I’m contemplating what contribution I make to…to what? Society? Friends and family? The Earth? Myself? I imagine that I’ve always felt like my contribution was to society in the form of work, my contribution to some goal for someone else. When i worked in the public sector, I felt like the someone else was the community at large. In some respects, I guess that was true, but ultimately the contribution was to the bureaucracy that paid me. Sometimes that bureaucracy did effectively contribute to the overall good of the populus, but sometimes it merely contribute to political aggrandizement. Public service, in many cases, is an oxymoron.

When I was younger, and before I had seen the worst of what people had to offer, I took great pride in doing things I felt contributed to the greater good. I took great pride in working for the local government, and it fed me. It almost didn’t start that way, but over time, I felt a certain fulfillment in the work. The corruption did get to be a drag, and it got even worse after I left. I spent fifteen years there, and after leaving for the foothills of North Carolina, the whole place went to hell in a handbasket. I have no idea where that phrase comes from, but I’ve been saying it all my life, so … there it is. Anyhow, after I’d been gong for a few years, Hurricane Katrina happened, and the corruption and incompetence and bad politics was all exposed. People died, lives were destroyed, and people I had worked for directly went to federal prison. Did I feel vindicated? Somewhat, I guess…but I didn’t give it much thought. Conditions there were normalized, and they had been so bad that I was very much emotionless about it. I remain, however, heartbroken over the loss of so much of the spirit of the city I call home. It’s as though someone has ripped the heart out of it, and I’m not sure that will ever be recovered. There are still a few cultural icons that can never be eradicated, but as time goes on, and the old ones die, some things have become frozen in time, in one-dimensional photos and pages in archival footage. I suppose that has happened to other places, but this one is mine, and it makes me very sad.

Anyhow, back to how I might be contributing these days…since I’ve been unemployed, I struggle to find any value in things I do. I suppose the relationship between someone else compensating me financially for my work product is stronger than I thought. I know that I have contributed to my community of faith (or at times, no faith at all) in many ways. I’ve been at the lead of our social justice work for a while now, and we did quite a lot toward voter engagement this past year. We are still working on that, as mid-term elections seem to be not all that far away. I also work on a state-wide justice group for the larger faith movement, and that’s fairly rewarding to me personally, although it don’t pay. I do a fair amount of working, formally and informally, to educate people on anti-racism and multi-culturalism. That’s probably best and more productively done on the informal level. People generally don’t need to be lectured about racism and prejudice and historical elements of both, but allowed to work through their own journey through it. Trying to unlearn our collective patterns of bias and various -ism patterns is daunting for everyone, regardless of racial/ethnic identification. I explain to people that I learned status quo and white supremacy the same way everyone else did, it just looks different on me as a person of color. Not better, not worse, just different. On me, it frequently looks like internalized racism, and something akin to PTSD. I’ve got to unlearn and question the status quo and figure out how I contribute to it, just like everybody else.

So, contribution is sometimes a sticky wicket. I contribute to the status quo, I contribute to dismantling the status quo, and I contribute to my own frustration. I suppose I also contribute to my own growth, as I do find that I’m not the person I was before I started questioning and exploring the norms I was raised with. Oppositional defiance comes in handy at times, and without that, I might never have resisted a lot of things. I might never have questioned anything at all, but would have remained generically enraged without ever knowing why. I don’t know all the reasons, but I know some, and I know I’m not the only one feeling that way. I once thought group resistance was useless, because all it did was gather pissed off people together in rooms where you just kvetch about how wrong they done us. As I’ve gotten older, though, I find that without group resistance I would feel hopelessly alone in my rage. So, although group dynamics frequently confounds me, I know that me kvetching by myself is the more futile endeavor.

Over the years, since I’ve been out of school, I seem to have been consistently involved in some manner of resistance to oppression. When I was younger, and had functioning hormones and some get up and go, I was marching and raising my fist for gay-lesbian empowerment, and liberation, and … stuff. We hadn’t even included bisexuals to the acronym yet. I came in on the end of the Gay Liberation Movement…then it was the Gay-Lesbian Movement, or alternately the Lesbian-Gay movement, depending on who you talked to. Then came the B, and many years later the T. Now, it’s gotten a little out of hand, with the Q and the I and the A and a + sign. Whatever. I go with the program, but I’m old and sometimes it’s just alphabet soup to me and I get it all screwed up. I mean well. Regardless, that’s where my activism and shouting out got started. That movement always had a white face, to me, It was what it was, and I couldn’t have survived without it.

By the time I had fallen out of the proverbial closet and was more or less comfortable in my skin, at least as far as my sexual orientation went, then came the AIDS crisis. My friends were dying, by the droves. Tiny little gay men, burly bears of gay men, average looking guy-next-door gay men…it didn’t matter. They were dying on the daily, sometimes homeless, wasting away to nothing. Vibrant artists whose creativity lit up silver screens and dinner theatres all over the world suddenly went silent, and nobody could do a damned thing about it. Moral police declared it divine justice, and meted out brutal pronouncements on the dying and those who loved them. My sense of justice and fair-play couldn’t tolerate that, and I volunteered for hotlines and marches and fund-raisers to help with the resistance effort. It was tough. People were so hateful, and they still are. By the time the causal virus was discovered, and medication was able to counter the worst of the symptoms of AIDS, the death toll was high. We were all more or less walking wounded, and our ranks were decimated. It wasn’t until AIDS was finally understood to be an equal-opportunity infections disease that some of the pressure began to ease off in the community – it had started out as “the gay scourge”, but that was a lie. It’s a virus, and the CDC finally discovered that a virus didn’t care whether it was deposited in an anus or a vagina, it just needed a human host. Because it’s a virus, it would do what viruses do and kill its host, unless intervened upon. That information was literal salvation.

The AIDS epidemic has quite a few similarities to this corona virus pandemic, so much of today’s bad behavior doesn’t really suprise me. It distresses me, but it doesn’t surprise me. Higher levels of violence toward Asian-Americans mimics the hate crimes that were so rampant against gay men at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when it was thought to be only a gay-infecting disease. People resisted efforts to mitigate the spread of AIDS early on, with safer-sex practices, and there was widespread resistance to that, much of it ironically in the gay community. The anti-mask resistance during this pandemic reminds me of that. Being faced with one’s own powerlessness and mortality frequently brings on episodes of very bad behavior, it seems. People dying, helplessly, often without alone and separated from their loved ones has been experienced in both pandemics. The race to develop effective testing methods, and difficulties in the distribution of effective medicinal remedy, that’s common to both viral outbreaks. COVID, however, has garnered a bit more energetic response, and I believe that’s mainly because it’s not sexually transmitted. There is no vaccine for HIV even now, and I don’t know how much research is dedicated to that currently. We’re very fortunate there is no moral judgement involved with COVID, or things would be even uglier than it is now. People still die of AIDS, due to HIV infection, but we don’t much hear about that anymore.

So, I digressed a good deal from the original topic of contribution, namely my own. I suppose I am much happier discussing injustice and the common good rather than my own contributions. Ultimately, I suppose I feel as though I haven’t made any significant contribution to anything. I can name things I’ve done that I feel are positive, that I feel are meaningful, but I don’t know if I really consider them contributions. I am toying with the definition of contribution, I suppose, and whether or not that means something rendered to someone or something far outside of my Self. Furthermore, can I actually contribute only to my Self, or is that merely selfishness? Ack. When I got sober, that was something I did for myself, but I conceive of that as something that was of some value to others…safer driving, better work product, better general health, treating people a little better, greater responsibility, etc. etc. etc. So, I don’t know. It was for me, but I guess there’s some positivity that radiates outward and benefits the greater good. I suppose. It is difficult for me to assign positive value to most things I do, and that’s just a quirk, an ego edge, a humility hurdle. Something like that. I have gotten so much in the habit of downplaying what I do that it’s just a default button now. Perhaps I should work on that. We’ll see; I have never wanted to be considered much of a horn-tooter or a braggart.

Today was a fairly nice day – sunny, temperatures in the 60s. I took the dog for a walk, not as long as we had gotten accustomed to doing a couple of months ago, but you have to start somewhere. It was about a 35 minute walk, and she enjoyed it. When I had taken her out for her constitutional earlier in the day, we ran into her apartment husband, the neighbor who had the quadruple bypass surgery 3 or 4 months ago. He’s close to 85, and came through it like a champ, and looking very good these days. He loves my dog, and she adores him. When she smells him in the vicinity, she cries like somebody is ripping her guts out. When he comes into view, she screams. Absolutely shrieks. I can usually just let her leash go and she races toward him like a little snausage torpedo, ears bared, legs churning. He loves it, and so does she. It makes me happy, too. We’re in for the evning now, but all in all, it was a good day for dogs and humans alike.

