I was responding to a FaceBook post this morning, in a group about my home town. The group talks about stuff that’s no longer there, not just since Katrina, but since then. People share amazing pictures from the past, some from before my time and some that I remember from childhood like it was yesterday. The city is indefatigable, as are its denisons, but there is still grief over what’s not dere no mo’.

Someone had posted a picture this morning, of a particular intersection, and just noted that stuff was no longer there. I commented that even though it looked the same, the energy was gone, like the guts had been ripped out of the place. That seems to be how I’ve felt when going back there, since Katrina. Yes, the buildings are mostly still there, at least in the tourist areas and the business district, but the energy is very, very different. It feels hollow, and low. The pandemic, of course, hasn’t helped.

New Orleans is a city of energy. Many thing make absolutely no sense. You cannot eat from the streets, like in Disney World; it’s a dirty city. The success of Mardi Gras is measured by the amount of trash picked up, which is usually several hundred tons. It’s always been slightly dirty, and that’s not counting the politics. It’s part of the charm, and part of the ambience. It’s where the music comes from, it’s where the food comes from, it’s where the hospitality comes from. It’s also where the crime comes from, but I suppose you have to take the good with the bad.

Regardless, my comment about the energy drew a response from another group member, who said “The buildings change, but you can’t change the energy.”. Oh, mon contraire, cher. That’s precisely what I’m saying – the building haven’t changed. The energy is different. Very different. Is that a bad thing, or just a different thing? In some respects, it’s a bad thing because some of the change is good, but for the wrong reasons. The gentrification, which happens in many American cities, helped to revitalize a lot of real estate that had been destroyed in the storm, but now…people who grew up in some of those areas can no longer afford to live there. People from other places, with no emotional investment in the city, have moved in. That’s how the energy changes. In other places, investors have acquired properties simply for financial gain, and use them for short term rentals or corporate perks. I’m not sure those arrangements contribute any energy to the spirit of the place whatsoever.

But, I’m a dreamer, a romantic. I respond to the energy of a place, the spirit of the land, the movement of the people and the water and the soil. New Orleans, in particular, has a tremendous subsidence problem. It always has. Our front porch used to sink every year by as much as an inch. That’s what happens when you live below sea level, and we accepted it as just a part of life. The ground was moving, the people were moving, the river was moving. That’s where the energy grabbed you, in the movement. That place has been moving since long before I came along, and it will be moving long after I’ve left this planet.

The Mississippi River has always been a part of my movement. I believe I’ve mentioned fairly recently the Indigo Girls’ song that says “the Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota, at a place where you can walk to with five steps down”. That’s how a lot of things start. The song goes on to say “…and I guess that’s how you started, with a pin prick to my heart”. That is how so many things begin – with a pin prick, with a trickle, with just a tiny blip. With a microscopic bit of DNA in a sperm cell that unites with another microscopic speck of DNA in an egg cell, and 61 years later, there’s me. Ain’t that somethin’?

So, in all this reflection on where I physically come from this time around, I now wonder…what is home? I thought New Orleans was home, and in so many ways it is, and will always be. That’s where my memories live, the ones from the earliest of times, when I was learning how the world worked and what was right and what was wrong. When I was learning what I could count on and what I couldn’t. I suppose some of that is constant, no matter where I go, but the picture in my mind’s eye of those lessons will always look like New Orleans. Always.

I remember when Mardi Gras seemed like a celebration, and not a battlefield. I remember when public transit buses were air-conditioned and the fare was $.10. I remember when our favorite restaurants served a meal for a family of four for less than $10, with a beer or two, and that wasn’t fast food. These were restaurants that were featured on national news and travel guides. Those was da days. I suppose every town has that sort of history, and people my age are reminiscing about how things have changed and how it’s a good thing the previous generation wasn’t around to see how bad things have gotten. I suppose people will be saying those same things about us in another few years.

Places are important. They are important parts of tethering us to the planet. When the places of our memories change, it sometimes feels like a fault line shifting. In California, there are earthquakes that do that, and where you’re standing is suddenly in a new relationship with another part of the planet a few feet to your right. Humans wouldn’t do that, but the Earth does it for us. Left to our own devices, we wouldn’t change one damned thing, and we’d take ownership of where our feet are planted. That’s essentially what we’ve done, but we don’t realize it’s all temporary. Things like earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes and tornadoes…those are the great equalizers, I think. The shake things up and we have to cast our lot again. I would contend that our estimation of winning and losing is somewhat narcissistic, based only on our comfort and satisfaction. The planet, though, always wins…on its own terms and in a way we can’t comprehend. But I digress.

Places are important. One of the reasons I wanted to move to this part of the country was my affinity for the Smoky Mountains. I visited them once, in Northern Alabama several years before I decided to come here, and fell in love. I am still in love with them. I love mountains, and find them fascinating and spiritually grounding. When I am driving along a portion of highway in mountainous terrain, and the road snakes through mountains on either side, I feel embraced by the land. I recognize the incredible privilege, however, and offer my gratitude for sacrifice of the rock which suffered the trauma of building that road, of supporting the weight of millions of vehicles traversing its expanse. But, the glory of feeling that solidity and unwavering witness sets my spirit right. There are occasional rockslides, as though mountains and hills need to remind us of where we are, and how small we are. Mother Nature does not take kindly to being ignored.

I live here now, and my stuff is here and my dog is here. But it does not feel quite like home. I came here knowing right from wrong. I came here with at least a sense of who I was, and how things worked. I’ve learned quite a lot since I’ve been here, and I’ve evolved quite a bit, but my foundation was already set. I consider this more where I live, and where my support system reside. I like this place, I feel comfortable here (the low crime rate and less traffic make it a lot easier to live). I have some great memories and experiences to add to my memoir. But it is not home. I feel like it may once have been home, because my spirit rose when I came here, but it’s nothing I consciously remember.

It has been said home is where the heart is. My heart is in Louisiana, in New Orleans, in Lake Charles where I was born, and where I buried my mother. I suppose my heart can multi-task, because I have significant emotional investment here. There are people I have come to love here. My medical support team is here, my emotional support team is here. My dog’s vet is here (and that’s important). But there will always be a large piece of me that is bound to New Orleans, and that’s the part of me that goes the deepest. I think that’s OK, but some days…I grieve that sense of ultimate belonging. I suppose that’s just how it goes.

At this point in my life, when I consider home, I have to consider what happens when I die. I am not sure I really want to be cremated, although it makes so much more sense. And I’ll be dead – what do I care what happens to this conglomeration of flesh and bones that is of no further use to me? And even if I’m cremated, do I want to have my remains back in New Orleans or in Lake Charles or put into a plastic bad and deposited in a land fill? Maybe have somebody spread my ashes over Louisiana and some in the Smokies? Who could I entrust with that task? ACK! OVERLOAD!

I suppose I will go and walk to dog, escaping from this important issue of where to deposit my mortal coil for another span of time. I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t. Yes, I understand that I will have to at some point, but that point is not now. I did my flippin’ taxes, so leave me alone. I bought a new vacuum cleaner and picked up a few ounces of trash in my apartment, so haven’t I done enough for one week??? Don’t make me have to whine. That would be ugly, undignified, and totally unproductive, so let’s just not and say we did. As a card I saw recently says…I’m no longer a crastinator, I’ve gone pro. It’s an art form, and I’m damned good at it.

I think I am reaching critical mass. I’ve gained what feels like an incredible amount of weight very quickly. I could blow at any time. I have returned to my previous Jabba the Hut incarnation, feeling very much like a large, shapeless, and gruesome lump of inert flesh capable of the necessary involuntary functions, like breathing, digestion, excretion…and the sole voluntary outreach of consumption. It’s not only food, although I’ve probably done more than my fair share of eating while bouncing off the COVID repelling walls of this domicile. It’s consumption of media, of sensory input, of information. Too much information. Waaaaay too much information.

I thought I was scheduled for my second COVID vaccine dose on April 7th, but I somehow misread the appointment date, and it’s not until the 19th. That’s really not all that big a deal (where the eff else do I have to do?) but the projected sense of relief will be delayed. I guess what I imagine will be a sense of relief is just that – imagined. I fully understand being fully vaccinated does not eradicate my chances of getting this damned virus, if exposed. I fully understand that being fully vaccinated does not cause other people to behave sensibly, to wear masks properly, or at all, to avoid gathering with those not vaccinated, etc. etc. etc. But, in all honesty, I believe being fully vaccinated will give me a fighting chance of not dying from infection with COVID-19. That’s about as good as it gets, so bring it on. April 19th…seems like a lifetime.

All this waiting is making me like a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Waiting. Never my strong suit, although looking back over many years (many, may years) I think I’ve been waiting for some things for a really long time. Now that I’m in the “twilight” years, I suppose I’ve lost patience with the waiting, the anticipating. I suppose that’s part of the problem with dreaming. Dream a little dream for me…don’t get your hopes up…but since I’ve said not to do that I’m now compelled to do that, so no matter how hopeless the landscape I am still waiting for the miracle of flowers. I can’t seem to kill the hope, no matter how much I try. Always the romantic, believing the miracle is just around the corner, accompanied by the happy ending.

That doesn’t happen for me a lot…and that’s not to say that i haven’t had some really good thing happen in my life. I suppose I often feel as though what I asked for, particularly something I didn’t need and something that benefited only me…those nonsensical and frivolous things. Those are things rarely constituting happy endings for me. Like love stuff, romantic comedy stuff, sleepless in the foothills kinds of stuff. No, I’m the village priest, the helpful one, the one that oh, sorry, I love you so much but not THAT way. That one. In the past I tried very hard to change that, was desperate to change that, believed that it was going to happen, that it was just around the corner. But, I’ve turned a lot of corners since then, and ya know what…I don’t think it’s possible any longer, but…still…there’s a little spark that rattles when someone pays just a little attention to me. WTF is THAT?

