#69

My heart has been calmer lately. Overall.

Had a phone call with an old friend that undid several knots in my spirit-body. Those of you who wish to punish me are probably thinking "Thought you had no old friends, because you are the great pariah, the unforgiven!" Well, I deserve that, and I'm cool with you, fellow traveler. Go in peace. Ha-tcha! Calm heart.

Effort goes in daily to sort myself out. While walking to or back from work, with the family dog, just sitting around. It has been an active process, is what I'm saying. In order to calm my heart, I have found it necessary to hammer away at it, bang it around the place. I have needed to be by myself for many hours. I walk about one hundred minutes each work day. At work there are opportunities. At home there are comparatively vast quietnesses to sink into. I have rearranged things to maximize available quietude. 

I remember, and in silence, wear my shoes out atoning. Once again I have mended my nets, and go fishing forgiveness out of my waters.

Gotta learn, and relearn, how to forgive. 

Gotta suffer. Quietly,

When you put your face right into it, suffering changes its quality. When you understand it, and don't shy away, or get arrogant about it--when you examine it objectively, relegate it to a sphere in balance with the rest of the moment that you are experiencing in its entirety, suffering is only a part of the mixture that forms ecstasy. Agony informs bliss, from the depths to the heights. 

*

The athletic director at my middle school got it into his head that I would be a good fit for the wrestling team, even though I had never heard of the sport as such. Word got to my mom through some channel, I was never told which, and she convinced me to go to a practice and see it through. I was most unwilling; really, even revolted. I do not especially enjoy close contact with strangers and was never strongly inclined towards athleticism in early life. Always I had to be prodded to put down the book and move,

Not in good form or able wind, I found the running, calisthenics, anaerobics, and resistance exercises all positively awful. The only thing that got me through that absolute doldrum of needless pain and toil, not to mention listening to the grunting shitheads that made up the team, was the knowledge that I would only have to do this once, a single time. I have tried--my failures have been incredible, but so have my efforts--tried to be an obedient son to my parents. I was there as a one-time deal to show my mom I'd give the deal a fair shake to make her happy. She said she didn't give a damn about my making her happy, that she wanted this for my own benefit. I both believed her and didn't. 

Actual wrestling did not change my opinion of the practice. Abrasive, damp, painful, and humiliating in that it was not the first but the third or fourth practice, and even the other seventh-graders knew more moves than me. I knew nothing, Nothing at all. 

Free wrestling for three minutes was how practice finished strong before cooldown. Up to this point I had been manhandled, twisted around, put in a headlock, put in half nelson, slapped around a bit, and insulted quite a lot. I was exhausted and in a state of placid fury. Everything had been horrible, hot, and furthermore, stupid. I was also wearing inadequate shoes.

Then the dude I was wrestling picked me up above his head. I had no idea that would happen. He lunged at my legs and somehow picked me right up. Then he drove me into the mat as hard as he could. The pain was immediate and sensational, self-destroying. The completeness of the impact, the ferocity of the shock running through my torso, a blast, a slam. My mind overloaded and went blank.

I've become a little more practiced at it now, but ever since I can remember I've not had quiet in my head. I'm always talking at myself in at least two voices, and there's always thoughts coming at me several at a time. I think fast, and a lot, and sometimes I can't even talk properly from thinking. That was, I believe, the fourth time and the first time in a couple of years my mind had gone blank for even a moment.

Then it hurt even worse and it all came back. Then a curious elation, what I now recognize as a high.

It was this high, its aftereffects still buzzing in my suddenly singing muscles, as well as the memory of that moment of silence, that made me reply, when asked a little later how the practice had gone, that I would be back the next day.

--JL

#35

Now, astute folks, or folks who simply happen to be in the know, are aware that one has many avenues open to one if one should wish to break free from the industrial shoe complex. Some are very nice and some are cons. I've known folks who swear by those shoes with the individual toes, I've seen those special ancient-tech super-moccasin shoes that one guy sells do-it-yourself kits for you to make your pair yourself out of leather that fits your foot precisely, I know about zero-drop hiking shoes, all that good stuff. I'll decide on something, someday. Something that will treat my feet like feet, let them move and stand like feet, and that is responsible and sustainable to own and make.

Not the point right now.

