the part of what you don’t see about 420 that’s obvious

‎420 is initially three numbers: 4, 2, and zero.

start with number 4.

4 = yang within yin/yin within yang.

the end result of this harmonic convergence is the tai chi, and thus 4+1.

5 comes before 4.

you start at 5 though its not really a start.

4 & 2; even numbers.

in between is the number 3.

2 = yin/yang but harmony brings them together to give birth.

thus, the number 3; it is the child of male and female.

but everything stems from one.

the numbers between 2 and 0 is 1.

and one thing is birthed by the no-thing, or the mysterious womb.

the zero at the end is reflective of the no-thing, which isn’t nothing.

so the even numbers 42 are visable. 0 fits in when you take a look at:

the invisible odd numbers, obviously, are 531 and signify what comes together.

this makes the invisible the mark of harmony.

.

an argument can be made that between 4 2 0 is merely 3 and 1 and that 5 is not neccesary.

but 5 is the tai chi; its what is born when yang within yin & yin within yang come together.

to back me up, i offer the following:

once 4/20 ends, there are 41 days in order to reach 5/31.

4+ 1 = 5.

(no references used to create this model, though i may not be the first to ever discover it using logic + numerology which is the number 2 that creates 3, an expression of tao)

a harsh light on new territory (final stand)

part three
an open ended end

when you take two people in any relationship with repeated conflict and only one person commits to changing themselves in order to escape the conflict, the person making the change immediately appears irrational. conflict only needs to be repeated once in order to actually be a repeat; the quicker one recognizes repeated conflict, the sooner one can attempt to escape it. but although this move sounds quite rational, watch out – it can make the person excaping the conflict appear even more irrational because of how fast they move, and as a consequence easier to attack. but nothing compares to releasing one’s self from repeated conflict, as scary as it may seem. you may feel irrational even about yourself when you’ve realized you’ve left behind a comfortable shared angst for a new discomfort to deal with all by yourself. you may feel broken. you may feel like you’re in new undiscovered territory and that does something to a person – it leads one to empowerment. in my case, the conflict lead me down one particular road while my perception shifted as different internal needs were addressed simultaneously. without this layered design, without me putting these layers together in order to reconstruct, i would carry the angst of a son unresolved, of a frustrated friend, and a man deducted. i cannot see myself for myself quite yet, but i can report that the method i am using is a living one that, if taken in consideration, can make one feel as alive as a fall to the earth.

as a result of this experience, i now expect no one besides myself to make internal changes during relationship conflict. in fact, i’ll expand that notion to cover the world – i don’t expect anyone else to change, ever. this is less a cynical conclusion than it sounds given that i have known acquaintences to make different ranges of change. i make the statement to remind me that i can only influence change within myself, and that even the biggest signs i receive don’t neccesarily mean anything to anyone else. case in point – during my argument with baby boy, after he had strayed away from the notion of helping him, i had a simple visual pop-up image of a bridge. it was not distinct, simply a bridge. it became obvious to me that i was going to cross this bridge no matter what and thus made the commitment to not look back (10). i felt it a duty because of the timing of the image to make all attempts to bring baby boy across the bridge with me, thinking that whatever was on the other side could help with baby boy’s ticking bomb sadness. my hunch that i was headed towards manhood partially stemmed from previous sub-personality work that brought out the man in me – “the cowboy” is his name, who told of his frustrations of not being in the lead. this was my alternative method vs. baby boy’s resistance to change that rolled its gears on both his willingness to say anything in order to back me off and his extensive knowledge of practical psychology that allows him to manage the defense ring like an experienced prize fighter. if there is anything near certainty with baby boy, it’s that change is not an option and to be quite frank, i wouldn’t want him to live any other way.

baby boy is an animated, sentimental and uber-nostalgic creature who treats his personal pains and rich habits with a pot maker’s hands and turns them into a unique and wildly entertaining force embracing hyper-child antics that envokes a lose-the-underwear attitude. once placed by his employer in an ugly corner with a terribly outdated computer and assigned a dumb and impossible task, he slammed the keyboard and fried the computer by pouring his coffee over it. the rebelious baby, unwilling to face the assignment opted out of responsibility in favor of lunacy and a howling “fuck off”. employees that knew of his antics let him have his day because he voiced the tension in the office while doing so in a manner that replaces shitty network tv sitcom. the once-coined yuppie that treats never-enough paychecks like icebergs against the hull which creates ingrown values that expresses itself with a parental care for his dear closest. his humor partially stems from his inner angst which mixes with betty crocker love batter to make warm cookies that’ll hurt your belly but warm your heart. he gulps on his drinks that he knows will make him sick and drinks too many of his favorites that he knows will make him ill. his tender eye for the delicacies in classic art … baby boy, will you put down that drink!? he works spends time in an industry where he carries resentment not just against the industry leaders but for the clientele; it’s nearly self-abuse while his body rejects them all at any costs. his sceptic language, born from old experience of hearing guru-types make gurusome asses of themselves, translates into a brisk and humorous slant on the problems of the many. the ending result is a you tube sensation that turns your silly bone into serious jello.

the rational walk the rain soaked streets and tisk at the idea of an adult jumping into mud puddles only to fathom the wonder of what it must feel like to crash their feet against puddled water. baby boy stomps in them, which helped me during my tao-stint of trying to live in the mud as well as under the sun (11). entertainers off all types feed of their neurosis and habits, which makes them endearing and fun to watch. baby boy is no different; he needs no laugh track. he can be frustrating to root for, however, as evidence by overheard comments as well as the ones in my own brain. so many people are aware of his potential, and wonder what’s stopping him. it all it makes you wanna root for him the same way north siders root for the cubs and if the giants can claim a world series pennant, why can’t the beloved cubbies? i can say i found myself close enough to make an influence on the cubs when i was called in by the manager as a relief pitcher to get the save. but the cubs beat themselves; have you seen them play? in human terms, this sounds like a failed attempt at intimacy not just on baby boy’s part but on mine as well. if it’s not obvious yet, an attempt to discover your authentic self is dirty business, and decisions relevant to the process must be made with a clear cut and genuine interest in the discovery even if it puts you at some type of loss. i recall before my big dive into serious deconstructive work that i thought i would lose myself and become unidentifiable. in baby boy’s case, “fixing himself” may feel like losing a large pat of what makes him so appealing to some. babies cry; it’s a byproduct of his persona that brings open-armed well-intentioned feel-my-healing people to him. the cry is rewarded. the pain makes the cry. the pain is rewarded (12).

i will only comment on my end by coming clean (partly because my hands feel dirty) and claim a glaring glitch within myself that i thought, if lost, would make me less of the person i’ve grown accustomed to being. for over ten years, i committed myself to avoiding relationships with women in order to make myself a unique writer. in other words, i built a wall of my own which i thought would allow me to float around easier in life, influenced by that funny thing called tao (or as close to it as possible, which means it wasn’t tao). several years ago, i attempted to break the wall down. slow process, it turns out, because even though i enjoy intimate moments opening up and expressing myself with someone of the opposite sex, it’s usually a one-shot deal or involves the comfortable platform of the phone-stage which makes me invisible, only voice. i fail to build off of intimate moments in order to develop something further which stems from a fear of not just a longer commitment to a person but a physical one because, i tell myself, i have nothing much to offer except what allows a person like myself to survive by themselves (13). notice how i won’t go to repeated intimacy but i won’t let repeated conflict past the “second time” mark. this blog is a part of the process to open me up to the masses but if i’m going to be honest with myself, then i’m going to be absolutely honest with everything and not just the stuff i’m partial to. simply working out my bloughts on this thog is not enough. i need to bring the wall down completely because what’s behind that wall is the authentic me just waiting to break out and run around.

i can look to my father for guidance in regards to intimacy, a man who married the first woman he ever fell in love with. he first meet my mother in their early teens and pronounced to friends that my mother was the one, and sacrificed much of himself to make sure my mother was taken care of. due to my careful avoidance of relationships, i’ve only been able to express any of my father’s values in relationships during failed attempts to woo women with poetry and the presenting of flowers & wines to call girls. but my father built his own wall. he loved to give but when it came to receiving be it hugs, gifts or advice, he put up a big defense. a man born in the 1940′s, he was also not open to fully expressing himself which i imagine is common with men coming from the second world war era. during his last months, i tried to get my dad to open up about anything to ease his suffering – unresolved issues during childhood, family grudges, work related frustrations which we all knew existed. i wanted him to receive me as an adult so we could gain new ground in our relationship together but even if i truly was the adult that i could have grown into, he saw me only as his boy. a mechanic he used to work with dropped by the house and during the end of their chat, my father was able to get some thoughts off his chest about people he used to work with. this moment for my father only came as he neared his deathbed, a hunch my father carried given his new experiences of hearing voices of deceased family members during the night. it was, however, possible for my father to open up given the proper time (last resort) with the right person (shared experience; as catholic as my father was, he wouldn’t tell anything to a priest). it just so happens that i was never that right man for him at any time.

intimacy, therefore, was not a part of my father’s way. he would never talk about his feelings, deciding to bottle them up; boil blood and keep in heated angst and you’re eyes may burn. his insistence, his stubbornness, to only listen as a measure of last resort made me furious, which tells me more about my anger towards baby boy. my father cried in pain when he was in dire physical pain and fell into depression after he quickly realized his runner’s life was now severely limited; the depressed baby boy, who barely makes it out of bed, cries for help while certainly feeling the affects physically. but at least my father cracked open enough post-cry. as an example, he would choose to suffer through spasm attacks, which would cause his foot to be pulled towards his shin well past the point of pain rather than take pain medication immediately because he was afraid of the addiction. if he could bear the pain near the ten minute mark, sometimes, the spasms would cease on their own and he could relax though this didn’t mean they wouldn’t return. in fact, taking pain medication normally kept them away but he was willing to suffer. i found my father one day on the bedroom floor yelling for the attack to stop when i told him “the hell with you and your suffering. i’m calling the damn ambulance”. he pleaded with me while in pain not to have the ambulance ordered because he didn’t want my mother to be burdened with the worry that comes along with her husband’s first ambulance call; this also broke his pride in half. my father finally took my advice to try a homeopathic valerian product which, although he had to take the maximum allowed amount of twelve and they smelled like shit, worked to the point of the spasms never returning again. perhaps you can now understand part of my conflicting anger towards baby boy’s cries. i get a close friend crying, i go to him. you suffer? i’ll help you get better. but its not just that he didn’t want the help he asked for, and its not that i’ve had success in aiding those close to me (including myself) in times of pain and depression. when i answer your cry and instead of letting me try and help, you hammer me and make me feel bad while taking no ownership of your actions, then i’ll fire you off my life as fast as don draper axing off a copywriter who can’t produce decent copy.

