Far Too Long

Fatigue turned to stultification, turned to stagnation, turned to a mundane stasis.  Isn’t that always the way, though?  But no matter, time to get back up on the horse.  It is time to flush the poisons away and stop wallowing.

The cycle must start over, as it does.  It is my sincere opinion that I took things too far on the 999 ritual day, but it also sped along a process that had been a long time coming.  I needed a magical detox to sort myself out, nothing getting between me and Buddhist truth of it all.  And when the truth came, I found the weak points and probed them to see where they gave.  All things considered, I would call it successful.

It did bring up a multitude issues–issues I thought I had conquered and issues I never thought I had before.  It forced me to be solid with my discriminating eye, and turn it inward again in a way I had not for years.  Things started to boil up from the deep black Shadows that I had yet to confront, and I would be made a liar if I did not say I jerked my knee and tried to run.

I tried to hide, even.  Obviously that did not work out.  I had to come to terms with the reality of my life, and it frightened me.  I saw my life for what it had become, not what it was, and I was dissatisfied (to understate things mildly).  Jobless, depressed, addicted, far from responsible, and going nowhere.  I felt spurned by my own lacking, and it bloodied my ego.

In truth, I felt out of control.  As the winter crept in, I felt a dull and careless frenzy set in that warned of the crash to come.  Careless of self, of body, of situation, of improvement, of freedom, of growth, of light.  It reinforced the seemingly inescapable nature of my situation, and it started to crush me.  Maybe at this point, as the Sun has begun it’s return, I can admit it was what I needed, no matter how painful it was.  Nevertheless, I felt true suffering like I had not felt in nearly a decade, and it colored this winter with darkness, hidden fecundity through putrefaction, confusion, blindness, self, and slow time.  This winter, Saturn came to visit.  I tasted his harvest blade again.  I sat in the Dark, and was alone again.

I was a misery, and the only way out was to embrace what came.  One thing that struck me more profoundly than before was my need for honesty.  Honesty with myself and honesty with the universe.  Honesty with those I love.

In the pursuit of honesty with myself I quit smoking cigarettes.  In pursuit of honesty with the universe, I reified my understanding of the First Noble Truth and encountered my karma as I had not before.  In pursuit of honesty with those I love, I made sure to tell the people in my life how much they meant to me, and not be restrained about showing them my affection.  I also came clean with my parents about the cigarettes, and made sure they had no illusions about my partaking of the Fruit of the Ganges.

This was something I had never seen as problematic before, but that changed.  I realize now that my relationship with Lady Ganja could tenuously be considered “healthy,” but that frequently my imbibing of Her was, in fact, unhealthy.  In the pursuit of honesty with myself, I had to admit to myself that I act like an addict every time I use Her as a crutch, every time She comes between me and Me, every time She amplifies my confusion, every time She keeps me from being the crazy/unstable/ungrounded live wire that I am when I’m sober.  I had to admit to myself that exchanging my sober self for normalcy and socially acceptable behavior was not always healthy, not always called-for, not always a good idea, and not always right.  If I am to be honest with myself, I need to be myself and not some Diet, edited for TV version of Me.

I also had to admit to myself that I know very few people who are not in the same boat I am.  Friends, family, neighbors, strangers.  I had to admit that the people in my life, even the people who “don’t do drugs,” are just as addicted and deluded as I, and that my non-normative activity produces a Shadow Reaction in them.  Though they see me as an addict, they also drink every day, take psychotropic pharmaceuticals, and run away from themselves through media and sedation.

I also had to admit that I, in fact, am not that bad off, and be able to forgive myself for my faults.  I had to admit that forgiveness is one of the most important things we can do as people, and that forgiving yourself is always harder than forgiving others, but always more important.  After the suicide of a very close friend early in the new year, the importance of forgiveness became undeniable to me.  He was always real, always true to himself, and always honest with other.  But he could not forgive himself, and eventually it deteriorated his capacity to forgive the world for being painful, and others for being weak.  Even with his immense capacity for goodness, truth, and valiant selflessness, he got lost in the First Truth to the exclusion of others.  It is my true hope that he found the peace and forgiveness he needed so much.

Crying out the pain was the only way to cure the sickness I felt at that point, and so it was.  I cried for weeks, but on the other side of the tears the Sun was rising, shining in the blue sky, and the world was real again.  Things started falling as they should.  I got a job at a local cafe busing tables, stayed away from the nicotine, removed the vampiric and unhelpful people from my day to day life, started working on the faults I knew I could control, and began the process of forgiving myself for the faults over which I had little say.

I re-started my search for graduate schools, and found one most promising program at a university in Houston!  Now, it seems, I may not even have to leave America to get the education I want!  With that knowledge in mind, I began researching new topics, reading new materials, and picking up my practice again.  Now for the hard part: cleaning my room.

To new beginning, and making sure I don’t leave this page unfilled for far too long yet again.