I am a far more stable being in semi-quarantine, keeping most people at arm’s length. There are a few that are closer, that are behind enemy lines as it were, but they are clearly not candidates for romantic partnership. That’s as it should be. I do really wish that I did not always look for the romantic crap, though. It rather sucks. Even if someone I wanted to explore on that level was receptive, I can almost guarantee they’re hopeless narcissistic, or worse, just plain nuts. I do not choose well. Since childhood. It’s not going to change anytime soon, and I’m tired of trying to unlearn everything I’ve been doing all my life. So…like the song “Least Complicated” says (Indigo Girls) – I’ll just sit up in the house and resist, and not be seen until I cease to exist”.

This is a goofy night…the day was really rather nice. A little too warm for me, but no rain, thank goodness. I did a few more adult things – paid a couple of bills. Threw out some trash. Picked up a few more things in the apartment. Went to two scheduled appointments, walked the dog, ordered prescription refills. Slept pretty well. Looked for a job online…a writing job. Still not sure about that, but we’ll see. I have to do something relatively quickly – not quite tomorrow, but soon. I effing hate money. Truly, I do. Everything has a financial dependency, everything. Is that freedom? I’ll have to check.

I was on a meeting earlier with some folks, and some of us are taking this Beloved Conversations course, from a theological seminary that credentials a lot of UU ministers. It’s an interesting endeavor, and this first module is designed to help participants examine their internal biases, and what informs our participation in status quo, things that have shaped us into our current form as a members of this complicated society, our culture, how we look at citizenship. We didn’t get here randomly, or accidentally.

If we want to move beyond our current reality, we need to figure out how we got here. The course is separated by race – white people are taking one facet of the course (focusing on liberation from what is seen as dominant culture, and the inequities that separate the cultures), and BIPOC another (focused more on identity, experiences, the toll of our journeys).

In my earlier meeting today, which was about meditation and mindfulness (irrespective of race or politics or current events or activism), there was another participant, a friend of mine. He is a white, 70-ish, cis-gendered male, highly intelligent. He is taking the Beloved Conversations course, and was expressing some impatience and mild frustration with the course so far, saying that he was waiting for them to “get down to the race stuff” and “was anxious to move beyond all the introductory” materials.

Listening to my friend sharing about the curriculum thus far, and his assessment of everything so far being “introductory”, left me with a vague sense of dismay. I wanted to tell him this is how we keep winding up in this place, because some of us think we’ve got all this “introductory” stuff, and we need the more advanced course, so we can “get to it”. Get to what, I want to ask. Get to solving the problem of race in this country? Are you ready to do that? I don’t think so.

I know, I know – they mean well. Running the risk of offending or hurting someone’s feelings, I sometimes need to say that meaning well is not good enough. Meaning well is roughly equivalent to “thoughts and prayers”. Meaning well is a cop out that I feel robs me of the chance to say, very frankly, you don’t GET it – you are more likely doing what makes YOU comfortable and allows you to give yourself a pat on the back for doing a good deed. That’s like earmarking federal money for putting up basketball hoops in the projects, while people are starving and can’t drink the water. Not saying the basketball hoops aren’t important in some contexts, but sometimes that is all that happens. There’s no significant action on the food shortage and the water quality and the crime and the educational system. But look – there are basketball hoops. Don’t say we didn’t do ANYTHING.

Doing just the easy stuff is where I get frustrated. Doing the more difficult stuff…that’s another story. Asking the people who live outside the basketball hoops what they feel like they need is more what I see as doing well, not just meaning well. Doing well is more what needs to happen right now, and continuing to do well, continuing to do the right things. Not just once, or for a month, or even for a year. For the rest of our lives. It’s taken us a while to get here, it’s gonna take us a while to get out.

I want to say to some people who mean well…I know you donate to the NAACP and yes, I know you volunteer with the food pantry and and donate clothes and blankets to the homeless shelters. You serve on the boards of various non-profits. But tell me…where do you live? Tell me where your kids go to school. Tell me who your friends are, and where you go for entertainment. Tell me about the books you read and the people you hang with. Tell me if you go to community meetings and listen to the people directly impacted by public policies that you think are great ideas.

Don’t tell me about how much you hate hip-hop and rap music because people just can’t see how damaging it is to “their” culture. Please don’t tell me about how it confuses you why racial and ethnic minority communities are the most impacted by environmental pollution but often the least supportive of environmental activism. Please don’t ask me over and over again to give you a list of things you can do to help. I don’t speak for the entire Black community, I don’t know what you should do. I can’t navigate my way out of my OWN hell hole, let along steer an entire diaspora back to safe waters.

What I CAN tell you, however, is how it’s been to go through my life as a Black person. I can tell you what it’s like to be so frequently the “only” – the only person of color in your circles, in your groups, in your churches, in your work places.

I can tell you how I might have felt a little more included and welcomed during social events, how even something as simple as the decorations let me know I wasn’t even an afterthought in the event planning. I can’t teach you one damned thing. It’s not what I do. My parents were teachers…they went to school to learn how to do that. Me, not so much, plus I have the patience of a flea. I’m trying to learn how to do my own life. If you want to know about that, I’m our girl. Otherwise…there’s Google, free for the taking.

People have asked me in the past what I want to see happen. That’s like asking me to tell you which grains of sand on the beach I want to see eliminated. Which leaves on a mountain laurel I want to see pruned. Maybe what I want to see more than anything is knowing that you respect me, as an equivalent human being trying to make her way through this effed up morass of capitalism and power dynamics and the human condition. I want to see that you’re secure in who you are, and what you can do, and that you relate to me as the same. I want to see compassion and grace, because we’re gonna screw up. Screwing up isn’t what makes us imperfect, but not dealing with the imperfection can make us less than human. I want to see your humanity, and be able to trust you with mine. Not being able to trust you (and vice versa), feeling the need to be constantly on guard and one step ahead is not the way out of this.

Here’s a thought: explaining to me “how we do things here” doesn’t help me learn anything but how attached you are to your own supremacy. How scared you are that something might change. How unwelcome difference is. That’s always the lesson I get when I’m dealing in dominant culture. My feeling these days, and I believe I’ve said it before, is that we don’t need to be trying to “fix” things, or dismantle what we’ve already got to make it “more inclusive”. Doing that is great for a start, but it still focuses on the existing inequity and gives it power.

These days, I’m thinking we may do well to focus on creating something radically new. Something that departs from the status quo, from the traditional. We can retain some parts of the old systems, the parts that work, but let’s re-launch the whole effort. New graphics, new logo, new goals and mission statement. No organizational charts, no linear progressions. Start at the beginning…with the introduction. No skipping ahead to the final chapter because you think you’ve heard the opening lecture already. We’re starting over – it’s a new day.

Keep in mind that while it may be a new day, we have debris to clean up from the storm that roared through here yesterday. There are trees down, cars on the sidewalk, signs and roofs that are no more. We’ve gotta clean that up, but…as they say…many hands make light work. (yeah, that’s trite, but sue me later.)

The big thing we are going to need to remember, in building this new community, is that we have GOT to be cognizant of who we are. We have to know who’s here, and who needs to have a place in the final product – that is going to include the people we know, and the people we don’t know. The people we agree with, and the people we don’t agree with. The people we understand, and the people who make us tear our hair out with their illogical approach to how we live together.

We’re going to have to know ourselves, and that’s where I started – with this Beloved Conversations. That’s what the course is really all about, not regurgitating historical data and testimony of inequities and empirical data concerning the state of racial/ethnic minority communities. We can read that in books and white papers, and we’ve done it for many years. I might argue that a steady diet of empirical data is what amounts to mental masturbation.

The most honest assessment I can make of myself is that I’m no better than anyone else, and certainly no worse. I’m just who I am. I learned a while back that is really a definition of humility – I am right where I’m supposed to be. If we can start there, we might be able to start doing the work in earnest.

I am having several random thoughts this morning. This is what happens when I sleep fairly well, which it seems as though I did that in separate iterations last night and early this morning. Goodness knows I needed it…I worked hard these past few days, doing things not ordinarily in my daily regime. I filed my 2020 taxes. That’s one of those adult things I have been avoiding, holding onto the doorframe of juvenile irresponsibility with all of my strength, leaving claw marks in the wood. I do still wonder if I completed the forms correctly, but they can’t say I didn’t file. It seems irreconcilable with logic and reason to receive a tax refund when I have no income and have paid no taxes. But…the logic and reason of the income tax system is way beyond my job grade, so…small wonder. Very small.

The status of my 2020 income tax is not really a random thought, but…there are other blips on my brain scan this morning. One is…Hunter Biden has written a memoir of his battle with addiction. I applaud that, without hesitation. It takes real courage to come forward about that, to take a look at your own behavior and to admit your powerlessness over some chemical that makes you do things you don’t really want to do, makes you lose track of who you are, makes you become someone you don’t even know. It’s not simply a question of will power, or choice. It’s a chemical reaction in the brains of some people, who have brains that don’t handle mind-altering chemicals very well. As my recovery program has always preached, we are not bad people trying to get good, we are sick people trying to get well. I do not tolerate people making a moral judgement on addiction and substance abuse. It’s just not that simple.