this frustration towards baby boy made it so much easier for me to cut him loose even though he has nothing near an unmanageable vendetta against me because i no longer want to be in this type of a relationship. i will now refer to this part of the process as method axing. a simple tool, an ax is. heavy, too. the words i used against baby boy to break apart from him needed to make it clear that there was no growing back on me with old habits (14). yet even though doing so feels counterintuitive given how ive parted ways with him, i can look at baby boy for possible inspiration. specifically, his comfort level when communicating not just with women but with people. baby boy will tell you everything about himself, period. in fact, he will tell the world because he has an open door policy that lets everyone in (and not just because his front door has a broken door knob). in addition, there’s no one i have ever met personally that has the fascination and admiration of women that baby boy owns. you can see this in his photographs of women, a personal tribute combined with a paying-soft-attention to detail. he dedicated heavy time in his childhood to learning how to please a woman. his antics and attitude make some woman link to his sweaty glowing presence. he can make women feel very comfortable.

funny thing, though. he can also make women quite uncomfortable, too (we’ll call him an acquired taste). other men own a similar attitude, the kind that is willing to break relationships of all types for the sake of sexually scoring once, or willing to manipulate the truth in order to avoid responsibility for their actions that caused harm and/or conflict; it’s an attitude that reeks of a lack of an absolutely genuine care for women. what it boils down to is this – fascination with and admiration of women is not the same as respect; that’s why we have laws against adults who take advantage of the under-aged. some male artists are able to make great gains from owning this attribute but that’s not what this rant is about. men who carry these attitudes will try to convince you that they in fact do respect women but partial respect is not the same as respect. because respect is not the core value of fascination and admiration. in fact, the core value of respect is respect itself (15).

i can look back to my father, who had a full respect for women, and determine the makings of the type of man that he was. he cared for my mother with compassion and dear love, and as a result, brought happiness to her life and the marriage. he was romantic, sending flowers to my mother when it wasn’t a holiday that called for it and taking her out to sears for a new outfit or to sizzler’s for a nice meal. my father may not have been openly intimate or willing to take hugs but that doesn’t mean he ignored his feminine side. in fact, manhood can be a bridge that allows one’s own comforting & nurturing spirit to come across with a strong diligence in order to create smiles on the other side (and that other side … could be the other side of yourself). i’m not calling my father perfect nor am i stating that this is the only way of being a man because, as one example, sometimes a man needs to exhibit himself simply as the man. this is also not an either/or or an “only this part” mode of thought in any sense. i conclude today that in order to come close to not falling apart as a man, a dimensional model of manhood as a bridge between the feminine and child is a model worth considering.

holy shit, does this sound new-agey to you? because it does to me, and that’s without a full understanding of what new-age really is. but seems as though in order for me to connect with the opposite sex to the point of trusting a woman after an initial moment of intimacy, i must allow for all opportunities to do so which pushes me to experience the feminine. obviously this is not specific at all but i cannot put a limit on how i come to learn about how to become intimate in this fashion just to keep my life in a particular comfort zone. as a result, i might end up running an all-women’s shelter and learn about the lives of the women staying there or end up becoming a professional women’s prison conjugal visitor working pro-bono where i’m forced to come back again and again and again; listening is a key to success in this regard. i have found a starting point, though. my mother and i will sit down from time to time and talk about my father. she will think of him and tell me stories of their past so that she can rekindle a wide range of memories of their marriage and childhood. my mother will smile grandly like a child because of it. this is me using the model of my father, reapplied to his wife again (16). and i can call this new age because no one said i can’t redefine the term based on my own parameters; attacking the new age with the same arguments is old vs. old, nothing new on either side. this is my next big step into the unknown man, a new age for me, and i will use any tools necessary whether they be the once-performed or the absolute new-from-my-brain in order to find and live as my authentic self and, as it turns out, to learn how to be absolutely intimate with the feminine in all due respect.

the greatest thing my father ever said to me what during a harsh moment of reality. my father had begun to use a walker, and quite well. but his condition fucked with both his equilibrium and feeling, and his ability to grasp the mere idea of what it was like to walk soon deteriorated. once day, my father stepped up to the walker but did not walk. his head was in such a world that he simply could not access his brain for the command to put one foot forward in an attempt to walk. “right foot, dad. right foot forward. good job.” is what i called out like a military general. “now what’s next. no, don’t tell me. show me what’s next … good, you moved the walker forward. now what foot do you use next to step with. don’t ask me; you tell me.” it was the same scenario once we got into the bathroom as my father struggled with understanding where the wall was, where the sink was, where the toilet was – all articles of home decor that he himself planned during a reconstruction of the space a mere ten years ago. the next day, my father brought my closer to his lips and said “thank you for being stern with me when i needed it, son.” it was here where for the first time, i felt like a man in front of him. it was also the first time we ever cried together, too.

my father’s ashes have arrived in his hometown today, representing closure. i however am not on the trip, held back due to necessary circumstances. i interpret this to mean that i am not going along with total closure, confirming my commitment to live by his virtues. but my commitment to living by my father’s virtues is not simply an either/or stand; this is again about integration. the man-as-bridge model is just one side of myself; i’ve got another one that loves being the hermit-type but simply needed some order. seems my father’s side needed some opening up in response, requiring a hammer to do the breaking. but i also need to embrace everything about me, sub-personalities and all, while committing myself to learn and express both engrained and new virtues even if i have to do so in strange and unorthodox ways. personally, i’ve felt nothing near proper nor behaved anywhere near normal during this entire process but what i gained was a new found freedom. this tells me that i, as a rational moving man, can truly brace the irrational man when necessary.

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(10) i may have even stated during my attempt to help baby boy that there was a bridge we could both cross (perhaps not in those exact words) but i can only be half certain of this.
(11) it makes me curious why, as stated in part one, baby boy insists on crying out for rational thought and critical thinking as if either the practice of it didn’t exist or he can’t find anyone using it. being a person who takes pride in not being an adult, this hints at the notion that rational thought and critical thinking are inside of him but fail to express themselves in a fuller capacity, as if they are being suffocated within his own psychological state.
(12) this is basic logic: A is B/the pain makes the cry. A is C/the pain is rewarded. thus, B is C/the cry is rewarded. another way of describing this conundrum is that the person is “stuck”.
(13) i lived under mr. hermetic disorder’s rule for a long time which meant treating myself as a burger king wrapper on the street, floating from one insignificant spot to the next. but i get it now. all spots are significant, which will perhaps make my drive for further intimacy possible.
(14) i now understand why, in film and television, one person will use dramatically strong language to try and break up with someone – they want complete closure, while the other person in the relationship will counter with something like “why you gotta be like that?” and not go away. you need to use very simple and direct language. and sometimes, you need to back this up with simple and direct action that clearly says “this is it; no more.”
(15) simply stating “respect” is a vague notion, but for now i will simply add one additional idea to the notion, and that is to honor the fullest scale of consent by a woman, and not a girl.
(16) i am not stating that this model is correct, or that it will even last as part of my method. im sure a case can be made for starting with the child and thus bridging to the feminine but so far, it seems that man and woman make child which motivated me to keep the bridge idea as a final stand.

a harsh light on new territory (the fuzzy middle)

part two:
the methodical pill

the method i use to deconstruct and reconstruct myself runs aggressively on surprise. more instinctual than anything else, the method barely reveals its diagram as i close in on the finish; an early sneak peak tells me there’s no chance of derailment. in other words, i have no real clue as to what i’m doing until reflection occurs after the fact when a full understanding of the method drops like a small circus of epiphany bombs. what’s left are bomb holes to be filled with circus tricks. the method is harsh, a revelation that arrived via past successful experiences such as the first time i broke myself into pieces in order to jump start my life. in that case, i ended up at UCLA as a result, and would have never ended up in college if it wasn’t for taking too much ecstasy. it’s a punishing drug if taken in excess and can turn on you, owning the ability to promise you the past sensation of being part of something bigger while knocking you into a euphoric dark corner that can disconnect you the way westerners were forced to turn away from the uhf television frequency; it makes you forget why, and i am pro-forget it. dark corners make for great perspective making the tiniest of lights encouraging. ecstasy is love born from artificial chemical. it is love both at its essence and as a product. so is my method.

early march arrives and im blasting baby boy on his facebook page. baby boy’s threat, made near six months ago, still had bite – leave a unresolved threat against you hanging around the house long enough and it becomes ugly furniture. i stretched my ten fingered jaws as i commented on some of baby boy’s threads that attacked his favorite targets – new agers, hippies, fundamental christians, and yuppies – it’s the same round of venting every year, a series of recycling bimonthly attacks that get his frustrations out which i have no problem with; power to the venter. last year, i would have read his crafty words and commented on them with a supportive snap partly because his words spanked spunky replies out of my ass that kept my creative writing habit alive; my firecracker comments combined with baby boy’s pin-point humor made for great rolling banter “liked” by many. this time, however, i heard his opinions with a new ear. the words, same as before, rung a new chime that was off tempo and nowhere past tense. they felt hypocritical. they felt unsubstantiated. they felt less than authentic. i felt like attacking a dear friend.

