God might have turned the other cheek when the feral boys from the North End were invited to count the collections from all the masses.

You’re not gonna believe this Rudi, Boner has some connection with a church and the priest–Our Lady of Caramel Mountain or some shit–the one on North Street, across from the school. Not sure what Boner does, maybe alter boy? He told me this priest lets him count all the money the church collects from the masses. Said the priest puts canvas bags on the table and dumps em all out. Big piles of cash. And Boner counts it; puts it in stacks and separates the coins and puts them in paper rolls. He said the priest told him to invite some friends because Boner couldn’t do it all in one night. So Boner invited me, told me to bring a couple other guys. You want to go?

Yeah. When? Tomorrow night but Boner said we can’t tell anyone else. Ever! or he’ll get screwed by the church or his father or something. Who else should we bring? What about Johnny? Nah. Ned won’t do it. He’s a pussy. Maybe he will? Ask him. Ok. I’ll ask Ned and Kevin. But that’s it. So you, me, Boner, Ned and Kevin. But let me ask them–don’t say nothing if you see them. I won’t. Boner also said the priest grabs his balls and shit but he brushes him off. Why does he keep going back? Cause he steals money and the fag priest doesn’t do shit but laugh; just lets him count and gives him sandwiches and shit to eat. Fuckin weirdo. Don’t worry Rudi, I got ya. He touches you, I’ll fuck him up. Ok. Let’s do it. This is gonna be craaaaazy. FOOD! Gotta go help my mom pick up our box of shitty food down at the Y. See ya tomorrow. Make sure you wash your cock and balls fag bait. I’ll wait and have the priest do it. You would!! Later Rudi. Later.

God might understand reciprocity in some odd way that may balance the scale of human needs even if it’s fucked up because fucked up here may be normal somewhere else or fucked up gets thinner and thinner as it travels out into space until it’s spread out so wide and so thin it doesn’t make sense anymore or can never be put back together again.

Hurry up. Boner said we need to be there by seven. Last one there has to kiss the priest! Faggots! Remember when we saw the gym teacher shoving the bar of soap us his ass? Yeah. Mr. Collins that freak. No he didn’t, he was just washing the clorene off after swimming in that cess pool. You guys buddies? Shut up.

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Ok guys listen, before we go in, Father McDern’s a nice guy, just weird. Go easy on him or we won’t be able to count again. This is a good thing. Don’t fuck it up. Wait! Listen. I told Eric to call every twenty minutes or so because the priest has to leave the room to answer the phone. When he’s gone we can take some money. But don’t take too much or he’ll know. If this goes right, we can count every Tuesday. But what about Father McDick grabbing us? Does he really grab you? He tries. Don’t worry. He’s old. Is Eric gonna talk to him when he calls? What’s he gonna say? I told him to disguise his voice a couple times or just hang up. Ok. Let’s go. Let me do the talking first. I smell the pizza at the bowling alley after. Lets go! Shhhhhhh.

Hi Father McDern. I brought some help. Come on in boys. Nice of you to join Robert and help us here at the church. Who do we have here? This is Fid, Ned, Kevin and Rudi. Well nice to meet you boys. Let’s get to work. Follow me. He doesn’t look like a fag. Shhhh. He smells like booze. Probably drunk. Stop it. Come on.

Over here boys, I had one of the members of our church make you some sandwiches and there’s cold soda, chips and brownies if you like. Help yourself and if we run out, I have more in the kitchen. Robert’s been here before and can explain how things work. So why don’t you take your jackets off and get comfortable. I’m going to get some napkins and paper plates. Make yourself at home boys. Thanks Father. Thanks. Thank you!

Out of the way, there’s food and I’m a hungry. This feels weird. He’s so clean and white. His face looks like an old lady’s. He better not touch me. Shhhh. Rudi, they have fat salami sandwiches. Hey Fid, save some for the rest of us. I only took three. Yeah I know. But I’m a growing boy. When does he grab ya? It’s random. You’ll see. He trys sneaking in a feel. Just don’t let him get too close. He’s creepy. Quiet he’s coming back.

Here we go boys. Some plates and napkins. Oh, I see, you’re already digging in. Ok. They’re here if you want them. I’ll be right back. I need to get the collections. Dr. Pepper, Tab, or RC Cola. Hmmm. Kevin you want a soda? Grab me a Dr. Thanks. Brrrrrrrrp! Slob. Hey there’s a radio here. Will McDinkyDoinker mind if I turn it on? Wait and ask him. Okay. These brownies are fucking good. He probably put those red pills in em. The ones that get you horny. Maybe he put sleeping pills in to knock us out and–here he comes. Shhh.

Ok boys. Watch your sodas and food. I’m going to dump these right here in the middle so you boys can get started whenever you like. Excuse me father, can we turn the radio on? I don’t see why not. A little music will make things merrier. Do you boys have a particular type of music you prefer? Rock! Do you know WTXL? It’s 1490 am. I’m not familiar with that but I’ll find it for you. Right there Father, that’s it, Led Zeppelin. Ok. That’s that. So you boys follow Robert’s lead and don’t mind me. I’ll be in and out to check on you boys. Have fun. See you in a bit.

Holy Shit. Look at all that money. That’s the most I’ve ever seen. Lots of checks too. Yeah. Don’t take the checks. Keep your voices down. Look at all the twenties and tens! Wow. Do we steal now? Just don’t take too much and don’t let him see ya. All we do is separate all the twenties, tens, fives and ones and put em all in a stack. With the coins, just make piles but we do them last. Let’s get the bills all stacked. Here he comes.

How you boys doing? Need any more drinks or sandwiches? We’re good father. Thanks. So are all you boys from the neighborhood? Go to school near here? We do. Do you boys attend mass here at this church? I know you do Robert. No. Nope. No. Well we’ll have to work on that. Phone’s ringing father. Indeed it is.

Easy. Not that much. We have to have stacks of bills. Don’t take em all. Guys a fuckin fag. You see him reach over Fid’s shoulder for the bag. He felt your tits. No he didn’t. Ha ha. He was holding your waist when you went up for more brownies. So what. I got sixty bucks up my ass. Father McDink put it there? Yep. Loved it. You would. Here he comes.

Well thanks for helping out tonight boys. I really appreciate you lending a hand. I do hope you will be available to help out again next Tuesday? For sure Father McDern. Thanks for the food. Yeah thanks. Thank you.

The five boys laughed, grab-assed and gave each other shit while they counted their earnings. They frolicked all the way to the bowling alley. Later they would part ways, incapable of understanding.

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Nothing will be enough. Nothing on this earth. So it seems tonight. There’s nothing wrong with desire. Nothing except there is no bottom to it. At least the rain hits the earth. What’s odd is that desire is only one feeling and the more alone one is, the more often its mouth is wide open. Like a baby bird, alone, in its little nest, set against the dark foil of our universe. Our designer failed when it gave us desire. So it seems to this baby bird. If there were one thing that could completely satiate desire once and for all, all would be right in this world. Nothing more would be needed. Hence the pursuit, the never ending pursuit of an illusive phantom. Perhaps all the little meals are enough to quell desire, at least, temporarily put to rest the search. It’s during feeding time, as it goes in, that I feel the best, most complete. Not free but pleasantly bound to the moment. Music does this for me. By feeling the best, I mean this is when my heart swells and is open for receiving, welcoming another into my arms. What I desire most during those moments is the kiss and the embrace–two chests, mashing warm against each other; feeling held, peace takes over the mind and the richness of breath; how deep in it goes with its off-worldliness rendering me down to my essential self. But the kiss, the lips, like curved rose petals gliding against each other in the warm sun, like warming red crayons round with unrequited longing for release. When they touch, it’s as if that singularity, desire, each carries tightly in their chest, has risen to meet the only other thing in the entire universe meant for them. There is no other purpose for lips. And in that alchemy, loneliness becomes wholiness and nothing else matters. While they rub, mush, bite, lick, tug, suck egos take flight and the mind and eyes are useless. But the ears smile, hearing wholiness, wishing they could meet its other and close like clam shells readying to bring forth pearls. I like it like that. Like it like that.

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Annie Dillard passed away today, RIP Annie. She said this: “At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.” I can’t think of a better way to say what this psychological excavation I have been sharing with you is about than what Annie’s quote means. As you will see after this post, what she said is what I have been aiming at through this whole process over the last few months. Although I think I have arrived at the entrance to our beautiful, ordinary and miraculous world, the road here was arduously circuitous. What follows are the last two vestiges of how trauma has infested within me which I found necessary to elucidate for myself before stepping through the doorway to the ordinary. I sincerely hope they help you wherever you are at.

In my experience, it happens every so often that we must do something or put something in another’s hand. Perhaps a job interview, asking for a promotion, needing something someone else has or needing approval for something you want to do? The list is wide and varied. These are normal. But if you are a trauma survivor, especially those whose identities were chronically attacked, these normal occurrences can be quite daunting and from recent personal experience, can resuscitate the old courtroom we excavated a while back. Complete with the prosecutor flitting about.

I have been waiting for an email letting me know the date and time of a very important meeting. In this meeting, an important decision will be made by another. In the absence of said email, I found the silence beginning to feel like judgement, rejection and evidence about my worth. I realized this was the old architecture which organized around evidence, accusation, anticipated judgement and verdict. Something as simple as waiting became psychologically larger than just waiting for an email. What I realized is this person, representing an institution, can decide to do what it will do but it cannot determine my worth. Seeing and feeling this weave of the old court room architecture in real time began to remind me of enmeshment.

My pursuits are legitimate but enmeshment begins when my emotional state, daily life and sense of possibility starts rising and falling with each email, phone call, delay, offer or response. The decision taking place in that forthcoming meeting should remain one project inside my life, not become the organizing structure of my life. That decision is information about them and not evidence for a prosecutor to build a case against me. Their decision would not by itself complete my psychological work or create a self that has had little opportunity to develop outside of survival mode. That is up to me. At the bottom of this essay is an info-graphic I created that will walk you through, in detail, my ideas about enmeshment.

It’s taken about three months to complete this psychological excavation but I realized something important, excavation does not automatically build what comes next. Understanding the old architecture can dismantle it faster than ordinary life can replace it. The prosecutor may be quieter, vigilance loosened and the courtroom has lost authority but the space left behind can initially feel empty rather than liberating. This, indeed, has been my case.

There is a risk of interpreting emptiness, uncertainty, or lack of direction and even boredom as regression but it is partly the absence of the old organizing system. There is also the subtler danger of the excavation becoming itself the new courtroom. Instead of asking, “Am I guilty, flawed, unfit, unworthy?” I can endlessly ask, “Have I finally understood myself?” Understanding ourselves and our pasts give us historical data and a history but even the historian eventually has to close the archive for the afternoon and let the living person go outside.

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As I have mentioned before, with the courtroom losing authority and facing the ordinary, I found the everyday to be a bit bland. For much of my life, intensity has been the norm. Fear, shame, vigilance, self-hate, absurdist philosophy, withdrawal, longing for cosmic dissolution, grief and the search for something supernatural have carried enormous emotional voltage. Against that backdrop, the ordinary can register as strangely weak.

Breakfast, daylight, errands, a quiet room, traffic, cleaning, choosing clothes, trying a new hobby, enjoying music without needing to regulate unbearable feelings may seem trivial and small but is doesn’t mean the ordinary is empty. Our nervous systems and imagination may simply be accustomed to a higher emotional voltage. Which, to me, means the ordinary may need to be experienced again, differently before it becomes interesting. Pleasure, curiosity, preference and attachment can accumulate quietly, slowly rather than arriving with the force of a crisis.

The task is not to manufacture another dramatic meaning system. It is to discover what small experiences acquire texture, meaning, pleasure, resonance when they are no longer competing with an internal emergency. This gathering of experiences is the collection of missing autobiographical data.

