Pain...we all know what it is....yes, we sure know it when we feel it.
Some pain is easy to deal with..aspirin, motrin, tylenol, vicodin, percocet, morphine...but that is for physical pain, and it has only one component, really - an injury, a disease or the like...
But then there is that other kind of pain...the kind that eats at you from inside and claws to get out. But you, the one in pain, struggles to hold it in. Isn't that interesting? And these are made up of too many components to count, but here are a few....
the things that hurt you that you could never rise above...the little human foibles that you have displayed since your youth that you have had the misfortune of having someone else witness - those who have suffered the same weaknesses or mishaps and were ashamed but escaped the view of another - and that witness, wanting the world to think it could never have happened to them, screams to the world of your misfortune. And all those other, similarly situated to the witness, scream in glee to hide their own secret shame;
The fears, the deep down fears that you were never good enough, and never would be.....;
The shame of wanting things and doing things and thinking things that everyone has told you are WRONG, and EVIL and SINFUL - FUCK YOU Religion and the Religious if you look outside yourself and peer into anyone else and seek to judge. Religion is to save YOU, no one else, so shut the fuck up and let people be.....
And the most painful component of all is knowing that you will never be able to overcome any of it, really. You hide it, you smile over it, you laugh it off as youth, or immaturity, or that it never even crossed your mind...
And shame on us for that.. So for some there is vice, sex, alcohol. drugs, religion, obsession to mask the pain,,, and others just carry it to the darkness....
Shame on us...yes, that adds just another component to the pain that is all human...perhaps being human isn't all it's cracked up to be
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Honoring your own sordid past
I have been sitting and wondering about my pasts. Yes, plural, because none of us has a past. We all have pasts. We have all tried to re-invent ourselves, haven't we? We thought we were losers in elementary school and tried to make a new statement in junior high..excuse me, middle school now is it? When that didn't work out, we tried again in high school...but nothing really worked. Maybe not until we went away to college, where no one (hopefully) knew us from the earlier years, where we could lie and lie and try so fucking hard to be someone else finally.
May be it worked, maybe it didn't but the true test came when you tried to carry that new persona into your adult life with family drifting back in to "tether" you to one you desperately didn't want to be anymore...so, like most everybody, you slid back to the person you were to begin with and time passed until you were ashamed of the creature of your own invention...when you shouldn't be.
Then there are people like me. I haven't really changed as a person much since childhood. I have gone the route of changing locations until I fit with the territory. I am probably a more refined (not in the genteel, sophisticated sense...more like the weaponized sense) version of myself - angrier, colder, more calculating and less forgiving, more empty if that is possible, than my younger, still idealized self.
So far the locales have continually softened, which is a regression. Easier-going places and people are harder harder to fathom, to tolerate because for the most part, I don't know how to believe them. We are all just savage, but some like the sheep's clothing wayy toooo much.
There was something very honest about Vallejo, and Oakland, and Richmond, California - ghetto towns, mostly, where I learned everything! When someone smiled in your face, you knew the difference between a friend and a person that was just about to take all you have, up to and including your life. I have the knife scars, etc., to prove my credits for the Master's Degree I earned in those streets. I have the dead friends littered along my memory lane that root my education in reality...
But now the question is: How does one honor that past? It's easy to act like it was awful, like it was unfair, like it was a terrible thing to happen to anyone, especially a young kid orphaned by alcohol, depression and lead poisoning...But truth be told....it was fun! It was exciting in ways that cannot be explained to those who didn't experience it - I knew I was alive because I didn't die in that instant before! How many people hear the rushing of their own blood in their ears and feel the cold, sickening rush of adrenaline pouring through their veins, making them as acutely aware of their every surrounding as a coyote tracking some pampered pet. The sudden impact of knowing that, if you had to, you were capable of trading someone else's life for your own - the truth that most pretend they are too civilized to even consider...
And that deserves honor from me. I survived things most will never imagine, and have outlived friends and enemies and family when I should have been laid to rest long ago. Survival is a prize, granted to people for only so long, and it has to be held high like the Word's Championship Belt, because sooner or later, everyone goes down to defeat....on any given day........
So, I hold my pasts in high esteem. I put on the clothes of a civilized member of this place. I go to work like everyone else, "socialize" like most everyone else, you know, be "normal" as much as I can. I honestly love my family, maybe more than most, because I know how quickly everything can be taken away.
And I know I am only here, doing the things I do, writing the things I do, making the music I make, doing the jobs I do, and all the rest...because of who I really am underneath.
Can you say the same about your pasts? If not, it is time to make peace with them, before they kill you.
What a nasty day outside, have you looked?