So, news reports are coming out this morning that National Guard response to the January 6th insurrection were delayed because of rule changes the day before. While that explains only a part of the incomprehensibly inadequate law enforcement response on that day, it opens a tiny window on the scope of the many layers of bureaucracy involved in this debacle. When one peers through such an opening, you have to wonder exactly what you’re seeing. Are you seeing a conspiracy? Are you seeing a second-level (or top level) effort to undermine democracy by making the certification of general election results impossible? Are you seeing the mere conglomeration of random chaotic elements that were energetically bound to create a desired result? Or something else? Personally, I could go long and hard in the wondering about all of this, but…I got stuff to do and at some point, I’m going to have to step away from this keyboard. But…

…I have to go there, at least briefly. I can’t forget that a while back, which now seems like a thousand years ago, the former POTUS was opining about the possibility of civil war in this country. I can’t remember the exact trigger for that discussion, but I believe it had something to do with government’s role in providing social aid for citizens. This was pre-COVID. As usual, part of the argument was that government (national) shouldn’t be responsible for setting that kind of policy, that it was up to the states. So, if some states opted to not expand Medicaid, that was up to them. Hm. Given that reasoning, it should have been no surprise when the White House opted out of composing comprehensive policy for pandemic response. But I digress.

At any rate, the mention of civil war stands out in my memory, no matter why it came up. There was the distinct blush of acknowledging the rage of so many who had their backs against the wall financially, but a veritable pallor in recognizing the root cause of those circumstances. Despite official reports of job growth and economic bloom at the time, there were a LOT of people out of work. Unemployment at the time, however, didn’t look the way it looks now, and most folks could still go out and have beer and wings at a sports bar, or at the football stadium. So, there was some anesthetic that, I believe, numbed response to the ongoing pain of so many who remained jobless even then. To add insult to injury, the glowing reports of economic growth didn’t match the depletion of social services, so there was even less assistance – and more blame – for those needing a way to survive.

The glowing reports, in my opinion, seemed to create a false bubble of positivity and many were encouraged to hide their heads in the warm sand of the vacation excursions. Somewhat like the Wicked Witch in the Wizard of Oz gleefully directing Dorothy and her posse through the poppy fields…the poppies…the poppies will put them to sleep. The poppies, in that fantastic world, were more than likely opium, and put them to sleep they did. While the Wicked Witch continued weaving her web to further imperil the hapless travelers when they awoke. While the Flying Monkeys were doing pushups and getting ready to wreak more havoc. I hesitate to call U.S. Senators flying monkeys, because I haven’t seen any of them become airborne yet, but the havoc-wreaking energy seems to be very similar. But again, I digress.

By the time COVID response hit, it hit hard, and when states had no choice but to shut down, the bottom fell out of the false bubble. We didn’t have the colorful, hazy film of soap to cover the reality of the dirty water we were swimming in, and … despair began to set in. Many who truly believed that life was good for everyone had no choice but to face the reality of the day, and nobody liked it. The emotional toll has been nearly insurmountable for a lot of us, and a retreat to fantasy is what has been required in many cases. I believe that’s where Q-Anon comes in, that’s where believing that today is going to be the Second Coming of a chubby, scowling, and naked Emperor. That’s where all of us are afraid. Very afraid. Politics is politics, but nobody expected a pandemic. We can argue about taxes and policies and job growth all day, but the pandemic has pushed us into a new level. Our reptile brains are activated, because this virus can kill people, and it has No amount of money or privilege or material possessions can grant us immunity from this microscopic collection of proteins that can end us. And that’s a whole nother ball game, where a couple of folks have even learned to take off the Rolex before descending into the inner city in search of an early dose of the vaccine.

Back to the civil war thing, though. As I watched reports this morning about rule changes for the National Guard, that prevented them from responding in a more “nimble” fashion on January 6th, I had no choice but to wonder if that could have been a concerted effort to at least enable the violence that we saw unfold. There are so many reports of these usually inconsequential pixels of the bureaucracy that were modified, or stood down, or unfunded just prior to the insurrection. Having worked in local government in my lifetime, I have seen things like this happen. It doesn’t happen the day before, either…it goes on while everyone is asleep in the poppy fields. I have no choice but to compare the response of law enforcement in various metropolises, included D.C., in relation to the protests and riots following George Floyd’s death with January 6th. I have no choice but to recall seeing militaristic response to protests, generally lumped together under the BLM banner, with laser sights visibly marking protesters’ bodies, canine units, heavily armed officers in full riot gear, military tanks. Seeing the absolute, and terrifying, inadequacy of the response of a handful of Capitol and D.C. Metro Police officers abandoned to resist the thousands of revved up insurrectionists on January 6th has to make you wonder. It has to. There are myriad justifications for why the response on January 6th was what it was, and none of that seems reasonable to me. When protesters – peaceful protesters – were forcibly cleared from the Washington Square area near the Capitol to enable a photo opportunity for the POTUS (the infamous Bible shot, in front of a church that didn’t give permission for such use of their edifice), you have to wonder. And wonder I do.

Back in the 70s, after the murder of Sharon Tate and others in the horrific days of the Charles Manson Family, Manson’s philosophy was raised to a high level of scrutiny. Most people wrote him off as a psychopathic and criminally insane aberration, but I recall very distinctly why he seemed so inordinately depraved to me. First, he had some kind of inexplicable hold on his followers, enthralling them beyond all reason. Women uncharacteristically murdered for him, mutilated themselves, and did not accept that he was an abusive wraith with no moral compass. At least a couple of them are still in prison, denied parole at every eligibility hearing. Manson’s goals, as he proudly stated them, had nothing to do with these women…had nothing to do with anything but Charles Manson and his gratification in realizing total control over these people. But, his ultimate goal, as he described himself, was “helter skelter”. A race war. He was going to engineer horrific murders and crimes, blame it on Black people, and that would start the ultimate race war, armaggedon as far as he was concerned.

When I hear references to the President of the United States surmising that another civil war in this country is not undesirable, I get he same feeling of depravity and hopelessness that I felt when hearing Charles Manson calmly describe his vision of helter skelter. But Charles Manson had control of fewer than 50 acolytes. The President of the United States could steer millions of people to his way of thinking. And in some respects, he did just that. There are still people who truly believe that our current elected President is illegitimate, that election results of the last general election are false. That last year’s Presidential election was fraudulent, rigged, not valid. Reality doesn’t seem to be any part of the equation; it’s too painful.

I am sure there are some people out there who are waiting for this day to end with bated breath, on the outside chance that a cataclysm is about to occur, sort of like the Rapture in some Christian belief structures, where the illegitimate ruler is ousted and the true Savior is reinstated, to sit at the hand of God. (can’t remember whether it’s the right or the left hand of God, but no matter) The religious symbolism cannot go without mention – deposing the false leader, and reinstating the one true leader, sounds an awful lot like sectarian vision of the second coming of Christ. I’m sure there is evidence in the Book of Revelations for visions that can be attributed to the progression of this prophecy…and the association of many who believe in this apocrypha with this sectarian Christian tenet is clear. I do not discount anyone’s beliefs, or faith in them, right up to the point when they infringe on my right – or anyone else’s – right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What does God need with a riot helmet, or a Congressional lectern? What does God need with a flag? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, what does God need with anything mankind can contrive? To my feeble logic, it’s laughable to presume that we humans could produce anything tangible that could not be instantaneously manifested by an all-powerful deity. Me thinks we are victims of our own hubris.

There was a space hurricane over the North Pole of the planet for around eight hours yesterday, or day before leading into yesterday. Apparently, this hurricane dumped a boat load of electrons into the atmosphere. I’m no scientist, but I think negative charge is not always a bad thing. Excess negative charge can repel all kinds of stuff that’s not good for us, and there is some talk about excess negative charge that can repel things like viruses and other microscopy. Negative charge also creates static, and if you’ve ever had your clothes sticking together after being in the dryer, or touched a metallic surface after sliding around on carpet, it’s really annoying. Maybe that’s what’s going on with all of us…we’re sticking together, and it’s really getting on our nerves. We’re not used to sticking together, and it’s not all that comfortable, and probably a tiny bit painful. When my socks stick together right out of the dryer, I usually give them a violent shake until the charge clears. Maybe that’s what we all need…a violent shake until we clear the charge. Sometimes when I shake my socks like that, it doesn’t really work, and my socks continue to attract unwanted objects of opposite charge for a time. So, maybe we need to be stuck together for a while, have some other stuff be attracted to us, and let the charge clear of its own accord. I’m just not quite sure about that. Not sure at all.

I think I have been employing social distance since long before COVID. There are just some times when I need to be doing that low ground-scraping belly crawl through the proverbial jungle. There is toxic fauna along the journey, so I have to be ever aware…and when something doesn’t feel right, gotta stay vewwy vewwy kwyut and wait until I see a way out or the danger has moved on. Sometimes I chide myself that such a tactic is merely passive aggressive avoidance, but ya know what? So be it. The last thing I need right now is to get taken down by some manipulative stealth bomb, so I have to avoid. Maybe one day I’ll be able to look a threat in the eye directly and tell it to eff off, but today’s just not the day.