it started with a thread he created based on the following premise: “men that do yoga/spiritual work are not like the men of the sixties” using don draper as his prized pony and deepak chopra as the representative softy. the comment was bookended with the impression that there are no real men existing now, and that both rational thought and critical thinking had disappeared. when i read these words, i wanted to break them. my response brought out the assumptions built on the universal statements; one claiming that “everything is x” or that “all x is y” is like standing at the midline in a dodge ball game with no balls (5). but it wasn’t simply the faulty logic that irked me but where the ideas that bred the comments came from. i blasted a comment attacking the logic while stating that regardless of whether a man worked on himself or on cars, it was particular attributes – responsibility, for example – that defined a man as a man. instead of getting hammered by red balls, my comments drew out concern from other baby boy friends about his current state of being; what this merely baby boy angry at something, perhaps at himself? this was naturally followed by expressions of love for him; don’t hurt the baby!

i put my premise together with the concerns, careful because two and two only make four if you keep things in line. so, i thought back to the previous week when baby boy asked for online prayers to lift his spirits … but some men do spiritual work so they can learn how lift their own spirit out of the river of grudge. baby boy, known for having no work ethic whatsoever while having direct experience with the frothy spiritual community in los angeles during the nineties, frustrated that he himself was well-under and could not lift himself out of his depressed hole. baby boy does so much work to remain the boy, and my own experience of doing something similar which kept me in a trapped compartment that depended on me holding up the constructed persona of a boy told me that i have at least a small lead on at least part of what he felt. my view was taken seriously by others, encouraging some that came to his rescue to engage in more involved communication on the topic. the support made me feel validated. it told me i was onto something, and combined with a thriving revenge itch felt +/- moving me to run like a recharged battery offering no apology for running off negative. more baby boy thread comments came, and my explanations of them turned into quick, one line retorts. those retorts became names. i began name calling like a provoker pressing into his hollywood screen-chest. it was dirty, and given i picked a small fight with my mother weeks earlier that emotionally opened us both, my actions felt sanely insane. my desire was to get baby boy out of his off-line shell and into an online spat with the promise of something greater.

(a short comment on threats – it is not important what the article was that he threatened to throw away because where i come from, friends do not threaten anything against other friends under any condition unless they are willing to risk losing the friendship. its funny that, after he so easily threatened me when i tried to reach out to him (while also throwing in a “jesus loves me” bomb, referring to himself) to which i responded that i could easily end the friendship right there, he asked me why i didn’t value the years of friendship we had built. my answer is this – i put value on the friendship, not the possession which he obviously never once considered while making the threat. once he made that move, i detached from the possession – they were as good as gone to me, even though i spent a nice chunk of change on those psychedelic mushrooms (6). did your idea of value change once i told you what they were? if they did, and you felt that psychedelic mushrooms carry no value for whatever reason, note that the reason why i don’t make threats against a friends possessions is because the friend puts all the value necessary in the possession simply as being their loving owner.)

now the following question may have occurred to you: why not attempt to resolve this matter face to face, the matter being the threat + my frustrations – why resort to barking on baby boy’s facebook page? baby boy is a delicate creature and would normally never threaten anyone under any condition. why not sit with him and find the genesis of the threat? a one-on-one conversation with a non-threatening friend where we could discuss this conflict like two grown men, and attempt not only to resolve our differences but to attempt a more intimate argument much like the one i experienced with my mother. his ex-girlfriend pointed out, eloquently, that by choosing to air my grievances on facebook instead of, say, calling or emailing him about my feelings, i really did not appear to care about preserving a real friendship, stating that appeared as if i was performing for an invisible crowd – standing on someone’s lawn screaming at them inside the house which is not an effective way to reach someone. she was indeed onto something, smart girl this one is. and once she revealed that fact to me, the method began to reveal itself – was i only doing this for myself, and if so, why wasn’t i doing it for the both of us?. these two questions lingered like a bad odor, and i’m not too quick to kill an odor. but i was one small step ahead, as i had recently figured out a great deal about how baby boy manages a situation such as this, explaining why i would refused any attempt to speak with him face to face. it was because of what i call “baby-logic”.

i figured this out during our argument where, after asking me for help, he quickly turned the conversation around, removing himself from responsibility in a experience he had even before jumping into the topic. i felt manipulated. i put the pieces together from other conversations with him + ones i’d overheard + experiences transcribed to me by others. babies get into trouble sometimes, like children. or, at least they’re told when they’re in trouble or that they may have done something wrong. many children will do anything to escape blame; a natural reaction. but baby boy is a grown man nearing forty. confront baby boy in a manner that makes him feel he may be in trouble, and he sends out “the negotiator” to try and convince you that everything is fine if you simply allows things to go back to the way they were. not much negotiation but simply an attempt by him to remind you of the value in being his friend in exchange for letting him get away with whatever he’s being accused of. if that doesn’t work, baby boy sends out a solid defense team that picks apart your words in order to use them against you, or does everything in their power to make you sound like the one that needs help or is in peril – essentially, you’re the one in trouble. it’s convincing, a well tuned line of defense created by a baby with a fantastic legal team designed to get him off (no pun intended but this does foreshadow some of his other actions … with the opposite sex) without punishment.

honest fact – baby boy lives on facebook. stating that he spends an average of six hours a day on the internet might be an understatement; i’m guessing a ten hour internet day is a commonality. in fact, i’ve seen him hyper ventulate when he’s gone several without internet time while at work. baby boy receives so many facebook email notifications that it’s tough for him to keep track of messages. this is not to say he never checks for whatever he finds important to him but from what i’velearned through both personal experience and other people, answering personal emails written to him often go ignored. and his phone? whether he’s paid the bill or has his prepaid service charged up, baby boy lets it ring until his voicemail becomes full and unchecked. perhaps this is different is you’re on his guest list; i don’t know if one exists. and ive seen what he does with mail – unopened power bills stained from sitting underneath a bag of last night’s chinese take-out. trying to make direct contact with baby is like climbing a wall, and the only way to get his true attention is to place something on his facebook wall.

in the simplest of terms, baby boy has built himself a firewall. per wikopedia … this is “used to protect networks from unauthorized access while permitting legitimate communications to pass.” as his roommate, i rarely ever reached him over the phone. always took at least four phone calls even if his phone was right next to him while he surfed casually on the internet without any other concern to deal with, and i can honestly report that i think i only reached him five times on the phone during my eight plus years of knowing him. this particular attitude is strict, an attitude that allows one to control precisely who comes into one’s life which makes everyone else an inconvenience. evidence exists of this regarding baby boy. i’ve heard him speak of clients pertaining to his particular love craft – photography, in a manner that puts them down even before meeting them, as an inconvenience of his time. i’ve watched him speak to acquaintances many times in which the conversation seems normal, but once they leave, he complains about their presence as though his time was stolen (7). now bear in mind however, when baby boy acts out, he’s entertaining to watch with a sitcom-style manner of conducting himself that would allow his character to survive on nbc thursday nights and it’s easy to fall in love with. but recently, i have discovered hints that i, one of his better friends for nearly ten years, have a space reserved on his list of those he forced himself to have to tolerate.

there’s a strange component to my discovery that, once i figured out the firewall, makes complete sense to me. during the summer, baby boy asked me to conjure up advertising campaigns for his second but more realistic attempt at creating his own advertising agency. having been a copywriter himself for several years and coming from a family rich in advertising tradition, baby boy has the foreknowledge to make a great career out of his talents; it was partly his lack of work ethic that held him back from doing something on his own but he expressed his desire and had great ad contacts to learn from. baby boy has gathered a small team, he explained, and asked if i would be part of the experience i’d never done copywriting before; just screenwriting and blog work, and he consistently complimented me on my creative flair. during a stay at his place, i conjured up some ideas to show him that i was committed and that i could do work. i wanted to support his efforts to get baby boy up and running with his own established voice. i wanted to be a part of his dream. even though my father was ill, i still put aside time to write. but several months went by, after i asked for him to keep me in tune with his progress, i hadn’t heard a word from him. attempts to contact him went unanswered. so, sometime around mid-october, i went to his facebook page months later and saw how much time he had devoted to … his photography career.

no attempted contacts were made to me, and as far as i could tell, i was the only existing member left of his campaign. i didn’t take this personally at the time because baby boy has a tendency to what i call “no-action” action but that was before i realized his attitude towards people when he feels his time is being bothered. i reflected on this after my father passed. baby boy, in fact, was the first of my friends to find out about my father’s condition, present when i received the phone call from my mother announcing the news. he understood the predicament given baby boy’s medical background. for months when my father was ill, friends found out about his condition and called, or dropped by both invited or uninvited and kept in touch to see how he was. baby boy, however, who i can honestly claim to be my best friend given our time together, never attempted to get a hold on me. email sent by myself to him asking him to contact me went unanswered. i could have posted a note on his facebook page given his habits, and in hindsight, i may have. baby boy never met my father perhaps i didn’t have to take this non-action so seriously. but people i recently met just once sent me emails asking how they could help, letting me know they were available if needed and if there’s any fact about baby boy, is that he has plenty of time on his hands – even with his ad and photo projects, baby boy finds as much time as possible to avoid doing work. so this begs the question – was i to expect baby boy, to have to do anything? is he the type of person that understands about how important a father is to a son?

the answer is an astounding yes. baby boy’s father is a famous father, adored by many and idolized by baby boy even with a rough relationship once baby boy hit thirty. baby boy also understands the loss of a parent, his mother having passed at what can be considered he understands loss and suffering and how support from friends is essential. so why did i never receive one moment of his time during an eight month long period? it’s because my situation was an inconvenience to his time, making it clear to me that baby boy was not going to be there as a supportive friend even when faced with a tough dilemma. this was not a great surprise; he usually carried the clause that you had to go to him, not the other way around … unless he make a special case for certain people which i was not a part of; what those parameters are that would qualify me as being to type of friend that he picks up the phone for to see how me and my father are doing, i can only guess at.

i seemed to have fit into a fuzzy middle with baby boy. i was not the entirely intolerable nor the friend he has on his mind when i was faced with a parent under distress. that puts me in a strange position – allowed access behind the firewall yet not knowing my pace with him. the odd thing about a firewall? i can recall countless conversations, both in person and online in which i would start off with a comment only to be met with a fast compliment. sometimes, the compliment felt as though it had no thought involved in its construction, as though he just threw it at me like a bone to a dog except there was no one to bring the bone back to. this had always felt strange, but i was one to let these feelings pass because i was never one to bring up conflict in order to keep the relationship intact. but given how he threw not only a threat at me but a “jesus loves me” just to push me away, the idea of using compliments in the same manner felt more and more plausible. but still, i didn’t want to be convinced of it … until i thought of a particular incident he was involved in, driven by my eagerness to integrate myself with my father’s virtues.