May be it worked, maybe it didn't but the true test came when you tried to carry that new persona into your adult life with family drifting back in to "tether" you to one you desperately didn't want to be anymore...so, like most everybody, you slid back to the person you were to begin with and time passed until you were ashamed of the creature of your own invention...when you shouldn't be.
Then there are people like me. I haven't really changed as a person much since childhood. I have gone the route of changing locations until I fit with the territory. I am probably a more refined (not in the genteel, sophisticated sense...more like the weaponized sense) version of myself - angrier, colder, more calculating and less forgiving, more empty if that is possible, than my younger, still idealized self.
So far the locales have continually softened, which is a regression. Easier-going places and people are harder harder to fathom, to tolerate because for the most part, I don't know how to believe them. We are all just savage, but some like the sheep's clothing wayy toooo much.
There was something very honest about Vallejo, and Oakland, and Richmond, California - ghetto towns, mostly, where I learned everything! When someone smiled in your face, you knew the difference between a friend and a person that was just about to take all you have, up to and including your life. I have the knife scars, etc., to prove my credits for the Master's Degree I earned in those streets. I have the dead friends littered along my memory lane that root my education in reality...
But now the question is: How does one honor that past? It's easy to act like it was awful, like it was unfair, like it was a terrible thing to happen to anyone, especially a young kid orphaned by alcohol, depression and lead poisoning...But truth be told....it was fun! It was exciting in ways that cannot be explained to those who didn't experience it - I knew I was alive because I didn't die in that instant before! How many people hear the rushing of their own blood in their ears and feel the cold, sickening rush of adrenaline pouring through their veins, making them as acutely aware of their every surrounding as a coyote tracking some pampered pet. The sudden impact of knowing that, if you had to, you were capable of trading someone else's life for your own - the truth that most pretend they are too civilized to even consider...
And that deserves honor from me. I survived things most will never imagine, and have outlived friends and enemies and family when I should have been laid to rest long ago. Survival is a prize, granted to people for only so long, and it has to be held high like the Word's Championship Belt, because sooner or later, everyone goes down to defeat....on any given day........
So, I hold my pasts in high esteem. I put on the clothes of a civilized member of this place. I go to work like everyone else, "socialize" like most everyone else, you know, be "normal" as much as I can. I honestly love my family, maybe more than most, because I know how quickly everything can be taken away.
And I know I am only here, doing the things I do, writing the things I do, making the music I make, doing the jobs I do, and all the rest...because of who I really am underneath.
Can you say the same about your pasts? If not, it is time to make peace with them, before they kill you.
What a nasty day outside, have you looked?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Time to be honest? Not with me...
OK - so here we go...time to be honest? No, not yet, at least not with myself - you all, maybe - probably, yeah, Why not?! But not to me - no way!
Coming out of the haze at about 10 years old or so, after what can now arguably be called the "best years of my life" - a haze gone away without my permission...
Oblivion - no memory, no pain, no sound, no light - just let the robot run...
Mr. Roboto doesn't have to cry...
"Do you think you want to speak to someone..like a doctor or somebody?"
Mr. Roboto doesn't have to talk to anyone...
"Are you really OK?"
Mr. Roboto is jussstttt fine....
"Do you need to cry?"
I thought I told you, Mr. Roboto doesn't have to cry..or maybe I just thought it...but anyway, Mr. Roboto doesn't know how to cry, which is just fine...
"We are really worried about you."
Why? Mr. Roboto is just fine, I told you....
"Will you tell us how we can help?"
You can't...Mr. Roboto doesn't want...doesn't need help...
"If you don't speak to us soon we are going to have to take you to somebody!"
There is no one Mr. Roboto needs to see....
Darkness to light. gray at first slowly growing into blinding, painful consciousness, and the light hurt and the air hurts and the sounds hurt and the memories hurt and the pain hurts and the....everything is pain....Mr. Roboto had gone away.....dismantled in a frightening flash of non-time...
And no one saw but me...
Now the question was(is): Who stands before you? And who is that in the mirror? And what is this terrible tightness in your chest and the burning in your eyes and the breathing that comes in hacking sobs?
And why do I want to fade to black in the wink of an eye.......?
Nice outside, though, huh?
Coming out of the haze at about 10 years old or so, after what can now arguably be called the "best years of my life" - a haze gone away without my permission...
Oblivion - no memory, no pain, no sound, no light - just let the robot run...
Mr. Roboto doesn't have to cry...
"Do you think you want to speak to someone..like a doctor or somebody?"
Mr. Roboto doesn't have to talk to anyone...
"Are you really OK?"
Mr. Roboto is jussstttt fine....
"Do you need to cry?"