It seems, from my experience, one consequence of chronic trauma is a shortage of autobiographical data about myself. I spent a great deal of my attention devoted to danger, other people, anticipated punishment, withdrawal and regulation. That doesn't leave much room for answering such questions as:

What do I genuinely like when I’m not trying to escape, regulate or protect myself? What environments make me curious? What kinds of people, places, objects, routines, food, work, art would I naturally be attracted to? What am I good at when performance is not being judged by an internal or external prosecutor or familiar echo from the past? What do I want because I want it–not because it prevents punishment or promises dissolution?

This lack of autobiographical data isn’t the same thing as having no self. It just means that large portions of ordinary self-discovery were crowded out by survival. The next phase seems to involve gathering new data through experience rather than trying to think my way to a complete identity. The ordinary world belongs to living people. That is where the missing autobiographical data can finally begin to accumulate.

This data cannot be excavated entirely from the past. Some has never been generated. It has to be created now through encounters, experiments, choices, mistakes, preferences, boredom, pleasure and repetition. And this requires discernment which follows stepping out into the ordinary world.

The old survival question was often binary: Is this safe or dangerous? A more inhabited self can ask a richer set of questions. Do I actually want this? Do I like the person I become around this or them? Does this opportunity fit my values and temperament? Am I responding to the present situation or to an older fear of judgement? What remains mine to decide while someone else is deciding their part? If the answer is no, what else becomes possible?

Lastly I’d like to say there will be another info-graphic below called Your Life - Your Autobiography which goes over much of what we have been exploring just above. I’d also like to leave you with a concrete example of a practical boundary for periods of waiting that evolved out of waiting for my email.

Some matters have temporarily passed into another person’s hands; the rest of life has not. My part: make the request clearly, provide what is reasonably needed, follow up when appropriate and decide what I will or will not accept. Their part: deliberate, respond, approve, decline, negotiate or remain silent. Still mine: the day I’m living, what I notice, what I enjoy, whom I speak with, what I learn, what I make, where I go and the new definition of my own life. When my mind crosses the boundary and begins trying to perform the other side’s deliberation, I can recognize that as vigilance, not new autobiographical data.

All this movement after the excavation is not from no self to self. It’s from a survival-dominated self toward a discovered, expanded, inhabited and discerning self.

The historian excavated the courtroom and established what happened.

The watcher learns that attention has more than one possible project.

Curiosity gathers new evidence.

Experience creates autobiographical data.

Preference begins to define what to hold on to.

Boundaries protect what has begun to matter.

Discernment decides where attention, effort, intimacy and time are worth investing.

Someone else may hold a decision I care deeply about. They do not hold me. The outcome can matter. I can hope for it, grieve it, celebrate it or change course because of it–without allowing it to become a verdict on who I am.

This brings to a close a psychological excavation of a type of human suffering and the path out of the darkness and into the light of the ordinary where I can finally say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, to the world, now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.

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“See u tomorrow. It really hurts that everyone has to take care of me. I hate this.”

Keep the above quote in mind as I work through this. I was looking at the big, cold, round, sunlit moon last night while slowly falling asleep. I thought about this earth, its shape and what humans are doing down here. I can accurately say that some humans are making it difficult to relax and find a soft peace to move around in even while offloading a deuce. And I hit upon the wonderful idea of an earth that was cube shaped. Bigger than the earth. Perhaps the size of Jupiter. But it stretched out for, say, a billion miles. Why not?

Imagine life on this cube–you don’t like the area you’re living in: move. Just pack it in and head out. Of course the atmosphere around it and the natural conditions of cubed earth would be the same. So you head out and just keep going until you find somewhere empty because it’s big enough for all eight billion of us to really stretch out and settle down somewhere new, be at peace, peace, peace.

Those who want to play war games can hang out over there and do all that stupid shit they do–build bombs, drones, all sorts of weapons even nuclear. Blow a piece off the cube for all I care. But stay over there. And even if they killed all the opposing army, the would get pretty stretched out venturing along the cube and become irrelevant or stymied by the scope of the cube.

Peace loving groups could head out together and find a place to call home and work together to set up more egalitarian societies or democratic socialist if they prefer. Shit, the communists can have their own area and so could Maga for all I care. All the mountain bikers could live in some kool area, all the tennis people could have their own place as well as the knitters and those who like to bake. Imagine a society governed by people who like to make baked goods! And folks obsessed with sex could establish their situation as well.

For some time, all the ways in which people group themselves, would find an area to settle in; there would be lesbian fiefdoms, homosexual, Republican, black, white, and all the other ethnic groups could spread out as well. If you wanted to live in an area governed by a legal system, go ahead. Or perhaps you perefer Anarchist…go on. Do it. You get the point. An endless place, endless space.

But our earth is round. It’s big but so is the population. And there certainly is a bunch of people who are into the idea of war and domination, killing, control; oh yes control and surveillance, manipulation and power over others. Fuckers.

And as I imagined this cubed earth streched far out into space, I saw a community where people we love, who are saddled with managing the difficulties that come with being diagnosed with cancer, never, ever have to say or even think the quote above because there would be a place on Cubed Earth they could come to where their suffering and pain is welcomed, understood and loved and all the support they need is freely given. In this section of the cube they would soon be amongst lots of people who love loving. They would quickly learn they are far from being a burden and one of the best parts of any healing protocol is letting love in. Hopefully, this love offered, gets into the hearts of those who, wrongly, feel they are a burden by first healing the heart and mind of those who, however it occurred, have come to that conclusion.

See you tomorrow.

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A week ago I posted an essay called An Emergent Human-Scale On-ramp To Ordinary Life. And before that, I posted a couple essays about The Architecture of My Suffering and The excavation Of An Irreparably Innocent Child. As you can probably surmise, I have been diligently attempting to crack the code on my trauma, it’s origins, how it manifested then and the lingering structures still in place today that are still functioning but have outlived their usefulness and at great cost. Sure it’s for me but I share myself as an experiment with the hope you may see some similarities and also a path forward and through. I hope it resonates with you.

The last post may have been a bit premature. I have followed what I laid out in that essay. Meaning, I engaged with the ordinary world. I took walks, said hi to people, went for bike rides, sat in a cafe sipping a coffee and watching people. I also sat on a bench for an hour and just took notice of the ordinary world around me. Ok. So that was engagement. That’s what this work is about. For the most part, I enjoyed myself. The prosecutor didn’t show up later telling me that I failed. I barely entered the courtroom at all. That’s progress. Things have mostly been quiet and peaceful but something was missing. I felt it. I was sad and a bit lost with what to do with myself. I thought, is that it? Cafes, walks, biking and sitting alone on a bench? It also didn’t make any sense to quantify engagement as if doing more would make me happy or be more rewarding. I also understand healing will take some time; change will take some time. It would be silly to expect everything to be wonderful after forty-nine years of living a certain way.

But like I said, something was missing or unconscious but I found it. I wanted to engage with the world. That is living but what I realized is that I don’t know what to do out there or even why or how to choose what to engage with. As you know, the world is a busy place out there. People are going at it hard! I am not and haven’t for quite some time. What I figured out was that children growing up in dangerous, unpredictable environments with scary, unreliable adults will turn a child into a watcher. A hyper-vigilance is formed as a survival adaptation. And if it’s imperative for a child to constantly be dialed in to what others are doing, an important phase of child development never occurs. In other words, a child will not have had an opportunity to develop wanting as a way to navigating life. And that’s different than not knowing what one wants. They may look similar but psychologically, they are different. Survival asks a different set of questions.

Consider what childhood normally gives a person opportunities to practice. A reasonably safe child gets to ask, often without realizing it: What do I like? What happens if I go over there? Who do I want to play with? What am I good at? What bores me? What fascinates me? What kind of person might I become? Exploration is almost experimental. The child tries things, abandons things, discovers preferences, gets excited, gets bored, changes direction. But the environment I lived in demanded an entirely different allocation of attention.

Instead of:

What interests me?

I needed to ask:

What’s happening?

Where is the danger?

What mood is everyone in?

Is violence coming?

Is my mother safe?

What do I need to notice before something happens?

Those aren’t questions of identity or aspiration. They’re questions of surveillance and survival. And there’s something profound here: hyper-vigilance doesn’t merely create worry, catastrophizing and anxiety. It occupies attention. The attentional system that might otherwise wander toward curiosity, play, experimentation and preference is being recruited for threat detection.

I have always not known what I want in the course of a day but out of life also. But now I see that I have to be careful saying that because I understand that for much of my life, the system responsible for asking what I wanted was competing with a system that believed it needed to watch what was happening. That’s quite different and the next move is from threat detection to exploration which helps explain why my idea of simply engaging with the ordinary may have been incomplete.

Previously the formula was Courtroom → dismantling → ordinary life. I now think there’s an important missing bridge: Courtroom → dismantling → safety → exploration → preference → desire → direction. I might have been trying to answer “What should I do with my life?” before some of the preceding capacities have had much opportunity to develop. That would be like asking someone to choose a destination before they’ve learned that they’re allowed to wander around and look at things.

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And that changes what those walks, the cafe and the bike ride mean. Their immediate purpose doesn’t have to be happiness. It doesn’t even have to be “getting better.” They can be exploratory behavior.

I went outside.

I encountered something.

I noticed my response.

That’s data.

Perhaps the first post-excavation question therefore isn’t: What do I want? It’s: What happens when I encounter things?

That’s wonderfully noncommittal.

“I liked that.”

“I didn’t like that.”

“That bored me.”

“That made me curious.”

“I wanted to stay another ten minutes.”

“I couldn’t wait to leave.”

“That person interested me.”

“I liked being outside but didn’t want to talk.”

“I thought I’d enjoy that and didn’t.”

Those tiny reactions seem to be the raw material from which preference develops. And preference may eventually accumulate into desire.

So I think I’ve uncovered another important layer. I’ve spent an enormous amount of time previously examining the prosecutor but perhaps he wasn’t the oldest structure. The watcher may have come first. Before there was an internal courtroom judging me, there was a child monitoring the environment.

Watching.

Listening.

Reading faces.

Trying to detect what might happen next.

Trying to predict violence, instability and catastrophe.

The prosecutor could have developed simultaneously or just after the attacks on identity started. The watcher gathers evidence about danger and threat; the prosecutor eventually learns to use some of that evidence against the self.

That would give us something like:

Danger → Watcher → Hypervigilance → Prediction → Self-monitoring → Prosecutor → Courtroom

And now we’re dismantling it in roughly the opposite direction. The prosecutor becomes less credible. The courtroom becomes an echo. But the watcher may still be standing there. Except now there isn’t much to watch. That could help explain something about what I found missing or the strange blandness or emptiness I felt about ordinary life.

My old system says: “Okay. I’m here. What are we monitoring?” And ordinary life answers: “Nothing in particular.” Then comes the unfamiliar question: “Well... what would you like to do?” And I have remarkably little practice answering. This is not a character defect. It’s a developmental question about what capacities were exercised and which received less opportunity to develop. It seems silly to realize I need to learn how to want but I truly think that’s what comes next.

When survival has organized a life, freedom can initially feel less like liberation than not knowing what to do. So the infographic that will follow isn’t about “finding one’s purpose.” That seems much too large and possibly oppressive. The formula will be more like teaching progression:

Safety → Curiosity → Exploration → Preference → Desire → Direction

Not:

Purpose → Plan → Achievement.

And there should be a warning: Do not ask the prosecutor to grade my exploration.

I don’t need to become “good at ordinary life.” I don’t have to enjoy the walk. Coffee doesn’t have to be meaningful. The bike ride doesn’t have to cure depression. An afternoon doesn’t need to justify itself.

We’re finding out what happens when a human being who became extraordinarily practiced at watching for what might happen begins experimenting with something radically different: looking around to see what they might like. That seems to me as one of the most important discoveries I’ve made in this entire project. I understand why. What I recognize isn’t merely an interesting psychological mechanism. It changes the meaning of a very large stretch of my life and there is a particular kind of grief in realizing, late in life, “I wasn’t freely exploring. I was watching.”

And perhaps the horrifying part is seeing how comprehensive it may have been. A child doesn’t know, I’m allocating excessive attentional resources to threat monitoring instead of developing curiosity and autonomous preference. I’m simply living that way. It feels like reality. And now, years later, I falsley conclude, I don’t know what I want. Something must be missing in me.