i reflected on a situation last year when baby boy was living with his girlfriend. he had complained before about problems in the relationship while they stayed together, and listening to his choice of words when describing their problems, i will say that the relationship was in a fuzzy middle. baby boy told me his girlfriend gave him a pass for a happy ending massage, which is fine by my book – two people in a relationship and in conflict attempt to figure out some sort of solution in order to put the conflict at ease, i say go ahead and try it no matter how irrational the idea (barring some obvious against the law type action). suddenly, this massage pass turned into the allowance for sex outside the relationship. soon after, baby boy and his girlfriend brought in a roommate – a mid-twenties girl off craigslist (and i can hear the joke already – never get a roommate off craigslist!). baby boy reports that the roommate sends him chat messages about pleasing him sexually, and how she makes advances. next thing i hear, the roommate tells lies to his girlfriend about what they did sexually. baby boy claims that the roommate is mentally challenged, that something is seriously wrong with her, kicks her out and thus goes to work in repairing his relationship (8).

now i honestly have no idea what really happened and i’m not going to speculate because speculating gets me nowhere. but i coupled this with other baby boy episodes in which baby boy did not show respect for a broad range of relationships, or used his free pass line on women, or made a strong effort to bring down the reputation of a woman that he proposed sexual activity to (9). even if baby boy did nothing with the roommate and told me everything, and even if he did not bring unnecessary dramatic conflict into his relationship, and even if baby boy was nowhere near responsible for anything that occurred, i felt like i was sold the truth. i now understood why i was provoking baby boy to come out from behind his facebook page and contact me. it wasn’t so i could attempt to create an angry spark that would open us both to each other in the same manner that worked for my mother and myself. i was provoking baby boy so i can tell him i no longer wanted him in my life because when i added up everything that, in short, made me feel frustrated towards baby boy, it felt like a load of words that sounded nothing like the word “trust” which meant i could no longer trust his word.

this may lead one to conclude, given all that i have written and the attitude i have carried, that i am simply being overdramatic in my actions and that perhaps i could have easily of dealt with this issue in a much simpler and cleaner manner that did not conjure up so much idea-fluff. in fact, baby boy himself, after hearing how i would quickly bring the friendship to a halt after his threat, told me himself i was being “overly dramatic” about the situation. when i personally think of someone being dramatic, i think of a teenager who cries something like “why does everything happen to me!?”; this is a yell without a committed attempt to gain perspective so one can escape personal tragedy. but when facing both self emposed and relationship challenges (they seem to go hand in hand) i choose to work through them in order to recognize harmful old habits so i can grow out of harmful attitudes that no longer serve me, which is pretty strong given i haven’t been in a relationship since the eighties. anyone taking this approach may seem to act strangley to others, especially when its your very first time discovering not just yourself but other aspects of your own self once hidden by you. you’re nowhere near a drama queen if you commit to such action. in fact, these actions build character and make you feel like a king of the theatre.

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(5) this is like saying “all balls are round”. so long as you can conceive of one single incident showing that the opposite is possible, the claim breaks. a ball can be deflated, for example.
(6) things i enjoy doing on mushrooms – stretching, developing screenplay ideas, yoga, healing injuries, frolicking, sex, dancing and asking questions about anything because my brain is so relaxed at the time that answers simply appear to me.
(7) this comment is not made in reference to “lucky charm eddie”.
(8) around this moment in time, i was the type of person who didn’t speak up to people, nor did i ever bring up personal opinion in risk of losing a friendship. this was part of my “just let things be as they are” code accompanied by my own fears of creating conflict. in addition, at the time this episode occurred it didn’t feel like a issue (though i have to be honest – i ignored lots and lots of feelings around this time and currently practice recognizing feelings in order to deal with issues. this essay is part of my first attempt at it) but it did feel “off”. i actually met this roommate/girl with baby boy as we took some of her belongings to her. i must say, she seems like a happy person, cheerful, sweet. a bit hyper. but some people have a tendency to just shake their heads yes and agree to whatever is told to them and in this case, i did the same as baby boy schooled me on her mental issues and problems. this makes me feel like a sheep.
(9) i don’t feel the need to go too specific on these events as i don’t see the relevancy of doing so in order to lead to my conclusion.

a harsh light on new territory (part one of three)

part one
breaking out the father

the supermoon arrived nearly two weeks ago, and as the moon’s influence on the waves go, i drove with the vigor of an escaped convict caravan to the bitter end of a week-long boil and swung an ax like a madman cutting himself away from old roots. the tree had grown on me in such a manner that it left fossil imprints of its heart on my palms as i stood underneath its fallen shade to catch dropping leaves. but a fast urgency cooked in my kettle that steamed from the desire for improved marks of personal dignified measurement. and so, in order to go mad and swing the ax, i needed proper motivation, a blazing fire that would burn my trapezoids with the pressing need to hack. in my case, motivation came from several different directions of wind, including some passing winds of death and the wild carry of flame that only occurs during forest fires; a tough task indeed. this tree, i found after examination to not represent the new ideals i have now fully committed myself to, ideals that mirror those of my great father – a man of integrity, honor, romance and bravery. this mood of moon meant cutting myself off from someone that represented a way of living that i sometimes mimiced, and greatly cherished for its carefree and playful style but that i will no longer call my own because i find it simply carries little virtue in the new world. new territory is strange territory, stranger because this territory is actually me.

a starter’s gun went off in the form of an online argument between myself and my dear friend, the self-promotional “baby boy” from beverly hills. it began from his call for help; more like a cry. he had done this before and, as a result, was not kind to my help but as a person who responds to friends in need, i gave him my attention giving the benefit of the doubt to baby boy; perhaps this experience will be different, i said to myself with conviction. it wasn’t. now bear in mind, i have methods of working with my own inner conflict. i don’t mind hitting conflict with a hammer and breaking m y s e lf in order to reconstruct and find new treasures of inner demeanor. it’s not for everyone, and as i put it so bluntly on my facebook page after this argument – you may not like my methods. but come to me again for help, and you better like my methods. i felt, however, that my anger was not boiling from the rejection of help or the conducted rudeness thrown my way as baby boy threatened to throw away something valuable of mine because he didn’t enjoy my way of solving serious personal problems. the real anger that stirred inside was fuzzy; i couldn’t clearly make out the details of what this emotional rage was made of because i had yet to gain the perceptual skills to solve the puzzle. thus, both inner and outer conflict was created and waited for me on hold (made easier because baby boy disregarded the conflict as nothing special worth spending time on) as i, on the cusp of my father’s human-life demise, let the argument go in favor of silent solution – the answers that i looked for, the ones that would clearly describe my ferociousness and why they felt genuinely proper, would eventually reveal themselves and come to serve me at the proper time. several days later, my father was crawling on the floor because he had lost the power to walk.

the condition that my father came to acquire is called “progressive supra nuclear palsy”, and it’s not pretty. essentially, brain cells die and you lose motor skills, including the ability to swallow, the ability to keep your eyes in place which means they roll up into the head like a slot machine, and the ability to walk. in addition, when you lie on your back, you feel as though your head is several feet below from where it actually is so as you try to pick your head up, your brain thinks its lifting itself from deep below the body. and that feeling as though you’re falling off a boat? it hits you over, and over, and over … forever. doctors kindly call this condition “the living hell” disease because the rest of the body perform on queue, leaving you blind to the world, unable to walk or talk, unable to function yet you are fully aware of everything that’s going on. on top of this, my father had rheumatoid arthritis, vertigo, and violent muscles spasms that attacked his legs and arm for up to fifteen minutes, making him experience excruciating pain. his cries for help were genuine. an ex-marathon runner that only six months previous ran three miles on the streets, he was now subject to little movement anywhere.

by the time new years hit, my father needed the assistance of a chair. a man of great pride, he avoided that chair like it was constructed of nails, preferring to crawl around the house in order to get from A to B. this made it tougher when dealing with him when he needed to use the restroom, as his ability to get himself up became strained but he was stubborn man, and would only use the chair as a last resort. a point eventually came when, only three feet from the toilet, it took him several minutes to turn around and take five simple steps backwards in order to be seated. pride is quickly taken away from a man who served his country in both the military and government when you have to hold his penis in a container so he can urinate properly while making sure his fecal matter hits the toilet water and not the floor. in between my argument with baby boy and the end of 2010, i watched the man who sacrificed much of himself for me, who never once questioning what i was doing or how i did it, living in fast deterioration.

new years eve was rough. during the day, my father was hit with a tornado inside his head. when he moved, it wasn’t himself moving his body but the pressure of his condition attacking him without remorse. it took me near twenty minutes just to get him to the bathroom door. i had to lift him out of the wheelchair he was now forced to use, my father’s body lethargic without a real desire to live anymore, and practically carry him to the toilet and while he went, had to hold his body upright. it was like holding up heavy unstructured jello with tired eyes that asked GOD why he, of all people, after giving his life to represent the lord in his name, was deemed a creature to suffer such severe consequences (1). the evening was much worse. normally able to sit in one place on the couch, unable to see the television but at least hear the sounds and be with his wife and son, my father rolled around without control on the floor, ending up in odd positions against furniture and the wall. this was like watching my father wrestle with a ghost who won him over by a hundred pounds. calling to my dad did nothing; he could not determine that i was there by his side. i tell you, picking up a one hundred and sixty pound man off the floor is not easy, which i had to do several times in order to make it look like he was my father once again, at least so my mother wouldn’t have to bear witness to his torment. but he managed to recoup and even made it to midnight with enough energy to smile and say “happy new years”.

