that I forget most of the time, but it’s essential to establishing trust and confidence in oneself.

The other thing my dog, and every other dog I’ve ever had as a companion, teaches me is the unconditional nature of love, affection, loyalty. She does not care a hair about my aesthetics, or my weight, my height, my skin color. From what I understand, canines are literally color blind. The visual cues that we humans rely on to make judgement about character, and worthiness, do not exist for her. Her judgements operate on a far more acute level than visual acuity. She judges by standards that are largely invisible and incomprehensible to us.

We believe that a dog’s brain is less complex than ours, but we cannot possibly understand their incredible system of sensory input. Their noses are exponentially more sensitive than our, and relay information that allows them to discern individual traits in much the same way as we utilize fingerprints. My dog recognizes me from a distance by my scent, before she can see me or hear my voice. That’s why dogs greet each other with sniffing of more private parts, because therein lie their stories. We humans must relate our stories to each other with language, but dogs need only their highly sophisticated olfactory organs.

The last thing my dog teaches me is forgiveness, and the art of a short memory. If she errs, and I fuss at her, she has an immediate reaction to the displeasure in my tone, but she carries no grudge. Our next interaction is not based on the last one, although she will come to expect certain elements of ritual and routine. If I fuss at her each time she makes the same error, one would hope that would eliminate the error, but sometimes not. She goes past the negative reinforcement in record time, because her memory really isn’t that long. Positive reinforcement, however, apparently goes much further, so instead of chastising her for the error, if I show pleasure when she does the correct thing, I’m likely to alter her behavior more quickly in that way. Positive reinforcement works better for me, and for her, and that’s a lesson I need to remember. No sense beating myself up for my transgressions, because I’m likely to keep repeating them.

My dog is not tremendously complicated. Her vocal chords do not produce speech as human bodies do, but she tells me what she wants and shows me how she feels nonetheless. I had to learn her language a bit in order to determine how to care for her, and how to respond if there is something wrong. Caring for a dog involves quite a lot of attentiveness, appreciation, and acceptance of her being exactly what she is supposed to be, no more and no less. It would be a very good thing if we humans could do likewise in our dealings with each other. Human relations don’t always have to be quite so complex.

…Hope you got your things together
Hope you are quite prepared to die
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye…
(“Bad Moon Rising” – Credence Clearwater Revival)

Ya know, there are days, and then there are days. Sometimes they come all at once. Sometimes they start off quite unobtrusively, then morph into some kind of hellish landscape that has no sunshine, when she’s gone or whether she was ever there in the first place. Today is one of those days.

It got an early start. I foolishly checked to see if there was a response to my revised application for ACA Marketplace healthcare coverage, and there was. Even more foolishly, I opened that email at 9:35pm. It was bizarrely worded, in typical bureaucratic jargon that says nothing in many words, including words that are contradictory.

Saying that I was “eligible”, the response instructed me to select a healthcare plan (I already have one, that is active). Then, it said the program could not award advance tax credits. Based on a few other words, and my previous experience with this program, I took that to mean that the subsidy would not be forthcoming. I called to verify, and that was exactly true.

I asked the nice lady on the phone whether my health plan was cancelled (and I meant that, in the literal sense, not in the recently politicized sense), and she had no real answer as to whether or not I was instantaneously void of health care coverage. In exasperation, I asked her if the words “advance tax credits” meant the subsidy, and that stumped her.

We talked more, and she revisited the issue that I had included an income amount on the application, and that didn’t match the income I indicated on the income tax form. For the third time, I explained that people who prepared the application demanded that I enter an ESTIMATE of what I EXPECTED to earn if I was able to gain employment.

Silence.

Finally, I asked if I would be expected to pay the full premium for the plan I have or a new one, if that has been cancelled, and she responded energetically in the affirmative.

Now, if I had the money to do that, I wouldn’t be on the phone late a night trying to decipher some poorly articulated statement of public policy. She confirmed that such a circumstance made no sense. (huh?) I went on to say that I didn’t know how I could do that, since I had no employment and no income, and she agreed that was a difficult situation, and then suggested I apply for food stamps.

Alrighty then. We chatted for another couple of minutes, and I said that it seemed I was just going to have to do without health insurance, and she then suggested I file for Medicaid. She also asked me, for no apparent reason, “What’s wrong with food stamps?” Um, nothing’s wrong with them, I responded, and thanked her for her help. Then, mercifully, we bid each other a merciful farewell.

After I hung up, I was deflated, defeated, and entirely disgusted. After going through all of these machinations with the plan, now I get why it didn’t make sense for me to be getting an income tax refund on income I don’t have, and how the innards of the policy work. It’s ingenious, but they don’t adequately explain that you must have an income equal to the poverty level in your state in order to make this work. If you don’t meet that requirement, you don’t qualify. Period. They need to print that in ALL CAPS on the application form, and in the welcoming correspondence, and repeat it every month. Yes, a “life change” can be entered during the year, but you have to shoot for the poverty level for annual income. Documented annual income.

There’s just no reason to make things so complicated, and no reason to hide salient facts in a jungle of seemingly irrelevant officialese. There’s no reason to make it so difficult to get to the heart of the matter, and no reason to have application forms provoke a panic attack. This one certainly did that.

After that phone call, I descended into a panic-driven depression spike, and decided that I would just give up. It was time, and I just couldn’t do this. As I tried to explain to the nice lady last night, I am living on savings and what is left from what my mother left to me. I am not asking for help with rent, or food, or gas in my truck (which fortunately is not a concern in these days of the pipeline ransomware hack). Just asking for help with this one thing – the healthcare policy. Just that one thing.

Maybe I needed to have this experience. Maybe I needed to see how difficult it is for people who have been in this situation for years, and who have no real hope of changing it. I understand that I have some choices, and it looks as though I’m going to have to make choices I don’t want to make. I’ll need to go back to making choices that ensure only survival, and compliance, but not happiness or gratification. But I have choices, and for that I remain grateful.

It really baffles me how and why bureaucracies become so impersonal and so devoid of the ability to respond to unexpected, unanticipated circumstances. I understand there is a lot of fraud in systems that serve millions of people, but maybe some of that is because it’s so difficult to navigate them. Maybe it’s because some of the rules are so inflexible and so nonsensical that people feel they have no choice. What exactly are you supposed to do when the form asks you to select a pre-defined answer to a question that doesn’t fit your circumstances? You’re going to fit a square peg into a round hole, however you can.

I cried. There was nothing else to do at that moment, it seemed. That didn”t get me any closer to resolving the problem of not having a health insurance policy for the remainder of the year. I had very dark thoughts of sinking into a health care crisis due to cessation of medications and therapies that are keeping chronic diagnoses at manageable levels. I had very dark thoughts of simply ending all of this, finding that handgun buried somewhere in all of the clutter in my apartment. I had very dark thoughts indeed.

It occurred to me that I might be a little behind on my maintenance medications for depression, so I hurriedly downed the necessary dose. And I cried. Then I got angry, which is always my default. Anger is a wonderful motivator, so I began searching online for work from home writing opportunities. It was nearly 2am, but so be it.

When I am that unsettled and that emotional, my frantic efforts are usually quite unproductive. The frenetic job search in the early morning was true to form, although it produced an unanticipated source of relief. There was a freelance job that I investigated, and it directed me to complete an online “grammar test” to determine whether or not I was qualified. I thought it would be a good idea to do it immediately, so I did. There were many questions of the better or more correct language choice for sample phrases and sentences. They were devoid of stylistic nuance, and the “correct” choice was not clearly discernable. I failed. The passing score was 80%, and I got 70% correct. That made me laugh. Out loud.

Because I am wired a bit differently from most people, and possibly because the medication was kicking in just a bit, I felt somewhat better after the laughable test results. I do have the niggling thought of maybe I’m not as decent a writer as I think I am, or maybe I am really not as well suited for a writing career as I think, but that’s down to a dull roar at this point. Not a new thing.

I know there are a lot of people who are in the same position, or something like it. I know there are a lot of people who have fewer choices, for whatever reasons, than I do. I still have to believe that I’m going to be OK, but it’s just a little harder today. Some days just be like that, or at least that is what I was told.

So, on to other signs of a bad moon rising…just to divert my thoughts from my own…Congress. WTF GOP? They’ve stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position, because she correctly pointed out the Emperor’s nakedness. The audacity of the woman, refusing to march in step with party lines and translate truth into lies. She voted to impeach the former guy, and spoke out against his rhetoric that inspired the insurrection on January 6th. She has loudly iterated her desire to make sure the former guy “never gets close to the Oval Office” again, and for that she has been censured and now demoted.

I was never a fan of Liz Cheney’s politics, or her father the former VP Dick Cheney. But, I have to say that I respect her for these recent demonstrations of standing in integrity and standing for truth, despite the consequences. This Congressperson has vowed to not sit down and to not shut up, and pledges to continue her fight to restore the GOP to a party of policies that adheres to the rule of law and the Constitution. You don’t hear that a lot these days.