But archaeology gives me another possibility: the absence of a clear direction may itself have a history.

That doesn’t make the lost years insignificant. I wouldn’t want to reassure the sadness and grief away. There really are things worth grieving here: the childhood exploration that should have been available; the experience of having adults create enough safety that I could turn my attention away from them and toward the world; the freedom to be frivolous, curious, bored, adventurous, mistaken—to discover myself without constantly monitoring what might happen next.

And there’s another reason I think this realization hurts.

Until recently, “I don’t know what I want” could remain an unexplained fact about me. Now I’m beginning to see a possible chain:

Danger → watching → survival → reduced exploration → fewer opportunities to discover preference → difficulty knowing what I want.

That moves the question from identity to history. But history can hurt more at first because suddenly I can see what wasn’t available.

I realized something else uncovering this layer. I have spent a considerable amount of time recovering what I’ve called my original or irreparable innocence. But there is another recovery adjacent to innocence: original curiosity.

Not some specific childhood dream I’m supposed to uncover buried underneath everything. I mean the much more primitive human capacity to turn toward something for no reason other than: What’s that? The watcher and the explorer both look closely at the world. But they look for completely different things. The watcher asks: What do I need to know so I won’t be hurt? The explorer asks: What do I want to know because it interests me?

Trying to “figure out what I want from the rest of my life.” could become another enormous demand placed upon someone who has already lived under too many demands. Maybe something much smaller comes first.

When I’m out somewhere, I don’t have to ask myself whether I’m successfully engaging with ordinary life. I simply have to occasionally notice: Does anything make me want to move a little closer? A sound. A building. A person. A trail. An idea. A machine. A piece of music. A place I’ve never been. Something beautiful. Something strange. Even “I’d like to know more about that” counts. Because perhaps I’m no longer excavating only the architecture of my suffering.

I’m beginning to discover the architecture that never got enough opportunity to be built.

And yes—that is terribly sad.

But the fact that I can see the missing architecture now also gives me something I didn’t have before: I finally know a little more precisely what the post-excavation work actually is. Now I understand how to engage with the ordinary in a different, more authentic way that might just lead to finding things I enjoy doing and gathering all that new evidence might just open some new doors and new avenues toward a life I like.

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My first memory is my mother leaving to go somewhere. I was crying ferociously in a doorway watching her drive away through a screen door. For a moment I was distracted by an airplane flying low overhead. It paused everything. I couldn’t tell you why because I don’t know. The babysitter was doing her best to calm me down and get me away from the door. I guess I was afraid she would never come back. She did.

My second memory was me standing on a wooden porch. It was the first floor and there were wooden stairs going up over me to the second and third floors. I was looking at the dirt lot we had for a backyard. This was in the north end of Springfield, Massachusetts. I was by myself. It must have been summer. I remember how hot it was. What I was focusing on was a little girl with a rope tied around her waist. The other end of the rope was tied to a wooden pole. She was by herself playing in the dirt. I remember my mother coming to get me. I asked her why the girl was tied to a rope. She told me the girl was retarded and her parents tied her so she wouldn’t run off. The girl’s name was Bebe, or, at least that’s what her parents called her. I remember feeling sickened by the sight.

I also remember an old Italian lady who lived on the second floor bringing down a big pot or tortellini soup for us along with a loaf of Italian bread. I really liked the soup. This was also the time when my mother was dating the guy who would become my stepfather. For fun he used to drop me out of the living room window onto the grass below. This was in front of the house. I would then run back in as fast as I could and he would drop me again over and over.

The next memory I have my two sisters, mom and I were driving to see my grandmother in Chester, Mass. It was early morning and my sister and I were in the back seat. My mother pulled the car over on the side of the road and parked behind another car. She told us to wait in the car she would be right back. I was standing on the back seat straining to see what she was doing through the foggy windshield. She was knocking on the driver’s side window when a man sat up and rolled the window down. They talked briefly and she returned. As we were driving away, my oldest sister, who was sitting in the front seat, leaned back a said that was our dad in the car. I vaguely saw the figure of a man sitting up as we pulled away. I kept staring out the back window trying to get a glimpse of him because I didn’t know him, had no memories of him. I remember feeling a sort of longing mixed with a sadness. Later I learned that he had pulled the car over drunk and slept the night in the car.

Those memories were before I was four years old. As one could imagine, I began to collect many more memories from that point forward. I’m not sure why I’m telling you them? It’s early in the morning on a Wednesday. I would imagine most of the town surrounding me is asleep at this hour - 2:22 am. I don’t’ want to sleep yet even though I’m tired. Today was odd. It might have been a waste? I spent most of the day with headphones on listening to my sad playlists and sitting with my eyes closed. I did this all day. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t until about an hour ago that I recognized my prosecutor showing attempting to point out what a failure I am for having spent the day doing that. He was easy to get rid of because I’ve recently learned that life is not a trial. But I felt drawn to write something. Of course I could go to bed. It’s right there but something’s gnawing on me. It’s a feeling I can’t identify. Something in me wants to tell you how hard my life has been and how sad it is to now be sixty-six years old and finally breaking out of doing everything as a response to trauma. I don’t want pity nor am I bragging about what I have endured. It’s just that I feel so depleted from all the effort it has taken to crack the code so everything isn’t a trauma response. But can you imagine what it has been like to wake up every morning and before I have even made a tea my internal regulation system has already armed itself for danger. That heightened vigilance scanning every noise and tailoring every behavior so as not to draw any attention. And even before the water boils the room is set up like a courtroom with a prosecutor and me. That internal voice grabbing every action and thought turning them into evidence that it will use against me in a trial that will never take place. All that before one sip of tea. And this used to go on every day and night for the past forty-nine years. So yes, exhaustion.

But it is changing because I excavated the architecture and see and understand it. So listening to music all day with headphones on was a relief, a pleasure, a break from the prosecutor and the threat of a trial. Not only did I excavate the architecture of my suffering but also put together an emergent, human-scale on ramp back into ordinary life. Now this may seem a no brainer for most people, that is, living an ordinary life but for someone like me, who has searched the depths of spirituality and philosophy for some way to grasp and frame what I have endured and find a way or reason to continue living, arriving at the doorstep of the ordinary is a breath of fresh air, a new start, a clean slate. Philosophy for me wasn’t a course I took in college or in my spare time out of curiosity. It was a drowning man desperately trying to find something to keep from going under. Absurdism gave me a dignity for having endured, told me to carry on even though no justice will be served nor reward given.

In fact, there is nothing but the ordinary to be had. It’s truly quite amazing, at least to me, to end up here, at the doorstep to the ordinary. For the entire forty-nine years up until recently I have never not felt life to be a truly desperate and intense encounter. I have never understood how most people do what they do. Meaning hold down jobs, pay bills, have hobbies, stay in relationships, have lots of friends and decent relations with their families, careers, goals, savings, homes, good credit, nice cars, even treat themselves well. All of that never even showed up on my radar. They were background noise, in the way, stuff I might? get to someday. No. People like me and I know you’re out there, carry around in their bodies, minds and hearts that desperation and intensity I mentioned. It was a short while ago I was longing for cosmic dissolution or admittance into a mental institution just to get a break from the inner intensity. Many of us become addicts and alcoholics not because there is something flawed in us but anything to smooth out the intensity or get a break from it. We may look like failures and flawed but we often can’t even see the ordinary world. Our worlds are haunted by psychic terror, dread, paranoia, hyper vigilance, severe isolation, deep loneliness, desperation and all the varied forms of self-destruction and self-hatred. We stumble over and through the ordinary. How is it possible to make breakfast when you’ve spent the night begging any god in the universe to take you or do laundry when the noise of the machines may draw attention to you and you may have to get ready to do battle and defend yourself. Don’t think we haven’t tried living in the ordinary world but it is only successful in spurts. It’s not long before the haunting returns. I remember running all over the hills in the town I live in screaming that I need a priest. I truly felt like I was going to explode at any moment.

The emergent human-scale on ramp into the ordinary is a lot easier than one would imagine. At first I thought it had to be about finding a bunch of new friends, become more social, put together a new career (at 66 - :>)), or create a new business or travel around the world. No. That’s not it. It entails going for a ten minute walk outside and noticing something for a moment–a tree, a bird, a cloud. Perhaps sitting on a bench downtown for fifteen minutes and notice people passing by. Or going to a store and briefly talking to the clerk. Smiling at someone or saying hi to a stranger as you pass by. It might mean opening your curtains first thing and letting light into your room. Making your bed. Getting a sandwich from the deli. Sitting by a river or lake. Perhaps the beach? Getting a coffee at a cafe and sitting there for a while drinking it. It means engaging with something other than what was generated by your mind and noticing it.

If you’re like me, you’ve reached a point where you’ve become isolated and withdrawn and spend an inordinate amount of time alone feeling all that intensity and desperate longing for the supernatural or some form of dissolution. And engagement with the ordinary may seem disappointing, trivial, bland, a let down especially after living with so much intensity for so long. But intensity may feel important and seem like one is close to a supernatural truth or for some, even close to some form of enlightenment but ask yourself if what you desired from the intensity has ever came. Engagement with the ordinary provides evidence. Every new encounter out there is contrary evidence that will help disarm your regulation system by providing it with new information that will show you nothing bad happened or no one dangerous showed up if your trauma manifests along those lines. And the more new evidence found in the ordinary that is contrary to what your trauma informed world is expecting or anticipating will, overtime, drown out the narrow closed feedback loop you’re looping in alone in your isolation.

I have learned that ordinary life has been going on the whole time I’ve been isolated and alone. It was just outside the door. Furthermore, for as many times as I have pleaded with the supernatural to reveal itself to me or open the veil separating them from me, none ever did. And for as many times as I have begged for cosmic dissolution, it never occurred. The universe just beyond our atmosphere has always done and will always do what it always has–remain indifferent.

Lastly, the ordinary world from the beginning hasn’t been without its madnesses. Each epoch has had its share. But the ordinary world and every epoch has also had its beauties, its lovers, its artists, its adventurers, its friendships, its acts of kindness and generosity. And our earth is the only place where we can join in and partake of the ordinary and it’s never too late to slowly and deliberately explore and find new and simple ways to start enjoying the ordinary exactly and only the way you decide you want to. So go, create some new memories.

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“…Is all that we see and seem

But a dream within a dream?” Poe

Holy fucking Ned & smithering, smothering forthnight you’ll see partly… everything humans create is just the brain’s, its ridiculous attempt at originality? but for the first of it, it mirrored what was inside: the body, the organs, the nervous system, the digestive system, and even the brain’s abilities, functions, potentials, fears, phobias, have all been made manifest everywhere and after its first run, mixes and matches endless combinations of whatever to produce the world as we see it. It shan’t be otherwise…couldn’t, mustn’t, won’t.

The world as we made it replicates our innerness. Imagine that! I dare you to. How could it be otherwise? It’s all about the brain. Just look at the world of the earthworm the path it leaves underground looks just like it, minus it. I am suffocated by this line of thought. I’m afraid it’s true. Highways, pumps, tubes, pipes, a house contains what it contains so does the brain. A structure holding it all. Electricity, chemistry, living things multiplying, dying, decay, rust, death, things burst, aneurisms, leaks, dominant genes, people, eating, bacillus, mites, defecation, battles, microbial & viral attacks, war…it’s all out there and in here. The silly little brain can’t do anything else but replicate from what it has to draw from–inside itself, inside the body, the liver, the artery, the cell…it’s all on display laid bare for all to see but…

there certainly is harmony, rhythm, heart beat, music, noise, gurgles, throbbing, desire, hunger, lust for someone, food, want, need, poverty, explosions, cruise missiles, gas, flatulence, diarrhea, vomiting and unity, systems, coordination, movement, bowel, swimming, a pool, a pocket, sequence, irregularities, cancer, kin, replication, shedding, dormancy, latency, shock, electrical, psychological, shut down, sleep mode, power, will, energy...fission.