At the moment, I don't have so much as a bicycle. If you really want to know, I can fit everything I own except the books and musical instruments into two bags. And I can fit a couple instruments in the bags. Certainly, this poor brother cat has no car. I do have a job, though, and to get there, I have to walk. A hair under five miles there, a hair under five miles back.

Well, I could take the bus. But again, that is not the point.

While I don't think anyone could fairly make a case against me to show that I am a bad person, a cruel person, a person who is callous about abusing others, causing pain--I'm not a concentration camp guard or a torturer, I don't murder children or attack women to violate them, I don't drive like a jackass or rob people...know that I'm not a good person, either. 

Sure, people make noises based on what they see. I've been called a good person a lot. Doesn't make it true. I'll allow that I have convincingly performed deeds and behaved in ways that people consider good. This only means they were benefited by my labor or attention in some way, though, and no conclusions can be honestly drawn. Maybe all those people were shitfuckers, and deserved none of that. It's possible. Perhaps I only made shitfuckers happy as they took advantage of me, and I can't see how that makes me good, instead of a driveling idiot. I look like an asshole, helping shitfuckers when decent people needed me. But who's to say those shitfuckers didn't need or deserve my help either?

Okay. Without getting too bogged down in the sticky shit, where it's not possible for us to keep or reckon the score, let us take as writ that I have misdeeds, mistakes, and inadequacies that I feel the need to atone for, no matter how politely I speak, how much I mind my own business, or how many dishes I do.

I have, for example, lied a lot. Lying when I sit down to type is one thing, that's what I'm here in world to do. Lying with my mouth is another thing entirely. I love the truth. I love justice. Why am I a fucking liar? I hate that shit so much.

I've pissed away my twenties like a dude pissing in a corner of a yard where two fences meet, which is how I spent a non-trivial portion of my twenties. I have broken many hearts, my own pain notwithstanding, and made terrible mistakes of judgment and commitment with lovers--and oh, I have said so many wrong things. So many words. So many of them wrong. I have stayed silent when it would have better served me to cry out. I have turned my face away when strangers might have needed my help. I have taken the easy road when I knew the hard way was better, the true way. 

Not always, you know? But enough to carry weight. Enough to feel it sitting in your chest cavity.

Finally I am prone to extremely vicious thoughts in anger. I rarely so much as raise my voice, but if your true and unalloyed thoughts could be broadcast, every decent person on this green and weary earth would be screaming for a shred of my flayed skin to toss into a fire so they might curse my name as my smoke dissipates on the wind.

Walking barefoot, then, serves me admirably for this purpose--a jolt of pain, sometimes bad enough to cuss from, for every stupid thing I've ever done or let myself do. 

Penance. That's what comes after the apologies are accepted, and you realize nothing's changed.

Walking barefoot on sidewalk and asphalts hurts very much, hurts in a maddening, ridiculous, insulting way. If I didn't deserve it, need it in some basal, fundamental way, I'd put my shoes back on. No one is making me do this--no priest or king, no vengeful ex-lover or angry friend. There's other ways to get stronger.

That's the other reason. I want the other side of this, when the soles of my feet are like soft brown leather and the concrete of the sidewalk feels like supple, smooth, yet springy velvet, and the asphalt just feels like being on some ground. I'm already getting flashes of it, like when I reach smooth sidewalk after a long stretch of old asphalt--bliss. Like striding onto perfectly flat, cool clay after walking on a rough hot skillet for twenty minutes.

Mostly, though, I want to have gotten stronger. I was not born strong; quite the opposite! I was born weak, and I hate pain. Making yourself stronger hurts. And it is good.

*

This wraps up tomorrow! I shall elaborate, then conclude.

Kanye has gotten so crazy, man. I was watching the correct TV station at the exact moment that dude looked straight into the camera stone-faced and eyes flaring to say that George Bush hates Black people. It was one of the greatest days of my life and I'll never forget it. Now...well, now the world is very fucking different.

On that note, I predict the 2020 election will pass the primaries with Kanye West on the Republican ticket and Oprah Winfrey on the Democratic. Oprah will definitely win, but not in 2024, when Ye's place on the ballot will be taken by the next celebrity president. I don't know who yet. Remember today. I'm as serious as a humorless heart attack. Check the tags, maybe jot them down, so you can find this post quickly when the time comes.


--JL