Because I’m a poster child for codependence, I feel guilty and stupid when I resist being manipulated, and really don’t like telling myself the truth about those efforts. Manipulative people generally aren’t focused on my best interest, but only their own. I don’t need that. And I don’t have to have it. When I choose not to engage, no matter how sloppily or awkwardly, I am making a choice for my Self, and that shouldn’t cause me to feel guilty. I would like to believe it’s getting better, and I suppose that’s true, but when I make that choice it’s still uncomfortable. I don’t particularly care to be uncomfortable, but who raises their hand and eagerly volunteers to feel uncomfortable? I suppose in some twisted way, that’s what I have been doing when I don’t resist my own codependence, so…no more. I wave the white flag of surrender, surrender to believing it’s not a big deal, that I know how to do this stuff, that it’s my job to be there for everyone else. It’s never been my job to make anyone else feel better, and truth be told, I can’t make anybody feel anything. I enjoy being the hero, being the one that has made the difference, but…that’s just my ego for the most part. There’s an entirely different energy involved when I am just trying to help than when I am trying to solve a problem. It’s not my problem to solve. Dammit.

The codependence thing, the feeling of it being my job to make someone else feel better, to solve their problems, the feeling that my only real value is in how well I do that…that’s just some serious and unadulterated, smelly, vile bullshit. I remember to the day when I got the conscious idea that it was my job to do that…my mother was bemoaning her own shortcomings, her feelings of inadequacy. Everybody has those, I suppose (except perhaps died-in-the-wool narcissists), but it’s a little different when your parent is needing to ask their child for that kind of support. I think that’s a level of support that should be reserved for adult-adult relationship, not adult-child. When you’re a kid, you don’t even have the skill set to solve the problem, but you probably want to please the parent, and so you try. You try over and over and over again, not realizing that it’s a problem you can’t solve, that no matter what you do you can’t fix them. You associate love with your usefulness, with utility, with how well you can do your job. But it’s not my job. I have to remember that it’s not my job.

So, I guess that brings me to the question of…what IS my job? What’s my purpose? Is my purpose my job? This is a whole nother track…and maybe it’s the operative one. What is my purpose? Do I need to know what that is, or do I just do the next right thing, what’s in front of me, what commands me ethically? I don’t quite know. I am standing at the crossroads of figuring out whether I continue to satisfy what I believe are obligations, or what I may falsely believe are obligations. Maybe I need to examine what I feel I’m obliged to be doing…and why. I don’t feel as though I’m obliged to do anything wrong, but definitely some things not in my best interest. I don’t know if I should be demanding anything, even if it’s in my best interest. I almost said that I don’t know if I have that right…which is a heavy thought. Do I really have the right to be happy? Now, THERE’S a heavy thought. The RIGHT. Do I have the RIGHT. That’s a little complicated. Is happiness an entitlement, is it the ultimate goal of the common good? Is the only reason I strive to contribute to the gross domestic product so that I accrue financial resources that are sufficient for me to get…high, drunk, travel tickets, season tickets to sports events, symphony tickets, books, a house, a car…whatever conspicuously consumptive thing I can contrive? I’m not sure if I’m entitled to happiness, and maybe that’s a conflict I need to resolve. I don’t think I DESERVE to be happy, I suppose. We laugh about this in recovery circles all the time, that if I got what I deserved, I’d be dead or in jail. Most of us, if honest, would be in the same position. We’ve all done stupid things, hurtful things, caused untold damage to property and people’s hearts and/or bodies. So, when we are talking about justice, I have to keep in mind how easy it is to go to the “dark side” of human behavior.

Some days I really believe that I must be from some place far, far away. From some other planet, some other galaxy, a walk-in to this body here on Earth. I feel alien sometimes, like everything around me is foreign, unusual, nonsensical even. I don’t always seem to know exactly where I am in time and space, as though I’m having one hell of a lucid dream in some other dimension. Am I some alien dreaming I’m a twisted human being, or a twisted human being dreaming I’m an alien? I don’t understand how most of this world functions, how it works. I especially don’t understand how people work, unless there is some deep emotional movement going on. That I do understand, but I can’t live there. I don’t understand my own emotional upheavals, but I can empathize with everyone else’s. Ain’t that somethin’.

I’m sitting here, waiting on a 12-step meeting to begin. This Zoom modality is fine, but my eyes are really tired. I think I’m cranking on a cataract, because when I look upward, I see a kind of film that floats in front of my direct line of vision, and it’s definitely on the surface of my eye. It’s transparent, but it moves, as though it was a soap bubble on the surface of some water. But that’s just my story. Maybe I just need eye drops, more lubrication. I know that I need new glasses…just renewed my vision plan, so I should make an appointment with the optometrist. I’ll get right on that, after my standard multiple hours/days of procrastination. I crack myself up sometimes.

I’m in some kind of weird and unsettled state right now, and I’m not even sure why. It’s more of that disconnected thing…the denial of my comments in that online group I mused on earlier is messing with me. I don’t know why I should care. This is so par for the course…I don’t understand some advanced principle of anti-racism, or group dynamics, or something and so they will decline to post my submission because, well, I obviously just don’t get it. Obviously. I am really beginning to think I don’t want to get it. I don’t want to have sure answers, the ones that come from some academic knowledge base, some formula, some theorum. It frustrates me when I have an intuition about something, but don’t have the vocabulary to express it in words other people will understand, particularly if they are the Ph.d types. I’m just not interested in that, although I would like to be able to compete, or hold my own at least in discussions. That doesn’t seem to be making any sense, but suffice it to say that I’m a bit frustrated with being tongue-tied with people that have credentials.

When I was a corporate ho, and that is exactly what it felt like when I worked for a corporation, I failed diversity class. It was a train-the-trainer kind of thing, multi-week duration. The diversity consultants – multi-million dollar contract – had a copy-righted plan for teaching us how to teach our colleagues. Because their plan was THE plan, you had to be able to present the training in exactly the way they taught it. Well, that didn’t go so well for me, because I felt like if I got the concepts, I could teach it the way I wanted to. Um, no. That’s not the way it’s done in that world, so…between a bit of stage fright and not being able to remember the exact vocabulary and sequence of items to be included, I…summarily…flunked. I was devastated. Felt incompetent, which is one of my worst nightmares. I do not want to feel incompetent, and just that word makes the hair on my arms stand up. But, I had not demonstrated competence in my ability to present the required material, so…see ya. I must relate, however, that a couple of years after my failure, the company was bought and the diversity program was scrapped. The consultants were tossed out on their academic expert butts, and the whole program became a historical blip on the timeline. So much for great ideas.

Anyway, back to the whole issue that upset me so much earlier…I suppose part of the real sticking point for me, or at least the discomfort for me, is a question of my identity. When my comment was dismissed, and they declined to post it, I felt as though I didn’t fit into a group that I should fit into. Racially, we share the same identity, so I should be able to navigate there better than just about anywhere else. But that has never been the case for me, and so this has brought up all the old insecurities about who the hell am I, where do I belong, I’m not even competent about my own racial identity. What the hell is THAT all about. Moving just slightly past this, however, I’m thinking about something I was told a while back, by a trainer in a church-based class. We were discussing racial/ethnic identity, and I said to her that I wasn’t sure there was a container that fit me in that context. She said, without missing a beat, “Create your own.”. I’ve never forgotten that, and now…I suppose that’s exactly what I’m being called to do. Create my own racial identity, because I really don’t fit into any of the prescribed ones available.

So. I’m trying to remember a time when I felt more connected than I do now, and I must admit that was probably a time when I felt least aware of opposition, or least aware of reality. When I didn’t really know how the world worked, how finances worked, how politics and oppression worked, I suppose I had a more or less naive outlook on things. When you’re a kid, you don’t know that certain things are impossible, so you believe you can do anything. Well, on some level…some kids know from the beginning there are certain things not available to them, but still, they jump from rooftops and slide down steep hills because they are convinced of their immortality. That’s an immutable law of youth, I think. When I didn’t understand the politics behind how I got my college scholarship money, I just assumed it would be there. It didn’t occur to me not to ask, nay DEMAND, it to be awarded. There was a lot of dirty water under that bridge, but I didn’t know enough to look down, and presumed the bridge would hold. Naivete’ is a gift at times.

When I felt connected, I guess I felt like I was at the top of my game, at the top of the world. The disconnect started when I felt like the world began telling me no. When I began to see the greater progress of others, but couldn’t seem to get my own canoe off the sand bar. Many years ago, I started to feel that it shouldn’t be this hard, everything shouldn’t be a battle. But it was. Or at least, I felt that it was. And so connection was a consequence of winning, I think. When I felt successful, I felt connected. The world was my oyster and all that happy stuff. But somewhere deep inside, I didn’t quite buy that, and over time, I became convinced there was no pearl in my oyster, that it was all a hoax. Success was a consequence of a privileged life, where one had certain advantages like wealth, beauty, brains, family name. Since I didn’t believe I had any of those attributes, it seemed as though life was just something you survived, something you endured, something you managed to just get through. It never occurred to me that joy, or happiness, was a measure of life, that quality of life could be intentionally varied.