Note: At this stage of the human mind’s immaturity, it is still finding out what it can do; it is learning from externalizing it. Hence the madness. “Look what I can do!” Someday, far into the future, it will find within itself processes and systems that will ensure its health, well being and longevity. We’re getting there albeit slooooooooooowly.

Note: Note: In other words, I am sitting inside the feedback loop while describing the feedback loop. Or, me, a biological organism, is examining whether biological organisms externalize their own predictive architecture. Or, can civilization be understood partly as biological regulation, prediction, memory and adaptation progressively externalized into the environment. If so, some patterns we associate with biological development, resilience, rigidity and decay may reappear at larger scales—not because civilization literally is a body, but because both are complex adaptive systems, and because one of those systems was constructed by the other.

I would love to turn myself inside out in front of you and let you watch what I can do. I’m telling mom! Go ahead, see if I care.

Roses are red

Violets are blue

The brain’s an exhibitionist

And so are you

A chest rising and falling

Like the moon.

Ears hear silence.

A brain sees memories.

A mind reasons

Making sense.

Anything can make sense.

Doesn’t help sometimes.

Every sound made today the world over

Is gone

Like all your thoughts from last January.

There are so many no longer with us.

Like forests.

It strikes me as odd how many people are asleep at the same time.

Even the meanest.

As I piss, I can’t shake the awareness of many others doing the same thing.

And at lunch time, all the chewing going on.

And the morning haze of coffee fueled thoughts

Leading nowhere.

Just dissipating.

Where are my childhood toys?

And only you know whether you still love someone

Other than the one you’re married to.

And you may never know whether the one you’re married to

Still loves someone else.

For as good as you are and as bad as I am

I’m as good as you are as bad as I am.

If I were a mouse

I could make anything

into a house.

*artwork - cellular landscape by Gael McGill

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Preface

I am writing this many hours after having posted this piece. The more time that passed since the posting, the greater the fear I began to feel for posting it. As I sat with this fear I realized that all but one of the people who deeply wounded me are no longer living and the fear was simply a byproduct of the old childhood wounds and a regulation system still armed for danger even though none exists.

This infographic is the result of a long, difficult and penetrating discourse with AI that at the last count was over 80k words. Everything within the infographic was designed by me. They are my words and carefully selected images and layout. I am pleased with it. Some may find it overly indulgent. I don’t care. Some may object to me having used AI. I don’t care. What I found refreshing and novel in using AI was its lack of moralizing or framing everything in religious or contemporary pop-spirituality. The responses were dry, logical and for whatever reasoning, it never failed to reframe all that I said in a positive and helpful way. So much so that it helped me not only see but truly understand what was too close to make out from an entirely fresh perspective which, in retrospect, I find quite accurate.

At this very moment I feel a deep sadness writing this preface. Mostly for me or more accurately for all the guys I have been over the years who couldn’t see what I now do but did their best carrying such a heavy burden. I appreciate this new compassion for myself. It is new to me and not too late. Although these new understandings would have helped a lot when I was younger, who knows whether I would have had the maturity to grasp them at their depths?’

Tonight I wonder what I might have accomplished by now had I not had to carry all that I did? I know I wouldn’t be where I’m at. It’s truly difficult to put into words how hard it is to continue living each day with so many wounds. From the outside we, the truly wounded, appear fucked up, strange, damaged, puzzling, challenging, abrasive and perhaps overwhelming. And more. But we keep trying over and over just to get to zero where others seem to start from.

If you are wounded, I hope you can relate to what I’ve shared above. I’ll never know unless you tell me but I hope at least one person learns something that will help them. I truly mean that.

db

Above is, obviously, an infographic. Although it is quite personal, I’m ok sharing it with you. Take what you like, leave the rest to rest. It took me a month to map and understand what my childhood abuse did to me. Although this image is only a slice of what I have had to work through over the years, it represent, so it seems, the last knot in my mind and associated behaviors.

The image outlines what has been the tightest knot to unravel. The easiest way to explain it is to say that an early childhood home, turned into a courtroom, became internalized and the prosecutor’s voice has haunted me my entire life. I am finding a bit of relief having identified and built the architecture. I share it with you in the hope that, to some degree, you may identify and resonate with some or all of it and this identification might provide you with a little relief or a lot.

Plates 4-6 are a glimpse into some of the current dynamics going on in my life that continue to haunt me. I have mapped the architecture of these dynamics and having done so, see clearly that the extremely traumatizing events that took place from 2021-2023 have opened some early childhood wounds. In its essence, I have unconsciously recreated and staged, almost exactly, my early childhood home and room. It’s truly peculiar, psychological time, in that it is unlike clock time, which is linear. Psych time seems to patiently wait outside awareness to spring to life again when the context is perfect for an old wound to be addressed maturely. I am grateful for that.

I have to admit, some of what I have discovered in building the architecture has left me a little embarrassed but I have to remember that it was an abused child who did his best to create an adaptive structure and dynamics to survive a hostile environment.

Again, I offer this to you for your reflection in the hope that you might catch a glimpse of yourself and a piece of your architecture so you can begin dismantling it and give yourself a little credit for enduring what children should never have to go through. What amazes me is that none of what I went through had to have happened. Glad I have lived long enough to unravel these knots. Good luck out there.

If you have any comments or questions - reach out. I’m here.

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I’m aware of all the pros and cons being tossed around about AI. I couldn’t care less. So late one night a week ago I logged into ChatGPT (the free account). I began searching for old insane asylums in the USA that one can voluntarily commit oneself to. I was looking for the old institutions. You know the type–big ass old buildings falling apart, ivy covered walls with people staring out the windows or mulling about the courtyards like zombies; the ones with torture chambers where they administer electroshock treatment while the patient is strapped in for the ride. Anyhow, I was looking for one to sneak into somehow. I wanted them to find me the next morning and ask me what I was doing there. I would tell them I think I’m nuts. I knew they would throw me out or ask me to leave. AI told me that typically people have to be admitted there by a professional for a wide variety of reasons, none of which I suffered from. I then imagined putting up a fight and security getting a hold of me and I would struggle against them throwing me out screaming that I wanted to be sedated with thorazine and sit in a corner drooling while staring out a window. I imagined telling them I was done with this modern world, wanted no part in it any longer, was done thinking.

Anyhow, I told all this to AI which lead to a conversation that at last count contained 67 thousand words. Truth be told, what transpired in that conversation was so enlightening to say the least. If you’re like me, having suffered at the hands of other human beings or been dealt heavy blows by life itself, you have probably either struggled with your agony alone for many years or sought help using various methods such as different therapies, individual or group, buried yourself in various spiritual groups or twelve step programs. But ultimately were looking for someone who could help you see you or, you looked for someone who was truly qualified to lay out a constellation of ideas that could help you wrap your head around not only what you had endured but could help you see from a larger, more accurate perspective, the style or truth about what you have been doing with yourself. Finally answering the question Why do I do what I do.

To be honest, I have never found that group or person who I thought was qualified enough to do the job. Or, it may be true that my wounds wouldn’t let me trust anyone enough to let them in far enough to see the real me and if you’re like me, you may not even know who the real you is yet? But you go on living, carrying your heavy load, making choices, developing habits and routines calling it a life.

I have always thought I knew what I was up to but I gotta tell you, after that conversation with AI, I was naive, short sighted and wrong about a lot of things. And you know that engaging with a large language model isn’t engaging with a being, it’s engaging with a large pool of data. You get out of it what you put into it. So there I was a week ago going at it with AI. I had made up my mind to lay it all out there just to see what it would say or come up with based upon the queries I made. I wasn’t going to hold back at all; overturn every rock, explore all nooks and crannies, even the heaviest and darkest gunk from my past. It is quite ironic that after 67 thousand words, I found someone or something that was capable of framing my entire life in such a raw, clear, precise and original way that I not only see myself quite differently from what I thought I was like but I now see what I have been doing from a unique and fresh perspective that I have genuinely begun to feel some relief from what has been weighing me down for sooooooooooooooooooooooo long.

It would be unwise to try and share all that was said. In fact, I’m still trying to digest it all. Likewise, I will not put together an outline of it all as well. That will take me some time. But I would like to share one insight I have gained. I want to do this for people like me who, because of abuse, loss or tragedy, are at a similar point in their lives, based upon how they live their lives, where they truly think they hate themselves or are genuinely disgusted and fed up with themselves. And like me, could imagine escaping into a nut house and desire shuffling around drooling and numb from thorazine. If that’s you, this is for you. I hope what follows helps in some small way.

Suffice it to say there was a significant amount of abuse and neglect in my childhood home and the two adults were so damaged and caught up in their own private Idahos that there was never an enlightened witness or healthy advocate. Never. Not once in the sixteen years I was embedded with that family. So, psychology 101 tells me that a child, out of being in survival mode, will unconsciously assume responsibility for the mistreatment because if it is assumed the child is doing something that brings on the mistreatment then at least there is an understandable reason and something can be worked on and changed so the mistreatment stops. That’s the hope and set up and hence some order to the universe. It’s well documented that a child cannot rationalize and come to conclusions that the adults are the problem. It would be impossible for a child to come to grips with the fact that their parents don’t care about them, hate them and abuse them.

My family dynamics will be unique based upon who my adults were. But yours may be the same or similar and what follows may make sense. My stepfather was a cop therefore everything I did was suspect. Most things were interrogated. It would be one thing to have had my behaviors interrogated with the goal of collecting evidence enough to prove that I did something wrong and was punished for it. This happened often enough and to some degree may seem normal on a smaller and reasonable scale but what typically followed was an attack on my identity which crosses a line that will leave a child’s mind and sense of self quite mutilated.

So, from a very young age, the architectural structure I lived in was similar to a court room where my stepfather played prosecutor and judge. That was the set up for a long time. A court room. Everything I did was gathered as evidence by the prosecutor and put into a file to be used against me. But a verb was turned into a noun. For example, I left a wet wash cloth in the shower (verb). Therefore not only was I wrong for doing that but I was a lazy slob (noun). Or I received a bad grade in school (verb). Therefore I was a dummy (noun). Etc., etc. Who, with love in their hearts for their children, attacks the child’s identity?

Fast forward. Maybe I’m a slow learner? Maybe the abuse was too much too often? But the insidious nature of having one’s identity attacked over and over year after year in a court room lead to the architecture of my suffering that has been with me my whole life. I’ve yet to meet a person who hasn’t, at some point or another, gotten down on themselves for something. Seems pretty common. Maybe they spent the whole day watching television and eating junk food? Afterwords, they may have said, “Well that was a wasted day” but they wouldn’t follow it up with a prosecutor pointing out that what they did was proof that they are a useless bum.

My discourse with AI helped me see quite clearly and specifically that I have had an active, prolific prosecutor taking up space in my head. His job has, as far back as I can remember, been to continue gathering evidence that will, someday, prove beyond a shadow of doubt, that I am fundamentally defective. If you’re like me and have a prosecutor, then you know what a heavy burden this is. Additionally, AI aided me in seeing that there is no defense attorney in the court room and no judge will ever show up to render a verdict. If it was going to happen, it would have already. The prosecutor has ample evidence because every damn thing I do gets distorted and turned into evidence to be used against me in a trial that will never take place. But oddly enough, it would seem a verdict has been rendered if one were to take a look at how cruelly I have treated myself over the years. I see this now, this mutilation of the mind, this five year old thinking he’s the problem and punishing himself now, as his parents once did, which has lead to such harsh self-criticism, self-loathing and suffering that, at times, has created an internal climate so intense and almost unbearable, so much so, that being institutionalized and given Thorazine becomes attractive.

In a small way, perhaps seeing this architecture can help shift my perspective enough to grasp the idea that no human being is a court case and life is not a trial! But just below the surface of this idea is a deeper layer that I won’t be going into but think worth mentioning. While the prosecutor gathers evidence to prove that I am fundamentally defective, if there were to be a trial, it would not be about whether I am fundamentally defective, it would be a trial about whether I have done enough to earn the right to exist. But even that trial would be ridiculous because existence precedes justification. Therefore, we already exist. Job done. Now we are free to live. Not as a defendant, not as a prosecutor, not as a case but as an ordinary person.