the key to understanding my father is that he was a great influence on people. this is a man – a man, who used to go to work at five thirty am, work an eight hour day, come home at six in the evening only to drive straight to the soccer fields and coach my team. players looked up to him as a father figure, and not just because they watched him make me run laps whenever i didn’t listen to an instruction (which was often). for some of these players who had no father or who’s own father was not always present or committed to raising them, my father represented discipline and love, and showed that a man can have these virtues. this influence extended into his other relationships. my father was a stickler of a soccer referee, offering great advice, leadership and from what many referees told me, wisdom. you can watch my father and see his integrity in his dress, his walk, his voice. we had no time as a family to tell people of my father’s passing, but word spread quickly. at his funeral, the pews were near filled. for two weeks, we received stacks of cards from as far as germany. donations were made in his name. promises to hold events in his honor were claimed. my mother had no idea her husband, a man of seemingly small stature, touched the lives of so many. my father exhibited the great values of an honest family man willing to sacrifice himself for not just his family but for others. and i, as his son growing up by his side, saw absolutely none of this growing up.

me, the rebellious boy. me, ignoring integrity (2). i didn’t burn down the helping hands volunteer office or anything like that, i just did not look at my father for inspiration on how to be a man. instead, i saw at how he impressed his values on my older sisters and how they struggled with them through divorce and relationship conflict and instead went an opposite way – a way of floating by, hanging on by a thread without security, and running around town without any real responsibility … like a child. this way of living, influenced by my commitment to learning about tao, brought me great treasures but they were on loan. eventually, there was payback because you can only survive so long on chase bank’s money, and all the yoga practice in the world won’t cover you under the “you’re doing spiritual work, so you’re granted a free worldly pass” clause on your life’s contract. turns out i was doing yoga for sport which means my spiritual work didn’t invoke spirituality in all its glory. the result? a ripped glute, a misfiring right leg, no cash and a one way ticket back home. but as i had always put it years before this moment, los angeles ’til the wheels fall off. and the wheels definitely came off.

i thus arrived home without power; i couldn’t walk away. i had no cash and could not buy my way out of my parents predicament even if i wanted to. home i was, with enough of me to spend on those that raised me. i reflected on this as i watched my father on new years morning. i stood in the doorway of his room and watched as he tried to get his pants off because he was uncomfortable. my father reached for dear life, kicking and kicking and grabbing and kicking, barely able to lift his head off the bed. i thought of that repeated falling feeling, what his world must have felt like for him at that moment. i stood there and watched him in his suffering because even if i took off his sweat pants, he would never be able to relax in peace. this was the same man that runs in his sleep because running was such a joy in his life. he was super energetic, but the cold hands that i felt when i held him during the day told me that his circulation had slowed down, his life lacking momentum. so instead of taking my father’s sweat pants off, i went to my room, got on two knees and spent several minutes asking GOD to end his suffering.

two hours later, i found my father breathless. he had sprinted to the end, and if my father could no longer run, he would no longer live. i came over his silent body and pressed on his lungs to let a last breath out. and for the next two weeks, i slept like a baby. then, my face screamed at me.

i have old avenues of anger alarms laid down by past angst stemming from my first relationship in high school; who knew, my first ever girlfriend would have this type of influence on my life. they lead from my liver and right into my face. its like a boxer punching migraines into my cheeks and eyes, except whenever i get the pain of one punch alleviated, i get hit over and over again usually until the sun comes up. this is my body’s way of telling me something is off. in this case, i discovered later on through my spiritual guide that works with me on sub-personality work (3) that the personality inside me, the one that was essentially my father, was screaming at me – for what reason, i have yet to determine. if there’s one thing that i do when i have rough inner conflict going is that i do whatever i can to get it resolved at any consequence. usually, the end result is deconstruction followed by the gaining of inner perspective which ends in reconstruction. in between, the process is denny’s-kitchen-during-breakfast-hours messy. i needed a spark to begin the deconstruction process and instinctually started an argument with my mother. near midnight, i found her sleepy tired yet working on bills when i quickly reminded her that father, with his type-A personality, did the same thing causing him to hit bedtime hyper. hyper is a lack of sleep which leads to more stress and stress leads to disease. my mother was stubborn and wouldn’t listen to me. i yelled at her and she batted me away thinking she could ignore my advice. only three weeks from the morning of my father’s death and i stay in my room the entire following day. she knocks on the door several times and asks if i need something, am i okay, if i’m hungry … and i say nothing, silent as the dark void that stood before the creation of all things material.

that same night, i approach my mother late at night as she fails to go to sleep. my mother cried as soon as she saw me, telling me that she will never turn a deaf ear to me ever again. in response i cry but i don’t just cry. my lungs are filled with so much confusion and regret and fear and i cannot stop. my mother consoled me, told me we would survive as a family, and said wonderful things. and i just kept crying … for three hours. i sounded like i was like coughing up blood, and carried the sounds of torture throughout the kitchen. my mom thought i broke something inside, because this wasn’t like the time i cried for fifteen minutes straight during my first identity crisis over fifteen years earlier. she told me i had to go out in the world and figure myself out.

as you can see, my methods are not for everyone. but they do bring great clarity to my life and reconstruct me in a manner that molds me into what i think is a better person. in this case, my mom and i bonded in a way that enabled up to be more open and honest with each other, necessary to fulfill my father’s wish to take care of my mother regardless which meant taking care of her emotional needs as well, and in order to do so, i needed for her to break down her wall and open up to me. the result of this opened me up to her, as i recently saw my mother on the recliner watching television and instead of passing her by wondering if she was okay, i asked her if she wanted her robe, or her blanket, or both. my mother grew a big smile when i brought her more than enough to keep her warm while she watched her mexican soaps. obviously, i like stirring the pot. the reason? it makes the tasty stuff at the bottom come up to the top.

before i go any further, let me get another thing clear – if my dad did not pass the morning of new years, i would have had no problem taking a pillow to his face and stuffing it over his mouth and nose in order to end his suffering, a thought that came to me as i looked at my father’s dead body and thanked him. because this was only the beginning, as he was expected to live at least five more years … and the condition was to get worse!? i did not have to resort to such measures, obviously. but i tell you this so that you get a clear as crystal understanding of how i respond to conflict – with a murderous intent. life-altering chaos thinks it can rush at me like a manic maytag washer and dryer monster that eats my clothes and keeps them wet? that’s heavy shit, and makes many run for the borders that make you wanna run for the borders. the best way to survive this monster? learn to live with the scars.

i raced down to ojai, california – home of my spirtual guide in order to do some sub-personality integration. the process: my p.i. coaxes sub-personalities out of my head so that they can speak, so i can listen to them and discover what their intentions are, what they want, why they’re making such a ruckus so i can understand more of who i am in order to determine how to let go of self-imposed blocks that hamper me from my development. i arrived after a five and a half hour drive and immediately began a session, to bring two sides of me at conflict with each other together so that i could move on with my life. i stood with my guide as she brought the irresponsible child who claimed an all or nothing approach that was tailored with a poor knitting quality that could not keep the cold out. this created a hermetic disorder built not just on semi-sound spiritual practices but also on the lazy dependency on half-magic. these actions were supported by yet another sub-personality that simply loved to be entertained regardless of consequence; in my case, it loved car crashes and i had four three wheels. but these methods only got me so far, as far as where i started – home. it was made clear to “mr. hermatic disorder” that his current practices were revealed to be insufficient as they had landed me in turmoil, and that perhaps listening to another sub-personality cold bring unity back within my being so that i could live on with hermetic order. but first, “mr. hermatic disorder” had to listen. my guide brought out the opposing personality, the one that was yelling with such force and demand – it was my father, or at least the part of me that was the essence of him.

when i do this type of work, each sub-personality carries its own way of standing, talking and maneuvering. “mr. hermetic disorder”, for example, immediately stood with a fierce closing of the arms, stubborn and right. but my father … was my father. i stood there with the feeling of a strong posture worn under demands, sorrowful. the tone of my voice, which sounds like my father’s to begin with, adjusted to express his tour-of-life heaviness – this voice was him. he was teary, which meant we were crying. my father expressed disappointed with himself for not being the type of influence on me as he had hoped. he put the blame on his shoulders, saying he had failed me. this is all justified – i didn’t connect through the catholic church like he’d hoped, i don’t have a family of my own; i understood this even before i heard the words. but to hear those remarks from your father with his voice as it dropped out of my own mouth … does something to a person. a deep impression is made, like a fallen leaf on new cement. children and adults collect these types of momentums and place them for show or keep them inside containers. i felt i could do both.

the session ended with a guided meditation where i had trouble getting out of my head – too much thought accompanied by logical practice and visuals that moved me away from what was most important; my ego throwing peep-bombs at me in order to distract me because the further i go, the less my ego has a say in my actions. with my guide pushing me to get into my heart, i made the instinctual move of visualizing my ear dropping down to my heart, repeatedly as if on ketamine. this created a new sensation, a new coating inside my body. several minutes later, a rainbow opens between my eyes – the third eye point. my guide tells me this is where truth is revealed. this is what i’ve been looking for.

what i quickly came to acknowledge, and what confused me previously, is that what exists in me, in my cells and bones, are the core values that my father believed in … am i right? during his sickness, my mother and i were watching television in the back room, my father having gone to bed early because he was tired. but my mother and i both heard his call of “honey?”. we found my father on the floor right outside the hallway. he had crawled all the way from his room to the entrance of the kitchen because he couldn’t bear to not be with his wife, and you’re telling me this romantic gesture of love is somewhere in me and i can’t fucking find it? i carried this thought with me as i dragged my dad’s body down the hallway with a mixture of mad and sad, like dragging a dead body back to its resting place as my father pleaded “son, don’t be mad” because the previous week, i got angry at him for being a danger to himself by repeatedly crawling out of bed and coming into the kitchen with no rational excuse for doing so. i said no rational excuse.

where oh where is my father inside, my father inside that i forced to hide. he speaks in my tongue and tells me of his pain. i need to learn from father passed. i need for me to stay me sane. no wonder i couldn’t find my father inside of me – because i stuffed him in a corner, to pass. but inward work. inward perspective. insane action. i was motivated to go through this inward channel in order to come out of the other end of this conundrum with my father’s virtuous spirit as part of my own, even if it meant breaking up a great friendship that, when looked at with a keen eye, was not as strong as i once thought it was.