That sounds very bizarre to me even now, but I suppose the point is…I think some of us feel so disempowered, so disconnected from power, that your circumstances are just something that happen to you, not for you. My proverbial “station of life” was not going to change unless I was very exceptional, and when I believed that I was exceptional for a time, I presumed that I would transcend the circumstances into which I was born. The period when I believed that I was exceptional was marked by … family stability, obvious and more or less unconditional family support, family security, a feeling that all was well, that I was well, that no monsters were sharpening their claws under the bed. There were monsters, for sure, but they were not under MY bed and they were likely asleep with full bellies if they were. The monsters didn’t come to be an issue for me until a long time later, but they made up for lost time then. But that’s another story, one of many.

Anyhow, when I began feeling that I really did have limitations, really couldn’t do whatever I set out to do, was a true cross-roads of reality vs. fantasy. OK, I have discussed previously wanting to be a roller derby star, but I could not skate. Those were the days before roller blades and inline skates, but no matter – I had the balance of a Weeble. I never could learn, but…still I kept the dream alive. I figured one of the strong figures I was so enamored of, my roller derby heros, would be able to teach me. Would take me under her strong wing and be very patient and teach me. Then it would be me zooming around the banked track, elbowing other skaters, racing in a blur past still others to SCORE! And the crowd goes WILD!

I realize that fantasy is not so deviant from those of other kids, who dream of being rap stars, or professional athletes, or movie stars. But I thought I was just a weirdo. There was something in me that knew I couldn’t do that stuff. I didn’t know any other kids, girls especially, who wanted to be roller derby queens. My mother thought most of my fantasies were ridiculous and stupid. Come to think of it, I didn’t really know many other kids at all. There was a separation…I didn’t have siblings…I lived mostly in a world of adults. I’m not sure I understood that I wasn’t an adult – somebody had to be the adult in my house, and it was frequently me. I got into all kinds of trouble, incurring my mother’s displeasure, when I thought I was just participating in conversations with adults and it was seen as being sassy, or not knowing my place, somehow disrespectful. Seemed like it was acceptable in my house, survival-oriented even, but outside the house I was somehow expected to understand that children didn’t do what I did. That was confusing. No, that was effed up.

I didn’t go to the school most of the other kids in the neighborhood went to – I went to private school from 6th grade on, and so I was “all that”. There were problems at the school as well, because this was the first blush of being in a racially integrated environment, and I was massively insecure there. So, whether at school or in my neighborhood, I always felt that I was somehow outside, looking in, not getting it. I didn’t know the latest dance (I really am not a good dancer, nor does it interest me). I didn’t run well, and was kind of a klutz. I thought throwing balls and making baskets was fine, but I was fine staying inside and reading books and watching television. It was my mother who sometimes physically tossed me out of the house and told me to go and play. I didn’t quite understand what that meant, actually, but there was usually some nice kid who would hit me in the head with the ball they were throwing and scream “CATCH IT, STUPID!”. So I learned. Kind of. Mostly, I learned that you faked it when you didn’t have a clue, and there were just some kids who always knew what to do, and what the rules were, and I wasn’t part of that group. So, I faked a lot of stuff, and if anyone was the wiser, I just pretended not to notice and fronted with belligerence when I had to. That pattern has persisted, even today., although in my adulthood I try very hard to not be a fake. But, in a pinch…well, sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

So, once I started to swim in a bigger pool, I felt more and more like a little fish. Getting a daily dose of failure, of creed that proclaimed me not much of anything, always going to be a failure, will never amount to anything…and that wasn’t coming from the Church. The chasm between me and the rest of the “normal” world seemed to widen every day. Once I had begun to half-separate from the neighborhood because of the school I attended, I realized that I was already half-separated at the school as well, courtesy of race and class. There were seven Black girls in a class of 64, and five of those seven were the daughters of doctors, dentists, lawyers. Not school teachers. The white girls were daughters of mayors, lawyers, society families. Literally uptown girls. I began to feel very different from, and definitely less than, everybody else.

That was a time of feeling extremely disconnected. Confused. Not right. It was definitely not a time when I felt successful, or secure. That pretty much continues all through high school, as my family situation became even more fragile, and unstable. College wasn’t all that much better in terms of feeling connected, and successful…in fact, that was probably the lowest point of the disconnect. I realized how much of a fraud I actually was, as I failed calculus and computer science quick, fast, and in a hurry. I also failed French, but she was a beyotch, and I had started drinking to deal with her and everything else that was wrong in my world. Self-medication is a time honored tradition for people who know something’s wrong but don’t know what, and don’t know how to figure it out. The world was a big, scary place so let’s just sit on the quad and have another drink where it’s safe and there are no deadlines or rules or demands. Just have fun. Don’t bogart that joint, pass the bottle, and don’t be a downer.

Good times. Yeah. How better to escape reality than making your own? But when the sun comes up on the day after graduation, and everybody has gone back to their respective corners of the country, you’re all alone and you’ve got to deal. So…all of a sudden you’re back in the real world, the one where you are supposed to know how to be responsible and work and all that. And there’s no campus security to bail your ass out of jail if you get arrested (fortunately, I never did but remember that some of my student activity fees each semester were for bail bond service) or academic counselor to tell you how to drop classes before the F hits your record. It’s not cute to be a screw-up anymore…so…it’s only life. And you realize why your parents have that hollow look on their faces most days, because now you have it, too. And you realize what there is to do, and…there’s that obligation thing again…so you just do it. Where I came from, there wasn’t really anybody talking about dreams at that point, or asking whether you were happy. The only positive reinforcement was garnered by going to work every day, on time, and doing what they told you to do. Doing it well, one would hope. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s working class mentality. That’s where I come from, that’s what they came from, and I did what they did. It didn’t occur to me that I could do anything else. Something else was for people way more special than me, so…just remember to set the alarm so you can get to work on time.

At the present moment, right here, right now, I have to say that I feel a bit disconnected from quite a number of things, but I am thinking those are just things, circumstances, maybe even certain people. I just had an experience where I went to a social media group, whose members identify racially as I do, to contemplate an issue in the news that involves a public figure, who also identifies as we all do. I disagree entirely with this person, but wanted to discuss how to remain true to my childhood values, requiring me to not speak ill of other people like me, at least not in public, but rather to accept them as kindred spirits in the struggle. Or something like that. The group, however, refused to post my comments, saying that because the public figure referenced had certain viewpoints that were damaging to the community, and they did not want to cause any further harm to members. I respect their right to make that decision, but I was seeking dialogue about how to navigate the complex terrain of internalized racism, celebrity privilege, and general bad behavior. I don’t have any ill will over the decision to not post my comments, but…felt like once again, I didn’t get it. I was on another beam entirely, not seeing things in the way the majority of the group did, and vice versa. This is really typical of my experience of feeling disconnected. I don’t feel disconnected from my original sentiments, as expressed in my submitted comments, but I do feel very disconnected from the group. That’s becoming less and less an issue these days, though. They don’t owe it to me to understand me, and I don’t owe them…anything. It doesn’t help the feelings of aloneness, though, and that’s why it’s a … thing. So be it. I no longer feel the need to change my perspective in order to fit in somewhere, and thankfully, I no longer associate fitting in with acceptance, approval, or connection.

The point of feeling connected, I suppose, is to feel connected within oneself. In the example above, I maintain a sense of internal connectivity, despite feeling a bit of disappointment about not connecting with a group. I know what my comments meant, and I feel they remain valid. No matter what the group thinks. I feel whole, sane, together. Connected.

There have been times in my past when I was not connected internally, when quite literally, I did not have my shit together. I was a bunch of spaghetti strands, all over the place in the water at the bottom of the pot, and when tossed against the wall, none of them stuck. not al dente, not done. I wasn’t done, I did not really know who I was, and there was no predictability in what I might say or do. This is the point at which I did not trust myself, not a bit. I think it’s gotten better, although I am still very much a work in progress. I can now point to a series of patterns, some of which I’ve gained enough insight to explain. That gives me some confidence in myself as an intentional being, a rational being, rather than some formless and chaotic association of random molecules.

That is exactly how I felt for quite some time, like I was more or less an accidental collection of odds and ends that somehow came together. I did not know who I was, but thought I did. I put up a good front, talked a good game. I can still talk a good game in a pinch, when I’m faking it, because some habits are really hard to break. I would hope that periods of time between those incidents are becoming longer and longer, and that I have begun to have more than a few instances of authenticity. When I talk a good game on the more connected days, it’s not a game – I’m saying what I intended to say, what I needed to say. Authenticity means risk, and vulnerability, though, and some days, truth be told, I’m just not that brave. I’m not up to it and fall back on my default bluster. I can live with that.