The book that Hunter Biden has written has received praise and a big thumbs-up from several commentators and reviewers. As I said earlier, I applaud his willingness to write this very personal and vulnerable account of his journey through such a condition. The reviewers, however, did a so-so job of offering critique, at least so far. This morning, one said something to the effect that Hunter’s journey is the one thing that has brought Joe Biden to his knees. Um, first of all, you don’t know that…and second of all, I have no doubt that it humbled the President, as it would just about any parent when they realize they can’t wave some magic wand and bring their child out of such a deep hole of despair. But, the President has also been very honest about the pain of losing his first wife and children in a car accident many years ago, and about losing his oldest son to cancer many years after that. This is one of the more relatable things about Joe Biden, his demonstration of living through such tremendous pain and loss with dignity. Evaluating which tragedy is the more painful, the single one that has caused him the most despair, is irresponsible. Pain is pain is pain, and you don’t get to rate one painful incident above another when you’re on the outside of that. It’s his pain, and I don’t think he would choose to keep one in favor of eliminating another. His life would not be what it is today without them all, and they ALL hurt.

The other random thought I’m having about the Hunter Biden book, which is titled Beautiful Things, is the inevitable discussion of the nature of addiction. Neil Young said, in “The Needle and the Damage Done”, that “every junkie’s like a setting sun”. That rings true to me. We don’t all make it. I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but it’s reality. The outcome of Hunter Biden’s addiction journey is not written in stone, only the pain is persistent. And the pain radiates beyond him – it touches anyone and everyone who loves him, who interacts with him, who depends on him. That’s how addiction works, whether it’s substance abuse or sex or gambling. I believe he went to treatment more than once, and the addiction persisted despite those efforts. His father is a public figure, and now he’s a public figure. They have money. They have resources. He wrangled, or was given, a high paying job despite his battle with addiction. This is not the case for the vast majority of addicts.

George Floyd and his girlfriend were addicts, as she testified in his murderer’s trial on Friday. He was also a very nice guy, an attentive father, not a domestic abuser. She enjoyed his sense of humor. He was a big guy, who had some athletic skill, and he was an addict. His girlfriend attributed chronic pain for both their addictions, as they sought relief in prescription and non-prescription opioids. These were not public figures, these were not wealthy people. There was no repetition of treatment efforts for them, but there was judgement, profiling, and labeling from law enforcement. That put them on a specific path of non-tolerance, and that is the path that intersected with Derek Chauvin on the day in May a year ago. That crossroads ended one life, and has put the other into a battle for its soul. Addiction, once again, radiates beyond the addicts themselves – two families in agony, one life ended, one life in limbo. Systemic policies in turmoil, witnesses plunged into the questioning despair of questioning themselves – should they have done more? Should they have done less? What should they have done? What is the truth?

So, Hunter Biden’s addiction and George Floyd’s addiction are the same disease, one of powerlessness and inconceivable loss of self-preservation. The outcomes, were so very different, however. That is painful to see, and painful to admit this is where race and ethnicity bring us…to the crossroads of class and moral judgement. At that crossroads, I find it even more unacceptable that some who enter the same experience have absolutely NO consequences, NO judgement. Hunter Biden had judgement only because his father is a public figure. Otherwise, we might never have know his name, seen his face. He would have been one of millions who go through treatment, or not, and who battle the addiction silently and in futility. If he didn’t have the misfortune of breaking the law, he would have had absolutely no public consequences, only the certain personal misery of the disease.

George Floyd, however, had a radically different outcome, because the “system” put crosshairs on him. As one of the witnesses testified, after watching him struggle with the police to avoid being placed into the squad car (he said he was claustrophobic and begged them not to put him in the car), he told Floyd, “You can’t win. Just go with it, don’t fight. YOU CAN’T WIN!” This is the crux of systemic racism, systemic oppression, poverty, all of it – you can’t win. When you’re an addict, you understand that you are powerless, against the substances, against what your body does once you ingest those substances. You understand that, whether you can articulate it or not. Layer that on top of everything else about your life circumstances in which you are powerless – you cannot be granted grace, or the benefit of the doubt, or even dignity once you are branded as undesirable. This was true of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, and so many others. It’s been true of thousands of others over the past 400 years as well – once you are labeled as “other” as “less than”, as not human, as an object…you have no right to demand anything. You are entitled to nothing, including humanity.

This is why the George Floyd murder is so monumental; as his daughter said, “Daddy’s gonna change the world.”. And so he is. We will never be the same after this trial is over, no matter which verdict is rendered. Are we not all guilty of making these same selective judgements against people, often judging Hunter Biden as a “good” addict and George Floyd as a “bad addict”. Was a counterfeit $20 bill – if it was, in fact, knowingly counterfeit – the price for a human life? In George Floyd’s case, it most certainly was. In Eric Garner’s case, a human life cost the price of single cigarettes. In Hunter Biden’s case, the cost of a human life had no ceiling. And Hunter Biden is still here, still capable of telling his story. I have no issue with Hunter Biden doing that, but I have no choice but to point out the difference in outcome of his story when compared to that of George Floyd.

When I look at this discrepancy, I also look at an even larger picture of a mosaic of other things going on in our country. Voter suppression bills are making their way across the landscape of 43 states, all of them intent on minimalizing absente/mail-in voting and pushing for photo ID in order to cast a ballot. Georgia is not the only state engaged in voter suppression, but they are one of the first and their bill is particularly robust. All of these bills seem to have the express intent of keeping voter turnout low, which nearly always benefits one political party. This is so contradictory of the intent of a representative republic, of democratic principle, where the voice of the people is supposed to make the decisions. The voice of ALL the people not just the ones who can get to the polls, who can get a photo ID, who can avail themselves of the factual information they will need to cast an informed vote. ALL the people seems to be a real bone of contention in certain quarters, however. That needs to change.

The game of voter suppression, which is not really a gam, of course, strives to negate the existence of millions of people. If you can’t vote, you don’t really exist in the system. The census is only once every decade, and even those results are up for debate. It’s truly pitiful that some partisan viewpoints dictate that if you don’t cheat, you can’t win. How about you come up with a compelling agenda, one that people can see will help them. Simply being the opposition party is not helpful.

At this point, all of the political and legal wrangling just makes a person tired. It’s emotional, and it’s exhausting because just when you think you have gotten all the facts, a new batch emerges, some of which are entirely contradictory to the first batch. My nerves are jangling, and nobody should tell me to calm down. Maybe I should calm UP, because going any further down in anything isn’t where my instincts resonate. Today, it’s sunny, and close to 70 degrees, so I think I’ll go out and soak up some Vitamin D and try not to give into my craving for another pizza. Gotta stop making the pizza companies more wealthy, and my gut more enormous. The dog will approve.

Today was an odd day. It’s supposed Spring…and it’s Good Friday (if the Catholic calendar has any idea about the crucifixion). It’s Spring, I say…and it was 29 degrees this morning. I understand that happens in places like Wisconsin and Maine and Colorado, but it’s not too high up on the list for us’n folks down below the Mason Dixon line. It was even more disconcerting to hear so many birds singing their little hearts out, in the robust and chilly wind. It sounded like the rain forest, but it was North Carolina and it was 29 degrees. Type mismatch.

Anyway, I listened to a part of the Derek Chauvin trial early this morning, while I was still on my first cup of coffee, and there was a homicide detective on the witness stand. As usual, the defense was trying to make it seem as though he wasn’t qualified to speak about whether or not a knee should have been applied to George Floyd’s neck for nearly ten minutes, but I guess they figure like that’s their job. I think it backfired, because the guy was pretty unflappable and politely explained that certain things are kind of, well, common sense and basic procedures don’t change all that much year to year. They were trying to make it seem like since he had been on the job for a long time, he didn’t know what he was talking about when he reinforced what EVERYbody has said, which is that if an officer has applied a choke hold, they should disengage it once the suspect has ceased to struggle and resist the arrest. Derek Chauvin continued the pressure of his knee until after the suspect had not only ceased to resist arrest, but had ceased…to be. He was dead, and there was still a knee on his neck. I hope that’s not supposed to make sense, because it doesn’t.

Anyway, the detective who testified has the same last name as me, and I always get really big charge out of seeing that sort of thing. None of my cousins are likely to be subjects of national news, at least not for something like this, and this detective had about as much in common with me as Ivanka Trump. The last Zimmerman who found himself in the news was George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin, and he had zilch in common with me as well. When he was on trial, I found it necessary to begin a lot of my conversations with the words, “No relation.” before the question was asked. I probably do have people in my lineage who are as nutty as George Zimmerman, but I ain’t claimin’ him.

So, while this is going on, and more of the unseen horror of George Floyd’s death on that Minneapolis street comes into painful view, we go from the horrific to the absurd. A sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives is accused of carrying on a sexual relationship with a 17-year old girl, and not only securing her transport across state lines, ostensibly for purposes of having sex with her, but paying for said transport. Dude. Even gang members understand that’s called trafficking. Apparently nobody really likes him in Congress (I found him a bit nauseating, myself) and reports have begun to surface that he would show nude pictures of himself having sex, while on the House floor. What a dildo. Last time I encountered a man locked into overdrive to demonstrate his libido and attractiveness, that guy was seriously conflicted about being gay. I wonder the same thing about this fool. He is always overly self-righteous about anything and everything, and if my suspicions are correct about his sexual orientation, he has some serious man-love for the former President. He has done everything but bend over and kiss his own behind whenever that guy bellowed, always over eager to show his undying loyalty. Bless his heart.

So, the last part of the odd-day triumvirate was…more calamity for the U.S. Capitol Police. Somebody in a blue car crashed into one of the barricades outside the Capitol, and two Capitol Police officers began to approach. The driver got out with a knife, and rushed the officers, who fired in self-defense. He was able to stab one of them, who died a short time later. The driver was hit, and died as well. Nobody has a hint of a clue what this was about. Nobody knows who this guy is, what he came there to do, why he was there at all. But two people are dead. At the Capitol, again. This mess is getting old.