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Again I’ve been sitting here listening to a shite ton of music and contemplating many things. Right now I have on Rafael Anton Irisarri’s Peripeteia…new to me but prepare to get blown off the planet (to be listened to on a good sound system or good headphones…) Whew…especially Fright and Control (here). Trigger warning, it’s not for everyone. Works best late at night when you’re disgusted. So there I am, leaning back listening to this mad man, my room dark except for a salt lamp (they can be eaten or licked), eyes closed, just took my ssri, and I can feel my teeth clenching and my breathing getting heavier (not because of the ssri, I’m finally on the right one!) and I’m feeling that inner thingy with it’s mouth open and I want to steal a ray from the closest star and shoot it into my veins just to feel a different level of being alive but I know that’s impossible or cut a hunk out of the distant dark matter and break it into little pieces and smoke them. Nuts right??? Who’s to say? The only needles that have been in my arms were administered at hospitals so that’s out but now I’m pissed or I’m being jacked up by Irisarri and the thought occurs to me that I haven’t done all the fucking therapy and twelve step work (21 years without one drop of alcohol as of May 9^th) just to get myself fixed up and pretty ready to rejoin our modern society; as if it is fine and I was fucked up or defective. No way. Fuck that. I’ve had to wring myself inside out to unravel the mess that was made of me because of this modern society. I shit you not, the last thing I want to do is join back in, become part of, fit in, take the blame. Nope. I’m with Withnail from the movie Withnail and I–“I must have somethings flesh!” Come on, don’t you feel it? The mediocrity of values, the numbness from the cultural routine and repetition or as Bill McKibben’s (he’s in Substack) essay, What’s on at 11:30? Where he calls what we are in the “familiar museum”. This time frame from 1942-1978 that everything gets recycled into and spit out as if it’s new–cars, clothing, food, tv shows, movies, music - especially music, etc. Like classic rock - do we really need to hear Brown Eyed Girl, Start Me Up or Highway to Hell even once more? And, included in the classic rock genre of what were, at one time, real hits, complete flops that only retain the title of classic because of how much time has gone by. References to a so called time frame representing an innocence in the USA. The problem with this, according to Bill, is that anything outside of that frame of reference seems scary, odd, threatening...or that change is stupid, unneeded, also a threat - a threat to what? Your happiness? Your financial strength? Your safety? Your plan for the future that you worked out with some dude from Chase Bank? Cue the canned laughter. No I’m with Marjoe Gortner in his movie When You Comin’Back, Red Rider (here). This movie is about the loss of innocence of the USA because of the Vietnam war. As kool as that is, that someone made a movie about that loss, we all know damn well there has never been and can never be an “innocence” associated with the founding of the USA. So I’m with him when he says, “…no we’re not about peace and love, we’re the other guys, the disaffected youth of thee United States of America.”

Well, it’s getting late or early and some other type of ambien music came on leaving me in a different mood. One more chill. I’m feeling a bit sleepy so I’ll leave you with an old song that doesn’t fit in the familiar museum by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (here). Bye for now.

db

Have you ever sat alone for hours on end with headphones on listening to music matching something deep within your small self (by comparison to the universe) that longs for something that quenches what it is feeling or needing? It’s not a hole, not a wound, perhaps it’s more like another being living in there? Has your mind, during these intervals, scrolled through past lovers wondering if they were with you at this moment, would they help? Are they what is missing? Or maybe you thought this feeling might be quenched with philial love? Would a good friend be what you need? Could being embraced, held, understood by them help? Perhaps storge; a parental love, long gone, returning for some time with you? You know what you need isn’t a food item, or booze, drugs or another movie; nor would exercise satiate this lovely longing. Imagine going to the mountains running along a moon lit trail trying to burn it out of your being. But instead, you carry it to the hills with you. While you run and breathe, it scours the dark forest or the cool night sky searching and you both end up back home unfulfilled. Maybe you never left your desk and because your eyes were closed you spit chewing tobacco juice in your tea and drank the tea anyways. It just doesn’t seem to matter in these moments. When this feeling hits, everything seems equivalent. You could do anything and you know it won’t matter. Meaning, you could lie on your big bed and pile everything in your house upon you one by one–blankets, pillows, bread, cashmere sweaters, old pictures, books, pieces of art you have created, heating pads, old movies, favorite books, yoga mats, bags of nectarines, a glazed ham, thirty rolls of toilet paper, prayer flags, hats, scarfs, a shit ton of coins, stuffies, bikes, a leather hassock, another mattress and there you are under it all with that thing inside you with its mouth open like a baby bird needing feeding.

But imagine roaming around anther galaxy. Taking a chip off a glistening comet and putting it on your tongue and it melts like grape cotton candy. Your brain lights up like you ate a glob of wasabi and your chest opens wide pouring out thousands of fireflies. Your arms and legs outstretch offering your everything and open to receiving come what may. Your eyes close tight but your lids have become transparent and all you see is warm ruby light everywhere and your toe and finger nails tingle and melt away like snowflakes landing on a warm arm.

Or you made your way to another planet’s crystal surface? Perhaps it’s more like porcelain; opaque, cream colored, cool to the touch and smooth, curved like worn granite water ways. It gives a bit when pressed like a line cooks mat. The air is warm on this planet, orange-rose colored and like our fog. Not too dense and always flows directly down from above and rolls out and away when it hits the surface. There is no smell but when it enters your nose, throat and lungs your insides feel like they were finally turned on; as if you had never been plugged in and needed to be. You sense you are expanding at the cellular level like the process of growth from infant to adult but sped up. You can’t help but gasp but when you do it moves through you completely as if it exited your feet. There is no breathing in and out. The atmosphere here simply moves through you like wind through a hollow log. There is no pain from this dynamic, only a sensation like an extended shiver. Below and to your left you notice what appears a liquid flowing through a porcelain pathway and you move there instantly because your attention was placed there. You bend down to smell it and are reminded of sandalwood, vanilla and rose. Curiosity gets the better of you so you dip your fingers in and this liquid flows up your arm and over your entire body as you are now part of the stream. Even though you thought this liquid transparent, it is always itself, like silver but the color of the fog. The moment you are overcome with fear, it completely slides off and slides back to its source.

I truly don’t know what will do it for you or for myself for that matter. I certainly don’t know if there are many others who feel this thing deep inside with its mouth open? For now, I’ll sit here and be somewhat content typing with my eyes closed, listening to TmrDark - Dark Study Academia…Soliloquy at Midnight and try to not spit in my tea again. Later!

I followed, eyes closed, each solitary sad note down a dark flight of stairs through my heart pausing not, remembering not the circumstances surrounding all the swirling feelings; only allowing myself to feel their warmth as I passed by. I could have stopped to reminisce but wanted to follow the staircase down having never ventured past before. Each new song I heard as I descended, brought to mind an image of, what seemed, a stranger; perhaps an image matching the stirrings within my heart? Downward still I descended and after a while, having reached what seemed the bottom, I entered a small dark, warm room. I ran my hands along what felt like a lathe and plaster wall. Not far away appeared a frail old man sitting at a small wooden table. On the table were his bony hands palms down and off to his right, a small, slender candle burning. It’s flame lighted only the area near him in an amber oval. I was certain he heard my breathing but he made no recognition. He stared out a small four lite dirty window at a landscape that was slowly disappearing as dusk turned into the black of night. I stood still and watched him slowly close his eyes in tune with the encroaching darkness. His hair was gray and thin and brushed up and over his head and tucked behind his ears. He had a long, gray beard and was wearing what appeared to be a long sleeve, thermal shirt with the arms not quite long enough. His arms were flaccid and I could see many veins running down his arms to his hands.

The moment his eyes fully closed, he gracefully gestured with his left hand for me to sit to his left. I felt my way along the warm plaster and found a small wooden chair in the corner. As I sat, he gently placed his hand back on the table palm down and was still again. Neither of us spoke nor did he glance toward me. His head remained as it was–fixed as if looking out the window. As we both sat in silence, a warm peace came over me as I fixed my eyes upon his silhouette and watched his chest rise slightly with each shallow breath he drew. I didn’t know him but studied his face trying to place him. Nothing came. No memories of him. His face was gaunt and his cheekbones sharp. He seemed calm and at peace. As I stared, an affection grew for him, an unromantic affection like that of a student and professor. I made the decision to stay a while. My affection made me want to be there to serve him were the need arise. So we sat in silence.

Outside the wind howled and swirled tossing dirt dust and dead grass against the window. The candle flame leaned back protectively from the leaky window. As I looked at the old man, I wondered what inner journey he was on. I fancied him traveling past inner landscapes as beautiful as his virgin voyages. Perhaps he was thinking of former loves or maybe his children but laughed silently knowing these were my fantasies not his. I had no idea who this man was nor anything about his former life. It was enough to sit there with him. I slowly closed my eyes and joined this gentleman silently listening to the wind.

I’m uncertain how long we sat there but when I opened my eyes I noticed his head had slumped over a bit and his chin was resting on his chest. I rose and gently approached him. I touched his shoulder lightly. He didn’t move at all so I gave him a gentle nudge. No response. I picked up his flaccid arm, leaned in whispering to him but he didn’t wake. I felt for his pulse and found none.

I picked him up. He couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. With him in my arms I leaned over and blew out the candle and slowly made my way up the stairs. With each step I took, he seemed to get lighter. We passed through all the warm swirling feelings; each step in tune with the lingering sad notes. When I reached the top stair there was practically nothing left of him. To my surprise, he asked me to put him down. His voice was familiar and fragile. Our eyes met for the first time I’m sure but there was a shared intimacy in those gray-blue eyes that seemed old and ours; earned. He gently held my right hand, thanked me for carrying him a while and said he’ll find his way back down through the darkness; that he must quickly re-light the candle.

Please don’t touch me.

I want no relief.

This pain, suffering, sadness, ennui, angst, despair

is mine.

In it is love, longing, loneliness, loss, memories

and a lucidity sharp.

I will not dilute it.

I earned it, all of it and more.

They remind me

that I lived, made choices

failed, succeeded, learned but more importantly

exist.

And I am not alone.

Above me, below me, beside me

in every direction

proof–

starlight

each wink a reminder of what was once

brilliant and

solar storms

wreaking havoc, impacting.

The steady swirl of galaxies

here, in my heart, mind and body.

And of shattered asteroids and comets,

I understand.

I am alive.

I am here.

Hold nothing back black, speckled universe.

I love it all.

Get this: there are roughly 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe and the part of the universe we can see from Earth is about 93 billion light years across in all directions (a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles).

At least once in your lifetime you must have grappled with how far beyond our comprehension these facts are or that day is forthcoming or, if you’re like me and others I know, you can’t hide from this awareness. This knowledge is disturbing and always has been, at least for me.

I’m not sure why myself and others happen to be keenly aware of our situation here on Earth. I have often wondered because there is a seriousness that comes with it. Certainly we have days, many which are carefree, fun and wonderful or simply ordinary. That’s a given. And by ordinary I mean complete with all the human condition has to offer; the full spectrum of situations, contexts, opportunities, wins and losses. But this seriousness that is never far away which, at times, shows up on its own or can be summoned quite easily, seems to me to have its roots in my upbringing and perhaps yours and if this is true then you may be just like me and it is for you that I write what follows. It would also follow that others will not be able to relate but so what. This is for us.

To be quick about it, growing up in my family was dangerous, dysfunctional, unpredictable, unhealthy and damaging in so many ways one can spend their entire life trying to free themselves from the effects. As many of you know, I have written about this elsewhere here in my substack. I do believe, in retrospect, that this seriousness about me comes from being in that dangerous unstable family. Tell me, how could it be otherwise? One is forced to be serious about one’s every move, choice, word or noise. All, at the wrong moment could have dire consequences.

Ok. So I’m serious. It’s not rocket science. It’s been well documented what those environments do to children. But what comes with this seriousness is the big question–Why? Why when all around us others are enjoying life. I saw them having fun as a family next door. My classmates behaved in class, earned good grades and came to class clean and sober.