Pax,

V:.I:.T:.R:.I:.O:.L:. / 999 / eleventhustwo

Couldn’t Leave Well Enough Alone

The whole situation was 120% fucked up in unacceptable ways.  I couldn’t let my little brother take the fall for this family.  It wasn’t going to happen.  He called me last night after I had ordered a hoagie, the plan being that I’d have my hoagie and watch a movie and forget about the events of the day.  He was obviously upset and in need of someone to talk to, so I told Beej that he should go get the hoagies and I’d be back in like 20, I just had to talk to my brother.  I went and picked him up and we went for a drive around King of Prussia.  He was very sad, very upset.  He seemed lost and didn’t know what to do or where to go from where he was.  He had mentioned that he felt forced, like he had no other options, to help my dad move out. He said that if he didn’t do it, it would never get done, and that he was just going to tough it out–and then he started crying.

My wings came out and my protective nature kicked in.  He didn’t -have to- do it.  He wasn’t responsible for that.  He’s a child, a young man about to have the summer before his senior year of high school.  There’s no reason a kid should feel responsible for the well-being of his adults; that’s just not right.  And the emotional ammunition of moving memories out of a house you love…the trauma was unacceptable.  To help his father make himself scarce at the edge of seventeen is a hot hell he didn’t deserve.  He shouldn’t have to bite the bullet, not this time.

I went home and told my mom that he was very upset, and that it was not in his best interest to be moving things out this weekend.  He had an invitation to go to the Poconos with friends from school this weekend after the prom, and him not being here to see this whole situation occur was, in his opinion, a better option for his own mental cohesion than helping my dad move to Maryland.  My mom had no idea.  Danny had apparently not told anyone else how he felt, which I can understand.  He wanted to be there for his parents, he wanted to be there for his family, he could come second.  He was thinking selflessly.  Usually this is a course of action I’m in favor in, but this was just too inhuman for that.  He needed to take his own feelings into consideration.

I offered to make the call, I figured my dad would listen to my logic more readily that he would listen to my mom.  This was an incorrect assumption.  His thought patterns were self-centered to such a degree that everything else had fallen by the wayside.  He started making statements I hope he didn’t mean.  He lied to me, told me my brother was excited to do it (this while the same brother is audibly crying in the background).  He started calling me “the only problem that existed in this scenario.”  He said I couldn’t know how it was because I hadn’t been around.  He was apparently under the impression that he wasn’t moving out, but just “moving some of his things from one place to another.”  He started pulling mal-formed statements from the broken circuits in his head.  He started patching biosurvival insufficiencies into my actions in the best interest of my brother.  He started making threats of not leaving.  He started pulling underhanded emotional circuit rhetoric about how my action were making him into a fool.  He started pulling unfounded moral circuit cries of injustices done to him.  His rational circuit was totally let out, short circuiting.  He tried to make it about money and support.  He said that I’d fucked him. He was feeling (which i supposes his a definite step forward, anger and any emootion is better than no emotion at all).

I told him there was an entire profession of people that work on an as-needed basis moving things.  He wouldn’t hear any of it.  He said he couldn’t schedule it even if he had the money for it.  I said he could as his friends.  He said what friends?  Which ones?  He said he couldn’t even ask his closest friends to do this for him on such short notice.  I reiterated, the moving trade is a spur of  the moment kind of things, and that for a couple hundred bucks he could have it done more quickly than my brother and a friend could’ve gotten it done.  He said that now he had to do it all by himself.

I let him sit in silence.  This was one of his favorite moves when I was younger, acting like a bratty child, I figured he’d see where I was coming from and what I was actually trying to do.  I’m not trying to fuck him, I’m not trying to mess his life up.  I’m not working for my mother, I’m not trying to make his existence any more difficult than it has to be.  I was looking out for my brother.  I was keeping him from being hurt, something which apparently my parents had neglected to pay attention to.  It just wasn’t part of either of their pictures.  They had not considered how badly this would have effected either of us.

This brought him to a further fury, just like it had me all the times he’d used it on me when I was acting irrationally and immaturely.  He lost his handle on the situation.  I tried to explaiin to him, I’m not trying to make his life hell.  I’m not trying to hurt him.  God, if there were anything I wanted less than  for someone in my family to come to harm I don’t really know what it would be.  But the way I figured it, this entire scenario was 120% percent fucked up, and if i could do one thing right, if I could make one adult decision in this entire clusterfuck of hurt and betrayal and juvenile tendencies, I would make sure my little brother came to no harm.

He hung up on me.  I had said what needed to be said anyway.  I told my mom and brother how the conversation went, and stuck around long enough for him to call back and for my mom to try and make things right.  I stuck around long enough to pick her up when she collapsed into a sputtering weeping mess, barely coherent enough to say something about “ruining another person’s life.”  I told her she hadn’t ruined his life.  It’s true, she hadn’t.  I told her this was the right thing to do.  At least, my compass told me this was the  right thing to do.  I left after that, went and got my hoagie and enjoyed it thoroughly.  We watched “The Wrestler.”  What strange overtones came out of the screen.  The night sat uneasy and coldly humid.

I wish he could hear his own anger.  I wish he understood what it does to people.  I hope he can see that I’m not the enemy, and that in this circumstance there is no enemy.  God, I hope that was the right thing to do.