Back in my corner of the house of mirrors, a.k.a. the crazy house, I managed to get one of my tasks into the “completed” list, and it wasn’t for some minimal effort. I went back to the IRS website again, trying to make some kind of sense out of what it was telling me to do with my 2020 taxes. I still find it hilariously funny that I should need to file income tax return when I have no income, but now it’s even funnier because the e-file program calculated a refund for me. What the…? The only reason I was even vaguely interested in filing is because I was told I had no choice if I wanted to continue getting a health insurance subsidy under the Affordable Care Act provisions. So, OK – I’ll comply. By the time I was finished, I had contradicted myself at least twice, because the program they provided for me to electronically file did not follow the instructions they sent me in the mail earlier, about supplemental forms I had to file along with the tax return. But, at this point in my life, I just nodded and smiled at the computer screen and hit enter. *poof* Away it went, into the void. I was just happy there is some record somewhere in the reality that I share with the IRS that says I filed a return. Like they wanted me to do. I am not going to spend a dime of that refund when it comes, because I have a feeling it’s totally a mistake. But I did what I was told. I followed orders. And if that doesn’t scare the crap out of everyone, there’s some giant hornets in a lab somewhere just waiting to come and visit.

I ordered a new vacuum cleaner the other day. They said it wouldn’t be here until next week, but it showed up today. Goody. A new toy. There’s a part in there that doesn’t seem to be in the assembly diagram, so I have no idea what to do with it. I managed to get the handle on there and screwed the “hose collar” on the back of the machine, and screwed it together. That extra part is annoying me, though. I have bad luck with these kinds of things, because the assembly instructions seem to be counterintuitive – and I never read the instructions until after I’ve got the whole thing put together (usually all wrong). I once bought a lightweight vacuum cleaner with extension wands, and for some reason I thought the wands fit into the body of the case for storage. Then I screwed the case together. Unfortunately, I discovered later, that could not be reversed and I couldn’t retrieve the wands, so until I got rid of that machine, there were brand new extension wands locked up tight inside the housing, never to be seen again. *sigh* I amuse even myself sometimes.

Today I was hungry. Legitimately hungry. Well, OK, I was a lot bored as well, but I had a real pang of hunger around noon, so I ordered delivery Thai food. When the carnage was over, I fell asleep at the keyboard, apparently on a carb high. I am very partial to Thai noodle dishes, and that’s what I had – shrimp Pad Woonsen, with crab rangoon for an appetizer. As though I needed an appetizer for lunch, but if somebody else is going to schlep over an overpriced meal, what the hell. It was very tasty. I at it all. Including the garnish. And the egg rolls and soup. Carnage, but I am unapologetic. I did adult this for the past two days, so I felt entitled. Hopefully, I will sleep well tonight, having gotten the taxes off my mind and having eaten like a short-legged pot-bellied quarter horse today.

Today I didn’t complete much of the cleaning tasks, but I did not one but two Zoom calls for my social justice group this morning. I feel like we got some decent things done, and seeing as it’s Good Friday, I figure I can take a little time off from my appointed rounds. I really want to finish, though, because even though I’ve been a shameless slob all of my life, I am the first to admit that after a while, the clutter begins to unsettle me. When I can’t find stuff that I can see in my mind’s eye but can’t get it into my paws, that makes me a little … annoyed. Irate. Not functional. That’s when it’s no longer fun, if ever it was in the firs place.

I am starting to wonder if I’m spending too much time working on myself lately. Or at least too much time focusing on myself, paying attention to myself, being concerned with myself. Or maybe I’m just not getting enough sleep. I keep waking up every few hours to go to the bathroom, which is fine since the alternative is not a good one. I am not taking anything to help with sleep, which could make the bladder enthusiasm disastrous, but I don’t feel like I’m sleeping all that deeply. I have had dreams that I remembered, which usually means I’ve gone into alpha sleep, but I don’t really know. When I sleep for a full eight hours uninterrupted, and I’ve gone down into deep sleep, I don’t feel all that much better when I wake, but I wonder if I have truly rested. If I’ve truly been able to shut down, turn off the lights in my head, all that. Sometimes when I wake up, I feel as th though I’ve run a marathon or something. I wake up with my feet and arms cramped, where I’ve been contorted in some unnatural position and held it for the whole time I’ve been asleep. Sometimes it’s painful, not because the muscles are spasming, but just because my limbs have been in a weird configuration. I don’t know what in the world that’s all about.

Life is so simple, but yet so complicated. I forgot to say that the new vacuum cleaner powered up just fine, and I did a sample swatch of carpet and it seemed to work just fine. But. It’s a bagged model (you need a bag when you have a poop machine like my dog – trust me on this). I ordered extra bags, since I’ve been through experiences with new machines that didn’t come with bags in the past. Those were delivered as well. Good job, good preparation. But. I can’t get the stupid machine open to put in a new bag. It says to just pull on the “bag door”, and then replace the bag. I have been pulling on the bag door since I took the machine out of the box. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be pulling it out or sliding it up. Either way, it isn’t opening. It just goes to show ya…it’s ALWAYS somethin’.

I think I will pull out the guitar and plink a few notes. Have not played in over a week, and I’m not even sure why that is. It could be the whole tax drama, it could be the weather, it could be the shape of things to come, or things that passed. Some days time seems to go faster than others, other days it seems to crawl. My strange mind says maybe that’s not imagination, maybe there’s some glitch in the space-time fabric, like something changes relative position and bends the arc of reality just a tiny bit. Who’s to say that’s not true? Who’s to say it is? The point is that none of us really know one damned thing about where we are and how reality actually works. We’re all in the same jam – where are we going and why am I in this handbasket. I have that bumper sticker, actually, and it’s always sort of resonated with me. Where the eff ARE we going, and why are we all in this container, this crucible of time and space and destiny? I am believing these days that we’re all headed somewhere that’s not so much fixed as it is impacted by whatever we do right here and right now. A while back, I believed Karma a real fixed orientation, based on what you’d done in some other place and time. Along the way, though, other folks’ perspective on Karma and predestination has begun to resonate with me. I was introduced to some other perspective that said Karma is not a fixed point that is set in the past, but an ever varying axis that is controlled by my actions in the present. In some ways that view tracks with the Law of Attraction – you attract what you put out there. You call to you what matches you, what is like you. If I rob people, I will call to me the energy of a robber, one way or another. Sometimes I suppose that will look like simply being always in the company of robbers, other times it will look like being unable to break away from the identity of being a robber, and other times it may look like being the victim of robbery. But it will be about robbery. Until I begin to change the energy I send out. That’s very simple and very complicated, but fortunately I don’t have to comprehend it, just accept it as reality. And reality, some days, is just a bitch. And that…is reality. Nobody asked me if I liked it.

So, today I tried to make a list of the stuff I need to do. Last night I realized, in somewhat of a panic, that I will lose my health insurance subsidy in about a month if I don’t figure out how to file taxes for 2020. I am somewhat stymied by that, because…I have no income. I am living from savings…still…and I don’t understand how to file INCOME tax. I suppose they consider the Affordable Care subsidy income? I don’t effing know. My panic was exacerbated by not being able to find some my old W2 forms that I should have been filing since I was laid off…but after finding them once, in this crack-house apartment, I lost them again. Hence, the panic.

It wasn’t just the approaching deadline for resolving the issue of the tax quandary, it was the self-flagellation for being so disorganized as to have lost the W2 forms for the second time. When I woke up this morning, I was somewhat proud of myself because I got up almost immediately to look for the forms, and thought I had found them. I was gratified that I had found some of what I needed, but literally bludgeoning myself for being in the position of having lost important documentation not once, but twice, within the confines of my disorganized living space. Moron was the kindest word I can repeat here.

It turns out that I need further IRS documentation, and it occurred to me that even if I had every single thing the Healthcare.gov site says that I need, I still don’t have any clue how to file the 1040 form, or the auxiliary form they are demanding. So, I had a thought. Usually that’s a scary thing, but I finally realized that I’m not going to mysteriously intuit what to do about completing the forms, so I my thought instructed me to call H&R Block and pay THEM to figure this out. It kind of irks me that i will need to pay for this, but at this point, it’s worth it a twice the price. So I made an appointment for later this afternoon. Enough with the anxiety provocation, already.

It is a good thing to have done something concrete to get myself out of this jam. It is the adult thing to do. I don’t like this adulting thing. I just don’t feel that life should be this effing troublesome. But it is. The bigger issue, though, is taking an honest look at how I’m living. I’m living like a drunk, with so much crap swirling around in my orbit that I might as well be a tornado, like they talk about in the Big Book. I don’t like that one bit. I know better. Much better. It’s not even a question of wanting to be the perfect recovering person, it’s a question of having generated all of this anxiety myself. All on my own. Nobody did that for me. I am talented like that.

So, I did flagellate myself quite a bit for having let this get so out of hand, and yeah, I understand that I caught it before it went any further and that’s a good thing and all that, but I am way to effing old to be still doing crap like this. I had some choice words for myself. Words that don’t exist in any reference book, or even the urban dictionary. Words that underscored how ridiculous I really believe myself to be most of the time. I did, however, push the adulting a bit farther than making the H&R Block appointment, and called my former (and hated) employer to get MORE copies of all the W2 forms that I will need to clean up all the taxes, all the healthcare issues, everything. Dammit. I had to send them an email, and it’s supposed to take a few working days, but whatever. I am just ready to have peace back in my space.