It absolutely galled me, although it was no surprise, that NC Congressperson Virginia Foxx offered the motion to call a vote on removing Cheney from her leadership position. Virginia Foxx is a most unpleasant woman, who represents no one but herself and her wealthy supporters. She was my representative for quite a while, and was so blatantly homophobic that it was difficult to even speak her name without bile rising from my gut. She once called Matthew Shepard’s death a hoax, and went downhill from there. But this hateful posturing is more acceptable to the GOP of these times, rather than common fairness and Constitutional principles. Not a good showing.

There is talk among some GOP members who are not in line with the current pro-former guy regiment that it might be time for a third party. Third parties have not been terribly successful in our history, but they sometimes prove to be spoilers for closely held elections. For example, many consider Ralph Nader to have been a spoiler in the close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, when Nader garnered a slice of the vote that many contend would have been cast for Gore. Nader had been urged to drop out of the race prior to the election, but refused. Particularly in Florida, the vote was very close, and many Democrats blame Nader for giving Bush a razor-thin edge by siphoning votes from Gore.

In the 2016 election, similar issues surrounded Bernie Sanders’ refusal to stand down from the contest for the Democratic nomination. Although Hillary Clinton did receive the nomination that year, the significant contingent of Bernie-or-bust supporters either refused to vote, or voted for third-party candidates on the ballot. Many Democrats continue to believe that Sanders’ campaign split the Democratic voting bloc, and deleted a significant number of votes from Clinton on election day.

I don’t know if people will support a third party at this point. We are having enough trouble deciphering the coded language and buzz phrases of the traditional parties, one of which did not even select a platform for the last Presidential election. With or without formal declaration of a platform, however, the policy and legislative outlook of both parties is always evident. There are numerous opportunities, on a daily basis, for party leaders and members to reiterate their positions and rationale for every discussion, debate, and decision they hold. By now, we all know that GOP leaders have pledged to do everything they can to repel the President’s agenda, and the Democrats have pledge to do everything they can to propel the President’s agenda forward (well, mostly).

So, when so many people don’t feel it’s worth a trip down to a polling place to actually cast a vote, I don’t quite know where we’re headed with this experiment called democracy. I have been feeling as though we’re in a functional oligarchy for quite a while now – they who have the most money have the biggest voices. When I see the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, both of whom seem to be honorable and intelligent fellows, solicited for their advice on public policy, health care, and diplomacy I have to assume that’s only because their money gives them a political voice.

Giving a political voice to millionaires and billionaires is not a new thing. There are several “advisory” groups, like the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), that organize corporate citizens for support of their common interests. It has been show for many years that ALEC authors draft legislation on significant issues and distributes it to state and local legislatures around the country. Consequently, when we see a flurry of similar proposals in multiple states, as we’re seeing now on voter suppression, abortion, and policing it’s likely those bills got their start in ALEC.

So, given all of that murky undercurrent in a representative democracy, I’m not sure the system can withstand another stress point with a third party. Aside from that, it would more than likely be very contentious to determine the platform for a third party. If a third party would be the result of a split in the GOP, which is more right-leaning than traditional Democratic party platforms, then maybe we’d need a fourth party to allow for a split of the Democrats. They don’t seem to be entirely unified about much of anything, either.

I don’t know where all of this is going, but wherever it goes, I’ll be working at some job that contributes to the national economy and, quite possibly, contributes to greater misery for me. But apparently, that is the American Way. One for all…no, no wait…one if by land, two if…no, that’s not it, either. Every man for himself. That’s it! (Gender reference intentional.)

The song goes “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden”. Another one says “Love is a rose, and you’d better not pick it – it only grows while it’s on the vine”. I say “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose”. Things do mean something if they’re not free, though. A friend of mine said the other day that perhaps the whole purpose of life was to be happy, was for enjoyment. I don’t know about that; there is suffering in the world. Suffering that is not the result of circumstance, and not choice. I don’t know if it is entirely ethical to be concerned only with our own enjoyment and pleasure. That’s certainly a part of a life well lived, but my current posture leans more toward humility, and balance.

Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down, sometimes you’re just spinning. The wheel of the universe is like that. Winter, spring, summer, fall. North, South, East, West. We move, and we come back to the same place, and we keep rolling. That seems more in line with the reality in which I find myself, but I’m open to suggestion.

My writing prompt today asks about childhood friends. My very first thought was that I didn’t have any. I played, sometimes, with other kids but mostly it was me and my mother doing…whatever. This was after we moved to New Orleans. Before that, in Lake Charles, I don’t remember anything more than being with my grandmother and my great aunts and my mother in bed recuperating from surgery. Come to think of it, she was in bed recuperating from depression after we had moved to New Orleans, so…a lot of that time was spent with her in bed.

Regardless, I don’t remember specific friends early on. I remember some kid named Tony when I went to kindergarten the first time, in Lake Charles. In elementary school, I remember some kids from the neighborhood – Leticia, and Karen, Melanie and Janice. I remember some kid named Russell who had a glass eye. I remember some of the boys, too – Dane, Armand, Barrett, Andrew. Andrew could draw, so he was fun. Armand had a glue fetish, so he always had dried Elmer’s glue on his hands.

I played marbles with the boys at recess time. My mother was not approving of that, and by 5th grade she told me that I should play with the girls more, because when it came time to start dating (huh?) the boys would see me as one of them, and not a girl, so I wouldn’t be asked. Alrighty then. I had no clue what she was talking about, nor did I care, so I continued to play with the boys at recess. Sometimes we played football after school, when waiting for our parents to pick us up. There were a couple of girls, but mostly the boys, and me. And I was loving it.

After we moved to a new neighborhood, in about 4th or 5th grade, a lot of my school yard relationships began to falter, because I was out of the neighborhood. After I changed schools in the sixth grade, most of those relationships died entirely. I just didn’t see those kids any more. It took me a while to get accepted in my new neighborhood, and I never went to the neighborhood school. After I started going to private school in the sixth grade, everything changed.

I’ve talked before about the issues surrounding my entry into the mostly white middle- to upper middle-class private school, and living in an all Black working class neighborhood. By high school, that had proven to be quite an issue for me, but it was largely invisible to my parents, who were all tied up in their own issues. I felt like I was pretty much on my own, although I suppose I had the nuns and teachers for guide rails on the roller coaster that I was on.

I had friends in the new school, some of whom I maintain connection with. We have a FaceBook page and we’ve had reunions. I know pretty much where they are and what they are doing with their lives. Most of the ones I didn’t like, or who didn’t like me, in high school are still people I wouldn’t pick out of a crowd to pursue a friendship. Almost all of them are straight, and married. Some married VERY well, and live in a world in which I don’t rotate. That’s nice. Happy for them.

I find that most of the folks I hung around with in high school are the ones I keep track of now. They are still the same people, still provoke my curiosity, still maintain a lot of similar perspectives as me. The bunch of us that I keep up with are mostly liberal politically, mostly accepting of who I am, mostly kind and not toxic. It just amazes me how early our personalities and convictions were defined, and how well those have persisted.

Along the way, we’ve lost a few of my junior-high and high-school classes…I think a good half-dozen of us have died. As I’ve said previously, there were only about 64 of us, so losing these girls is kind of a big deal. One of my friends, who is still with us, lost her husband. He died in his sleep. She knew my mother, and loved my mother tremendously when she was a teacher there. I felt the pain of her losing her husband, and she most assuredly felt mine when my mother died.

There were some other people I can remember, vaguely, from the parish church CYO group, or from summer music camp, but I can’t say I was terribly close or maintained any kind of relationship with those people. I barely remember any names, or even faces. As I’m writing that, it seems my life was kind of a blur during those years. I attribute a lot of that to what was going on in my family back then – my parents negligence, their preoccupation with their coming divorce, my father’s affair with a Chihuahua (short, brown, yappy thing with big eyes and a nasty bark).

In high school, I did have one number-one best friend. My friend Amy. She was my BFF for sure. Basically joined at the hip, we were a dynamic duo to be sure. She was a bit weird, I was a bit weird, it was a match made in Heaven. She was also the one who couldn’t invite me to her birthday party because they had never had Black people over to their house as guests before. *sigh* We somehow remained friends, after a short period of pouting and awkwardness, but lost track of each other after graduation. I have seen her on the FaceBook page, but we haven’t really had any intentional contact, and I think that’s just fine.

During those high school years, I was also starting to feel like something was very wrong inside me. First, I was less and less connected with Catholicism, and since I was attending an uber-Catholic school, that was an issue for me. Second, I was entirely disinterested with the frenetic drive of my classmates to get boyfriends. I could have given less than a damn about dating. I felt ugly and fat and ashamed, but more importantly, I found boys mostly ridiculous.

There were a couple of boys I spent time with in high school – Kevin, who was possibly a bigger nerd and geek than I was, and Wilbur, who lived around the corner. Kevin was somewhat interesting, and I enjoyed spending time with him. Occasionally. He wasn’t very demanding, so that worked very well. Wilbur was a dog, and I inexplicably felt the urge to run when I was with him. He was not as smart as he thought he was, and I didn’t respect him. I don’t know what happened to either of those guys.