So, how do I know I’m connected to things, to whatever I’m doing, to other people? Do I presume that because I’m in agreement or in synchronicity with things around me? Do I feel connected with other people and issues simply because I agree? I was on a meditation session earlier, and the group was discussing compassion. There were hundreds of words, but I kept feeling that we were missing the point of compassion. Then again, maybe I’m the one missing the point. They were discussing a lot of laughter and smiling and feeling good and doing good things, and I was more on the beam of doing things unselfishly with the aim of eliminating the suffering of another. I gave the example of a burly firefighter, in full fire gear, unshaven, spitting tobacco, scowling…who goes into a burning building to put out the fire and save lives, if he can. Many firefighters have died in the performance of their duty, because this is what they do – run into burning structures while others are running out, trying to eliminate a fire that may cost others their lives, or at the very least, their property. I count that in the compassion column. It just doesn’t look like Princess Diana hugging African children in a poverty-stricken village. But is it not the same thing? Is it not caring deeply for the suffering of another, and seeking to eliminate that, even at the risk of personal cost? I think some of that went entirely over the heads of my fellow group members, but that’s not my business.

I am having a bit of a wrestling match with this whole issue of maintaining connection, despite friction and despite conflict, or even repulsion. Are two magnets in connection when their like poles are repulsing each other? I suppose they are. I would imagine there is still a connection, one that consists of repulsion. The energy of the repulsion cannot exist without the potential energy of the attraction. As I am writing that, however, I am wondering whether attraction and connection are synonymous. Hmmm. I’ll have to get back to that.

At any rate, I’m also wrestling with the news coverage of this CPAC gathering, and the creative truth telling that went on there. The golden statue of the former leader is ludicrous, and not terribly attractive, but folks lined up to take selfies with it. The CEO of Goya Foods pledged allegiance to the former POTUS, whose trash-talking of Spanish-speaking immigrants continues to be the most vitriolic of all trash-talking. Candace Owens, a Black woman who identifies as both conservative and a supporter of the former POTUS, and who formed the BLEXIT group (Black Exit) and speaks out vehemently against Black lives Matter, is trending on Twitter for … I have no idea what. All of that to say…I just don’t understand people, but I pay attention to them. In some cases, I am repulsed, but am I not somehow still connected? I am locked into my opposition of them, and non-acceptance of their positions, their logic (or lack thereof), their wrong-ness…at least in my opinion. I’m not quite sure why today, this particular today, is bringing me to a higher level of frustration with this than usual. Must be something in the ether.

Many years ago, I was kind of, almost, dating someone who observed that I live most of my life alone. And by that, they were not referencing the physical circumstance of living alone, of being an only child. They were speaking of how I experience life, how I go through significant experiences, life’s ups and downs, hardship, change. And they were absolutely correct. It rarely occurs to me that I should, or can, seek the advice of people close to me when it comes to making decisions. I suppose that as I age, I find myself leaning a little more intentionally on my inner circle, but it is a challenge and sometimes an effort to reach out and solicit advice, or opinion, or experience. Sometimes I wonder if that’s because I really don’t trust anybody, and sometimes I wonder if that’s because there’s really not been anybody there in the past. I guess I have gotten into the habit of depending only on myself…but there’s a big problem with that as well, because sometimes I don’t really trust myself. Hm. Not quite sure how to get around that, but I guess I do somehow because I’m still standing. It would be nice, though, to do this life thing a little differently, ’cause I’m old and fat and tired. Dammit.

I’m trying to think of when I felt connected, and don’t think I feel entirely disconnected from people and situations now. I usually think other people are more connected with each other than they are with me, or me with them, but I’m not sure that’s reality. I recalled a while ago that I made a conscious decision to not succumb to bitterness, at a particular point in my life when it was a fair choice. I hold myself to that, despite how I might present to the outside world.

I am wondering if I am faced with a similar decision point now, to decide whether or not I want to risk living my life more in community, or at least in connection with others. I’m not really interested in being in a capital-R-relationship with anyone, but a circle of spirits might be nice. That sounds really high-fallutin’…but whatever. Just so as there’s some folks who know when I haven’t been seen in a while, they might wanna check on me. I had that at one point, with a close friend here, but she went effing nuts and exited stage right. There wasn’t anything romantic about that relationship, but I had begun to consider her like a sibling, and she just fell into a pit somewhere. She was pretty insulting to me on her way down, so see ya, babe. Don’t let the door hit you in your flat ass on your way out…but still it hurt. My take-away from that was…why do I still choose so poorly? That’s been going on for most of my life, and still I ignore the red flags and the craziness and narcissists feed at my trough like food was going out of style. I think my strategy at this point has been to just fly under everybody’s radar, keep low, stay down…and stay the hell away from just about everybody. Not sure if that is actually working, or if I’m just not out there enough to figure it out. Topic #2 for a later time. (What good is procrastination if I can’t make it work for me?)

So, as I was meditating earlier, before the annoying group discussion about compassion, I was getting in touch with my ancestors. That’s a fairly regular part of my so-called practice, and I’ve been very much in touch with the great-grandmother who committed suicide. I have conversational-type thoughts about her, and this morning I said to her that I wanted to know the whole story of how she made the decision to end her life, what had caused her so much pain that she couldn’t go on. And the answer that came back was…you know the story. You’ve always known that story. The he-said-she-said chronology of the events in that life are just details, but you’ve always know that story of pain so sharp, so debilitating, so paralyzing that you can’t breathe. You’ve always know how it feels to have no place to go. And so I do. So I do know that pain…but I’ve done something different I suppose. That woman, whose name was Sylvia, had pain passed on to her by her ancestors. She passed it on to her son, my grandfather. He passed it on to my father. My father passed it on to me. And I have always know that it ends with me. Or at least I hope it does. There is no reason for it to continue. None whatsoever. If that is the reason I am here, to be the last link in that chain, then so be it. The ancestors who brought forth Sylvia, and all of who Sylvia brought forth, all of those people came together for me to be here right now. I have jokingly said that I must have wanted to get here really badly if I brought together such an incredibly dysfynctional family to plop me down where I was born. When I’ve had that thought before, I’ve always followed it up with a wondering…what the hell was I thinking???

What the hell WAS I thinking, I ask. Who the hell knows, but I should probably figure out what the hell I AM thinking now. What I’m thinking now is that I have something to do here, and I keep expecting that to be a conscious, linear course of action. For every day that I am still alive, I am more and more convinced that is not to be the case. I think whatever I have to do is going to be one of those exercise in throwing pasta against the wall, and whatever sticks, stick with it. Or something like that. I am going with chaos, I suppose, somewhat intentionally. I feel that I should be writing, not putting together jigsaw puzzles for some faceless corporate entity that doesn’t give a damn about my life. I should be using my voice, or the pen, to do something that makes some kind of a difference to somebody, somewhere, even if it’s just to me. At least I think that’s what I’m hearing. Of course, it could just be the television, or the rain, or the dog, or my stomach growling. As long as it’s not that horrible sucking sound that I used to hear all the time…the sound of my spirit being fragmented and going down the drain. That would not be a good thing.

I don’t know any more. I don’t know any more, less every day. Don’t care anymore what I know, or don’t know, if ever I did. There was a writing prompt that asked me to consider if I felt connected, connected other people, connected to the world. If not, why? And…was there a time when I felt more connected? Well, hell, I don’t know anymore. I could not know less, I don’t think. Feeling connected…I’m not entirely sure what that means. I’ve always felt somewhat detached from just about everything at some point. My persistent overlay is obligation. At any given time, I’m doing whatever it is that I am doing because I am more or less obligated to do so. The obligation probably arises from some choice that I’ve made, but sometimes I feel that my choices are themselves obligatory. I suppose I don’t feel that I own my Self entirely. Very strange, if you ask me.

But…I am asking me. Why is it that I don’t feel as though I own my Self? I suppose it’s an old habit to feel that way, back when I was a kid and felt that I had no privacy, even in my own thoughts. Always hiding, always furtively covering up some part of how I was really living, what I was really doing. If you knew what I was really thinking, mommy, you would hate me like you hate my daddy. If anybody knew who I really was they would realize that I am A. Bad. Person and should be…I don’t know…destroyed. Or something. Every aspect of discipline and how I walked through the world was based on “you don’t see anybody else doing that, do you?”. No, I didn’t see anybody else afraid to order candy from the candy counter, but then I didn’t really see anybody doing much of anything. We were pretty isolated…didn’t have parties or lots of visitors, weren’t constantly going to visit other people. I think when I was really young we did…we’d go to see my father’s brother and sister, and my cousins. Sometimes they’d visit us. I remember us going to City Park and having picnics some times, me and all my cousins. I don’t remember being tense about anything, about doing anything wrong, until…sometimes…on the way home, or back at the house, when it was just me and them. There was always some kind of critique of the interactions, and usually I was chided for having said or done something out of line, said the wrong thing, was too “sassy” to an adult, was too smart alecky, something. Always something. I came to anticipate that post-event critique, and I think it did afford me a bit of anxiety. No matter. Other families do that, you know, and you don’t see them getting all upset about it, now do you? Go ask them. You’ll find out, you big baby.