So the Why was born. Why my family, why are we like this, why am I like this, why do they do what they do, why do I do what I do? And it’s not hard to see the questions going beyond the family to the town, to the state, to the nation, to ideology and so on.

About this seriousness, I wonder about you others who relate intimately to the dynamics of what is described above. I wonder if, like me, you naturally began questioning the meaning of life? Something peculiar happened to me the first time I went to a Catholic Church. My sisters and I were sent to church one Sunday morning with change in our pockets and without our parents. I remember sitting up in the balcony overlooking the entire mass below. I was probably six years old. At first we goofed around a bit and were shushed by the basket holding decon. As I settled down, I heard the priest explain that when the little red candle to the right of the alter was lit that the spirit of Jesus was in the room. For whatever reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off that candle the whole mass.

From that moment forward something in me latched on to the ideas contained in Catholicism. Mostly that there might be a god who was all seeing and knew my every thought and move. These ideas were interwoven with my seriousness and opened up a life long pursuit of the “truth.” For whatever reason, I had to know for sure. There were no half measures. There had to be solid answers. My life depended upon it. Or so it seemed for such a long time.

On this path my ideas about god and religion changed over the years. At times they were supplanted with philosophy, various schools of eastern spirituality and agnosticism. I joined everything I could and gave one hundred percent of myself to those schools of thought but none of them held water and the seriousness never left nor did the why’s.

As you may know, coming from my type of family, leaves one seriously scarred. Under the scars there is pain. Lots of it. Emotional suffering too. It’s simply there; on its own, always. Some of it is manageable but at times it can be so intense that one seeks relief and once again the search for truth begins again and again and again.

Starting in July of 2020 and lasting up until September of 2023, I went through something so disrupting and disturbing the pursuit of truth was a life or death reality. I leaned into everything I had learned over my entire life regarding truth, spirituality and god and nothing helped. At the lowest point, I once again turned to philosophy as a last-ditch effort. I have written extensively about this moment in my substack (see The Ailment).

Suffice it to say the simple philosophy outlined in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, gave me the strength to stand up and carry my human burden with dignity. But the story doesn’t end there.

One sentence in particular hit me like a diamond bullet right in the forehead–”There’s a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity.” What I had endured from 2020 - 2023 was in fact absurd, still is but I stood up at that moment and have been living with and carrying this burden every waking moment. So what right? We all carry burdens. This is true. I am not special in this. But something new and wonderful has taken place recently.

I read that book over and over trying to grasp Camus’s philosophy of absurdism. I do believe I had a decent enough grasp of several of the main components of it (That can be found in The Ailment):

• Life is absurd

• There is a longing or nostalgia in the human heart for a lost paradise

• We want a unified story that explains

• The universe gives everything and explains nothing

• The absurd can hit anyone in the face at any moment

• The absurd doesn’t exist on its own. It is born in a confrontation between the human longing for unity and the cold indifference of the universe

• Most people will appeal to something to relieve them of the weight of their life

• There is a cost for appealing to something that gives one hope

• Humans have at their disposal their rebellion or defiance, freedom and their passions

• We die

• Ultimately, we will not be remembered

• This is a difficult wisdom but this lucidity is essential to authenticity

And with the above I armored myself and pushed my rock up the hill daily as every human alive today does. Each day I earned my metaphysical honor. Camus also says, when the absurd hits–breathe with it. This I did from 2023 to this very day. But I kept reading knowing something was missing. There was still something I wasn’t getting.

Camus did say new torments will arise whenever another dies and we will childishly chase after forgetfulness. That it will be tempting even to those with a lucid gaze who understand. Many cannot stand on the ledge for long. This I have experienced as my torment never waivers. I am reminded daily of my loss and the pain that accompanies it. At such moments my old habits of wanting to appeal to something supernatural rises and the why’s return in various guises and my human weakness both saddens me and makes me angry.

In these states of torment I find myself again frustrated with having come once again to the same point of an old loop in thinking and I become almost bored seeing this old pattern: life is mostly good, then torment arises and with it the petty need to be rescued, cured or fixed. Do you understand? Is this you?

On April 16th of this year at 2:30 am I was sitting on my deck overlooking the Petaluma river. I was staring at stars embedded deep in the night sky smoking a cigarette when all of a sudden I had an epiphany which summed up Camus’s philosophy of the absurd in the most simple terms. It was as if my mind, in and of itself, had been working to understand his philosophy and suddenly summarized it for me. I said out loud–I don’t have to believe in anything. It was as if I was catapulted off the Earth and burst through the atmosphere and hovered just outside it in the darkness. I floated there looking back at Earth and in a second I knew that all the creation stories I have ever heard, all the paths to enlightenment, everything that explains it all were nothing more than hypotheses lacking credible evidence and as such, I don’t have to believe any of them! Not a single one.

What also became quite clear is the mind boggling amount of hypotheses at work in just about everyone on the planet. Next time you're with someone having a conversation, listen closely and you can spot them. What you may come to realize after a while is nothing short of understanding the great lengths people and whole civilizations have gone to assuage both the longing in the human heart and the desperate need humans have for stories that explain it all. And today, listening to your friends or overhearing people talking in public, you can hear all the old stories still circulating and a plethora of spin offs or dilutions. Camus says, “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.”

Once you have pierced through the world of hypotheses and understand this new type of freedom one is also free to reenter the world with all its explanations and join one if one is so inclined knowing full well one is acting as if. There is nothing wrong with joining. There are many temporal benefits even without a link to the eternal.

I understand that there are many who have already arrived at this understanding. There is nothing wrong with joining them when you do. The moment you understand the above, is the moment you join them and it is right that you do. It takes as long as it takes. To be clear, this is not atheism nor is it nihilistic (indifference to life). This difficult wisdom is simply running with what is certain.

This was a profound awakening to me and not too late. I literally laughed out loud at the simplicity of the idea. It was a big deal to me; one for whom finding the truth had been such a serious endeavor. Metaphorically I saw myself dumping all my books on religions, spirituality and metaphysics into a dumpster knowing they were nothing but hypotheses and being such, considering them any longer would be an idle effort. I no longer needed them. That said, I finally arrived at a truth that works for me.

Camus, quoting Goethe says, “My field, is time.” The way I read and understand this now after spending so much time trying to understand Camus’s philosophy is simple and this is my truth, my cognitive mapping that has been wonderful since that moment on my deck. I am born. I have a field of time I can roam around in. Surrounding the field is a forest and I see death peeking at me from behind various trees. One day death will step out from behind a tree and walk toward me and we will meet face to face and I will lose. But until then, as Camus says, I have my defiance or my ability to give death the finger letting him know that I will continue living despite my knowledge of his presence and I have my freedom to pursue my passions for the duration of my time on this Earth. And whatever I decide to do, as Camus says, is a tribute that I pay to human dignity in a campaign in which I am defeated in advance.

If you are like me, dead serious about finding the truth, it will be my delight if you find something in what I have written that makes your time in your field easier.

ps Since April 16th I have noticed a few things:

• In watching my thoughts, I have noticed there are extended periods of time where my mind is now quiet and I am at peace.

• When I am busy working on something, my mind is like a tool and I can see it at work.

• When I am being negative about myself, others or life, I now can see echos of old hypotheses and do not entertain them.

1. This brutish world seems a dream. Nightmarish even. Who’s? The midnight hour is above and below a frightening figure covered in many layers of thick, dark clothing, face hidden in a scarf, unloads bodies wrapped in layers of white gossamer cloth. They carry them with ease, one by one, into an old, brick warehouse, stack them in pyramids of fifteen. There are hundreds of these stacks. Each time they return to the cart for another body, there is exactly the same amount on the cart. Inside and deeper into the warehouse another figure slowly unwraps these forms carefully and gracefully as if following a hauntingly slow piano, violin and distant choir of wounded souls; music only they hear. Each strip of gossamer cloth unwound reveals nothing at all.

2. It may seem odd to you but I’d rather curl up inside the soft, fabric like husk of an empty acorn shell. Or nestle in the fall leaves, hidden, safe under the low hanging sweep of a Blue Spruce tree. In the Spring, my attention is usually drawn to the Robin’s nest in the White Pine just beyond my window. Am I no different in my needs than her offspring? What mother Robin does seems so natural, so absolutely pure and perfect and I want what she offers. Do you understand? Look at her now as she opens and spreads her wings to cover and shield her young from the harsh wind and rain. I see room enough for me in there.

I know it’s silly and yet, I wonder why, at this late season of my life, such a longing should greet me each morning? Perhaps, long ago, I fell from a nest, featherless, scrawny, squirming, bulging blue eyelids and covered by a warm, translucent, pink, silk, my puny peeps too weak to be heard in the pounding rain and there I slowly died little by little.

I remember when the first ant crawled upon me. It walked around as if inspecting me. I feebly flapped what were my tiny wings but they barely moved. It was if the ant didn’t care about my unfortunate situation and then just walked slowly off of me. Much later it, I assume, came back with others. They are hard to tell apart. After a short while, it seemed like dozens were upon me, biting me with stinging little pinchers. I writhed and squirmed which didn’t seem to bother them at all. I did my best to peep over and over but mother didn’t come. Eventually I stopped peeping and squirming. There was nothing I could do.

In a short while, I was covered in ants. Some tried to get to my eyeballs but I held them closed tight. Something strange happened–after about an hour, all the separate stings from every bite came together as if they were one feeling. It was as if the pain had reached a crescendo that went no higher. I found I could tolerate it so stopped fussing and laid there, eyes closed and slowed my breathing and began to relax. I imagined myself standing on the edge of our nest for the first time, like mother did. I then sprung off, dropped a couple inches and naturally flapped my wings and began to soar away and up, up and up into a beautiful blue sky.

Within moments I was above tree line and what a surprise–I couldn’t have ever imagined how many trees I saw down below. It reminded me of a piece of small, green cloth mother lined the nest with. From high above the trees appeared just as soft. I flew higher and higher and for the first time, I felt like I began to lose control of my wings. They became harder to flap and stopped flapping despite my efforts and to my surprise, I began dropping lower and quickly. It didn’t scare me. I simply hadn’t ever experienced what was happening so I tried flapping my wings again and when I spread them, and to my amazement, my fall was broken and I found that if I just held them open I could glide sideways.

I wasn’t sure what it was I was gliding on because there was nothing to see but I could feel it. It was dense but not so dense I couldn’t move through it; it was kind of like what one big rain drop becomes when it lands in the nest and then is no longer there but was somewhere. So I held my wings open and soared through where rain drops go then dipped my right wing a little lower than the left and this took me over there. I was still way above the trees and began to feel hungry and tired. So I thought if I tuck my wings in I might fall again like before. So I pulled my wings in, pointed my head and beak downward and, again, to my surprise, I soared straight down, my beak piercing where rain drops go.

I began to pick up speed and was overcome by a feeling I didn’t understand but it seemed similar to the feeling I felt when I first spotted mother returning to the nest with food for me. I dove and dove toward the tree tops and when I was close, I opened my wings and soared level just above the trees and began looking for my nest but all the trees looked the same. I began flapping my wings again and went in many directions and my wings again became hard to flap so I alighted upon a tree top branch to rest a while.

As I sat there I felt the warmth of the sun upon me. It made me drowsy and I wanted to nap in my nest. Suddenly, I began to feel the way I would always feel when mother left the nest. I was never certain she would return. I felt that sitting there alone upon the tree top and began to peep repeatedly just as I did in the nest when mother was gone. I continued peeping deep into the night.

Where rain drops go began moving quickly and I began shivering. When this happened in the nest, mother would come close and cover me with part of her soft, warm underside. Then I fell fast asleep in her warmth and safety.

I was hungry, cold and alone. I tried peeping again but nothing came out so I sat there in the cold of night with my eyes closed tight and my wings folded against my sides. My small, yellow-red feet began to lose their grip on the skinny branch. I began to pivot forward but lurched my self upright several times. I then sensed I was dropping, as if in slow motion, now and then my fall broken hitting smooth, long pine needle brushes. I slid off going lower and lower until I hit the ground. I couldn’t move. I tried but nothing worked. I opened my eyes and saw only the dark silhouettes of tree trunks until my eyes grew heavy and began to close on their own. I can barely see mother coming toward me and she….