There was one other guy – Michael – who I didn’t like very much but who really liked me. He always wanted to be kissing me, which I was like…whatever. *yawn* He wanted me to go to his prom with him, but I didn’t want to go and didn’t know how to tell him no. That’s a pattern I’ve maintained for a really long time, but more about that another time. I didn’t go, and I’m not sure I handled telling him that I wasn’t going very well. I regret that.

So, I never had all that many friends when I was younger. I had a hard time breaking into established circles of kids, and I recall that clearly around the time of junior-high school. It may have been happening before that, but my first clear memories are from junior-high age. That is the first memory of feeling like everybody else had gotten the instruction book on how to do things correctly, like there was some secret code that everybody else knew but me. I never seemed to do the right thing, say the right thing, be in the right place at the right time. I felt like an idiot more often than I felt like a person.

So, as an adult, I’ve still had my share of making friends and keeping them. It’s been better here in NC, which I don’t attribute to the locale but to my age, and emotional development. (I’ve done a LOT of work in therapy!) I feel as though I’ve still had my share of abortive relationships, some of which have ended in such animosity and betrayal they make me shudder even years later. But, I also have a small number of close friends who I would trust with my life. That is a huge, gargantuan big deal because I need to feel that if I can’t speak for myself, there is at least a chance that someone would make sure that my wishes were expressed. Trust does not come very easily for me, so again, having these people in my life is the very biggest of big deals.

When I was much younger, junior-high and high-school, and even college, people told me frequently that I really needed to grow up. I was a cryer – when I was in conflict or angry, I cried. I don’t know if that was merely attempted manipulation. I do remember intentionally trying to manipulate with tears, but sometimes they just came spontaneously. That was perhaps fear, perhaps genuine hurt. I don’t know. But regardless, I cried a lot, whether I meant to or not. If that was childish behavior, so be it.

Calls for me to grow up annoyed me to distraction, and I never understood exactly what that meant. I settled on just not crying, but that was a dismal failure. I couldn’t control my tear ducts, and my eyes would just overflow, even at the most embarrassing of times. It was particularly annoying when I was drunk, and messy. There are not enough tissues in the world for a drunk having a crying jag.

I continued to be told to grow up far into my adulthood. That always confused me because I felt that I was quite grown. I had been gainfully employed since I was 15, I was not getting hauled in by the police every few days, I had a roof over my head. What I didn’t understand, though, was that I was constantly beating my head against the wall of reality, refusing to accept things as they were. Refusing to see what was really in front of me, manipulating circumstances to suit my needs, regardless of the impact on anyone else. I just couldn’t understand why there was a problem with any of that.

These days, I feel some maturity has settled in, although I have my moments of flat out high-chair kicking foot-stomping tantrum. Most of the time, when something happens that I just can’t accept, I withdraw, shut down, but the motivation is still the same. I just know how unattractive it is for me to throw myself on the floor, pound my hands and feet on the ground and squawl. But I am doing that inside my own hear, and will be damned if I let anyone see it. So…silence. Invisibility (I’m well practiced at that). The wall goes up, and it’s tall, and thick, and solid. Nobody is getting through. Nobody.

The problem with raising the wall (it’s got a quick-release auto-activate button, pretty high tech) is that once it’s up, I’m more or less blind to any changes in the circumstances that triggered activation. I’ve take a still photo of the unacceptable situation, and there are no updates. I need to figure out how to maintain a live feed, instead of vacating the premises. That’s an old childhood trick – just leave when things get too dangerous. Your body can stay, just to fool everyone, but you are gone. Ingenious, isn’t it?

These days, I stay in my body more than I used to. I’m not sure if that means I feel safer, or if I’ve just gotten tired of navigating escape routes and then having to make my way back. That’s part of the problem with vacating the premises – I have to find my way back. Sometimes that’s easier said than done, sometimes the escape route is circuitous and hazardous in and of itself. Having to make the trek back is sometimes torturous, and what if I’m mistaken and it’s not entirely safe? What if the threat is still there?

Sometimes it seems easier to stay, or at least to simply close the blinds rather than erect the wall itself. That leaves me vulnerable to repeated threats, however, which explains how and why I sometimes repeat efforts that are futile. Explaining that is just great, but how about not doing it any longer?

So, there it is. Again. The crossroads. Do I stand my ground, or do I retreat? Do I persist in the effort to get what I want, or do I accept that it’s not to be? Is accepting reality just giving up? I have never know the answer to those questions. Some days, acceptance looks very much like giving up, other days it looks very much like settling. Either case seems to be largely unsatisfactory, although frequently met with affirmation from external sources.

I suppose some of that questioning brings me back to defining what it is that I want. That is usually a very fuzzy answer for me, and I find myself answering it from time to time like a Hallmark card – I want peace, I want world peace, I want no hunger or poverty, I want financial security, I want to be happy. Maybe I should be more about specifics, and more about the personal. Peace, and world peace, and absence of hunger and poverty are probably beyond my pay grade. I can work to accomplish that, but I am clear that I am one of many who is making that effort.

But, let’s get to the more personal, individual level desire. I want financial security. So, let’s see – what exactly am I willing to do in order to achieve that? Am I wiling to take a job that doesn’t particularly excite me, that may or may not allow me to use the skills I have? Am I truly willing to do what I’ve said in the past, that if it was a difference between living under the bridge and having a roof over my head, I would be willing to scrub floors? If that time was now (which I don’t truly believe it is) would I do what was necessary?

If I really want to get published, or write about social justice, am I willing to pursue that goal outside of a job that is not directly pursuant to that goal? For instance, if I took a job as a customer service representative, or a help desk associate, am I willing to use my off-time to write and revise and then submit to publications?

If I really want to be in a relationship, am I willing to start attending social functions, amd I willing to show up at meet-and-greets and group meetings of like-minded people are likely to be? Am I willing to seek out groups that do things I enjoy doing, just to increase my social contacts? Am I willing to expand my personal network of acquaintances and potential friends?

I have the choice of put up or shut up. I don’t complain much to friends and such, but sometimes I feel as though I’m not supposed to be living in such a state of isolation. The isolation is potentially how I will engage in a self-fulfilling prophecy of dying alone in my apartment, not to be discovered for days, while the dog eats my nose. That’s a fear I’ve had since I was a teen-ager, and it sounds ridiculous, but there’s a part of me that says weeeeel, maybe not.

The dog is well fed at the moment, so no chance of her needing to eat my nose any time soon. I’m not in danger of needing to find a spot under the bridge anytime soon. I’ve got food in the refrigerator, the power bill is paid, I’ve got a full tank of gas in my truck (although there is still that rear oil leak that I need to get fixed), and I’ve got clothes on my back. So, all in all, I’m not in bad shape. Unless I count that belly fat, but we’re not going there right now.

The point is, I have much to be grateful for. Much. I asked my therapist a while ago what her diagnosis of me might be. She said human. I diagnose you as human.

Dammit.

It was bright and sunny this morning, clear sky, with temperature about 66. Very nice, the Earth inviting me out for a meet and greet. I was able to relax and just take in the ambiance. I checked the weather forecast, and it said 30% chance of rain this evening, about 8pm.

So now, at 3:20pm, there is thunder and more pronounced cloud cover. I can feel the air pressure has dropped a bit, so there may be rain moving in. So much for doppler radar and the Weather Channel. Never a dull moment, I suppose.

I was writing earlier, and then reflecting, on a concept that’s taking root in me. It has to do with some old ways of looking at things, and changing my perceptions. These are more esoteric concepts, I suppose, but I am struck by how the new perceptions change my spiritual energy.

The first concept has to do with gratitude. I learned a while ago that I had the wrong notion of gratitude, or at least one that wasn’t terribly productive. My concept for quite a long time was that if something good happened, something beneficial, you were grateful. You said thank you to whoever and whatever had graced you with such gift, and you moved on. You remembered the grace, the blessing, however you named it, but you took it in stride and kept going, possibly with a little humility or even humbleness.

I was introduced to the more energetic concept of being grateful for something you wanted to manifest before it was apparent. You expressed gratitude for that abundance you were asking for, the new job you wanted, the new relationship you wished, and spun your energy as though you already had it. By generating the energy of joy and happiness and gratitude for the manifestation of the desired outcome, you would attract the energetic circumstances that matched that, and thereby manifest the outcome in real time.

Or something like that. I kind of know what I’m talking about, and it kind of makes sense to me, so just go with me here.

Anyway, that concept of manifesting the energy prior to the reality is quirky for me, because I’m a bloody Capricorn and we goats need to know where we’re going before we get there. So, that concept of energetic response prior to reality is challenging, and is totally an act of faith. Leap and the net will appear kind of thing. Hmm. That might take a second.

So, I’m working on that. I still want this job that I’ve applied for, still feel like it’s the job for me, but still have not heard a word from the employer. When I think about having that job, and what comes with it – like healthcare benefits – my energy definitely goes up a notch. I have to keep my energy there, and not let it dribble down into all the times I thought something was destined to be mine, only to have it evaporate into the ether.