Pretty early on, it was more about me not measuring up to what experts agreed I should be doing, or saying, or being. Later, while I stayed a focal point of the analysis, things got way more tense between my parents. That was good in a way, because I could just slip away and occupy myself in my room, but it was also bad in a more profound way. They would get to arguing about something, usually my mother taking exception to something my father had said or done or thought (yes, she was a psychic, that woman) or something he didn’t do or didn’t say or didn’t think. That was pretty nuts, especially since he rarely said 10 words during the whole harangue, but it would go on…and on…and fuckin on. Hours. I would sometimes go to sleep when they had been at it for a couple of hours, and wake up the next morning with the argument still going strong. I don’t know how my father held a job all that time, seeing as how he didn’t get a lot of sleep. But, this was the model I had for a relationship. You chose a partner for any number of reasons, not the least of which was obligation, and then you proceeded to let them know they weren’t worth much of anything and they were of no value to you or anyone else, for that matter. OK, yeah. Got it. Love has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

Did I feel connected back then, to anything? I suppose I did, because I didn’t know how to disconnect. These people were in my head, in my space, in my sould…all the time. I’m sure that’s pretty much the case for any family unit, but when their occupation of your persona is more a menace than a Pleasant Valley Sunday (that’s a Monkee’s song, from the late 60s or early 70s I think, and it’s been in my head a lot for some reason). I always felt like I was living a double life, even then, because I understood clearly they were putting up a front to the outside world. I was always petrified that if I had people over they would see what a lie we lived – we didn’t have money, or nice things, no good toys, no big television set for watching cartoons or movies. I’m still kind of like that, fearing that people will know who I am if they ever come over here and saw how I really live. But I digress….

This whole issue of feeling that when left to my own devices, in my own habitat as it were, I am more or less a different person than who I present as socially. It’s a learned behavior for the most part, a response to all that tension and pretense. Everyone, to this day, believes my mother to have been a gracious and well mannered lady, sweet and kind, and totally in your corner if you were one of her students. Her lawyer said she had class. I always felt that I was keeping a mammoth secret from the whole rest of the world, because when people said those things to me, I smiled politely and nodded. But I was ashamed, because I felt that I was lying. I knew they would have been incredulous if they could have seen her throwing a bag of fudge from the Sears candy counter on the floor, and then jumping up and down on it repeatedly while cussing my father out in the most vile fashion possible. She was angry because he had bought the fudge, and brought it home for us all to enjoy, and it had pecans or walnuts in it. She berated him shamefully for that, accusing him of purposely bringing home something she couldn’t eat…he KNEW she had no gall bladder and couldn’t eat nuts, so he had done that on purpose, just to screw with her. That was her story. I don’t recall him making a rebuttal, but he was most definitely a man of few words under normal circumstances, let alone having a crazy woman jumping on a bag on fudge. He retreated to the bedroom, she followed, and I picked up the bag of flattened fudge and at the whole thing. It was pretty good fudge, and peeled off the slightly waxy inside paper of the bag. It was a good day.

Peace was not a commodity that we dealt in, my family. I never knew that was a desired outcome, because I had no frame of reference for it. All I knew was that it took a lot of effort to live in that house, and to get through any given day. After my father left the house to live elsewhere, I thought it would get easier, but it really didn’t. My mother turned a lot of her rage and frustration on me, and so I assumed the role of a surrogate spouse in many respects. Fortunately, that role did not call for violation of any sexual boundaries. Fortunately. But the remainder of my child’s role and my parents’ roles were entirely inappropriate, and hopelessly enmeshed. It was normal, so I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal for everyone else. I knew something wasn’t right, though, but had no vocabulary with which to express that. So…when kids don’t know how to say what’s wrong, or how to fight against it, they act out. So I did. All things considered, I was pretty ineffective and mild – never got hauled home by the police, never got kicked out of school, never got thrown out of school or out of any extracurricular activities. But it was pretty stressful, with just about everything I did or didn’t do bumped up against the litmus test of whether or not my mother would find out. If she did, I didn’t even want to think about what might happen, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

Fear of my mother kept me more or less in line for much of my life. That was not entirely a bad thing, but it was entirely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I didn’t manage to get into unredeemable, or at least undoable, situations. I didn’t have life-changing consequences, like jail time or anything. But, the lines I stayed within were entirely her lines, not my own, and so I complied out of obligation and not so much agreement – or even understanding at times – that compliance was a good thing. Oppositional defiance was a constant gleam in my eye, and remains so. I’m sure I was born with those wires crossed, but there was good conductivity for the short circuit. Obligatory morality, obligatory compliance, obligatory thoughts. I still function quite a bit on obligation, but I resent the hell out of it, then as now.

So, did I feel connected to things back then? I don’t know if I felt connection or just a resignation to the routine. The routine didn’t fulfill me, but it met expectations because other than wanting to join the roller derby (without, of course, being able to skate) I really had no dreams. When I did, they were made light of because they didn’t conform to practical…obligations. I was supposed to aspire to making a living, like everybody else did, being respectable, Going to church, having a family of my own, blah blah and blah. Obligations. That’s how I got here in the first place…my parents felt obligated to do what was expected of them, to get married and be respectable. Until they couldn’t keep up the obligation any longer, at least not my father, and then it was a flash-bang and hey, Rocky – watch me pull a rabbit outta my hat, said Bullwinkle. And he did. And then he disappeared entirely. Joke was on us.

I have no coherent idea why this is all coming up in response to a prompt about being connected, but there it is. I am not going anywhere today…it’s already 4pm, and I have not interacted with another living human all day. And that’s fine. Some days it just be like that. Tomorrow will be different…it will be Monday (another Manic Monday) and that, of course, will be different from today, which is Sunday. I feel a little tired today, actually, feeling some hangover from that all-day conference yesterday. All day on Zoom is more tiring than people realize, because your focus and concentration are honed to such a fine point in space and time. My eyes are really tired, and my brain kind of hurts a little. So, I’m fine with hibernating for today. I didn’t even logon to the Fellowship’s service this morning. Just didn’t have the heart.

Another rainy Sunday, here in America. My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I … of thee I … grieve. Mourn. Wail. A COVID relief bill has just passed in the House of Representatives, with not one vote of support from GOP members. At nearly the same time, people were flocking to witness the unveiling of a gold likeness of the former POTUS, snapping pictures of themselves with it, cheesy smiles all around (including the idol). At exactly the same time, Americans were contemplating how they would eat in the next 24-hour period. They were juggling meager resources to provide basic life essentials for themselves and their families, things like shelter and medication, no big whoop. But let’s have the privileged line up for a photo opportunity with an inanimate symbol of conspicuous consumption, in some bizarre parallel dimension that is not the Twilight Zone, but America…in 20221…a dimension of sight, and sound, and competing planes of reality based on outdated notions of worth and value and success. This is the flypaper zone…or possibly the roach motel…once you enter, you can’t get out.

I suppose that’s the question I have – can we get out of the roach motel? SHOULD we get out? I’m sure many of us would unequivocally say yes, of course we should get out…WE should get out, but not…those people over there. Not the ones who steal, or use drugs, or the kind of crazy ones that we can’t trust…the ones who won’t work, who think everybody should have health care. Not them. And to be fair, there’s an equal and opposite faction that believes those with disposable income, and good salaries, and entitlements like health care and life insurance…THEY are the ones who should have their feet glued down and make no further progress. Who wins? Who decides the winner? This is when a super-hero is needed, but which one? AquaMan? WonderWoman? Super Man. Bat Man…with or without the Boy Wonder. Black Panther? There would be a new civil war over the nature of super-hero rescue, and … we would be doomed. What an ignominious vision of the future.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, like within the first 36 hours, the Red Cross distributed direct aid to survivors in the form of fixed limit debit cards that could be used to purchase food, clothing, gas, and to satisfy other immediate needs. My mother, who was near 70 at the time, dutifully stood in line for a card, and they asked her a few questions about how many people were with her, and some personal data. She answered truthfully (you’d have to have know my mother, she was a VERY good girl) and they handed her a $200 card. When she reported this to my oldest cousin, her niece, the firebrand of the family said, and I quote, “Oh, HELL no.” and took my mother by the hand to revisit the folks in charge. My cousin, who is not a terribly large woman, drug my mother back up there, no waiting in line required, and angrily confronted the “management” about giving such a paltry sum to a senior citizen who had nobody to look out for her and no other resources for who knows how long. Dammit. My mother came back with another card, with double the spending limit.