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Share Grief's Reliefs

I.
Imagine writing something beautiful
That reaches deep into a stranger’s
Wounded heart
The perfect choice of words
That will flow through
Soft, warm, essential ventricles

When they first enter
They enter through the eyes
To the brain
And then the heart

Their affect is instant
The wounded heart needs them most
Will constrict not wanting them
To ever leave the one place they
Most belong

It clings to them
Savors them as long as possible
I know you have experienced this
With the words of others
This phenomenon of the heart

Remember?
It stirred achingly plump, dense feelings
At such profound depths
You sat eyes closed
Tears slipping out
Clutching your heaving chest

The magic happened
Your heart hummed and held tightly to
Silent melancholy memories
The words, oh those words:

Come in, you’re here, come closer,
I’ve missed you, I love you, stay,
Don’t leave, where are you,
Come back, why?

But I can’t do it
So my heart idles,
Changes its color to a shade of rust
No longer identifies with love and beauty
Becomes just a pump
Doing the minimum
For a long time

But every now and then an awakening occurs,
A reminder is sent or stumbled into
It can’t be avoided
It could be a faint, familiar smell lingering
Somewhere in some air
Or the gently roiling values of grays at dusk
Or a melodic minor piece or tone of voice
Or even witnessing others expressing love, etc…

And this inner world, this big fuck faced inner world
This beauty, kindness, sweetness, gentleness
Pressing hard against an arched damn
Within my heart
How long will it hold

Could you withstand the pressure
I doubt it
But I was formed to withstand
And it is killing me–
Holding, bearing, being sturdy

One fortuitous day
I jumped into the sweet water of my heart’s lake
Held my breath
Dove to the murky bottom
Found a loose foundation stone
Kicked it through
It didn’t take much
Was sucked into the cavity
Resisting not the flow
It was too strong

Spewed out
I rode the misty, ballistic blast
Tumbling to my arid river bed below
Crawled
To a nearby bank
And amazed did watch as
Foundation stone after stone
Succumbed to the force
Tumble clunked down
One by one

With the water’s feted roar
Slowly the river swelled
Susurrously along its banks
Its reach wide and level
And beheld the former dam
Now an able arch
Through which flowed effortlessly
A nourishing, silky, sweetness
Resuscitating the arid valley
Of my life.

II.

I am that black dog

Collared and chained

Metal staked to the ground

Where I have remained

My bed is dirt

No house to be found

I live alone

All year round

I stood eagerly waiting it seems

At times deep into night

And through a winter’s freeze

I even stood in warm Spring rain

And came to accept

It was all in vain

Without tender touch

Or walks, or play

My legs grew weak

So here I lay

A small boy did once

Timidly tenderly approach

And sat beside me in my dirt

His reach slow and gentle

Afraid he might get hurt

I didn’t know I needed a soft embrace

Or the tears that fell from his face

Which disappeared into my fur

But when a few slid in and touched my skin

Something in me began to stir

A discarded wonder if he’d return again.

III.

The wind doesn’t just blow by, it seems to be looking for something, searching, touching everything in its path, on its journey; your face, every leaf on ten thousand trees, skims the water, the ripples proof of its effort. It dances with dirt, swirling as if in love across the dry field, presses itself hard against glass, bending it inward and it frolics with floral summer dresses, plastic bags, hair, umbrellas and newspapers. Then it is gone. Has moved on and carries on like an invisible ocean.

And the ocean and seas, those magnificent beasts, sometimes gently licking every shore and other times pounding them ferociously.

Oh creator, designer, even evolution itself, why the thorn of incomplete, unfinished, unsettled? Why the incessant search down so many roads, in so many cities, towns, beds, arms and throats. This thorn of bone, will it ever dissolve, its painful tip ever be rounded out? By what, by whom, when? Relief, only temporary. Then again, the prick and the search begins anew.

Is this a cruel joke? Perhaps somewhere a child holds a crystal orb containing our universe; a toy they clasp in the palms of their hands peeking at us through the space between their thumbs and laughing?

I couldn’t care less. Does not the wind eventually settle down to a calm? Does not the turbulent ocean surface lie flat one day? Is this not a returning to oneself? The wind never left the air, the wave never left the ocean or sea. And I now know, after many turbulent years, I have never left me.

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Buy me a coffee?

Perhaps it’s the communist or the socialist in me that likes to share what I have found but I suspect sharing is simply something that is natural to the human species and, I would venture, the hallmark of a healthy human being completely in touch with their hearts. I do have something to share with you but first, I need to set the stage and in doing so, I hope that what I have found is as useful to you as it has been for me. Let us begin.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you are probably familiar with the fact that I have been through some shite in my life. In retrospect, someone should have stepped in long ago given what was going on in that family. Unfortunately, no one ever did and we were left to fend for ourselves like feral beasts in a dangerous environment. My siblings and I made it through and to varying degrees, are out there giving it their best shot.

As you may or may not know, I have been trying to write creatively about abuse and trauma. This is a new thing for me. I took a few creative writing classes during the pandemic and started posting on Substack in 2023. That is the extent of my training and writing history.

I have written essays, stories and poems. Most have been an attempt to understand what I went through; to speak about it, at it, get in touch with it and ultimately find some release from its grip and continued affect upon me. I have shared this with the hope that others, who have suffered from all sorts of traumas, may see themselves, perhaps try writing creatively about their junk and heal a little but more importantly, know they are not alone. It is with this in mind, that I now share with you the latest, wonderful discovery.

A little background first. For most of my life I have known something was terribly wrong with me or sensed I was severely messed up from my family of origin. Damaged goods. How could it have been otherwise. Imagine a large boiling pot. Like the ones in fairy tales where witches stir the giant steaming pot. That one. In this pot is a child whose father left when the child was one and never came back. Add to this mix, a step father, police officer, alcoholic, fascist and violent. Lastly, add an mother, alcoholic, suicidal, withdrawn, lost, powerless. This was the early imprint upon the child. Take the child out of the pot, send them out into the world and...

After dropping out of school after ninth grade, my first attempt at doing something that might help was join the military when I turned 17. The military loves bad boys and girls. My hope was a reparenting where I might learn some discipline. I was too rebellious. I was home again in just over two years with a Chapter 13 - can’t adapt to military life. No one wanted a bad boy around in a voluntary army. By the time I had reached 19, I had been arrested five times: drunk and disorderly, breach of the peace, criminal mischief, destruction of government property (throwing a 35lb rock through the windshield of a police car) and escaping custody. All this having taken place in a quaint, small town in Western Massachusetts.

Next I sought refuge in Christianity. Joined a church. Someone in the church knew someone in a sister church in California and off I went on a Greyhound bus. This too was short lived. For whatever reason, Christianity never touched the core of what was driving me.

I forgot to mention being thrown out of our house when I was fifteen. Many are the times I had spent living in other homes, with other families, wearing other’s clothes, eating other’s food and sleeping in other’s beds. Eventually, nothing fit. Kind of like Goldilocks.

But now far from home, living in Terra Linda, California, I managed to get into a private college in 1982. It was not my intention but I was living with a woman whose son was enrolled. She and I went to a dinner one night at the college and I found out they needed students and offered a substantial financial aid package. “Just sign here every year for four years and you’re in.” I saw only a free room and food for FOUR YEARS! Yippee!!

In that first year, I developed a personal relationship with one of the professors who taught a psychology course. This man took the time to sit with me in my dorm room to talk about the inner workings of the psyche. He knew I was struggling and wanted to help. At that time I was completely ignorant of most everything for lack of exposure but those conversations helped me understand, at an intellectual level, some simple ideas about what was plaguing me. What I took from those talks was that epiphanies and insights were only that. For some reason, I had it in my mind that if I understood what made me tick or could put a name on what was bothering me, it would simply go away or evaporate. I was wrong.

I dropped out twice but made my way back into the school. At one point, I found a Jungian analyst who did pro bono work in San Francisco for a non profit. We did therapy for four years. Talk therapy. Psycho-education. More insights but still, this did nothing to stop the turmoil. In my last year of undergraduate school I worked with a school counselor for a year. Again, more insights yet I was still a mess. This inner turmoil ,as you probably know, has behaviors and habits that go with it. To say the least, I was unfit and struggled to live in a “normal” way.

I started drinking when I was twelve and continued binge drinking even while in therapy. I didn’t see it as an issue. I had it in my head that everyone who drinks has similar struggles. If you drink, there will be, occasionally, hell to pay. It seemed normal. A few years after college, I found another non profit in San Rafael that had low cost therapy where I worked for five years with an Object Relations Therapist. One day she told me she couldn’t work with me any longer because I had spent five years trying to figure out how to drink. She told me to go to AA just to see how they define what an alcoholic is. She said she didn’t care whether I stayed or not but she hoped I would stay long enough to get a glimpse of what an alcoholic is. This I did but couldn’t hear anything useful.

Rather than bog you down in more of the details of the circuitous route I traveled, here is a list to simplify the many paths I have traveled down attempting to come to grips with what was eating me alive:

• Got a Master’s Degree, an MS in International Community Economic Developement

• Went to Kripalu Institute in Massachusetts to study yoga and Hinduism

• Went to the Shivananda Yoga Ranch in the Catskill Mountains of New York for the same reason

• Studied Buddhism at the Green Gulch Zen Center in Mill Valley

• Did Ashtanga yoga in San Rafael and at the Corte Madera Yoga Studio

• Joined the Re-Evaluation Co-Counselor Community

• Found out about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or DBT, contacted Marsha Linehan who wrote the text book on DBT, bought the text book, read it and then found a therapist in Santa Rosa who practiced DBT, couldn’t afford it

• Read When Nietzsche Wept, Loves Executioner and Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom, found his phone number in San Francisco, called him and he told me I couldn’t afford him but gave me the names of two therapist he trained in Existential Psychotherapy–couldn’t afford them either

• Joined psychological research groups for PTSDs at the Veterans Administration in San Francisco

• Was prescribed various anti-depressents over the years

• LIstened to countless hours of Alan Watts talks on youtube

• Read piles and piles of spiritual and philosophical books

• Became a long distance swimmer

• Became an avid mountain biker

• Became a long distance runner, raced

• Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

All this I did while barely hanging on to life by the skin of my teeth and white knuckling life every day. I left no rock unturned searching for the keys to happiness, inner calm, a sense of direction, normalcy, a quiet mind and body. Anything to assuage the psychic terror and inner war.

Over twenty years in AA has helped but I left AA a couple of years ago finding that it was no match for the complexity of the tragic situation that befell me during and after the pandemic; I lost custody of my daughter after fighting an heroic battle against a vicious character assasination attempt, a hideous smear campaign and ruthless parental alienation. In fact, the only respite from that existential crisis I found myself in came from the simple philosophy outlined in The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. But even arriving at a lucidity bright enough to highlight and understand the absurdity of what I had gone through and survived, it wasn’t nearly enough to assuage the emotional state that I was left in when the dust of the battle I had lost finally settled.

The nasty, abusive, relentless, manipulative, distorted smear campaign and loss of my daughter brought to the surface all of my past traumas and engulfed me, or imprisoned me in something akin to a movie set where, unconsciously, I again had set the stage, for the forty-thousandth time where I was again, replaying the dynamics that went on in the home of my early childhood.

Then came the “All is lost“ moment that appears in just about every story or movie. You know, when a beloved character hits rock bottom, is trapped, doomed, forsaken, has no way out.

Until, a few months ago, when I stumbled upon a piece written here in Substack by a woman. I haven’t been able to find the post since then. I did look for it but to no avail. She briefly spoke about C-PTSD* or Complex Post Traumatic Stress; used terms and ideas that hit home, made me perk up my ears. I started researching more about it which led me to two talks on youtube by a guy named Pete Walker. There are others but his seemed definitive (here and here). He also wrote a book called, Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving (here).