When something does NOT manifest, should I accept that I have somehow failed at keeping my energetic output in the right place? Or did someone else want or need the opportunity more? Or was I simply wrong in believing the opportunity was perfect for me and that I truly wanted it to manifest? Maybe I’m just overthinking the whole thing.

This is kind of how it goes when I’m in my head, which is most of the time. One day, something tangible is going to shoot out of the back of my skull and run off under its own power, signifying actual overload of the finite capacity of my brain for useless thoughts and needless hypothetical queries. But I digress.

The other shift in perception has to do with something I am thinking stemmed from my early Christian upbringing. It’s the concept that was taught concerning bestowal of indulgence, grace, answers to prayers. The visual and verbal concept always included praying up to the heavens, and asking for something to come down to you. From above, so below. Please send down your grace. Bestow upon me down here on the Earthly plane. And so on.

What I’ve been toying with lately, though, is coming from my obsession with this volcano in Iceland. The volcano has been actively erupting for 47 days now, and showing no signs of stopping. When it first began, the lava spray came from deep within the cone, and shot upward several thousand feet, on a continuous basis. It was a spectacular display of molten lava spit out from a pool of boiling rocks and pieces of the Earth’s crust, in a red hot puree from deep down in the planet’s core.

After more than thirty days, however, the pattern changed. Now, the lava spray pulses, about once every 10-15 minutes, in a shorter but nontheless spectacular spray of red hot lava. Some of the expert chat has speculated this means the lava flow deep in the Earth is continuous, so after a fountain has sprayed upward, the pressure in the vertical lava tubes is mitigated. Because the flow continues, however, the tubes fill up and the pressure builds again and then it must be released. Again. Repeat. And so it goes, on and on and on.

This volcano is apparently produced as a result of tectonic plates moving apart. The lava is being produced deep in the Earth to move up and fill that gap. Iceland is apparently located on a rift between the plates, and that’s why there are so many volcanoes there. At least I believe that’s what I heard. Regardless, it’s a fascinating mechanism and a fascinating process to watch.

So, here’s where it comes into focus for me. That incredible energy that I see jettisoning millions of pounds of crushed and molten rock from inside the volcanic core is not coming down from above. That energy that can move things, reshape things, destroy things and build new things is coming from below, and pushed up and above. Not the other way around.

So, the whole concept of the energy of our lives, our life force, has generally been taught as something that comes from above, that exists above and then descends below. Maybe at least some of the life energy bubbles up from beneath us. Maybe the life force originates below, at the core, and ascends. That feels more empowering, less powerless.

Perhaps I am closer to Source than I ever dreamed. Perhaps I am more worthy of interacting with Source than I thought possible, maybe it’s closer to me, and more closely related to me, that I have believed in the past.

It’s interesting that our Christian vision of the after life involves Heave, which is above, and Hell, which is below. Heaven is your destination if you’ve led a good life, while Hell is the nether world, and your destination if you’ve not led a good life. That, of course, is the kids version of the afterlife, but that’s what I was raised on. No wonder I was confused.

These days, I don’t believe Heaven and Hell are quite so simple, and possibly exist only as part of the mythological world created in the Bible to explain how and why we got here. The inhabitants of Heaven were supernatural beings, of infinite good. Hell was also inhabited by supernatural beings, inherently evil. So be a very good child, and follow the Commandments, and don’t talk back to your parents or the teachers, and you will go to Heaven when you die. As someone else has pointed out today, why must one wait until death? Is Earth but an incubation period? If so, that design plan needs a bit of tweaking.

So, what the heck is this life on Earth, then? Is it the proving ground for something else? If so, why not let us in on the bigger picture? Perhaps I would be less inclined toward misery if I knew for sure this was but a phase of my development. Maybe I’d be more prone to experiment and experience new things, different ways of looking at things, if I knew I would not permanently cease to be. Even if I wasn’t assured to return to exactly where I departed, but knew that i would play some part in a continuing journey, I might handle things a little differently.

Or how about this? If life on Earth is what amounts to cosmological elementary school, how about some field trips? How about a break from the routine, just to show us what’s possible? Or better yet, show us what some other beings have come up with. This is why I go to my faith community’s annual “convention”, where they handle business matters. More important that business of the larger non-governing body, however, is gathering a few thousand people who share (mostly) a similar outlook on faith, on community, on humanity. I have found that to be energizing, and thought expanding; exposure to new ideas and new voices is essential to creativity and faith development.

I find the same idea of expanding one’s horizons true in the recovery community as well. I need a home base, and I get that from my regular groups and my “home group”, where I establish familiar contacts and areas of responsibility for keeping the meeting going. But I have to venture out to hear other people, see different ways of doing the same thing, experience different perspectives. It’s like travel – see the world, meet new people, eat different food. Free your mind.

So, at the very least, perhaps life on Earth is populated by the proverbial monkeys with typewriters who will eventually produce a Shakespearean drama. Maybe. Or maybe we’re a bunch of kindergartners who eventually grow out of our shoes and clothes and can be trusted with sharp scissors. I would say if that’s the case, we’re showing a bit of developmental challenge.

Who in their right mind would possibly think following in the footsteps of a leader who has failed time after time would be a productive course of progress? Who in their right mind would possibly think loyalty to a liar, a grifter, and somebody who actually denies the reality of a disease that has killed more than half a million people? Those people are not just playing dead, they are really dead. Not from the flu, not from something they did to bring something on themselves, not from their religious beliefs. They are dead because a virus propagated in their respiratory systems and overwhelmed their bodies. An organic process that doesn’t know where it came from, nor care where it winds up.

When someone tells a lie, and is caught in it, they usually have the good sense to be at least a bit embarrassed, and stop perpetuating the false assertions. A liar that responds by questioning the accepted and contradictory truth is nearly impossible to deal with. Contending that truth is variable is dangerous. That leaves us with questioning the nature of truth, not just what is true in any particular circumstance, but what is truth itself?

Unfortunately, this is where we are, debating the existence of truth itself. Most of us do not know quite what to do with this. I would contend that truth, as a component of reality, is immutable, inherent in the fabric of the Universe. It is something that can be replicated and duplicated by impartial evidence, tangible evidence. If we accept that 2 plus 2 is equal to 4, what is 2? Is 2 simply whatever fits my purpose at a given moment? If we refuse to agree on 2 as a unit that is composed of one single unit and another single unit, then 2 becomes totally irrelevant. Anything based on 2 becomes irrelevant and totally subject to perception. Societies and nations would collapse, because we’d have no basis of agreement on anything. Maybe 2 plus 2 is equivalent to 6 when you’re in the Southern hemisphere, and 19 when you’re in the Northern hemisphere. And only on Tuesdays, if we can agree which point in the Sun’s orbit is Tuesday.

This is much the same nonsense as the flat-Earth theory. We have photos and still images from space, we have laws of physics that affirm we are not a flat linear space, but still we have a group of people who contend that evidence is false and refutable. I have yet to see anything from their postulate that affirms their position, not anything from any other group that successfully disproves that Earth is essentially functioning as a round mass that rotates on a slightly tilted axis. Even if I were doubtful of that, I fail to comprehend what acceptance of a flat-Earth model does for us, or how it explains things like magnetic fields and poles. But, it’s a free country, I suppose so they’re welcome to believe whatever they want to. Bless their hearts.

Denying things agreed upon by scientific fact is like deciding general mathematical rules are negotiable. Like deciding that homo sapiens are not part of the animal kingdom, or that our brains are not located in our heads (although for some people who spout nonsense in the news these days, I might entertain that idea). Deciding that that science is political is devastating to society as a whole. It destroys faith and trust in the science of … things we don’t understand, but have no better explanation for than what science has to offer.

Dissidence is to be admired, except when it’s dissidence for the sake of dissidence, when it’s dissidence just to hear yourself talk. There are an awful lot of people who just like to hear themselves talk, and enjoy the attention that yields. Yakking about some mythical online personality who may or may not be real but who has top-secret security clearance and knows mysterious inner workings of the government is just that – yakking. Show me. Show me this person. Show me the evidence of anything they have said or warned about that has proven to be true. Show me the dead bodies of children in a pizza parlor where they have been consumed by high ranking politicians. Show me, and I might believe. Otherwise, this is a pile of stinky crap.

When I was a kid, we had to get certain vaccines to be allowed to go to school. No vaccine – no school. The law said you had to go to school, so to go to school you had to get the vaccine. We just did it. And this was after Tuskegee and all kinds of evil sadistic experiments perpetrated on communities of color back in the day. We did the vaccines, we went to school, we followed the rules. And we survived that, and even that medieval inquisition-grade torturous playground equipment that took chunks out of us at every recess period. We ate red meat, and fried food, and we did just fine. So get a grip, people.

My aunt had polio. She was in an iron lung when she was in her 20s, and lived the rest of her life in a wheelchair. If she’d been able to get a vaccine to change that, she would have been grateful to do so. I don’t remember anybody jumping up and down to decline vaccinations because God was going to cure them. It was pretty well understood that God put the vaccine on Earth to help us, so just get the damned shot already. And we did.