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(1) the main contributor to progressive supra nuclear palsy is environmental toxins, which can include stress. my father worked as an auto-mechanic for the f.b.i. and made complaint in the sixties as to the toxic conditions of the space – the fumes, the smell. he also ran an average of 20-25 miles a week including many races at a time where anti-oxidants were not being marketed. it’s possible all that running created a load of extra oxygen cells that attacked him over thirty years. plus, his body seemed to grab at his muscles for nutrients giving him painful spasms. in addition, he was a man that worried like no one’s business, especially his family. he had red eyes of fire that always bothered him. emotionally, he would burn himself out. in other words, many components could have caused his condition.
(2) funny thing. our soccer team, historically named the “dyn-o-mites”, needed a new name as we had all reached the age as players to represent ourselves with something more mature. that year, acura came out with their first integra series of cars. thus, i named the team “integra”.
(3) read earlier posts. it’ll explain this process in greater detail.

more than just that

a travelor came across a man looking at a tree.

the travelor asked the man “what are you looking at?”

the man replied “i am looking at this tree, and have been looking at it my entire life”.

the travelor responded “really. so what do you see?”

the man said “i see a tree. what do you see?”

“something dying”, said the travelor.

“you see what!?”, yeleld the man in utter surprise.

true love reimagined (first draft)

A search party is formed to find someone or some group deemed lost or possibly dead. True love has an incredibly brave search party, an unprepared and blind exhibition that can leave the searcher disappointed not just because of their inability to find what they’re looking for but because true love’s existence is ultimately questioned, giving true love the quality of being worse than dead. Call the search for true love a ghost hunt.

The analogy describing true love as part of the haunting family may be taken as doused with a cynical tinge of cruelty but it happens to be quite fitting. Obviously, true love does not take the form of ectoplasm-spilling ghosts or otherwise televisions would be infiltrated with gooey pursuits of true love on shows that carry asinine titles like “The Bachelor”. The ghostly shape that true love currently does take, however, is not only invisible thanks to descriptions of it that insist you simply ‘know it when you feel it’ but pronounced to be so obvious once experienced that you’d have to be blind to miss it. The situation allows for those that swear to have found true love torturously superior to those who either have not or may have missed out on it, made even worse by the fact that by proclaiming their experience of love as being true, it infers that there is no truth in the ordinary love of things and on all accounts of respect, that’s just flat-out rude as shit.

Take a look at true love from a linguistic perspective. Naming a particular type of love experienced as true sounds just as dumb as describing an apple as red-red (or more fitting, due to the glowing greatness attached to one’s certification that they won the true love lottery, describing describing an an apple apple as as red-red). Isn’t love by itself supposed to be innately true? And if not, then when did love by itself become such a flawed experience. Both the line of witnesses to seeing a ghost with their own shocking eyes or experiencing true love with their in-shock hearts stands tall and long enough to sway a vote but not with the confidence those that seek a fucking explanation want. The public can buy the idea that some people have more specialized powers that enable them to witness the unseen, but nothing in anyone’s heart puts a halt to the splurge of special limited edition chemicals that allows you to miss out on true love even though you’ve had the balls or slot to fuck nearly fifty plus people in churches or committed yourself to the same companion before you knew what love even was. In short, it’s not the term “true love” that needs fixing, but what makes it tick that needs rewinding.

We’ve been fed for a long time the idea that two star crossed lovers brought together by out of the ordinary events get the prize of being crowned as destiny’s choice, usually confirmed by their quick deaths or because the gods force the two lovers apart leaving them unseen to each other. It takes two lovers being turned into ghosts (either to each other or the world) to sway our opinion, mostly because we’re forced to swallow many of literature’s true love insistent tales through great convincing writing and a serious case of boredom. This sells books, and most salesmen lie. Lying, obviously, is not honesty and what can be more honest than being true. Now this doesn’t mean you cant be simultaneously true and confused, but one point of this piece is to clear the confusion of what constitutes true love so we can all go to bed at night and masturbate with a slightly clearer conscious, or at least do it without such an empty feeling in our bones.

The modern true love parade has bred a suspicious band of romantic liars – the general public, hiding behind bad poetry and borrowed metaphors to tell us of their affairs that sorta match the ones found in books. The most obvious after effect of this preposterous brigade is that it leaves ordinary love in a condition that makes one’s expression of even, say, a satisfying marriage marked without a helium high enthusiasm an expression of love with empty calories. Worse, there’s very little difference to detect if a true love winner is being any more honest than someone who claims they love their food. Sarah Silverman would fuck Baby Bell cheese because she was so richly in love with it. Many true lovers make the proclamation of true love well before they have sex with their partner, if they happen to live that long making any attempt at figuring out a measuring stick for true love totally flaccid.

The AMC television show “Madmen” prides itself on the tagline that nothing is as it seems (… kinda like love), and in their season four finale, portrayed lead protagonist Don Draper as snagged by true love’s claws while he fell inside a turbulent wind of secretarial no-strings-attached pussy greatly motivated by his need to find a hot looking babysitter that fucks on this side. Without offering any motivation to marry current business-girlfriend Faye, Draper flips a bitch and suddenly goes in for the sensational and dramatic attachment to his slightly exotic French-speaking secretary who, after a one time audition on how well she could tolerate Don’s children, outbids for the place by Draper’s side over Faye, the woman who turns into a no-personality tin-woman once she gets within fifty feet of a schoolyard. The sex must have been fabulous because suddenly, Draper’s drooling with an engagement ring along with … meaning?

“Think of all the events that had to occur for me to get here (with you)”, Draper proclaims to his hot new Barbie-bride.

Put a gun to Draper’s head and asked him if he found true love; Don would sell yes! to you without hesitation. Then again, put a gun to Don’s head while he walks Joan home through the ghetto within a week after this proposal and I’m confident he would nail Joan just as fast as Copper did. It doesn’t help Don’s case that Roger Sterling married one of Draper’s secretaries several seasons before which taints the Draper surprise proposal with a gap toothed cliché smile. Faye was right when she asks him over the phone whether or not his new beau knows about his “… love for beginnings.” This makes Don sound delusional even before I remind you that he once proclaimed his first wife Betty as ‘the one’ (though to be fair, Don did say “The first time I saw her, I knew I was going to marry her” and to be fair, the statement does not make legally bind Betty as the destined sidekick though it does leave the door open for more marriages; this means Draper can’t be hit with false advertising).

The point here is that nothing holds anyone back from proclaiming yet another true love experience even if the new experience stinks of ridiculous. We have to be careful that true loving repeaters aren’t simply using the term as a way to separate themselves from the rest of the social pact as self-important validation machines that deem anyone who parks in their slot pre-pregnant-approved with the destined meaning of true love intact. The consequence is that their possible confusion gives true love another bad name – true love stink.

Our motivation to figure out the validity of true love thus turns on the brain state of true love’s messengers. Look at Don Draper. His new wife may disappoint him the way his first wife did, but is this the fault of the wives? He doesn’t see what truly motivates him into his secretary’s skinny arms. Those events that destiny created to put them together? Well, let’s see – his secretary died. His newly appointed one opened up to him; literally, by slipping off her skirt so she could fuck him on his office couch. He takes her to Disneyland! Now in actuality, anyone and anytime can account for several not-so-normal events that lead them to a one time experience doing anything, including how you came to read these words. All of this makes Draper sound self-delusional (and coincidently, normal) when it comes to claiming that he loves anything – his kids, his job, sex … well that one’s tough but on a serious note, as different as Don Draper seems to you given his past and present actions, there is no difference between him and you when it comes to attempting to understand love.

This threatens even the love expressed by many when it comes to describing their affections for ordinary objects, so a reminder – this piece is not a direct attempt to segregate true love from feelings of adoration that people have towards something like their iPod even though people will tell you they have more feelings of happiness and security with their iPod than they’ve ever had with another human being. I mean, fuck – iPods are dependable, they thrust you into artistic pleasure that’s personalized, and the metallic casing feels satisfyingly soft against your fingertip. And just wait when the Japanese invent a device that turns your iPod into a transmitting vibrator device that coordinates to your music. We’ll have idiots running down the street, iPod sex device still in hand and attached screaming at the top of their lungs Bono ficked me! Bono fucked me!

These words are an equal opportunity search for love free of self-projected illusion that generally tends to accompany human relationships. An alteration of what constitutes true love is drastically needed not just to figure out what true love really is but to save straight and simple love from game show guidelines that doc your pot when your expression of love for someone is deemed imperfect by a scale with its’ only source of measurement a secret measuring stick that no one can produce. Otherwise, there’s no real reason why any asshole can run around screaming jenga! just because they think they know what it’s like to crumble apart after being built block by block. And let’s get it straight – if we don’t get some fucking aliens down here by 2050 like people have promised, I predict people will run around towns insisting true love just jilted them in order to fill the gap of the aliens that are missing in their lives.

But there’s a silver lining to the dental dam that traps us from love’s true goo side, with evidence of it existing in the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Price. It’s certainly not with Joan, who’s catch of the perfect husband turned into a marriage-raping half-skilled doctor that leaves a hole in her heart that not even Sterling Cooper can fill with a baby. Pete Campbell never knew much about Trudy before marrying her and during the Season Two finale, Pete tells Peggy that he thinks she’s perfect, and then confesses he loves with her wishing he had married her instead. And speaking of Sterling Copper, he’s too busy failing to love himself by making himself immortal through an unsatisfying autobiography and a younger unenthused wife. This leaves us with the one character, the one woman who’s having the most trouble simply hanging onto a relationship yet having no problem getting laid. And her name, dolls and gents, is Peggy Olson.

Peggy, the first lady of the Manhattan ad world without a man by her side has a love stronger than the boys – advertising, and her journey into it reading like any mythological tale depicting love in authentic form. Peggy gave her life … well she gave her baby’s life, at the end of season one to become a junior copywriter. This is a declaration to the gods of her commitment to one entity as strong as any other. She gives her life to the office, and sometimes, won’t even leave it. In season four, Peggy keeps her boyfriend and her family on hold (and ultimately, dumps them all) in favor of spending the night in her favorite safe haven – the office.