I thought I told you, Mr. Roboto doesn't have to cry..or maybe I just thought it...but anyway, Mr. Roboto doesn't know how to cry, which is just fine...
"We are really worried about you."
Why? Mr. Roboto is just fine, I told you....
"Will you tell us how we can help?"
You can't...Mr. Roboto doesn't want...doesn't need help...
"If you don't speak to us soon we are going to have to take you to somebody!"
There is no one Mr. Roboto needs to see....
Darkness to light. gray at first slowly growing into blinding, painful consciousness, and the light hurt and the air hurts and the sounds hurt and the memories hurt and the pain hurts and the....everything is pain....Mr. Roboto had gone away.....dismantled in a frightening flash of non-time...
And no one saw but me...
Now the question was(is): Who stands before you? And who is that in the mirror? And what is this terrible tightness in your chest and the burning in your eyes and the breathing that comes in hacking sobs?
And why do I want to fade to black in the wink of an eye.......?
Nice outside, though, huh?
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Boxes
Boxes - you know, those things that you need all the time to put things in to keep them from being mixed in with other things - to separate for the appropriate time or place or use. Sometimes those boxes are used to put things away that you never want to see again, but for some reason, you can't let go of.
I don't understand, yet I am the biggest practitioner of the art. Go through my house, my desk - my mind - and you will find boxes - cardboard boxes, cigar boxes, nice wooden ones that look like decorations, every kind imaginable. No, I'm not talking about an episode of Hoarders here. But everywhere you dig around there are boxes holding little bits of my life, my dreams - realized and lost - and I guess, if truth be told and the soul really exists - my soul is in them as well.
I have thought many times that somehow you can just burn the boxes and be done with all the clutter, but the problem is the true clutter - the soul clutter - survives all burning, discarding - any and all attempts to remove them. So here I am with the awful clutter of a journey stretching across and into seven different decades now....
And there is some significant stuff in those boxes - horrifying deaths of friends and family, even some that "made the papers" - one even made into several movies; sadness and pain, often self-inflicted, in attempts to escape pain that came before; glories that fell flat in the end, becoming more painful than if there had been no glory at all; and then there are the "sins."
I don't believe in sin in the religious sense. First, I am pretty doubtful about a god, or "God" as we are so often required to spell it. On a side note, I don't think god, if any, would give a crap about capitalizing my name, so fair is fair. And I don't think that any supernatural being could punish me anyway close to what I do to myself right here. But as far as sin goes, it is a very neat word for the nasty shit we do almost everyday that fills the boxes - it is the lies, black and white and the worst are the ones we tell ourselves; it is the little and big things we do to get by - financially, socially - the whole shooting match; the disappointments we suffer and can't share with anyone - at least I have never learned to share - that pile the boxes higher and deeper...
To become your fortress and your tomb.
There are no answers here, not even any questions. I guess they all just continue to stack up until you finally put them in one final box and lay down beside them forever...
Nice outside, huh?
I don't understand, yet I am the biggest practitioner of the art. Go through my house, my desk - my mind - and you will find boxes - cardboard boxes, cigar boxes, nice wooden ones that look like decorations, every kind imaginable. No, I'm not talking about an episode of Hoarders here. But everywhere you dig around there are boxes holding little bits of my life, my dreams - realized and lost - and I guess, if truth be told and the soul really exists - my soul is in them as well.
I have thought many times that somehow you can just burn the boxes and be done with all the clutter, but the problem is the true clutter - the soul clutter - survives all burning, discarding - any and all attempts to remove them. So here I am with the awful clutter of a journey stretching across and into seven different decades now....
And there is some significant stuff in those boxes - horrifying deaths of friends and family, even some that "made the papers" - one even made into several movies; sadness and pain, often self-inflicted, in attempts to escape pain that came before; glories that fell flat in the end, becoming more painful than if there had been no glory at all; and then there are the "sins."
I don't believe in sin in the religious sense. First, I am pretty doubtful about a god, or "God" as we are so often required to spell it. On a side note, I don't think god, if any, would give a crap about capitalizing my name, so fair is fair. And I don't think that any supernatural being could punish me anyway close to what I do to myself right here. But as far as sin goes, it is a very neat word for the nasty shit we do almost everyday that fills the boxes - it is the lies, black and white and the worst are the ones we tell ourselves; it is the little and big things we do to get by - financially, socially - the whole shooting match; the disappointments we suffer and can't share with anyone - at least I have never learned to share - that pile the boxes higher and deeper...
To become your fortress and your tomb.
There are no answers here, not even any questions. I guess they all just continue to stack up until you finally put them in one final box and lay down beside them forever...
Nice outside, huh?
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