So now, the incidence of polio, and measles, and mumps, and whooping cough is greatly reduced. The incidence of influenza is also greatly reduced, although not eradicated. Most people agree, however, that we’re better off with a flu vaccine than without one. Again, get the damned shot already.

I sometime believe the only reason there is so much resistance to the COVID vaccine right now is that people want to be right. A lot of those folks bought into the lie that COVID is a lie, that it’s a political ruse, that the vaccine was developed for political reasons and will deposit a microchip into people who receive it. So they need to make the case for illegal tracking devices and other mind-altering stuff in the vaccine. Alrighty then. As has been pointed out just about everywhere, if you have a cell phone, you are being tracked. If you have a GPS, you’re being tracked. Nobody has a reason to add a microchip to your bloodstream. Your butt is already on the grid, in neon colors. And if there’s mind-altering stuff in the vaccine, I say bring it on. We can use all the help we can get.

So, I am back to the change in my perception about where life force, and Source energy, is coming from. I am leaning toward the image of it rising from deep within the Earth, from deep within ourselves, and rising up. Rising up through our spines, and our energy centers, as some of the ancients spoke of as kundalini energy. That’s where I’m feeling a resonance right now, and it feels stronger than having a celestial lightning bolt from the heavens bop me on the head.

I have to say this is my premise today, it may not be tomorrow. I also have to say this really does not make light of other ways to look at the issue of where and how Source energy originates. We’ll never know the answer to that, and we’ll never understand it if we did. In many ways, it doesn’t matter, because it just..is. Perceiving of energy rising vs. energy descending does not mean one concept is better than the other, or that yet another concept is not possible. It just means that my relationship to it, here in my little pixel in my little corner of the Universe, is resonating a bit differently, and that’s all.

Of course, with my luck, that difference in resonance could be the blip that raises an alarm flag somewhere on the console of the dark overlord who has been waiting for a signal to attack Earth. But, I think too much of myself sometimes.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. A complicated day for me, full of memories I want and memories I don’t want. Memories of another life, another time, another place. And that’s not to be overly dramatic, either.

I have come to view my life experience, up to now, as somewhat of a civil war inside myself. Parts of me have been in combat with other parts of me. As I come to know all of these factions, I can see how they’ve worked against each other, how the combat has been a no-win situation for all of me. I’ve been successful identifying and healing some of the big parts, and I look at those as literal reconstructions. Still a bit of work to do, but the house stand better now than it ever has.

One of my other lives is my younger self, when I was a lot more filled with misery and despair than now, but still not up to a level of happiness or fulfillment. I couldn’t figure out how everyone else had gotten the memo about how to do this living thing, and I spent quite a lot of time banging my head against various walls.

I couldn’t figure out how to be successful at much of anything, including easing my own pain. I tried very hard to drink it away, but I was a largely unsuccessful drunk. I felt that if I just hun around at the bars, I would eventually be the only one left when the lights came on, and someone would scoop me up and take me home. That didn’t happen.

I still have no clue about how to pick up women, or allow myself to be picked up. No clue about what the rules of dating might be – more than one woman has been enraged that I “dumped” them, but I never knew I was dating them in the first place. I thought we were just friends, since there was no sex, no kissing even. Color me stupid.

When I thought I was dating someone, because I really wanted to, I still wasn’t exactly what I was supposed to do. Ask them out to dinner? Pay for dinner? Go out to the bar like always but stay close to them? I had no clue. It always ended badly. So, just drink more and pay no attention to the sobbing woman in the corner of your own heart. She’ll be fine.

I am entirely ambivalent about sex, to be honest. Perhaps I don’t have a high sex drive, which is fine. That usually gets more negative response from other folks, for some reason. Either tales of how high THEIR sex drive is, or pained looks of sympathy. They don’t understand how little I care about it, so no dramatic music is necessary.

My younger life was consumed with trying to navigate the vast expanse of what I thought I was supposed to be doing, and what I was actually doing. I thought I was supposed to be having wild sex and unbridled episodes of debauchery with multiple people. I thought I was supposed to be narrowing the field, and beginning to establish promising relationships for the purpose of “settling down” with The One. I thought I was supposed to be getting ever closer to what I wanted, but in all honesty, I had no idea what I wanted.

What I realized a long time later was that notion of “settling down” was my mother’s notion, my parents’ generation’s notion, of how life was supposed to go. It was also excruciatingly dominant culture, heterosexual, Christian. I didn’t yet have the vocabulary or maturity to understand that one of the reasons I was having so much trouble with the goal of forever after and what not was because I didn’t buy into any of the sources of that model. I didn’t know exactly what my life was supposed to look like, or what I wanted it to look like.

The other reason it wasn’t working for me, aside from the drinking part, was my own self-esteem and self-loathing issues. I didn’t want to have a relationship with me, so why would anyone else? But again, I lacked the maturity to connect those dots, and it was the fault of the entire Lesbian nation that I had not found The One. They didn’t know what they were missing, and neither did I. As I’ve heard in recovery rooms, I was comparing my insides to other people’s outsides, and coming up short every time.

I had no goals. I reacted to most things. There was a tiny sliver of light between stimulus and response, and most of the time I ran past it. I was angry at everything, and everyone, the whole world. You – whoever you were – contributed to my misery and so screw you, and the horse you rode in on, and get the f*ck out of my face. I wanted to fight, all the time, about all the things. It didn’t matter, as long as I was fighting, because life was being fair to me, and that wasn’t fair. That’s how I went through most of my days, and nights. Fighting.

To a large extent, I understood that what I was doing wasn’t working, because the misery persisted. I wasn’t winning the fight. Any of it. This was not just unhappiness, it was misery. I was needy, greedy, and had nothing to give. I was a gaping black hole that encroached on other people’s space without invitation, and sometimes consumed them entirely without so much as a nod of appreciation. Maybe a burp, but that’s about it.

When I got sober in 1988, I still didn’t realize how badly I was moving through life. I didn’t realize the impact of anything I did, because I figured I was inconsequential enough to have caused no damage as I bulldozed everything around me, including my soft parts. I was not generally a blackout drinker, so I remembered nearly every second of every horrible day and night that I had spent on my rampages. I had not cared about anything or anyone, including myself, and now I had to pick up the pieces of what I’d destroyed.

It took a few minutes to get my bearings after years of stumbling around in the dark, and there are still shards of debris that are uncovered even today. But, things are much improved I understood impact, understood that even when you don’t know what you’re doing or don’t mean what you’re doing, you can still have impact on someone, or something, and you’re responsible for that.

I understand responsibility now. I don’t always do a great job of it, but I understand it. In all honesty, I do a much better job that I’ve ever done before, so there is progress. But, the misery persisted after progress, after reconstruction, so now what? Oh, I know – it’s the place I’m living. I’ll go some other place, and I’ll be the new kid in town, and more importantly I’ll have no history. OK, let’s go! Eight hundred miles away sounds like a healthy distance from the wreckage of the past.

So, as they call it in recovery, I took a geographical remedy. The whole problem was where I was living, but this new place, well things are looking up! New living arrangements, new job, new people – that will cure everything. Right? Um, not so much.

Wherever you go, that’s where you are. I was taught that in early recovery, and found it to be true. But, I forgot that when I packed up my dog and my stuff and headed East, toward the Smoky Mountains and beautiful land and shining happy people. It was all going to come into focus here, just wait and see.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Well, I have found a few things here, none of them what I had in mind. I’ve found me. But, I had to lose some things, though. I had to make room.

I had to lose my uterus. That was a relief, actually. I’d never had any plans to use it, never understood what the hell it was doing, and it never functioned correctly. It actually tried to kill me at one point, so good riddance.

I had to lose my arrogance about race, and the sure knowledge that I knew what racists looked like, and what systemic racism looked like. I had to lose a few friends, and a few relationships that did me no good. I had to loose the notion that I deserved the abuse and the emotional deprivation.

I also had to lose my survivalist outlook, that I don’t need anyone and I can do life by myself. That my only job in life is to survive, and that I can ignore fun, and silliness, and chaos, and doing things that make no sense just because I can. I had to lose the notion that I know what I’m doing and don’t need to learn anything else.

I had to lose the home I grew up in, and most of my tangible history there. Flood waters destroyed evidence of nearly everything I remember from my growing up years – the piano I learned to play on, my childhood bedroom, pictures that I can now see only in memory.

I had to lose my mother, who eventually faded into the recesses of her own mind, and was lost to the rest of us. She fought the good fight, and I love her for that. I hope she feels that it was all worth it. She taught me how to fight, and she taught me how to survive. I truly hope there was more than that for her. I am still trying to find the more-than-that part for myself,, though, but I keep plugging away at it.

I had to lose my job, which challenged everything I’ve ever been sure of in my life. I’ve been working since I was 15, and have been learning how to live outside the regimentation that 9-to-5 linear functioning brings to a more creative left-brained chaotic thinker. I never liked it, but thought I had no real choice, and thought I could not survive without it. It’s a little more challenging, like it’s more challenging to be left-handed in a right-handed world, but I am surviving.