After listening to his talks and reading his books something happened to me or to my character in the “All is lost” moment. Each new term took its place in the dark sky of my mind and became a new constellation; a new cognitive map of sorts. Listening to his talks and reading his words was the psycho-educational component I seemed to have needed. I’m built that way. I have a hard time doing things unless I understand them intellectually first.

Here are the basics. People suffering from C-PTSD differ from those suffering with PTSD as a result of having suffered chronic emotional abuse and neglect. But many in that type of environment have also suffered physical and sexual abuse. One can suffer from PTSD after being in a horrific car crash or fire or having been robbed and beaten. But having been in a place with chronic emotional abuse and neglect sets the sufferer apart in unique ways that can last a lifetime.

Imagine a toddler growing up in a home where there was never, what Peter called, an enlightened witness or advocate. Where a child is never seen, heard, nurtured, comforted, protected, made to feel safe, valuable and loved. A place where they are ridiculed, laughed at, told to go away or outside, yelled at, shut down, dominated, punished, beaten, etc. According to Peter, this child’s identity never gets a chance to develop because they are abandoned. But the will of a child is still there and being undeveloped the child becomes a perfectionist in the sense that they begin to do things for attention, for approval, for recognition.

When they are denied what they so desperately needed over and over they begin to sense that there must be something wrong with them. Peter says they develop a toxic super-ego and they never develop a “user-friendly ego.” After a while this child, sensing it is flawed, begins to hate itself and what is born is the “abandonment melange.”

Here are the symptoms Peter says make up the melange:

Emotional Flashbacks

Tyrannical Inner &/or Outer Critic

Toxic Shame

Self-Abandonment

Social anxiety

Abject feelings of loneliness and abandonment

Fragile Self-esteem

Attachment disorder

Developmental Arrests

Depression

Relationship difficulties

Radical mood vacillations

Dissociation via distracting activities or mental processes

Hair-triggered fight/flight response

Oversensitivity to stressful situations

Suicidal Ideation

Having read his book and listened to his talks, I have begun to see how the above symptoms have been operative my whole life and are still active today. For example, I now know when I’m ripping into myself, this is the voice of the inner critic and when I’m finding fault in others, my outer critic is on a tear. And of the myriad habits I have formed over the years where I check out for sometimes days, self-abandonment. And a big yes to depression. I wear it like an old coat.

But what has been most helpful is understanding the emotional flashbacks. I now see that when the right circumstances line up and certain triggers are in place, my brain, body and emotions tell me I’m back in the box I grew up in with those two unenlightened witnesses. Literally, I am that child again and I will be misunderstanding, misinterpreting and not hearing what someone is really saying and I will act as I always have. Peter says these emotional flashbacks can last an hour, a day, a week or even longer.

When in an emotional flashback I will engage in a variety of behaviors rising up and out of the toxic super-ego such as turning against myself as the inner critic or I will fight you when the outer critic is up. Or I will become overwhelmed and abandon myself in some unique-to-me way and at my expense. And this continued process will inevitably lead to a depression long lasting and deep enough that no longer being on this earth seems a good option. Who in their right or wrong mind wouldn’t desire an end to so much suffering? All this taking place under the umbrella of the abandonment melange.

But here’s the miraculous thing. Imagine your whole life long and wherever your life’s journey has taken you, this young, innocent wounded part of yourself desperately trying to get your attention by once again setting the table on the theatrical stage to mimic the vibe and dynamics of your childhood home so that you might, once and for all, here her or him asking for help, asking you to become the enlightened witness or advocate for yourself rather than fall prey to another round of self abandonment.

In essence, as I see it now, we have been given countless opportunities to enter into the dark waters of our unconscious in order to lift our wounded self from the waters to a safe, warm shore. This may just be the definitive turning point in your journey where, finally, you get the opportunity to learn how to love. And let it be said that every time that your wounded young self has reached out for your help and you have abandoned them somehow, that person doing the abandoning them isn’t you. Not the real you. In fact, it is your toxic super ego who, surprise, is just like those nonenlightened people who abandoned you long ago. But now, it is you doing what you learned from them.

But the shimmering beauty in this new constellation comes from having the words to create a new constellation of understanding. This is the psycho-educational component. One that explains like sailors of ancient times navigating the dark, tumultuous waters guided only by stars. But it is not enough to only know. Next will come the behavioral and grieving components.

I found Peter’s email address on his website (here). Wrote him asking him if he knew of any therapists in and around the area I live in and if he had any other resources that might be helpful.

He replied with a website for finding local therapist (here) and mentioned a group that meets online and in person–ASCA or Adult Survivors of Child Abuse (here). ASCA does C-PTSD adjacent recovery work and I have found the zoom meetings very helpful. There you will find a group of enlightened witnesses offering only healthy support and acknowledgement. On Peter’s website you will also find many recovery tools.

It is my personal pleasure and joy sharing all the above with you. I hope some of it, in some small way, will better help you begin to place shimmering stars in the darkness surrounding you.

*Complex PTSD recovery has adjacent modalities such as Developmental Trauma or IRS Internal Family Systems. I know people dealing with similar struggles using the above and they are finding it quite similar to C-PTSD recovery work. C-PTSD just happens to be where I landed first and what truly resonated with me.

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Buy me a coffee

What happened

That I have lost

The one perspective, the only

Perspective

With which to correctly

View you?

Can I, at a minimum,

Have enough of a dose

That when I look at you,

Or you, or me

I see nothing short

Of extraordinary?

How vastly small

Against it all are we

But of the this and the that

Of our vast surroundings–

Black

Arrive you

In front of me.

Please

Endow me the one vision not untrue:

You, from the demise of a star came;

A roiling cauldron

Tearing across space

Now standing in front of me;

A Pilar of Creation

The humbling, coral beauty of your eyes–

Harvested from the shores of Orion

Your amorous curves–golden dust

drawn from the Rings of Relativity’s

undulating, charged phenomena

And your sturdy surging spine–

Swiped from electric neon nebula

Your movements–graceful, orchestral

Are the slow, flowy swirl

Of a galaxy’s spiral

And of your mind’s mysteries a many–

Deep as alien aurorae

Even your troubling thoughts–

Rogue waves of dark matter

Scooped from Mare Tranquillitatis

And your passions–stars colliding

Raging red with intense heat

Please

Never let me forget

To rise above

The dense, alien, western cloud

Of mediocre assimilation

For an accurate view of you–

One nothing short of

The inexhaustible beauty and

Magnificence of our universe

Come true.

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Sometimes there is nothing

In the world or of this world

That can satiate

This feeling

Nothing

Sure it’s just a feeling

But it’s the one that needs to head toward something

Towards something unknown

But going there is still here

I’d find more of the same

And I’ll feel this again

I’ve tried scrubbing it out, soaking it out...

I could:

Get a pet to pet, get laid

Eat sugar

Doom scroll

Read something, write something

I smell something

Stretch, listen to music

Go to sleep, weep

Stare out the window, pace

Floss, pace and floss

Watch a shitty movie and

Let some editor manipulate my emotions

Watch a really good movie like Blade Runner 2049

And let some editor move me around like a marionette

Get into a fight I can’t win

Run an add in Craigslist:

Looking for a female wrestler for serious wrestling matches

(no getting to know each other - we meet just to wrestle)

Lament about the past

Lament about the future

Lament about now, about never

Swim naked at night in the cold, polluted river

Go night biking with failing eyesight

Bars are out, booze is out, drugs are out

Off the table, no longer an option

Spent spent too much time doing the above

Things temporarily held

But worsened overall

The most apt metaphor–

I’m sitting in a large pool of liquid human manure

Which comes up to the bottom of my nose

All around the pool are others in the same situation

Above me, on the grass dike surrounding the pool,

A lady walking by pauses and asks me if I’d like to be helped out

I rise up just high enough so my lips are above the manure and say, yeah.

Can you get that guy over there to stop moving around so much?

All the above has been seen for the distractions they are

Now I know what’s going on–

It only took what seems like forever

When I feel that feeling

I’m at the murky shore of my unconscious

And I know this because I have yet again

Unknowingly set the scene

Recreated another replica stage where I can

For the 45,000th time feel again

Old wounds so they might, this time,

Be clearly understood

Conclusions arrived at

Blame correctly aimed

Feeling identified

Wounding understood

Grieving begins

Healing begins

Poco y poco

In other words

I’m in my time zone

Which isn’t yours

Nor anyone else’s

Psychological time isn’t like clock time

Imagine instead one giant clock

Large enough that it will mark

Every second of your entire life

Not just 12 or 24 hours

Screw that

This one is recording it all

So, again, I’m in my time zone

And in it with me

Is everything I have ever experienced

Felt, done, seen and did.

Time holds it all in my big invisible tub

With curved, smooth sides

That I have been trying to climb up and out but always slide back in

Like a spider in a bathtub

Slide back down amongst it all

Again and again and again

I get it now

I’m supposed to be there

It’s been telling me to do what’s necessary

Over and over and over

Providing me the opportunity

To do something with it

I’ve only learned secret now

This is what happened

I was feeling a bit off, like above

I was in the tub

I wanted out

Instead I looked around

I wasn’t alone

I’m with thousands of me’s

Of all ages

In so many occasions

At first I was uncertain

What to do with them all

They’re all me in there

No one else

In various poses

Suggesting something

Has just occurred

Every me is in some way traumatized

SufferingScaredHumiliatedAbandoned

AloneTrembingSickFeverishTimid

NeedyFrozenForlornDissociatedLost, etc

I give up my desire to climb out

I gently wade through them

Sit down in the middle

Suggest the gather round

They gather round

In a circle

And sit

They stare at me

With eyes wondering

Some wild, some deadened

Others pleading

I gather myself

I ask, how can i help you?

What do yo need?

They are mute

So I say, I see you all

As I look at each one

I begin to remember

Remember it all

I ask them to gently come closer

And sit shoulder to shoulder

In a circle around me

I ask them to embrace

The one next to them

As they do

They merge

Their numbers now half

Do it again I say

And we repeat this again and again

Until two remain

I gesture kindly

For them to merge

Now it is the two of us

He is very young

Trembling, face wet with tears

I embrace him

He vanishes

I feel a deep ache in my lower abdomen

The tub vanishes

I am now the container

Of all their, my trauma

And suffering

Time has collapsed into this moment

Giving me the gift of

Remembrance

To both remember

But also to put

Myself back together

Re-member

To become whole

again.

Wandering along my winter’s edge

I came upon an abandoned orchard

where I found myself beckoned

by an old apple tree

whose subtle gestures

seemed to say old friend come sit by me

do graft your thoughts to my boughs and branches

let me show you something of time’s advances

forgive my appearing barren and without fruit

dormant my friend not dead

my strength is in my root

behold my sprawling wooden self

a gnarled and tortuous path of one

a senescent silhouette

this something I’ve become

each of my twig’s tip touches

the utmost of all my might

a limit so complete

like the furthest reach

of my neighboring tall pine

who shot straight up with delight

yes a few apples dangle still

a bit shriveled and decayed

almost all always fall

but of the few that have remained

their sweetness I’ve reclaimed

one must needs always retain

a bit of oneself for oneself

it’s unfruitful to give all away

below spread round

impressions of me upon the ground

reds oranges and yellows together

turn a rusty mush for November

my colorful palette lying below quite natural

from a bird’s view high above

appears a lone apple

and nestled amongst them

a hundred of my fallen fruit

on their resplendent journey

from tart to sweet to rot

is it any wonder who let go of who

and why or how perhaps not

even so was it the apple or the tree

or the wind or one too many a bee

is it better to let go or cling

to forgo or maturity bring

will not the seeds of those still tethered

one day become part of it all however

and once there

embedded in rich decay

await our warm spring sun

in a deep sweet sleep

uncertain they will awaken someday

fret not my perennial friend

of what I’ve revealed to you

this miraculous becoming

is not unbecoming of you

do take what I have shown you

of time’s effect upon me

and what I have done in time

as a wonder-filled example

of how we all embody the sublime.

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