The mythological manner in which Peggy has involved herself in with the world of advertising allow her to receive the type of growth and personal development that she can never find in a relationship with any man. Her main love is nonphysical, like a ghost, which raises the question of whether or not a physical element is necessary for an experience of true love to occur. In Peggy’s case, there is – and his name is Don Draper, the man who allowed her access into the ad world and the mentor who influences Peggy’s direction like sail wind. Make no mistake – Peggy dared herself to favor Don when she avoided her family on her season four birthday because he is the quintessential representation of advertising in its’ most daring, He adds the fire to what is a star-crossed cable network threesome, playing third string nonetheless, and without him, Peggy’s true love affair does not even exist.

Modern television and film give an array of true love encounters, effective due in part to the relationship experienced not between two people directly, that can alter our way of recognizing, perceiving, and altering the way we take care of it. Does this mean we scrap all attempts at depicting true love in dramatic form,? Hardly. It simply means that we use all mediums to help us rewrite love’s history both past and unwritten. Again, a careful approach is taken, for the last thing we need to accomplish is to infer that simply sharing a gig with someone gets you mythologically fucked by angels. But looking at a film such as “A League Of Their Own” in which we feel true love through the actions of protagonist Dottie Hinson, and realizing that the most intense personal relationship she has is with her sister Kit, the value of true love through the medium of baseball raises itself high enough that we can clearly say that Dottie’s true love is a game, and not her husband … and still, another threesome emerges with two same sex siblings. The orgasmic quality exhibited by Dottie, portrayed through her excite and denial play with baseball as she resists tryouts unless her sister goes along, or how she quits baseball on her own terms to be with her husband only to come back for one last fling, is pop-a-licious.

Dottie is romantic with baseball, and not to take anything from her husband, but her devotion to him and his good-man ways never hits what she catches with balls. Yes, he may be dedicated, honorable, a decent lay, supportive and a trusting father (though many military men come back from World War II quite abusive so we really can’t assume this), but if given a choice whether to be buried by her husband’s side or underneath the home plate where she missed the tag on her sister which gave Kit her championship and, more importantly, her self worth, I guarantee Dottie would pick the double bed plot by hubby but with her spirit in the Racine ballpark dirt because she, as romantic as she is, is bent on making sure her husband is not left alone.

Damn, people and their feelings. They really get in the way of true love. Things like baseball, and advertising, and BSDM (a preview of what’s coming, no less) accept you for who you are, and give unconditionally without judgment or asking for anything in return – not even full participation. In Dottie’s case, she feels obligated (probably as much under contract as she does emotionally) to her husband, so much so that she would rather struggle with not being able to play ball than to live independently with the sport. If the sport was as emotionally needy as people, I bet you a steak dinner Dottie would take weekend ‘gonna see my kid sister’ train trips that ended up with her in baseball’s bed. This isn’t to insist that Dottie didn’t elegantly and romantically insist she get buried with her catcher’s mitt, but only to ensure that baseball, above all other things, made her heart flutter the way true love is apparently supposed to make you flutter.

The expression of true love comes back to us. Expression, like so many other things, does not necessarily need to be expressed in words. Dottie’s expression of true love is clear in what she did for her sister, and how she played the game. This is an honest expression, even though she’s delusional because she, like Draper, would probably insist her husband is her true love. Not to run too far off course, but Dottie’s relationship with her kid sister Kit is far more romantic than that one she had going on with her G.I. Joe doll. Even Peggy Olson fucks on her office. And recall Peggy when told by Don about how his new wife-to-be, who wonders if she could be a copywriter, admires Peggy. Peggy gets flustered because her spot has been taken; it’s Peggy who’s supposed to be the only female Draper helper to get turned into copy. Think of Spider Man 3 when Maguire kisses Bryce Dallas Howard as Kirsten Dunst watches – that’s her kiss! It’s the same with Peggy, who’s own mythological experience has been tainted with her role replaced by marriage (so cliché …) and a pencil with a gap in her teeth.

Even though both Dottie and Peggy live without the awareness that they feel true love not for a man but for an invisible entity, it’s tough to deny that their love is not honest. A target has now been drawn on the back of this paper, big enough for those who insist they feel true love but the feeling simply can’t be put into words; the feeling, unable to be transferred and verified, they say is nothing but honest. But if our understanding of true love infers that love by itself carries no truth, then how do we continue to deal with these self-convinced insistent roars that true love is somehow more true that love which is innately true?

This can move us to wonder about honesty in regards to any one being honest about themselves to themselves which affects their relationships and ability to judge. Many people get to a point in their lives where they agree to their essentially developed habits and responses, making drastic changes seems like a lost cause even if it would improve one’s self primarily because of the consequences it brings to their relationships. Humans do a great job developing a world that blocks them from experiencing unplanned surprise, knowledge and past experiences used to control their environments … until news of pregnancy hits and a person has no clue how to raise a baby but that’s only because having a baby was such a non-factor consequence into getting laid. Of course, surprise may arrive in the form of, say, attending an event for the first time but this is made snuggy by the company of others, so the event is easier to be accepted. Trying to lose weight? Congratulations because weight loss is a fad supported and accepted by plenty of books and success stories.

The main reason why people don’t go out alone to try something new is because if they return to their friendship circle altered with a craving for new experiences in a setting foreign to many that they know, they’ll be deemed ‘weird’ and made to feel bad. I mean, fuck – simply changing your political party creates an uproar even though you’ll probably end up in a party with nearly as many supporters as the one you shafted. In the modern world, it is difficult to be a hundred percent honest with ourselves, and even a tougher challenge to alter enough to shift our personality around others. Many feel they have something inside that desperately needs to be protected or are so fast at judging others in order to protect themselves, that one’s ability to adjust and become immediately vulnerable crashes.

You give just about anyone 50 years and, given the probability that they will continue not being honest with themselves, the result is they will never be ‘honestly honest’ (hey, I never said I wasn’t dumb) with themselves or you. Most by instinct run away from challenge; they need more time to think, to prepare, to figure out if their learned habits and attitudes can be used somehow to work with another. It’s like people cramp up around each other when trying to expose themselves as to who they truly are, and sadly, this interferes with love.

Take a perverted peek into the film “Secretary” and you’ll find a relationship built on surprise. When E. Edward Grey, played by James Spader, tells Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lee Hollaway exactly what she could eat over the phone, realize that this is something he has never said before to anyone. Lee, reciprocating, does what is ordered; again, this is an act she has never performed before. The relationship is again, a threesome. BDSM is the other party, and whether or not it is the true love of either could be debated (and probably just by myself) but there’s a deeper element at play here.

By comparison, E. Edward and Lee are honest with each other, completely vulnerable which is something that baseball and advertising offer except that those two entities are not tangible, obviously. The hunch here is that true love does exist between E. Edward and Lee, though their relationship could in fact cease to exist. We can imagine Lee, frustrated after a divorce, going out to BSDM clubs or having submissive and dominant experiences with new people. Whether or not her new experiences will be fulfilling is not the question of importance. What’s important is the naked exhibition of taking two people completely honest with themselves and each other and smush them together into an experience where they are completely vulnerable. Will this pass for true love, given the inclusion of honesty beyond a doubt?

Here’s the tricky part, however: the hunch is that the vulnerability between E. Edward and Lee, or for anyone who is able to experiences such an open and honest relationship, is so prominent, allowing for the type of surprise between two people that allows for anything, including leaving each other, that a worry is created in the back of the head that tomorrow, one’s partner simply may decide to leave. This surprise, this worry, may be so incredibly heavy for each that it keeps both parties on their toes which creates absolutely no security. Thus, there is not a single instance where one can stop for a mere second and proclaim their love as true, even though it might be. In essence, both are living as true love with is not delusional one bit because their actions say they aren’t. Each are a machine of the invisible as the source of anything possible, able to produce surprise at a moment’s notice, cloaked in a manner that doesn’t allow others to see them as they truly are except for their lover with their special powers. This is two ghosts in love.

Many have loved with the experience of that love as fleeting, when in reality faced with an undeniable truth about their significant other’s character that shattered the illusions that one had placed upon them in order to allow themselves to love, making their love nothing near love at all. Is love just a reflection of our illusions, or does it exist in a pure unfiltered form? The answer to that is dependent upon how much responsibility we take upon ourselves to be open and honest. This is not to say that two people can’t fall into something called love without the conditions currently laid out. But if we are to give true love authenticity so that we all understand it in a manner that allows everyone access to it simply, then it makes true love honest. As a result, we get access to a by-the-minute pouring of a new coat of love paint over us regardless of whether or not we really needs it, merely by being honest with ourselves.

beargasm! (of a sort)

this post is the finale of a blog under a stunted growth, not even two months long in its existence but is not simply a short-lived idea that died from a lack of interest. if it were up to me, i would breast feed this girl under she grew into a fat farm prize winner. but it’s not up to me, really … though when the lights go out, it is purely my decision.

when my sub-personalities don’t like something, they really make me hear about it. last week, i sat down to write under normal circumstances which included touring the internet like a bad habit. two hours of online mingling that produced absolutely nothing was followed by picking at my current attempt at a film script, which accounted for about thirty minutes of productivity amid four hours of actual time. the next morning, i woke up in a sea of dread and, to my discovery, the artistic sub-personalities were mad as hell. they wanted to paint paint paint, and were frustrated at the lack of opportunity.

so, i bargained with them, and the following day, i would write and save my internet surfing for sometime afterwards. i thought i could get away with a short stint of creative spark followed by an ebay window shopping spree but what happened is that i wrote, and got so much done to the point that my sub-personalities feet absolutely elated; my brain warmed up into a glow-spunk of living light and thus, the bargain created a new habit – write without dumb internet interruption like the old days (except for the war battles, cattle milking and other renaissance happenstances) and since then, the habit has stuck. i won’t call this focus because it feels different than that. it feels like my windshield finally got washed.

old habits are now disappearing fast while new ones comfortably take their place, including the loss of this blog. my sub-personalities simply do not care for it, though they certainly love aspects of it that will find a new home on new pages. so this is nothing near an end. in fact, it’s an injaculation of sorts, a redirection of what could have ended sent inward (into edward) to be utilized in a different manner, not to die, while the process of creating what inevitably found life on this site continues to circulate in the microcosmic orbit under my rug.

