joe.

Simple.

A new start, gracious though ungraceful – panicky even.  I am close to the end, the parts amputated are still nearby, sheddings of a weightful something – old trauma perhaps, but more likely sheddings of a present fear.  Just me. 

I am – we are – ever close to the end; indeed close to everything, only an instant away.  It is all just on the other side of a membrane which contains us, and time, and reality as we know it.  Everything crowds up against it; birth, death, and every moment in between, the boredom and the thrills, the history and the moments yet unlived.  The possiblilities and the impossibilities touch me all around, and reaching them is not a process of filling this space with complex stuff.  Reaching beyond the limits of this membrane is achieved by becoming less, by emptying, shedding, and simplifying. 

Simple.

To be decent, I should include at least one renamed link to assist the intrepid visitor in the navigation of this site, which is apparently going to be entirely revamped.  (I thought this was simple?) 

For the old familiar journal presentation, click here. 

There is so much to do, and so many ways to do it.  I find it difficult to avoid the complication of all things, the exponential expansion of each detail into a new universe of my own making.  Nothing ever comes in to that universe from the undiscovered country, and my complications more than adequately distract me from any need I may feel to mount an expedition to explore the undiscovered country. 

The frontier of complexity is unmoving; it never progresses.  The illusion of movement comes from the explosion of itself backwards, a sustained production of geometrically multiplying details, a roaring flow creating its own wind, mesmerizing like the blur of asphalt which I contemplated as a child while hanging out of the rear window of my parents’ station wagon.  A vision fascinating to behold, but utterly impractical, for it reveals nothing about where I am really. 

Enough abstraction.  There really is a life being lived here, and these are some of the parts of that life which are important to me.  I worry about my friends. 

Hints and wisdom; whispered rumors of an enlightenment that surpasses light; existence spent in the intimate process of living.  How can one remain downcast for anything more than mere moments? 

(Two sentences – not bad for five days.)

I’ve been trying to complicate things again. 

While fighting the waking-up this morning, I was dreaming about my cousins’ Dachsund.  The memory is from more than thirty years ago, and my cousins were military brats who had then recently returned from Germany, though I don’t know if the dog was from there.  I have since heard that Dachsunds are a breed prone t.  being nasty and mean.  My cousins’ little dog was not like that.  In fact, it was extraordinarily patient; my cousins were angry kids not given to gentleness. 

Maybe she just liked me; the Dachsund was female, I think.  I have a vague memory of puppies.  Back then I was a gentle person, maybe moreso than now.  No, certainly moreso than now. 

My cousins were three boys, a year or two younger than me, sons of my mother’s sister who had married an angry guy named Blair.  Her first pregnancy produced twins, and they named one of the new boys Blair.  As an adolescent he was agressive, and enjoyed dominating his twin, Robert, or anybody else who would let him.  I was fascinated by Blair, and a little afraid of him.  I was very attracted to him.  I have never been battered by a boyfriend, but remembering my feelings for Blair reveals the early origins and depth of my desire for isolation; regular violence at his hand would have approximated companionship without the risk of anything even close to intimacy.  I can actually see myself preferring a violent Blair to the shrieking emptiness which is my companion now. 

Robert, the other twin, was a whiney child – kind of a wimp – and definitely not the favored son.  And two, maybe even three years younger than the twins was Jeffrey.  Jeffrey was the artist and, for a time, he was innocent. 

We all grow up, one way or another. 

The landlord is raising my rent by $165.00 to six hundred dollars per month.  That’s a 38% increase.  I find myself spontaneously rehearsing courtroom dialogue in scenes from a Chekhovian nightmare. 

I don’t like myself.  I don’t like my space, much less its container.  But circumstances force me to be champion-protector of this place (or some place) as if it were mine, as if I loved it as something more than just a familiar place to go and isolate, as if it really mattered to me.  As if I mattered. 

Yeah I know, that sounds whiney, and I know also that in fact I DO matter.  But you see, I DON’T want to matter.  I WANT to not matter.  Defending myself, making claims to protect and preserve myself and the things I need – it all makes me very uncomfortable.  And if doing any of it was just a hopeless fantasy, beyond my capacities, then I could let go of all this landlord-tenant bullshit, and move on to the next lesson life sends me. 

But this is one of those despised challenges that you hate for one reason more than any other; it is a challenge which you are perfectly capable of meeting, and though it may not – indeed probably will not – have a favorable outcome, it is a challenge you cannot forego without the disappointment of knowing, deep down, that you ran away from a struggle, and turned your back on a contest with an angel – an angel sent to make you become more than you thought you ever could be. 

Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled an angel until the breaking of the day.  When the angel saw that he prevailed not against Jacob, he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh.  The hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him, and the angel said, ‘Let me go, for the day breaketh.’  But Jacob said, ‘I will not let thee go, except thou bless me,’ and the angel said unto him, ‘What is thy name?’ 

He said, ‘Jacob.’ 

The angel said, ‘Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince thou hast power with God and with men, and thou hast prevailed.’  And Jacob asked him, and said, ‘Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.’.  And the angel said, ‘Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name?’.  And the angel blessed him there.

Toward the end I was really starting to get it – you know like life was finally starting to make sense, at least a little.  The restraints surrounding me, which had always been concealed by fear’s murkiness, began to emerge as I drained that swamp, revealing to me most (or perhaps all) of the many ugly secrets that had deformed my youth, had confounded my every effort to grow, and had tied me to my eventual ruin.  At the end I began to see clearly for the first time in my life the tragedies which had been origin to a thousand tragedies more.  At the end I began – with compassion – to finally absorb the agony I had been unable to endure at the beginning. 

The reclamation of the small amount of trustworthy ground which I was able to recover was an excruciatingly slow process, considering that at the end I had been at it for over forty years.  But the progress at the end had become quite swift, leaving me now with only a hint of how far I could have gone had I been able to continue that progress untruncated.  I know that every summit – and beyond – would easily have been mine; ahh, but the mere imagining of those vistas inspire such heart-bursting joy that I don’t believe I could have survived the real thing.  I would love to have died trying. 

However, I have yet to record the middle of this story.  This is not an unlikely problem; more than half of humankind’s existence was spent not in ignorance of our beginning, nor of our end but, until Copernicus, in utter ignorance of the middle from where we observed all the rest.  Self-awareness is ever the greatest challenge, and simple presence the most daunting task.  If now is all I have, really, then the last thing I want is to make an inventory of it lest I find naught but crumbs.  Let us measure the past counting and recounting its achievements and its accumulations, or let us guage with imagined specifity the promise and the peril of the future.  But let us not give now more than a mirror’s glance for it reveals all we are and all we possess, and as such represents by cold inference all that we are not and all that we do not possess. 

But that may be exactly what we need to know most of all.