One would think I’d lost enough, made enough room inside myself, to have invited in everything I’ve been wanting. Well, that’s not exactly true at this point, but there is some change.

I’m learning a little bit more about how this body works, which has always confounded me. I listen to my doctors (mostly) and pay attention to what I believe my body is telling me. I still don’t drink, or smoke (anything), but I do eat badly some days. Exercise is part of my life, although I go through phases where I just don’t want to do it. I still try, however, and I suppose that’s just how it goes.

My depression is no longer an exercise in futility and stark misery. I get sad. I’m sad right this moment because yesterday was Mother’s Day, and my mother is not here. But I understand that, and I’m not paralyzed by it. I can move. I will take the dog out, I will eat lollipops, I will drink coffee. I will know that I am OK.

Perhaps that is the most beneficial thing I’ve gained, knowing that I am OK. That was one of the last things I told my mother before she died – I’m OK. Don’t worry about me, because I’m OK. Shortly after that, when I lost my job not even six weeks later, I wondered if I’d lied, that I wasn’t OK. But then I remembered something she’d told me a while ago, to never let any job make me think I couldn’t make it any longer, that I had to leave. Not for any job, she said.

So, I’m OK. It’s scary, but I know I’m OK. It’s scary, but…nobody ever said it wouldn’t be. I’m not the same person I was when I was 8, or when I was 21, or when I was 40, or even yesterday. But I’m still OK. Tears and all, I’m still OK.

Today is Mother’s Day. It’s Sunday, May 9th, 2021. The sun is out, at least here. I’m sure it’s not in some other parts of the land, the continent, the planet. All a matter of perspective.

Mothers are a matter of perspective as well. I loved my mother. Truly I did. But that came later in our time together. The very early years were difficult, then contentious, then finallly peaceful and loving.

Our mothers are the people we’ve know the longest in our lives, regardless of when they leave us. The initial time spent in the womb means everything about who we are at this moment. For some, even that time was a battle, a struggle to survive. Post partum, some of us never had relationship with the mother, and some of us wished we had not ever had anything with her past the end of the birth canal. But, a mother got us all here, one way or another.

The observance of Mother’s Day, at least in the United States, began innocently enough as a worship service in a West Virginia Protestant church. It was the brainchild of a woman (Anna Jarvis) who simply wanted to honor mothers and mother hood. Unfortunately, it has become a highly commercialized “holiday”, which even Jarvis herself found problematic. But, we’re a capitalist bunch, so I suppose that is to be expected.

The focus of Mother’s Day is supposed to be mothers, although it has expanded in some circles to celebrate motherhood. For women having fertility issues, women who have not birthed children intentionally or because of health issues, and anyone who has issues with mother, this becomes as problematic as Christmas Day for members of non-Christian faith communities.

For most people, Mother’s Day is a spring-time celebratory occasion, so what’s the big deal? Let your mother take a load off, enjoy having a nice dinner that she didn’t have to cook, send flowers and a nice card, maybe some chocolates, spend time with mothers and daughters and daughters of daughters and mothers of mothers and…life is good. Raise a glass.

Unfortunately, like most mainstream and high-profile holidays in the country, it’s not quite that simple for everyone. If your mother is no longer living, there may be feelings of grief and loss still brewing and brought sharply into view on Mother’s Day. If you are estranged from your mother, or your daughter, it may be very difficult to focus on celebrating a day focused on the maternal relationship. If you’re a mother who is going through a divorce, and separated from your children today, the widespread happy wave can be excruciating. And if you’re a woman having fertility issues, or has lost a child, this is not a day likely to bring a ready smile to your face.

When I took the dog out earlier, I was having a good time just sitting in the warm sun, watching birds flitting back and forth in the trees, listening to myriad sounds around me. I watched the dog searching for the perfect blade of grass that would mark the even more perfect patch of growth to make her deposit (this goes on for a while), and it made me smile, as it usually does (unless it’s raining or below freezing).

While smiling at the zany canine, entirely unbidden thoughts of my mother assailed me. As is sometimes the case when that happens, I found myself conversing with her in some deep, internal place that I cannot explain. I was acknowledging Mother’s Day, and immediately saddened by her absence, yet again. Mother’s Day had become a bit of our ritual over the years, and when I lived in the same city as she did, we always went out to a nice restaurant for dinner. I usually gave her some kind of remembrance of the day, sometimes a book I though she would enjoy, sometimes a piece of jewelry. Always a commemoration of the day. It began as merely obligatory, but as i got older, it became a source of pleasure for me, and for her.

Today, I was remembering that, and missing the routine of it, the enjoyment of it, and found myself basically and quite simply…sad. Sitting out there, with the dog oblivious to the storm of emotions coursing through me, I shed quite a few tears, silently and unobtrusively. I just let them come, and I was receiving some kind of messaging from her.

The message had something to do with her not being upset that I had let this ridiculous neighbor’s daughter get away with not paying rent in the house she had left to me. She was telling me, not in words of course, but nonetheless letting me know that she was glad to have raised me to be an inherently kind person. She said that my heart was actually too big for my body, and that was a problem for me sometimes. But she was proud that I was kind. And she did not regret that, even though while she was here she often said otherwise. That was because she feared it would be difficult for me, which it is.

That was all. It was not words, it was feeling, and it brought up more feeling, and that’s OK. It’s one step closer to being OK with myself, one more piece of the puzzle. The puzzle that is being filled in with the inside pieces, and not just the edge pieces – the frame is there, just being filled in now. This is a good thing.

The day my mother died, I managed to get there before she took her final breath, and I had “the talk” with her. She was no longer able to open her eyes, or respond in any way, but I know that she knew I was there and I knew that she could hear me. So, I talked out loud, and did what I had been told to do by friends in the past, I did what I had done with my father in the same situation. I told her what was on my heart, that I wouldn’t be who I am today – warts and all – without everything she had given to me.

I told her that I wished things had been a little different, but that it had all been necessary for me to be standing right there at that moment. I told her I wished we had not had so much contention, and that I was sorry if I had disappointed her at times. And then I told her that I loved her. I don’t know why I was so afraid to do that, but I did it, and then I left the room to take a break, get something to eat. She died before I got out 15 minutes away from the hospice parking garage. I had told the hospice staff that she was going to do this on her own terms, and that is exactly what she did.

So, remembering all of that, and getting the message that I got today, brings it all back in the proverbial “stark relief”. I am not sorry, but I am sad. I am happy that so many people have good reason to celebrate this day, happy for all the new and old experiences of mothers and motherhood. Truly, I am.

We all find ourselves at different places on days like this. There’s no crime in that, and we all have a right to whichever place we claim. I have a right to any of my feelings that may choose to show themselves, today or any day. Same for everybody else.

So, it mystifies me that so many people seem to appoint themselves guardians of emotional conformity. One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamotte, posted something on FaceBook reflecting on Mother’s Day. It’s not a simple day for her, and she offered her feelings about having had a difficult mother, and feelings of loneliness that some have on the day. She talked about the complex emotions and expectations, about obligation and judgement. She spoke of her experience as a daughter, and a mother. There was so much of what she wrote that resonated with me, and so much to which I could not relate. In either case, though, I accepted it as communion, a sacrament given and received from some deep and authentic place of love.

Because social media is what it is, there were thousands of comments about the post. Most were effusive in their praise and love of the author’s writing, and the content of her offering. But, of course, there were a couple that I could have just smacked off the screen and been none the worse despite a cracked video monitor. One nice person made a comment about being happy for the people who were enjoying the day, because it was about them being happy and not “your” feelings. They went on to say that people should not “inject” their negativity into the happiness of the day. Hmmm. I’d like to inject something a bit stronger than negativity into that commenter.

Thanks for sharing, you insensitive clod. Don’t go away made, just go away. I’m not here to decorate your world.

So, the whole issue of insensitivity and presumption that conformity is correct makes me a cranky girl. I’ve reflected before about how much I abhor conformity for the sake of conformity. Conformity likes to masquerade as order, as easy management, as strength. In reality, conformity makes it easier to control people, but that never lasts. I’ve said before, you can only keep the dragons in cages for so long before they remember they can spit fire.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to hear Shirley Chisholm speak at a Martin Luther King Day event. I have counted Shirly Chisholm among my heroes ever since I found out who she was, and that she was the first Black woman elected to Congress, and the first woman to run for President of the United States. This budding feminist always enjoyed hearing her speak, particularly during the time when the women’s movement had little to no voices from women of color.

That Martin Luther King Day, which I believe was somewhere around 1986 or so, she talked about political power in the Black community. I remember distinctly she said, “You are like sleeping dragons. You have immense power, and if you would wake up and stick together, you would be unstoppable.”. I have never forgotten that, and the image of sleeping dragons sticks with me.

We have all, regardless of gender or color or marginalization, forgotten how to breathe real fire. We may open our mouths and shout insults, knowing that our words can bring harm, and can hurt, but those are the tales told by idiots and signifying nothing, as the old bard said. Any bully can throw out harsh words and momentarily stun their target for some finite period of time, but the effect is ultimately only temporary.