this means that i cannot go into depth about new sub-personalites “the handheld” and “quickdraw, the architect”, and i cannot key you into stories involving girls masturbating with/on county fair prized stuffed bears and their significance in my life. in fact, as i type, there’s an urge in my body to stop already and get back to other artistic endeavors. but i do thank you, my handful of readers, for keeping up with me and my antics for the past less-than-twelve weeks.

dearly,

edward bear

an attempt to kick sartre off his high chair

going the pop-philosophical route and, keeping this as short as possible cause heaven help us as to how quickly philosophical pieces can dry out, i’m going to make an attack on sartre’s fundamental belief that existence precedes essence, which means that a human exists first before they have meaning in life.

let’s take a couple, married or not and the woman (or one of the women) learn that they are in fact pregnant. a doctor confirms it, shows them proof and now the couple start to create conversation about how the baby will impact their lives, make decisions and plans based upon this baby, blah blah blah. some of their actions are even impacted based upon this new revelation, perhaps habits reconsidered or new ideas spring to mind. then, say after a month or so, the doctor informs the couple that actually, the hospital was wrong – scans or records got mixed up, wrong names on wrong forms, whatever.

the baby never existed. but, the baby was relevant in the lives of this couple enough to make such an influence as to change the direction of thoughts … sort of like another possible world of thinking, realized. the baby had relevance to this couple, and i say that under the assumption that two people in this world would not simply get news like this and conduct their lives in the exact same manner as if they had not been given the news. what does this mean?

a. relevance can precede existence
b. something that does not exist can be a relevant something to someone
b. something relevant that does not exist can mean something to someone
c. something relevant that does not exist can have meaning in life

sartre pronounced that meaning is something truly unique to each person – separate and independent, and that we must come into existence first and then create our own essence out of interaction with our surroundings and ourselves.

but the baby that didn’t exist, in this example, had a form of interaction with other people and yet still had meaning and, dare i say, had an essence established, an essence that was not within itself but instead created by two other human beings.

but who is to say that this couple was correct? they sure were faulty creations, though not the fault of the couple but still, their idea of what was meaningful had a huge hole in it. what this non-existent baby meant to these two people was in error, so who’s to say that anyone’s idea of meaning isn’t in error as well?

take any person that states “you know, i want to have more meaning in my life” and thus embarks on new challenges and new changes and a new direction, a commitment to a different life. and that’s all it is really; different. no more, no less. sure, perhaps this person went into a monastery or committed themselves to feeding the hungry or enlisted in the army or just got themselves a brand new start.

but … at the point of stating to themselves “you know, i want to have more meaning in my life”, they could have followed that by saying “fuck it, i change my mind” and still lived on as they normally would have and still would have been able, if they wanted, to declare their lives meaningful in the same regards as if hey had saved a thousand lives (and who knows. maybe out those lives they saved, some were left so physically or emotionally scared that later on, they would have felt better dead than alive resulting in a disagreement as to the meaning of this person’s life). in fact, who’s to say that by avoiding their new direction in life, they would have prevented a thousand lives from dying which would be quite “meaningful” in itself?

so to end, an essence can exist before the existence of a person, but with fault which shows us that people are truly at fault for declaring such a dumb idea in the first place (like me!). however, declaring essence before existence seems to be on par with the self declaration of meaning to one’s self (a declaration made about someone else being meaningful to them swims in the pool of opinion, with gratitude, so this doesn’t feel like the same type of MEANING that sartre is discussing). this meaning (again, using “meaning” with a different connotation) that MEANING could very well be less valid than what we’ve come to accept, even though it is still quite convincing.

the changing of the guard

i sat in my room today with a ripped feeling of lost cause combined with an open enthusiasm that springs aloud the sound of completion and forward momentum. this enthusiam one may suspect would arrive with a cause of its’ own, though it has not. and the cause i feel lost was one i never figured out until it was gone.

i have discovered within myself two sub-personalities that were, to say the least, destructive but in manners that were both harmful and helpful to me. i wrote about one of them in an earlier post: “smudge guard”, the dense dark cloud that barely let anything past the door. one result of this was keeping me numb to feelings. it was common, and still may be i don’t know, for me to be called indifferent by a variety of people though i threw them off as i maintained an elementary school smile. this was a level of protection to keep the boy safe in the world; the boy, at play, can’t feel a thing when he is intimidated or beat up on the playground and thus remains in a state of ha-ha glee. smudge guard, however, had an accomplice.

6. “the love downer”

the love downer was born from, of all people, my parents … out of love. the essential task of the love downer was simply to keep me down, and from gaining. memories of being crushed in several ways were used to enforce this idea which may be the most influential reason why i can recall, in vivid detail, all the times i was hurt while barely or never recalling better moments in childhood (or at least not so vividly). i imagine my parents simply wanted me to keep me in their grasps, to not let me get away. in order to do that, i couldn’t develop myself as far as i could have while i was younger. in short, while i was developing, the love downer kept me in the breast of the family.

when i met the love downer on the weekend, it was sinister and quite unfriendly, and the fact that it loved memories of emotional and physical pain came as a slight surprise when my guide realized that smudge guard barely allow anything inside. when you add these two characters together with a child at a young age, interesting things develop. i imagine love downer didn’t initially act like this upon its entrance into my body and brain but developed in this fashion to go along with its duties, a point made more prominent when i realize that again, smudge guard barely let anything in; it was the love that was allowed to seep through into the fragile child.

i can recall, one afternoon, sitting on a bench in elementary school and determining that i would simply not grow up with the rest of the kids. this, i can now consider a reaction to the love downer as my body instinctively felt the need to not grow and thus my imagination, picking up on this vibration, went with it in the most positive way imaginable … in a way that kept me at the opposite side of “being down, with love” which would be “being happy, in torment”. remaining a child in a growing man’s world on the slow verge of puberty would keep a smile on my face, drastically. and thus, my first lesson in tai chi took place, engrained into my head at the ripe age of eight.

i thus grew up happy as a fool, growing into my early twenties as the silly one with the answer to “why the fuck are you so happy all the time” plastered as grin on my ignorant face that backed itself up with a shrug of the shoulders. but inside, quite unhappy with myself as i could never get out of the low-end rut i felt inside, like i was worth little to the world making myself feel smaller than my small frame actually was.

subsequent years in which i felt depressed by some act resulted in using my creativity to keep myself from sinking, thus explaining why i created a new character in my head while drowning myself on party pills, and moving into that character upon coming across the notion that i hated myself, or the fact that what myself was wasn’t enough to become what i felt i could become.

during my latest sub-personality session, i was actually able not only to let go of smudge guard for good (as smudgy is useless to me now) but transfer love downer back to their original home – the parents (he put up a fucking great fight to stick inside of me, but eventually and under certain specific conditions, eventually left). this was not a cruel act made upon my parents but it’s just that love downer has an original home of origin, in two worlds. its concern that he would not be around to watch over me now covered by the fact that it could watch me through different and original eyes. funny – when attempting to coax love downer to leave into his original home, he countered with “yeah, but they’re going to die sooner that edward”. isn’t that the cutest thing?

none of this, by the way, could not have been accomplished without:

7. “the esoteric engineer”

this is the guy that made smudge guard. genious, ay? to make an entity that is formless that barely allowed anything inside, especially feeling. he stood back and simply let smudge guard do what it needed to do. but before smudge guard could be done with, the esoteric engineer had to be convinced that he could replace smudge guard. the funny thing was that … we’ll call him e.e. from now on … e.e. was not convinced he could step in and do the job, as e.e loved his creation, and smudge did exactly what was asked of it and e.e simply did what was asked of him.

it took a while for e.e. to understand that he had the power not just to create new protection but to be my new guardian – period, to create within himself a level of flexible guardianship needed for my current phase of development. so it’s a learning process for e.e., a slow one that will allow me to expand my boundaries (a dangerous notion considering i’m taking lessons in tantra sex; perhaps i’ll lead a life as a male prostitute because quite frankly, i will not rule anything out at this point). i’ve already read more books in the last month than i have in over ten years but these new boundaries will extend beyond what i can perceive because during my next session, i am going to communicate with those sub-personalities that, like the cowboy, were either shut down or simply not allowed to flourish due to love downer and smudge guard keeping them locked in the basement.

this makes me fucking giddy.

oh, … one more sub-personality:

8. “rainbat”

rainbat is responsible for the colors that i paint with. when asked how he would want to name himself, he told me that he held the colors of the rainbow but didn’t want to sound like some fluff piece so he came up with the bat, due to the fact that the bat is symbolically black/colorless.

thus the menage a trois between the two darkest of figures and the little boy is over. what they were able to create – me, over my first 38 years of life, i find astounding. a long time ago during my very-early twenties, i urged myself to make myself into something interesting because i felt that was the only way i could actually make anything interesting, a boy’s cry fuels his imagination to run wild amongst the world and the particles allowed to inhibit my body being mostly harmful but leading me to a stronger sense of self through a long-term spiritual growth experience.

with the room cleared of dark elements, an expanded feeling of newness, and more freedom felt inside my skin, i will now venture on this weekend on a grand mushroom trip of dance and rhythm, taking my current sub-personalities out in front of the mirror with a time to practice their ways on stage as single forces, taking me one step further in my evolution so by the time 2012 hits, no one’s gunna know what the fuck hit them when they met me.

be(d)side

the frisk of your love pulls me down
the sour of your love keeps me in wonder
the chance of your love makes me hide
while my pretend-to-be-you cakes my
words into blunder

the shell and fish games are over
there is nothing more to be protected
if you don’t like what you see as a result
you just might enjoy my animated rejection

from here on out,
i will lay my skin to the left of the bed
and my cut-loose infections to the right

when i awaken,
i will find myself in a box cart
shipped out to a leathery sea,
tightened and tough, away from the protection
that made me squander for small meals and
musical notes only heard in reviews

and i will catch a glimpse of the plain obvious
going along with the stream, and beside
the swift finned gales that eat the merchants
and leave their wallets to drown.

downstream is not yet
i learn to swim with the better bet
love is nowhere to be found
love is something simply all around