It mystifies me how I get into these predicaments. Truly, it does. I am not stupid, and I really don’t believe myself to be inherently lazy. But, it seems the older I get, the less I am inclined to figure out stuff that I can’t see my way through. There’s some emergence of shame, for some reason, and that does trouble me. It troubles me quite a lot, actually, and I’m not quite sure how to handle that. That shame triggers a depression cycle, and I really don’t need that. I think such a cycle is what I’ve been buried in for the past year or two, and once in it, I’m virtually paralyzed.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and we share a few similarities about the cycles we repeat in our lives. She has been diagnosed with adult ADD, and asked me if I have been diagnosed with that as well. I have not, but was screened for it by one of my medical providers a few years ago. There wasn’t any conclusive diagnosis, and we haven’t dealt with it since then, but I wonder if that could be some part of my repetitive patterns. My friend was describing the tendency she has of getting overwhelmed with things, which causes her to want to withdraw and procrastinate on tasks. She also described the feeling of wanting to blame herself for the pattern, and how badly she feels about herself when that happens. I could relate fo’ sho’. I have gotten better at the self-blame, but last night and this morning I made up for lost time.

All of that to say, I know that I am harder on myself than anyone else could ever be. I do wonder if some of my inability to focus over the past few years is the result of erosion of my ability to compensate for something like ADD, or maybe just depression. I have not been quite all the way in here, in my body and in my psyche, since my mother died. No, wait – that’s not even correct. I haven’t been myself since my mother fell of the face of the Earth and lost contact with reality, and that was about 2015. When her body ceased to function in 2017, that was a second death. I had lost my mother at least two years before that, when I had to take over managing her affairs (even though she didn’t know that). I felt as though I was living for two people, and essentially, I was.

When I started paying her bills and making sure she had power and water and bills paid, that was logistically difficult, but the psychological distance was still there. When she had to go to a nursing home, a part of me just kind of withered. It was fine for a while, but then she began to decline very badly, mentally and physically. By the time all was said and done, I had been twirling in the breeze for almost three years, and my mommy was not there to reel me in. But I tried to cope, tried to put on my game face, and then…six weeks after the funeral, I got laid off. My performance had been slipping since almost exactly 2015, and I just couldn’t keep things pieced together any longer. I could no longer compensate for the inhumane treatment, the effed up management, the sabotage of co-workers. By 2016, I didn’t have anything left, although the corpse of that work situation didn’t give up the ghost until 2017. I really hate that corporation, how they do (and don’t do) business, how they treat people, how they treated me. It is merciful that I no longer work there. It’s a pain in the ass, though, because when you work for a corporation and have benefits, you don’t have to go through all this crap that I’m going through now with health insurance. But, I am grateful that I can put it together at all. Some people who lose a job with benefits have no resources and wind up with no health insurance at all. So, gratitude applies, but it’s still a pain in the ass.

So, me compensating for things I find less than acceptable is a pattern of mine, and now I see how that ends. I don’t think I can do that ever again. I was looking online for jobs yesterday, before the panic about the tax forms, and saw a posting that I wanted to read in more detail. OK, that looks good, yeah I can do that, and that, but…deadlines? Fast-paced? Nope. A nervous twitch started in my upper lip, and there was an involuntary lurch in my stomach. Not going there. I don’t mind having a time frame, but this “urgency” bullshit is not going to work for me. I would rather go and live under the bridge, out of the back of my truck. I don’t want to hear about metrics and performance objectives. I just can’t. It’s like PTSD, and I am not exaggerating. I’m way too fragile to be dealing with that, so I’m not going to do it.

When I contemplate this stage of my life, it’s such a temptation to fall into the hole of self-defined failure, disappointment to so many. I definitely feel as though I am not exactly where I want to be. It could be so much worse, and I understand that. This morning I was having such a hard time settling myself. I was a live wire, jumpy and twitchy, feeling as though naked wires randomly connected, with no warning. Sitting down to do this journaling has calmed me somewhat, and that’s a good thing. I definitely feel the need, and the motivation, to be doing more of the de-cluttering and cleaning, though. It’s time. I don’t understand why things have to get to this point of extreme pain in order for me to take action, but it seems that it’s always been this way.

I don’t always understand what goes on in my brain, in my psyche. I don’t get why it takes so much for me to stop doing harm to myself. I don’t cut myself, but I overeat to the point of self-harm, so that seems to be the same end with slightly different means. I feel as though I bleed, though. As though I have to do some of this harm in order to convince myself that I’m actually alive? I’m not sure if it’s to convince myself that I’m alive – I know I’m alive, because I feel pain, I feel dissatisfaction, I feel unfulfillment. But, I don’t feel a broad range of emotions…frequently just a flat line, then some unexpected extremes one way or another. Like an EKG. Very erratic.

Back to the earlier mention of shame…I think shame may well be my base of operation. Everything seems to radiate from that core of feeling that I have no real purpose in being here, that my purpose comes from other folks’ acceptance and affirmation of me. Does everyone go through that? From what I hear, they do not. I am perplexed to find that I don’t know where that came from, but seems to be so much a definition of me that I suppose I don’t know if I would persist if that feeling was erased. I cannot, in good conscience, blame this on upbringing. Somehow, I think it’s just how I am wired, how I’m put together, how I came here. Is it brain chemistry? Who knows, but it’s what I’ve got, so without it I wouldn’t be…me.

My tendency to believe myself to be a failure seems to be perpetual. I don’t remember it so much when I was a kid, up to the part of puberty at least. When I was the little princess, I thought I could do anything. It didn’t occur to me there was anything I couldn’t do. I didn’t think I could do everything, but it just didn’t occur to me there was anything I could NOT do. That changed after my whole world fell apart around 1971…and the pendulum didn’t swing back. It’s not that I didn’t accomplish things, but it always seemed like the same pattern as the lost tax forms – I have something to do, I don’t do it, it proves to be way more difficult that I thought and I do it half-assed at the last minute, having to run to catch up, and with great anxiety and angst, finally get it done at the last minute by the skin of my teeth. What the eff is THAT all about?

I also have no patience for practicing things, or working my way up to finishing tasks. I am accustomed to sitting down and making a first attempt, maybe tweaking a few details, correcting a couple of minor errors, then hitting then *poof* done. I got through college like that. It worked just fine for English and Philosophy classes, but not so much for Computer Science. My lust for learning extends only to the point of being bored…when the stimulation dies, and boredom sets in, I lose interest pretty quickly. But the deadlines remain, and my fear of punishment demands that I finish whatever it is, but it’s a minimalist endeavor at that point. Why why why why why? I don’t know. I wish I knew. I feel things might work better for me if I could be more disciplined, or something. I feel that I have the soul and the brain of one of the great charmed circle of writers, or artists, but…not so much the brilliant talent. But that’s how my mind works, like the descriptions of Gertude Stein and Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Sylvia Plath. Those romantic and tortured souls who marched to the beat of something other than a drum, something only they could hear. Driven to some point in the distance that remained unseen by anyone else.

I feel like there’s some point in the distance that beckons me, or at least to which I am oriented, pointed toward. Not sure if I can so much see it, but I know it’s there. I don’t know how I know it, but it’s such a strong feeling that I know it has to be true. Perhaps it’s not on this plane of existence, I don’t know. I sometimes wish that I could describe it, name it, explain it, but I can’t. Maybe that’s best, because my small perspective would probably not do it justice, would limit it. Sometimes I feel that I’m constantly fight that sense of being self-limiting. It’s very frustrating to feel an indescribably potent longing to expand, but somehow feeling trapped. It’s very much like the feeling in a dream when you want to scream, but nothing comes out. Going through life feeling that way is disconcerting, at best. Some days it makes me want to give up, but I don’t.

I can visualize so many wonderful things that I could do, but when I’m at the starting line, I freeze. Or maybe not so much freeze as just dissipate, like air being allowed to escape from a balloon. It could have flown so high, but instead, it deflates slowly and falls ungracefully to the ground. Gravity is not a theory. This I know to be true.

I don’t know where any of this diatribe came from, or where it’s going, but it has calmed me a bit to be doing whatever the hell this is, this regurgitation on a computer screen. The blank white paper of the new millennium, I guess. It feels good to write, to get the turmoil in my head out into the ether. Perhaps one day some of this will congeal into something that makes more sense, but for now it is what it is. I am not what I was when I started this, but that’s how it goes.

My writing prompt asks me to discuss how I think others see me? Truth be told, I have no clue what I look like to anyone else. To be clear, I don’t mean physical attributes; I normally stay fairly well hidden in the rafters or backstage, like Phantom of the Opera. Fortunately, I am not a passionate homicidal maniac. Passionate, but not homicidal.

So, like many others, I am my own most brutal critic. I engage in excoriating critique on every interaction, every submission, all entry points into social engagement. It can be infuriating, but my tendency is to second guess just about everything I do, so it’s just…how I roll. But, I would conjecture the unending self-criticism erodes my self-confidence. It certainly erodes my motivation for continuing to participate in new engagements, try new audiences, perform even when I am confident of my skill. Tiring, to say the least.

I am sure I’m not the only one who goes through such machinations. There’s a part of me that worries about whether it’s essentially an ego-driven tendency to simply expend a lot of time on … myself. I must admit, some of that resonates, but it could go a little deeper. I’m aware that a good deal of the obssession with self critique has to do with ensuring that I’ve not offended or conflicted. This is an Achilles heel, because it mitigates the ability to remain a healthy degree of vulnerability and risk-taking posture. It’s not recommended that one never jump from a fully functioning airplane, just that if you do, take a parachute. Therein lies my dilemma – where’s my parachute? Anybody?

Perhaps the parachute is simply one’s self-confidence, that if you fall, you’ll have the ability to get up and proceed to another experience. Some of us, apparently, don’t have that inherent faith in themselves.

Faith. Faith in oneself may imply there’s something other than oneself in the equation. When I’m in a jam, and don’t immediately see an escape route, I’m in the foxhole and bellowing foxhole prayers quicker than a preacher on revival Sunday. Regardless of my spiritual identification at the given moment of crisis, my first thought is to “pray” (beg, entreaty, plead) for help. Help from who? Someone, or something, other than myself, always. Because I was raised Christian, or maybe because I am who I am, it’s always some higher entity that I am reaching for, possibly supernatural, but definitely more than my mortal coil. It seems relatively immutable for me, and I would suppose that’s not a bad thing.