We’ve been stunned by the sting of some very bad predators, possibly murder hornets. We’ve forgotten that we can breathe fire strong enough to incinerate them. I forget this all the time, and allow people to get away with all manner of disrespect. When I react with fire, I am frequently assailed by others who have claimed to be merely “seeing both sides”, and who caution me that “you can disagree without being disagreeable”. However that goes, the message to me is clear – you are not heard, no matter how loud you speak. You are not seen, no matter how large you get.

Judgement has been rendered, and I have been deemed as a difficulty, a problem to be solved. No attention is paid to the root cause of my resistance, just the mechanism I have employed. It’s like doing an autopsy on a murder victim, discovering they have been shot, and not investigating who shot them. Yes, it’s true the victim died of a gunshot wound, but who pulled the trigger is an important part of our justice process.

I contend that justice has to be pursued and rendered at even the smallest of opportunities. We can’t just talk about justice at the level of the courts, and the level of legislation. Individually, we all have to be about the business of having just and equitable interactions all the time. It will take courage, humility, and a lot of practice to do that, but we have to try.

When I go to make a retail transaction, sayin the grocery store or the pharmacy, I always make eye contact and acknowledge the cashier or store representative in some way. Many stores require their employees to make some kind of greeting to customers as they begin a transaction – “Good morning/afternoon. How are you today?” I always respond directly, and return the greeting in kind – “Good morning/afternoon. I’m doing OK. How are you?”. Once the transaction has concluded, I ALWAYS say “Thank you! Have a good one.” or “Thanks. Hope you have a good rest of the day.” . Or SOMETHING. Even “Man it’s hot out there.” or “I wish this rain would let up.”.

I don’t ever like to feel that I’m expecting people to “serve” me on some unequal level. I detest feeling that I’m elevating myself to some level of superiority. I understand the relationship inherent in the transaction, but that’s a temporary state of circumstance. If the cashier and I were at the mall, we’d be just two consumers at the mall. If we were at the stadium, we’d be just two sports fans. I’m neither better nor worse than someone from who I transact some kind of business.

When I see people in, say, Starbucks I am frequently appalled a the lack of courtesy show to the baristas. People often will remain in active conversation on their cell phones, expressing irritation that the barista is asking questions in order to complete their order. They will stomp angrily back to the counter after receiving their completed order to loudlyl complain that something wasn’t exactly the way they ordered it. These are jobs I could never have. I would surely wind up in jail.

I could never be a barista, wait staff in a restaurant, a bank teller, or a teacher. In all of those jobs, you’re supposed to be nice to the so-called customer, who may be rude and demeaning from the onset of the transaction. Ain’t nobody got time for rude. That’s just not happening for me these days. Being rude is sometimes a death sentence – be rude to somebody who has a gun, and they may demonstrate their shooting prowess very quickly. Truth be told, though, you can only get away with that if you’re the Vice-President of the United States. Just sayin’.

A few years ago, people were having active conversations about civility. Not so much any more. People talked several years prior to that about good customer service, and rudeness at the point of sale (the employee as well as the customer). Not so much any more. We’ve now got a wave of resistance to “political correctness” that says a person should be capable of saying whatever they want to say, no matter how offensive that may be to someone else.

People get killed for saying offensive stuff these days. People get killed for going to bible study at their church. People get killed for looking at each other wrong. People get killed for texting in movie theaters, or playing their music too loud. People get killed for all kinds of things to day, and I contend it’s the easy access to weapons of mass destruction. That easy access coupled with the lack of compassion, lack of empathy, and the legitimization of bad behavior has made us engage in uncivil war without a cause.

Many people feel they have a cause, a cause for which they are willing to kill, willing to destroy everything to achieve. These are the people who are saying they want “their” country back, they want things to go back to the way they were during their things in the good old days.

This “I want my country back” is problematic in a number of ways. First, whose country is it? It’s not any one person’s country. It’s OUR country, but some of us have been excluded from the dream we talk about so often. But we know all this. We know that everybody wasn’t included in the American dream, we know that everybody wasn’t included in the American way. There was a silent acceptance of that for a long time, lest your dissent got you killed. But now, people are being killed for no reason at all, so…silence isn’t working. Obedience isn’t working. Compliance isn’t working. For many, guns seem to be working. This is NOT good.

FaceBook popped up a memory for me today:

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

My comment for today was this:
I accept finite disappointment, but it seems to be tending toward infinite betrayal at this point. Infinite hope remains inherent for this idealistic romantic, but despair chips away at the corners of a smile that is not so quick to shine most days.

Raise a glass to freedom! (“Hamilton”)

I am a realistic idealist. I can separate my idealism from the reality of the world in which I find myself. My idealism is hopeful, aspirational, sometimes childishly romantic. It all seems very simple in my mind, before I get out of bed, before I realize the dog has made her digestive presence known in the living room. Then idealism and hopes for justice seem unwieldly, impossible, and even foolish. Who am I to imagine such things? Who am I to ignore the dream such improbable fantasies?

Well, I suppose that I am one of a long line of dreamers, a long line of people who refuse to let the darkness of night overtake the sun of the day. A long line of people who simply cannot march in line, even if our lives depend on it, which frequently they do. I have a t-shirt that says “I am a December woman. I was born with my heart on my sleeve, a fire in my soul, and a mouth I can’t control.” . That really is who I am. My heart has always been on my sleeve, fair pickin’ for the unscrupulous and those with no heart of their own.

As my mother recently told me, my heart is too big. I imagine that means when it’s pricked, it bleeds quite a lot. Some of us do bleed quit a bit, all our lives. So far, it hasn’t been enough to kill me, even when I thought it would. But, my heart is still beating, and I’m still standin’., in the figurative sense and in the literal sense when my back isn’t hurting. But, it is what it is for now. Whenever that changes, I suppose it will be time to do something different.

My loyalties have always pulled me in different directions. The larger issues surround family, race/culture, and sexual orientation. I have always felt as though how I appear in each of those niches didn’t entirely match how I appeared in the others. I have always felt as though I couldn’t be all of me, and the same me, in all of those places, as though I would be unrecognizable in all of those places. Like, how i present in my community of faith, with my queer self hanging out, and my multicultural self hanging out, and my non-Christian self hanging out might not be recognizable or appreciated in communities of all Black people.

I don’t seem to get on well in all-Black communities. In all-Black commuities, I am frequently on a different page, or not quite resonating with the primary issues. Sometimes I wonder if that’s about skin color, or the unique culture of where I grew up. I never know. What I do know is that I feel out of step, and no accepted, and not taken entirely seriously. I don’t feel accepted there. In certain of those communities, or groups, I don’t feel as though the LGBT identity I carry is fully accepted, but where the intersection of my community of faith and race is prominent, I don’t worry so much about that.

The UU faith community does a better job than most of dealing with sexual orientation, but i still feel a bit out of touch with the race piece. There is too much that I have to explain so they feel warm and snuggly, and they can understand. I can’t say I blame them for that, but I also don’t feel as though I need to give them a medal for it, nor do I feel as though it’s my job to help them understand. But, if I don’t help them to understand, I don’t get to move into more of the environment that I want to be in. So, trapped again. Kind of sucks, but I guess that’s the way it is.

When I’m dealing with all-Black UU groups, though, it’s as though I am not quite at the professional level of navigating race; they are far more erudite and competent on some advanced academic level. I feel as though I am speaking a different language, and shouting it from very far away. Suffice it to say that I don’t feel particularly well accepted, almost excluded. So, at this point, I don’t much care and have given up on trying to fit in.

That is most definitely a question of loyalty for me, but I can’t make it work, can’t make them accept me, can’t make myself feel a sense of comfort and belonging that’s just not there. So, I am not going to try any longer, nor am I going to change one damned thing about myself in order to fit in better. I don’t harbor any animosity, but enough with the snobbishness and the cliquishness. I can get that anywhere. I don’t have to seek out my own people to experience exclusion.

Since I was a little kid, I was always told that you don’t speak out against other Black people, meaning don’t tell white people our business. Don’t let white people see us fighting amongst ourselves, don’t cut each other down to “the Man”. That has always weighed very heavy on me, but my goodness, sometimes Black people do other Black people wrong. Worse than any white person could ever do us. Like the wench still living in my mama’s house and paying no rent. Not a dime. But when there was a major repair to be done, she knew exactly how to find me. That ain’t right; no how, no way is that right.

The business of not speaking against other Black people got to be more of an issue for me once I started going to school with white people. The other Black students didn’t exactly ally with me, or stick up for me, or go out of their way to be friends with me. We came from different economic strata – their parents were doctors, lawyers and mine were school teachers. White girls reached out and included me, at least up to a point, but at least I had people to hang with. I couldn’t quite understand how to be loyal to “my people” when they weren’t exactly doing anything for me. It made no sense for me to choose their society over people from a different race who were being nice to me. But then, on the other hand, there was a certain line I couldn’t cross with the white girls, either so…trapped again. No way out.