I would have left with the $200 card and probably starved under a bridge a few days later. Who decides, and how? I was raised on the credo that “It’s not what you know, but WHO you know”. Who decides? Who do you have to know? How much is it going to cost to get what you need – not what you want, but what you need? My mother eventually came here to NC, a bedraggled waif in oversized sweat pants and sloppy tee-shirt after the hurricane, because she was basically homeless, and penniless. The debit card had long since been exhausted, and it was still less than a week past the hurricane. I shudder to think what might have become of her if I had not been able to provide a place for her to escape; it would be nearly a year before she was able to return to New Orleans and begin the process of rebuilding (her choice). There were literally horror stories about people with kids, and infirm family members, who did not make out nearly as well…I’m not sure anyone has properly counted the deaths brought on by the trauma after the trauma as people ran into one wall after another in the effort to recover. Some never did, some have never been able to go home, the heart of the city is still broken.

There are some parts of a broken heart that can never be restored…the cracks remain, and the life blood leaks. There’s a tenuous hold on life once you realize how fragile it really is. You also realize there’s just no such thing as getting things “back to normal, back to the way it used to be”. Time has marched on while you were down, while your life was in pieces and other people argued about what to do with it. If you thought you were powerless before this catastrophe, you don’t have words to describe this fresh, new Hell. Nobody should dare wonder how or why the rate of opioid overdose has skyrocketed. Nobody.

I am wondering (always a bad idea, I am beginning to believe) where my mother is right now. Do people who have passed on do so with their full consciousness intact, or is their essence merely reconstituted as part of the Whole? Of course, there is really no answer to this, and I am welcome to believe whatever I choose to believe. As is true for everyone. I go back and forth with this question, and I’m sure I am not alone.

At this point in my life, I don’t require a definitive answer, or conclusion, about this. I don’t need to check this off my bucket list and go on to the next item, which is probably something experiential and entirely selfish. I don’t have a huge issue with not having answers to some of life’s more esoteric questions, but I do require that I’m allowed to choose what I believe. I require the agency to do my own exploration, and to change my mind. Repeatedly change my mind. What I can’t tolerate is choosing to believe something on the basis of believing the source of the information rather than the conclusion itself. This is why I can’t be a member of a credal religion. If I choose to believe in a deity, or some statement of belief and a historical or philosophical account, it’s because I believe in that philosophy and that world view. Not because I believe in a human who tells me about/explains, teaches that accounting, and narrates that world view. Not because that is all I have ever known about how the world functions and my place in that. Not because I had no questions, didn’t debate philosophical inconsistencies (and theologies are rife with them), came to my own conclusions. I came here with a brain, and the least I can do is use it (sometimes badly, but whatever).

The role of the blind, unquestioning acceptance of religious tenets has been translated to political arenas successfully, and that’s not new. That’s not a necessarily dangerous situation, until it is. Until it becomes the rationalization and justification of things like Matthew Shepard’s murder, of things like Ahmad Arbery’s murder, of lynchings, of cross burnings, of coup d’etat (successful or merely attempted). Not until it becomes someone’s interpretation of religious “law” and justification of beheading journalists and supposed enemies of the state. Until we begin to manipulate reality, and simply say no when the facts say yes, or yes when the facts and the data and the evidence says no. Until we begin to argue about the definition of fact, the burden of proof for evidence, and ultimately debate what is truth. I’m not sure truth is in the eyes of the beholder. That’s beauty. That’s subjective. Facts are not supposed to be subjective – that’s why they are facts, as opposed to beliefs, or thoughts. Just because I think something doesn’t make it true, except in these strange times. Apparently, I can define something as true when I have enough relational power to have a critical mass of support that agrees. There’s something wrong with that picture, in my not so humble opinion.

I’ve said many times in the past that wanting the world to change, wanting something different, isn’t good enough. We can spend all day talking about what’s wrong, what needs to happen, what’s broken, blah blah blah. That’s easy. What’s more difficult is describing what things look like when they’re fixed, when the world is perfect. No matter how fantastic, how improbable, how impossible. Sometimes you’re very big, and sometimes you’re very small. Imagine the right is wrong and the wrong is right. Imagine that black and white make green. What if everybody had high speed internet and a working computer? What if there was high-speed rail running parallel to the interstate highway system, so that going from Miami to New York was as simple as going from 5th Avenue to the Bronx? When there is poverty of the mind, of the imagination, the first thing to go is dreams, imagination, the “what if” questions. To sleep, and perchance to dream….

A part of the world I dream is really pretty selfish, I suppose…but I really want a world where people tell me the truth, are kind to me, gentle with me, and see me for who I am and not what I look like or what I can do for them. I understand that people like pretty things, like useful things. I am not pretty, and useful only some of the time. I am not a mannequin or a machine, so I have my limitations. Sometimes, after running up the down escalator, I get to the next level. Tiring, but it’s a totally different perspective and is more challenging than simply following the usual prescription for the journey. What is a journey without challenge, without at least a change of scenery? I would assume this is why our bodies have muscle mass – to serve us well during the journey.

I know a few things about myself, like I don’t handle rejection well, or say the right things at the right time, like my mouth is frequently uncontrollable. Sometimes I use the wrong fork at dinner, or abandon utensils entirely and eat with my hands (thin fried catfish is simply unwieldy under the confines of a fork). I have been told I am a good friend, that i listen well, that I give comfort well. People generally understand that I give a damn about them, sometimes to the point of overkill. It perplexes me that I am constantly giving on a particular level of loving kindness, or whatever the buzz phrase of the month is, but do not receive love or kindness in return on that same level. It feels as though I am playing a 3-dimensional game of chess, and so moves are made and countered on different levels, and require a great deal of coordination. A move could be made and countered appropriately, but not at the same level, and never the twain shall meet in traditional geometry. Perhaps that is the answer I’m looking for…to play 3-dimensional chess, a player must widen their scope of vision, be able to see a bigger picture, be able to visualize a more complex strategy. The problem, however, is that I’m really not trying to play a game. I looking to navigate my world with as much grace and dignity as I can, if that love stuff didn’t throw me off course so often.

Relationships on a 3-dimensional playing field. That’s an interesting concept, actually, and I suppose my only resistance to it (aside from the afore-mentioned denial of game playing) is a) everyone is not able to make the leap from one dimension to three, and b) why the EFF does it have to be that complicated? I’ve been working on mapping some internal mechanisms lately, and the question of love consistently arises…do I know what love really is, am I capable of it, how does that actually feel? When I felt that I was in love, it maybe it was merely infatuation, or strong (incredibly strong) liking. It’s always obsessive, and very fast, and I am simply giddy with excitement. The sex part gets all screwed up in there somehow…I have this weird notion that whether or not I want to have sex with someone that I am liking, if it’s not an open option the relationship feels incomplete and I have been summarily rejected. What the FUCK is that all about? Where did I get that? How can I get rid of that?

I want my brain to be able to receive and purge data dumps on demand, much like my smart phone or my laptop. Here user – your upgrade is ready…download…install. The programming will take care of deleting the old version and installing the new one, and it will clean up after itself by removing duplicated and unwanted bits of data that would cause operational problems, or are simply not needed. The user doesn’t really have to fool with much of it, just initiate the process and it runs. It’ll let you know when it’s done, and from then on you can use the device with all of its new bells and whistles and just drive on.

Unfortunately, a smart phone is a dumb electronic device…it can’t talk back, it doesn’t have conditional memory, it doesn’t tire of repetition. People, however, are dumb organic devices…they not only talk back, they have conditional operations in general, and they are easily fatigued by lack of variety, lack of refreshment. They are fickle and inconsistent, but they have opposable digits that seem to set them apart from all else. Pains in the arse, these humans. We like to be in control of things, so how do I know that download is not doing something I don’t want it to do? How do I know what it’s doing at all? Wait, that sounds like Q-Anon stuff. Have I been assimilated? I’m told resistance is futile…no, wait…that’s the Borg on Star Trek. Hang on – I may need to reboot to clear all this detritus from my mine field.

Hold on, this is a mostly disconnected thought process this morning, but coming up…I have always wished for someone that I loved with wild abandon, childish exuberance, recklessness. They would love me the same way in return, fearlessly. They would not be frightened off by my weirdness, illogic, seeming moodiness, neediness, anxiety that leads to irritability. And I would return that in like fashion. Or would I? I have always thought it takes some guts to love me the way I want, or need, to be loved. Do I have the guts to love someone else like that, or do I expect perfection, only to fade away when the thrill of newness is gone? Sometimes I wonder about that. Maybe that’s the question I need to answer before I start asking why I’ve never found the love I dream of, or whatever I think that is. Judging by the relative incompetence of my attempts to explain all of this, I suppose I haven’t got a clue.

I am starting on a course, or seminar, or whatever they want to call it, with my community of faith. It’s called “Beloved Conversations”, and is offered by a theological seminary out of Chicago, the Meadville Lombard Theological School. They’re relatively progressive, and graduates have been ordained en masse by United Church of Christ and the Unitarian Universalist Association. From everything I’ve heard, they’re academically sound, and the faculty is high quality. So. This course is supposed to help people journey toward racial equity by encouraging self-exploration and exploring the roots of bias. This is a spiritually based approach to helping folks begin to figure out how we got here, to this place of division and polarization, and how we can get to a new place. Sounds good. I’ve heard from folks who have taken it that it IS good, so here I go. It looks good so far, but I’m still in the pre-course work, and everything looks good. I’m very open to it, though, so hope that it will live up to the hype.