Humans are social creatures, on some level, and so we crave community. That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions, because there are some of us who are flat out anti-social, although to be anti- something you have to accept and acknowledge that which you oppose, but that’s another story. Regardless, we somehow find ourselves all part of some intangible network of energy, of resources, or solutions. We share, no matter how selfish we find ourselves, certain essential resources like air, water, language, base bodily needs. We can’t help it. We can’t really survive alone, no matter how hard we try or how hard we reject that notion.

So, when I am down in the foxhole, and the bullets are flying overhead, and my life is flashing before my eyes, I’m wanting out. I’m also probably ackowledging that I can’t see a way out with only my own resources or abilities, so…going to The Matrix: Tank, I need a door! Quickly!

Is that faith? I don’t know. I was always taught that faith is leaping without seeing a net, and one will appear. Believing in what is not apparent. However it’s described, faith is a nonverbal crossroads that brings you from despair to hope in a flash, from presuming the worst is inevitable to seeing yourself whole, safe. I don’t know quite how that works, but faith is not linear nor is it rational.

I have generally misunderstood faith most of my life. Again, because I was raised in an organized religion, faith was usually associated with faith in God. Faith in the precepts of the religious denomination, in something external to me. My concept of faith has evolved over the years, but still implies something external to myself. These days it’s not the multi-faceted and supernatural deity of “God” (and definitely not some older white man with blue eyes and Irish white hair). It’s more a concept of all that is, the Universe, the Great Mystery, that which I cannot comprehend nor quantify, but which exists all around me.

That’s about the best I can do these days, and I suppose it will have to do for today. Tomorrow, it might be different, but for this moment, that’s where I am. So, when I attempt to consider how I look to other people, I find myself working very hard on divorcing that from aesthetics. I don’t want it to be about aesthetics. I have no confidence in my aestetics, but I know that matters to many humans. Fine, people want pretty things, and I can live with that (mostly), but people make judgements and valuate things based on their attractiveness. That I have big problems with; just because someone is considered not a pretty thing does not mean they are less valuable. But, collectively, we are that shallow.

I think some people like me, and feel that I have value, that I have something meaningful to contribute to whatever it is they see as valuable. Some people find me amusing, some find me annoying, some find me entertaining in small doses. Whatever. I suppose I am becoming far less interested in what people think of me on some esoteric subjective level as what they assess as the value of my contribution to…whatever the hell we might be doing together. I suppose that means that i have some faith in my contribution, not so much in myself, but in my ability to emote some kind of energy that makes a difference. Maybe that makes no sense, but…it’s a somewhat nonsensical concept.

Moving energy that makes a difference. What does that even mean? I suppose it makes as much sense as “In the beginning there was the Word.” I translate that as meaning there was sound energy that changed something. Changed something that sent random atoms in motion and produced…Light. I have no idea if that’s what really happened, but I am kind of well beyond the whole Garden of Eden myth, and have more confidence in atoms and molecules banging together in this enormous crucible of organic potential to produce…this. After billions of years, we get…this. Life as we know it. In more billions of years, who knows what there will be. But, I have faith there will be SOMETHING.

So, I guess I’m more interested these days in how the Universe sees me, how I fit into the space-time fabric and all that happy stuff. If I am to believe that I matter, then I am to believe that I am not accidental, and that what I do matters. Some days that is more difficult than others, particularly when I haven’t taken my meds, but ultimately…I do believe that what I do matters. For better or worse. I believe things happen for a reason, meaning there is cause and effect. Everything I do somehow changes the dynamic and the inter-relationship of everything I touch. I have no idea how that works, but I think it makes the most sense (at least to me).

I was looking for a job online earlier, and my eyeballs are popping out of my head from staring at the screen. There is actually a job title of “thought leader”. Someone called me that a while ago, but I really think it was a backhanded insult because she couldn’t bring herself to call me a leader and someone worthy of being in decision-making capacity. In all truthfulness, I don’t want to lead anybody anywhere. I want to know where I’m going, with some degree of confidence, and if people want to come along, that’s great. We walk together. There is way too much pressure in leading; people are constantly looking for someone to blame when they take a wrong step.

My brain works in strange and mysterious ways, and the world is frightening and confusing to me. I say that in all seriousness. There are, however, some places where I feel more at home than others, and in this arena of words and ideas and contemplation, I feel as though I belong. Crowds of people, not so much. Organizations and communities, even less. I need people, though if for nothing else but to fix my truck and make me a pizza. Sometimes they are rather amusing, and sometimes they say things or do things that provide more fodder for the cannon that is my writer’s brain. I have faith that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Whenever I take a long road trip, driving for several hours and such, I necessarily have to make pit stops…for gas, bathroom, snacks, beverages. I used to bring my most favorite dog Ariel with me. She was born to ride, and we had really good trips together. I miss that old girl so much. She knew what I was thinking and where I was headed before I did. She was gentle and amicable, with other dogs and people, loyal to the maximum allowable by the Universe. Just a kind bundle of bones and fur, and smart. I could send her down three flights of stairs, she would do her business in the most available yet appropriate spot, and then turn right around and head back up the stairs. Ace companion. She was mine, and I was hers, no questions asked.

The pooch before the current lunatic was better than I realized at the time. She knew how to do what she needed to do and get business taken care of, then … back to me. She’s the only one I’ve ever had to actually put down, and that just about killed me. I can still remember, and feel, every breath of that last day, mine and hers. I hope I did right by her, and by Ariel. I always feel that I should have done so much better, but…hopefully I did better than I think I did.

At the moment, I am trying really hard to keep my promise to keep cleaning up some random area of my apartment. I’m still working on this one area in my bedroom, and for the love of all that is holy, I don’t know when last I had a foot fall on those few square feet of space. I keep finding stuff that I haven’t seen in literally years, my USB speaker that I love because it’s orange. I totally forgot I even had that. Also found the USB CD player and the external hard drive for backups. I also found the damned cable box remote, which I have not seen in more than eighteen months. Sometimes I amaze even myself.

To underscore the cleaning effort, I ordered a new vacuum cleaner and it will be delivered by the 5th. My plan is to keep cleaning up small areas until it arrives, then I can vacuum up the detritus and have at least a small area that looks habitable for human occupancy. I have literally a ton of trash to throw out, more huge bags full of … crap. Old magazines, envelopes, old bills. People are going to think I have bodies in these bags, because some of them are pretty weighty. Oh, well. It will give them something to talk about, assuming anyone is paying any attention to me whatsoever.

I suppose today was somewhat of a big girl day…cleaning up. Paid the property tax on my mother’s house, which is of course now my house. It was, of course, overdue but…I paid it. It was about $2500, and I really wanted to convince myself that i couldn’t afford to pay it now, but I grabbed myself by the collar and forced my hand to hit the enter key on the online payment in full. That’s actually a load off my mind. I need to sell that place, because I need the money, and I’m not going to go back there and live. I might go back to the city at some point, but I will not live in that house. It’s time has come and gone, and I can’t go back there and recreate the past.

Listening to Bob Marley on the re-discovered speaker…Redemption Songs…how long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look? I wonder how long that might be. The older I get, and the more I see of how this world is unfolding, the more I think prophets are amongst us all the time, and we don’t recognize them. We expect something grander, exquisitely articulate, impeccable in their oratory…but perhaps they are the least likely figures of all. Maybe George Floyd was a prophet. Did he not bring us to a flaming point of clarity, focus decades old aspirations into a burning X on the ground for us to gather round? Who is to say that was not his purpose here?

I stupidly watched more of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-police officer in Minneapolis who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nearly ten minutes, leading to his death in May of 2020. The video played for the jury is now reported to show an even longer torturous span of more than nine minutes, not the eight minutes and forty-six seconds most had come to accept, that George Floyd lay handcuffed and prone, in the street, his cheek pressed against rough asphalt and the knee of a grown man cutting of his airway. Nearly ten agonizing minutes. One of the eye-witnesses who gave testimony today said that he could see Floyd’s struggle to breathe, struggle to spit out the most gutteral wrenching sounds, and finally to begin spitting up blood.

The defense has attempted to make the case that police officers, all of them, on the scene were “distracted” by the crowd and had begun to feel “threatened”. Um, no. Derek Chauvin looked for all the world like he was riding the bull at some beer dive, hands in pockets, a smirk on his face, looking vaguely satisfied a s he squeezed the life out of another human being. Even when the ambulance arrived, he would not release his hold on the victim’s neck, and the witness said the ambulance attendants had to shove him out of the way in order to render medical aid to the victim. What. The. Fuck???

Regardless, this is only the second day of the trial. It’s a rare occasion to see a law enforcement agent brought to this point, because usually they are not indicted by a grand jury for questionable deaths in their custody. This is a big deal. But, as I have said before, this could go either way; evidence is almost secondary in arriving at a verdict. There are technicalities…did the officer’s actions summarily cause the victim to die, or did other circumstances (pre-existing conditions, drug intoxication) cause the immediate death? Welcome to U.S. jurisprudence, which is neither prudent nor just at times. But, here we go…and all we can do is wait for the machinery to wind down.