I constantly second-guess myself, even today, about my loyalty to Black people. As I said, I feel as though I’ve been treated very badly by other Black people, mainly socially, but in other ways as well. The most horrifyingly unfair and incompetent managers I’ve ever had at work have been other women. Black women have been exponentially worse to me than anyone. It could be the feeling of always having to prove yourself, it could be something I was doing, it could be the weather. I don’t much care at this point, but note that I don’t want to experience any of that again, wondering if it’s me or if it’s them, am I not down with the cause or am I really trying to be white?

For the record, I have never conceived of myself as trying to be white. I don’t think anyone is apt to mistake me for white, unless they’re white and have been really sheltered. I cannot help what color my skin is, nor do I want to. I cannot help how I speak, nor do I want to. I cannot help what resonates in me with regard to music, or the arts, or hobbies, or my personal history, nor do I want to. If I don’t have sufficient credentials for some folks in the Black community, that’s their problem and not mine. I know where I come from, I know what I’ve experienced, and I know how racism has worked in my life. Next.

No matter how badly I feel that I’ve been treated by other Black people, I remain loyal to my own integrity about how I respond to them. I have a lot of empathy, and belief in the experience of people who I see have been rejected and excluded from professional and social circles just because they are Black. I’ve been excluded from some of the same circles. I’ve also been excluded from some of the Black society and boogee echelons, and that’s even more unfair. I just choose not to make an issue of that. I understand, though, that collectively, we have a long way to go.

Loyalty on levels other than race runs even more deeply in me, though. When someone does me a good turn, no matter what color or class or gender they are, I don’t forget that. When it’s something that was just a random act of kindness, I find that endearing and very sweet, on a somewhat sentimental level. When it’s something that literally saves me on some level, usually from myself I might add, the loyalty is undying. Even if they screw up later about something else, I am far more likely, if not compelled, to give them another chance.

This is how it was with my mother, where no matter how many abominable things I could point to that hurt me, provided lasting negative impact, could not be taken back, I was not going to let her go away from here alone. I was not going to abandon her, I was not going to throw her aside. No matter how much of her own problems she had caused, no matter how wrong she’d been about her mental health, no matter how much consequence that gave me, I remember all of the other things, all of the things I felt offered some measure of redemption.

There are some people, some transgressions, that prove damaging to me, harmful to me, and I never forget them. The ones I hold against people are the ones where nothing has been offered to balance the offense, nothing has redeemed the damage done. I owe nothing. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’m only a fool when I know what you’re doing, see it coming, and let you do it anyway. That’s been a pattern in my life, and it’s been exacerbated by my confusion about loyalty. I call it quits.

These days, I’m loyal to my dog. I’m loyal to my cousin, who did so much to show my mother genuine love. I’m loyal to my mother’s neighbor, who I’ve been knowing since I was 9, and who also did a lot to help my mother when things were getting bad. It’s her daughter who is living rent-free in what’s now my house, and my loyalty to HER mother is part of why I have let that go on for so long. Her mother now has Alzheimer’s Disease, and it’s my loyalty to her that is causing me to risk my own affairs to not challenge the whole debacle. But, that’s how loyalty screws me up at times. I don’t want the confrontation, or the guilt, or the shame of challenging the whole thing, although it’s getting to the point where I’m going to have to do it. But I hate it. I really would rather do just about anything to avoid it, but…barring that I win the lotter and become insanely wealth, I will have no choice about doing that. Oh, well. I tried.

I suppose a final aspect, or if not a final aspect just another aspect, of loyalty is choosing sides when there’s a conflict between friends, or parties close to me in some fashion. I have this near obsession with fairness, and if I don’t think people are being fair to one party in a dispute, that is the side I will choose to support. My mother gave me that “root for the underdog” sentiment, and I guess it stuck with me.

Mean people suck (I even have a bumper sticker to that effect). No matter what, I don’t come out of the gate leading with mean. Once provoked and attacked, I can most definitely be mean, but it’s not my opening salvo. And nothing provokes me more than meanness. If there’s a way to combat meanness, or give a mean person some of their own medicine, I’m on it. It’s been pointed out in the past that some of my responsiveness in that scenario is co-dependent. That’s very nice. But I hate mean, and I’m usually very loyal to people who are getting the short end of the stick. The underdog needs to win a few.

So, that brings me to the question of what happens when I’m the underdog. I feel as though I’m the underdog quite a lot, too. I don’t stand up for myself, I don’t assert myself, I don’t insist on fair treatment. Loyal to myself? Not so sure about that. The internal voice in my head says there’s a reason people treat me the way they do, because I screwed up, I didn’t do it right, I always screw up, I always do it wrong. I’m not good enough. Why did I even think I could do this?

All of that is going through mind, usually all the time. And I do mean ALL the time. It’s a wonder I can accomplish anything. I have accomplished a few things, but of course, what I have NOT accomplished more informs my narrative more than anything else. That’s how I roll. I kind of wish I didn’t roll so much, though…maybe rock some. Rock has to go with roll, I would imagine. The yin and yan of the beat, and speaking from experience, it’s a dark day when you lose your beat.

I said earlier, in a previous entry, that I want my spark back. I want the spark, I want the beat. I want the rhythm, I want the melody, i want the rap, I want the whole thing. I want unexpected harmony that doesn’t sound like it fits, I want no rules, I want improvisation. I want to have no plan, just a destination, just an exploration, just a throw it against the wall and see what sticks kind of experience. I want chaos, and let’s see what we come up with. Let’s see what happens when you press this button. Let’s see how it looks if you add more purple to this and more black to that. I want nothing mundane, no slight variation. Bold and new and loud and never been done before. No spark – let’s go right to the big bang.

Some days I am feeling outrageous, but talk myself out of it quickly. I was just listening to a podcast (Brene’ Brown’s “Dare To Lead” sessions, with guest Aiko Bethea) and they were talking about invisibility, and internalized oppression. There was a connection made that struck me like a lightning bolt: imposter syndrome is related to inner critic syndrome is related to internalized oppression. This is the connection I’ve been missing for quite a long time. I always wonder where in the hell those inner critic messages come from,, those inner voice that say any minute now, everyone you know is going to figure out that you’re a fraud, that you’re faking everything, that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. Any minute now. And when that minute comes, you’re going to be run out of wherever you are on a rail, and made out to be a laughing stock. Just you wait. That’s a lot to be carrying around, all day, every day.

That connection may very well explain what I feel is underachievement, and failure (yes, failure) to live up to my own expectations. I’ve said before that I remember believing what everyone said about me, that I was promising and could be anything I wanted to be. Along the way, after I started navigating in the real world, I feel as though I just got beat down, further and further from promise and more into negative expectation. No longer an exception, or even an individual, but more a fulfilled prophecy of the toxic waters in which I swim. And yes, I realize water can’t have a prophecy, but I’ll clean that up later, with the water.

Regardless, I’m not trying to excuse myself for what I’ve slacked on, or messed up in my life. I own that stuff. It just helps to understand where some of that slime came from, that I didn’t create it myself. Once I know something of where it came from, I can drill a bit deeper into my responsibility for cleaning it up. With the water. The water comes first…and it has to be detoxified, cleaned, purified. My own little environmental project. It won’t do any good to clean up slime with dirty water, because then I’ll have toxic slime, and that will be worse. So…let’s start with the water in which I’m swimming. It looks normal to me, but – as they said on the podcast – a fish doesn’t know what they’re swimming in is water. So. Seeing as how I can’t swim, I should learn.

I’m learning quite a lot of things, some unbidden, some quite intentional. I suppose the point is to be as open as possible. Groovy. I am really still feeling as though I am on the brink of something, and I don’t quite know if that means I should take a leap of faith, or wait for something to come into view. As the old ladies on the bus used to say, “Somethin’s gonna break, somethin’s gonna come on. You just wait and see.” So, I’m waitin’ but I ain’t seein’ much. I’ll give it a minute, though, and keep doind my best to do that next right thing.

Today, in between having flashes of random insight and playing the stupid online FaceBook games I’ve become obsessed with, I ade an honest attempt to revise my health care Marketplace application. They FINALLY sent correspondence that said I should do that in order to satisfy their questions about my eligibility, so I made a stab at it. It still doesn’t make sense to me, but I attempted to comply. I may try calling them again on Monday to see if I got any closer to fine, because I really am tryin’ to tell them somethin’ about my life, maybe give me insight between black and white. Really. The form didn’t have a checkbox for that, however, so I had to do the best I could to fit myself into the narrow confines of their cage. That’s never a good fit for me.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I don’t have a mother close by any longer. It gives me just a little bit of a downturned mouth. Not too bad, but it makes me just a wee bit somber when I think about how it used to be, and how I’m pretty much out here by myself. That’s how it feels, like I’m out here by myself, even though I have friends and support systems and all that. But. It’s never going to be quite the same, or quite as natural. I’ll live with that, but some days it sucks worse than others. Tomorrow could be one of those days. I’m going to put a place holder in getting outside with psycho-dog to distract myself and suck up sunshine. Truth be told, it ain’t all that bad in my world today.