The state of affairs in which the nation finds itself is…kind of silly, in my unsolicited opinion. Collectively, we have bigger fish to fry than worrying about the tweets of someone who has been nominated for a cabinet post. Tweets from several years ago, mind you. Tweets that did not even begin to approach the savage cruelty and high levels of disinformation that our last POTUS broadcast on the daily. Hypocrisy is a negative force unto itself, and it’s going to be taking a big chunk of ass out of more than a few people on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, timing is everything, and I may not get to witness the carnage, but I’m sure it will happen.

My big question, though, is why is all this necessary? I seriously wonder if this is solely a question of power, privilege, elitism or if there’s something deeper going on with people who make a career out of self-centered hypocrisy. I’m beginning to lean toward the latter these days, and must allow room to include mental dysfunction in my assessment. I would imagine that it’s not sane, or at least not mentally healthy, to refuse to budge from a point of proven falsehood. Proven. With documented evidence. It’s like denying the sky is blue, or the grass is green, because at some moments in time the sky appears grey and the grass appears brown, so there. The whole premise that says the sky is blue is a lie. By all means, let’s plan around the exceptions rather than the rule. Yeah, that’s productive.

Anyway, notwithstanding the nonsense of current events…I was thinking about my father yesterday, and this morning. He died at 68, of I don’t even know what…complications from diabetes, I believe the death certificate said. He had a pacemaker, so his heart had apparently begun to cause him problems well before that. I wasn’t very involved in his life when he began to decline, so don’t know exactly how the health issues emerged or how they were handled. What I do know, not so much from medical reports as my heart, is that he was a profoundly unhappy man. I get that. That huge void lives in me as well, so I understand him being so unhappy. His mother died not very long after giving birth to him, and from what I understand, his siblings cruelly – in that truly horrific way that children can be cruel – blamed him, saying that it was his birth that killed her. I remember him saying that he was raised on the streets, even though he had a stable home and food on the table. He said he was hanging out on the street corners smoking cigarettes at 14, just … out there, no particular place to go. Just out there.

My father graduated from high school just fine, and went on to a Louisiana HBCU. He graduated from there, with a degree in music. Played the clarinet. From all of the pictures I’ve seen, he was a thin, not too tall, good looking guy with hazel-green eyes and wavy brown hair. He and my mother were introduced by some distant cousin of my mother’s, I believe, and tongues started to wag about what a good couple they would make. I’ve never been sure there were sparks flying between the two of them, but more between everybody else in the family. And it was mostly my mother’s family, since my father’s siblings were doing their own thing, and their father had abandoned them to his sister and taken off for California. The grieving widower left to start a new life of his own, without his children, without any responsibility. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.

I will intentionally digress here, for a moment, to say that my father’s father, my grandfather, was even more of an unhappy soul. The few times I met him, I remember him being somewhat distant, austere, formal. He was a handsome man, but very stiff. Stood up very straight, even when sitting in a chair. A smile never quite reached his hairline, although his lips curled and his eyes softened a bit, if I remember correctly. What I found out many, many years later was my grandfather’s mother – my great-grandmother – had committed suicide when he was still a baby. She had apparently conceived him through some kind of illicit relationship with a man who remains somewhat a mystery to all of us, but who abandoned her. I’m not sure if the man left the picture before or after my grandfather was born, but whenever it was, he faded into the woodwork and left my great-grandmother with few resources. Somehow, and of course there are no records about this, she drew up a will that stipulated my grandfather was to be raised and adopted by a neighboring family, who had children of their own but were more than willing to agree to this. So, when my great-grandmother did commit suicide, in 1900 I think, my grandfather went to a new family and assumed their surname, which I carry as well.

My grandfather was a little boy when all of this happened, but at some point he was made aware of how he came to be, and felt quite…abandoned, I would imagine. He was an adopted child, and his mother had committed suicide before he even knew her. My story is that he retreated, keeping to himself, sucking all of the unwantedness into himself. As an adult, he produced a brood of children – my father’s siblings – but I’m not sure how much of the child-rearing fell to him. My father’s mother most likely did much of that duty, until she died. And then my father’s world fell apart, before he even knew what it was. His father left, and he was raised as one of not only five siblings but really ten, because his father entrusted them to the care of an aunt. The aunt, who I remember, took care of their physical needs and made sure they were clothed and went to school, but nurturing…not sure that woman had it in her. Plus she had ten – TEN – children to raise. My grandfather sent money. Yay him! But this is why my father was hanging out on the street smoking cigarettes at 14.

So, by the time my parents got married, which in my book should NEVER have happened, my father was already well established in the pattern of avoidance, and going around any obstacle he might encounter. He was not a mean person, but he also just didn’t engage on any emotional level. As I said earlier, his world fell apart when he we very young, and his father abandoned him. Just like my world fell apart when I was still pretty young, because my father abandoned me. Just like my great-grandmother’s world fell apart when she was still a young woman, pregnant, when her man abandoned HER. The pattern…goes on, long past its origin. My father couldn’t give to me what he did not have, what he had never experienced. I don’t excuse him for that, because his siblings didn’t do what he did, his friends didn’t do what he did. But he couldn’t deal, and he went around the problem, and kept going. It has taken me a really, really long time to forgive him, and I’m not sure I have forgiven him entirely. He gave me a lot of things I needed to make it this far, and so I am grateful. I told him this when I had “the Talk” with him in the ICU before he died. But…did it have to be THIS fucking painful? He could have done better, even from the simple point of paying his child support when I was still a legal minor. Just that might have made me feel a little better, like maybe he gave a shit. I think he really did give a shit, but I’ve had to figure that out on my own, not because he did things to let me know that. I had to make all the moves, when I got old enough, when I got sober enough, when it had started to hurt too bad to keep hating him.

I don’t hate him any longer, but I still have this overwhelming cloud of … why? Just why? What the hell were you thinking? I see so much of him in myself, and it alternately gives me some kind of closure and pisses me off entirely. The same is true of my mother, but for different reasons. I see myself in her, and it explains quite a lot and then makes me want to break things. Those are times when I don’t feel like I’ll ever be “right”, like I’m damaged and can’t be fixed. I will say those times are less and less frequent, but sometimes I do feel as though I’m just not “right”, that I see things and experience things so differently than everyone else that I will always be standing alone. Sometimes I enjoy standing alone, but figure like it’s just a consequence of stubbornly refusing to break, to give way, to yield. I can’t, when I feel as though someone wants to break my spirit. I give a lot of ground up to that point, and then it’s just…done. And I can’t go back.

Frequently, that position costs me, sometimes financially but most often emotionally. It costs me emotionally when I feel that I can’t play well with others, can’t compromise, can’t work in a team. I’m not sure all that’s true, but it feels that way in the middle of the storm. When the storm is still raging, my rage protects me, because it is simply too painful to feel the guillotine come down, even if for only a split second. My rage protects me, but it also excludes any salve or balm that might comfort me. I want to curl up in a fetal position under a blanket and hide, protecting myself from any further onslaught. That’s what it feels like. What it looks like to the outside world is…oh, she’s fine. She’s upset now, but she’ll get over it in no time. She’s just mad, but she’s tough. And so, they listen to what I say and what they believe my body language says, and they stand back. I’ve always wished for one – just one – person to not stand back, to stand up to me, to not give into their alleged “fear” of the big angry stuffed animal and refuse to let that pass. That horrible sucking sound is not rainwater in the gutters, it’s me going down the drain is waht I want to scream. There have only been one or two people in my whole life who have not stood down. They know who they are, and they are very rare souls. I’m lucky to have them. Maybe that should be enough, I don’t know.

So, back to my father…he’s more typical of people who choose to be intimidated by people who are passionately demomstrative (nice words, eh?) and will let loose with their feelings. I thought I was numb many years ago, and I suppose that I was, but could still exhibit volcanic rage. That may still be the case, I’m not sure. Maybe nothing has pierced my skin quite deeply enough to bring about rage. It’s the rage of impotence, I think…the rage that says I have these deep, incredibly deep, feelings and I can go nowhere with them. I have no place to go. Again…I have no place to go. Is that truth?

At the moment of the meltdown, it is entirely true, and the moment of the meltdown is where the bulk of my work must done. I can analyze, realize, rationalize, theorize, all in retrospect, but when the chips are down and the reaction is blowing off the top of the mountain, that moment is showing me exactly who I am, at my core. That default, knee jerk response – when I am feeling that my survival is threatened – that’s who I am way down deep. That’s my burning core. I have not always liked what I see there, have not been proud of what spews out when the top blows. So, that’s how deep I have to go with making changes in my Self. That’s how deep it is. It’s a scary, dark place…but I have to keep going because it’s all I’ve got. Can’t have the light without the darkness, or so I’m told.