One of the memorable witnesses this morning was the young woman who actually filmed the clip that most people have seen on the news, the actual moments that George Floyd took his last breaths, crying for his mother, gasping, then going limp. She was seventeen at the time, and just recently turned eighteen. She and her younger cousin had been out to get snacks at the store that George Floyd was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill. They saw everything, and she filmed it. The prosecutor asker her what impact the whole thing had on her, and she said that when she sees George Floyd she sees her own father, her brothers, her uncles, her friends who are also Black men, and thinks in horror the situation could have been the end of life for any one of them. She then said, tearfully, that sometimes at night she remembers all of it, and apologizes to George Floyd, for not doing more, for not saving his life. But, she said, it wasn’t her job to save his life. It was Derek Chauvin’s. *sigh* So many lives changed in those ten minutes, on that one day, outside that one store, in that one city. So many lives impacted. Things will never be the same.

So. I am still wondering what more can be done, what is the work before us. How can we make something of everything that has happened in at least the last twelve months? I sometimes wonder if it was not divine providence that visited the COVID-19 lockdown on all of us at just the right moment. We had George Floyd, which had come very close to the murders of Breonna Taylor and Amaud Arbery and Jacob Blake. Without COVID forcing most of us off the streets and into semi-quarantine, we might have just blown ourselves up. That can still happen if the verdict strikes the wrong nerve.

Bob Marley is saying that I need to emancipate myself from mental slavery…none but ourselves can free our mind. I want to free my mind. I don’t know what chains it sometimes, but I do not always feel that it is free. Obligations, expectations, knots in the threads that hold me together, I think, not allowing the free passage of joy, of purpose. Blockage. Obstacles, pathways blocked. The mind is said to be able to re-generate itself, at least up to a point, such that if a neural pathway is blocked the brain can re-route the electrical impulses to circumvent the blocked point. Unless…unless there is simply too much damage where the nerve is rooted. Perhaps this is where faith will make a difference, because who is to say that a new root cannot be generated. I saw a picture of yesterday of a tree that had died, but somehow, another tree had come to life and grown within its carcass, the new growth surrounded by the old but … thriving. An amazing sight, If asked, anybody with knowledge of trees and flora would have said that such a thing was simply impossible. But, obviously it was not impossible. The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know, and sometimes life just surprises the hell out of us. I guess we should let it.

I’m not considered a particularly cheerful person, although I love to laugh and love to be the joker. OK, not the Batman kind of joker, but a person who enjoys being humorous and likes jokes. That kind of joker, sometimes not serious even when I need to be. It’s take me a long time to learn how to laugh at myself, and I’m not giving that up easily. It’s a really dark place when you can’t laugh, and I don’t like those dark places any longer.

But. Sometimes I get kind of fixated on things a lot of people would rather not be. I generally don’t last long with people who want to dictate conversation matter to be “only cheerful stuff”. That ain’t my world, y’all. I can be silly and find humor and irony in a lot of things other people don’t see, but sometimes I need to go deep. And sometimes the deeper you go, the darker it gets. That’s how it goes. If I don’t go there, I feel superficial and more or less transparent (and not in a good way). So, I have to honor that, and people who can’t go there should just stay on the surface. That’s fine, it’s just not for me.

So, I say all of that to say…I watched a bit of the Derek Chauvin trial earlier today. Before the trial started, Rev. Al Sharpton and a group of activists held a press conference to mark the start of the proceedings. They talked for a bit, then Sharpton led them to take a knee for the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck last May, leading to Floyd’s death. They called out every minute that passed, and even though it was a bit of drama, I found myself unexpectedly uncomfortable waiting out the entire time span. There was plenty of extraneous conversation, camera shutters clicking and whirring, people shifting position, adding commentary. But still. Trying not to imagine that scene in Minneapolis that day, trying not to imagine a man’s life slipping away in broad daylight, on a city street, with numerous people standing by. Hard to imagine, but I don’t have to imagine it because it happened. It is reality.

The trial has begun, and all eyes are on it. The prosecution had already called the first witness to the stand, a young woman who is an emergency dispatcher for the City of Minneapolis. Question after question, examining the transcript of the call, having her explain the acronyms and abbreviations, the jargon, how she felt, what she did, the process. On and on and on. Details, details, details…building the case. I didn’t make it very far…only about thirty minutes, but that was enough to get some anxiety building. For however many days, or weeks, this trial extends, there is going to be emotion and stress and legal machination and…reliving this horrific death. Fortunately, I did not have to see the now infamous video of that day George Floyd died, but the jury and the witness have reviewed it several times already. I saw it quite enough, though, when it was top of the news every hour on the hour and every day for weeks after it happened.

And today, it recalled the dread I felt when the video was emblazoned on my mind’s eye. Dread that someone could die in such a cold and dispassionate fashion, on a city street, with dozens of people in attendance, while cars passed by totally oblivious to what was taking place. This is the stuff that horror movies are made of, someone dying at the hands of another within earshot of witnesses, and there is no succor, no rescue, no mercy. There was no mercy.

I have no idea what the jury’s verdict will be in this case. I have no idea what it should be; I was not there, I did not witness this. But I am dreading the outcome of this whole procedure, because I fear the public response. The insurrection of January 6th was bad enough, but if there is an innocent verdict for the officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, I am truly afraid of the public reaction. It may cause the Rodney King riots to look like a May Day picnic. If the verdict goes the other way, I fear that reaction as well. Will there be more mass frenzy directed at the court and the legal teams, will there be more hatred directed at the Floyd family? Will there be anti-Black crime in retaliation for a guilty verdict?

In short, I do not trust my fellow citizens at this point. I can’t even trust them to wear a mask when in public, or to not gather in large groups, or to follow guidelines designed to keep us all safe. I can’t trust them to not take advantage of people who don’t have the societal privilege they do, the privilege that affords them greater access to resources than other people. The privilege that enables them to not give a damn. I can’t trust them. In many ways, I’ve never been able to trust them, but the stakes are higher now.

I am tired of having to explain that to people who don’t share any part of my cultural experience. I am tired of talking about it, having book discussions about it, listening to podcasts about it. I need to be doing something concrete, something that lets me scream my rage at the systems that created circumstances that caused George Floyd’s horrific death. And Trayvon Martin’s. And Mike Brown, and Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland, and Tamir Rice, and all the rest of them. And that’s just 21st century mess…we have not even begun to grieve the unnamed victims of lynching and hate crimes of centuries before these.

There is a river of blood flowing under our feet, and the groundwater is red. Anything that comes from that source, or the soil it feeds, will be born of blood. There is no prayer or rite or good wishes that will cleanse us, no financial recompense that can ever be equivalent to meeting the eyes of those directly touched by these wrongs, Not muttered statements of apology, not hurried and rushed thoughts and prayers in prepared and strategically appropriate statements. We need to know that our country has collectively accepted that wrong has been done, and that it sees how those wrongs have impacted all of us, and how it’s going to make that right. And then…and then…we need to see the change beginning. We had begun seeing a shift in status quo in the 70s – Model Cities programs, election of more diverse legislators across the nation, affirmative actin to afford more educational opportunities for diverse students, and to diversify employment. More women in STEM careers and executive management.

Aside from some of the mandated programs in public and private sectors, school desegregation had gained a foothold and there was intermingling of cultural niches. Some – not all – of the rigid walls between dominant culture and racial and ethnic minorities began to crumble. People began to socialize across race, across ethnicity, across sexual orientation. There was still resistance, but organized institutionalized racism began to fade. Gone were the “whites only” signs, and the sundown towns. Homophobia still had a bit of a hold, but race and ethnicity seemed to have turned a corner. There was some hope that Blacks, in particular, might finally realize some equal opportunity in hiring, education, home ownership. Maybe the American Dream might not be so impossible after all, and for all

And so we thought, until the resistance began to ramp up…again. Affirmative action saw challenges of “reverse discrimination”. The pre-cursors of charter schools began to form. White flight from the inner cities escalated, and with them went much of the money for public education. The prison-industrial complex reached stratospheric levels, and drug use with it. The 70s had enough big hair and left-over daze from the 60s to carry us through…and the 80s, well, I don’t know what to say about the 80s except maybe the big hair clouded reality for everyone. But the resistance was still going strong – and there was a Southern Strategy. We had a President who was about to be impeached, so he resigned. Imagine that. He. Resigned. Before impeachment. As opposed to being impeached twice, losing an election, and refusing to take responsibility for any of that. But I digress.

We’re now well past the hippie era, the disco era, the big hair era, the leading up to Y2K era, the millennium, and now…this. Whatever the hell this is. The WTF era? That seems appropriate enough, because WTF is this? We’re full of hate and bitterness and acrimony, blame and shame, beating each other with anything not nailed down and each one claiming victimhood. Hatred and insult has become legitimized again. Accountability has been surgically removed from our paradigm, unless you don’t know a guy and you’re not criminally adept. Even if you are inept, just have a large firearm handy, because everything’s fair in love and war, and this is war. We just don’t realize we’re only shadow boxing with ourselves.

My point is…until we can acknowledge that a significant part of our history is based on racism and greed, and we need to do something radically different, I don’t believe the polarization is going to be mitigated any time soon. We’re dodging bullets all over the place, but law of probability suggests that sooner or later, we’re gonna take one. That’s not going to be good for anyone. If I’m lucky, we won’t take a bullet until long after I’ve turned to dust again, but it’s not entirely about me (well, most of it, but not entirely). People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’, but if you’re just sittin’ on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time…you ain’t goin’ nowhere. And we need to be goin’ SOMEwhere. That’s the way it works – if you’re standin’ still on that uphill climb you’re going backwards.

So, a recent writing prompt is about relationships, and it’s taken me a few days to complete it.

Relationships of all kinds, family, romantic, friendship, even work. Well, hell. This is the LAST thing I want to be thinking about right now, as I sit here on a very cloudy National Napping Day under my binkie with my dog and a second cup of coffee. I would rather get my COVID vaccine, or be stuck in the eye with a sharp stick. My preference would be the COVID shot, but I don’t have that choice just yet. But, that aside demonstrates my lack of enthusiasm for exploring the topic of relationships.

I. Suck. At. Relationships. Totally suck. I have never been able to discern the difference between users and give-and-take. I usually give way too much and get way too little. That happens, I suppose, but I tolerate it for a very long time. I train the user to perfect their craft, it seems. Don’t say I never gave ya nothin’, though. I sometimes wonder if my true resistance is that I don’t want to be treated as well as I think I do. Perhaps when people are TOO good to me, I have to screw it up, repel them somehow, run away. I wonder if that’s because I don’t feel that I can afford to trust people who talk a good game, seem to like me a great deal, love me even, accept my quirks, but still leave. That’s always been my experience…say you love me, then much later throw out boundaries – barriers, even – and leave. I suppose in my mind, I have driven them away.

Not sure who drives the escape vehicle, but regardless, there is somebody leaving. They change, and they leave. I suppose I change as well, but I rarely leave. You leave me before I leave you. Those are the rules. Not sure whose rule book that is, but it’s the one I’ve always had. I suppose it is more or less a power play, and a lot of what goes on for me is about power (or the lack thereof). This rule applies to romantic relationships, friendships, workplace, everything. My last job became so miserable, but I was determined they were going to fire me before I would leave. The one job I left voluntarily, which brought me here, ended disastrously because I took a leave of absence in case I needed to go back. I was supposed to formally resign a year later if I wasn’t going to return, but I didn’t do that, and they terminated me. I couldn’t bear the thought of saying that I resigned, for some inexplicable reason. I don’t really know why. Couldn’t say goodbye? I’m not sure. That confuses me terribly, and it cost me – didn’t get my terminal leave days paid out, or my retirement. What an idiot. And I say that with love and affection.

So I won’t leave, but reserve the right to be…abandoned. I have always figured I have an abandonment issue, but this is one with an odd twist. I wonder if there is some twisted wiring in my brain that says if you leave me, the relationship is over but I was powerless to control or prevent that. If I leave YOU, though, I have some control in the ending. Stupid thing, though, is that it still ends. I suppose if one is a control freak, maintaing any little scrap of control – no matter how nonsensical – is a win. That disappoints me in some ways, but maybe it is self-protective in some bizarre fashion…when your feel that life is handing you loss, you take a win however you can get it, no matter how small it is. Or maybe I’m just kinda nuts. I suspect that I have such mixed messages about what love is, about what it looks like when you love someone and they love you, about when enough is enough.

Now, that’s another related issue…when is enough enough? I don’t know. Discerning when enough is enough is a multi-faceted issue in my little world. Staying past the point of fun, or reward, or positive return is often considered loyalty. That is what is usually in my mind when relationships become challenging. I will stay past the point of comfort, past the point of reward, because that’s what you do when you are loyal. Maybe that’s what you do when your ego says that you can change them, fix them, make it work even when it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s what you do when you have abandoned yourself in favor of the relationship, in favor of the comfort and reward of another person. The funny thing, however, is that you are not respected for that, you’re not rewarded for that, your needs are not met when you do that. I think one of the informal names for this is co-dependency, and there is a huge power dynamic involved in that, and a huge not to my ego involved in that.

My ego is a fully self-aware part of my persona, sort of like the network in The Terminator. I learned, the way machines do, to anticipate which part of my brain lights up when I feel good, and so it began pointing me in the direction of more opportunities for that outcome. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, unless that becomes the only consideration for engaging in people or situations. I will typically feel as though I have been used when I’m dealing with a narcissist, or a toxic sociopath, but if I am going ot be entirely honest, I am using them as well. It’s a choreographed stage play, everyone assume your positions, and recite the script. No ad-libbing! You know what you’re supposed to do, so let’s just get to it. If there is not a happy ending, don’t whine, this is just the way it’s written, and you can’t change it.

That’s the way I have this all twisted up in my mind…it’s a script. I’m just doing my duty, following the script, reciting my lines when I’m supposed to. Enter obligation from Stage Left. That’s the connection for me, I suppose…I have to continue doing what I am supposed to be doing, or … . Or what? That’s the big question at this point, I suppose. If I choose not to do what I am supposed to do, or what i feel obligated to do, what happens? Does the world end? Does the motherhship return and retrieve me? Do plants and animals wither and die? What happens? If I go off-script, what’s the worst that could happen?

Even writing this, I have to chuckle a bit, but then I want to weep. That’s a lot of pressure for a little person to carry, worrying that if you don’t do what is expected the world is going to crumble. It’s all on just you. Nobody else, just you. I can see that as such an ego-trip, one that was taught, but still an ego trip. I believe that’s where some of my oppositional defiance originates, because when people are trying to impress “a sense of urgency” on me, my typical response is to sit down and dig my heels in. Refuse to move. Like a donkey (like an ass). I sometimes really enjoy that, and then relish pointing out that nothing bad happened because I didn’t break my neck trying to get something done that was “urgent”. This frustrates the hell out of people, which can be sardonically humorous, but if they are writing your paycheck, it can also be largely counter-productive. What price glory?

So, the whole issue of “you can’t tell me what to do” takes on new direction…because on the one hand, I usually feel as though everyone can tell me what to do. Most of us are not able to dictate our terms of engagement, unless maybe you have enough money or a big enough gun. I have neither. So, a lot of people, places, systems get to tell me what to do and how to engage, and I don’t particularly care for it. But nobody asked for my approval on that. Fortunately for me, I know how far to go with the resistance, and have never been incarcerated or assaulted. I’m getting older, though, and not caring quite so much these days, so we’ll see. I’m mostly a coward about standing up to people in person, though, so maybe I’ll get out of here without getting my butt kicked in the streets. The point is, however, trying to get free is a fight that has all kinds of battlegrounds.

When I like you, I am gonna go all in. I want to take care of all your needs, like a little kid in class when the teacher drops the chalk. Or at least that’s how it was when I was a little kid in school. I would have to cop to that not being entirely unselfish. I definitely want to be seen as the hero, as the savior, as the helper…and have that gold star on my chest. [superhero theme music here]. You like music? Let me find that. You like Italian food? Let me make reservations for the best Italian restaurant. You’re upset? Let me drop everything I’m doing to comfort you, listen to you, tell you it’s all going to be OK. It’s not that I see any of that as inheritently negative, but there’s no balance. In going to extremes to make someone else feel good, I abandon myself. And the really amusing thing about making someone else feel good is…it’s not possible for me to do that. I can’t make anybody feel ANYTHING. I may do some very nice things for them, but ultimately, if the result is a good feeling for them, it’s because they chose to see it that way, they chose to be open and accepting of that. Not because I am powerful enough to wave a wand and cause them to feel anything. My feelings belong to me, but their feelings belong to them. No exceptions. In the past, I’ve gotten myself all hyped up on being god. That, in no uncertain terms, is simply a delusion; I am not god. Dammit.

Posted this on FaceBook earlier:

It’s a dreary day here. Yesterday, there were storms…some really impressive thunder…lots of rain. Supposed to be more storms today. The weather seems to mirror what’s going on around us right now…kinda dreary, some impressive noise from above, lotta stuff falling from the sky. Supposed to be more storms coming. So, for me, it’s a day for thinking and ponderin’ and music.

I was listening to “Farewell Angelina” (the Joan Baez version, which I love) and if you are familiar with those lyrics, the puppets are heaving rocks and fiends are indeed nailing timebombs to the hands of the clocks. The sky is trembling. I must go where it’s quiet. Shut the eyes of the dead not to embarrass anyone….

Farewell, Angelina…farewell to expectation that if the suffering is revealed it will be eliminated. Buddha said there is suffering. I suppose our business here is not to eliminate it, but to take away its power. That seems woefully inadequate, to say the least. Perhaps it is the point at which I must say farewell to any attempt to make sense of that, to live with it, only to accept it. Accept it regardless of its inequity, regardless of its pain, despite its weaponization. It’s another philosophical quandry entirely to presume that suffering can be eliminated.

So, where does that leave the likes of me? What the eff do I do with that? I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing. I was told that when you’re lost in the forest, the best thing to do is stay still so that you can be found. That works some of the time. It works when there is someone looking for you, someone who recognizes that you are missing. It doesn’t work if you were largely invisible and not perceived as being missing. A lot of us are missing, and there’s nobody looking for us.

Farewell, Angelina…the cross-eyed pirates aren’t shooting tin cans, they’re shooting real people, our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers, our children. They have hijacked our ship of dreams and they hold us all hostage to their lack of imagination and their malicious intent. And yes, the people clap and cheer for their savagery, because this is what happens when the dreams die. When there is poverty of the spirit, there are no more fantasies, no more dreams, no vision of a better future. There is only grasping at the repair of broken mechanisms that promise freedom, but instead deliver only more bondage. Achieving power over others is the eternal joke on the hopelessly powerless.

So, seeing as how I’m in a Dylan groove today, here’s another Dylan line from another day in the 1960s. It says a bit of how I think some of us are feeling right now: don’t think twice, it’s alright…ain’t no use in callin’ out my name, babe…i can’t hear you any more. i once loved a country, a child i’m told…i gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul. But don’t think twice, it’s alright.

I don’t want to hear about reparations at this point, or analysis of the Founding Fathers’ intent on anything. I don’t want to hear about the rule of law, or who’s to blame for the latest crises within the country. Don’t want to hear any debates on score cards, or fact checking, or who said what to who and when. All I want to hear is…we ain’t gonna do this same crap any more. We’re gonna cut out the bull shit right here, right now. I’d love to abolish political parties entirely at this point, but that’s not realistic. Partisan politics is simply organizers working the way organizers have always worked, just with suits and ties and bigger salaries. so let’s use that to organize people for the good of…the people. ALL the people. Can we at least agree on THAT?