Yesterday I did something pretty brave. I came out of the closet, so to speak, in front of a room full of almost strangers.
And I was totally okay with it.
And the world didn’t end.
And if you haven’t been paying attention to the code words I use in the message tags, then now is the time to start.
I had issues that I had given up hope on get resolved during the Advanced Course.
We were doing an exercise where we examined an aspect of our life where things just weren’t working out. We cast our memory back to early instances where we noticed that we felt like something was wrong and we had changed our behavior to compensate. My area had to do with how I behave when I feel that I have failed/disappointed/hurt a woman in some way. Somehow this has become the worst thing in the world and I feel horrible if I let a woman down.
At first, my earliest memory had to do with the time I decided to make my mom happy by taking out the garbage unasked. She had always wanted me to do more chores around the house, so I thought this would be a nice thing to do. As it turns out, for whatever reason, she had left the garden hose in the bottom of the garbage can and it got taken away when the garbage truck came. She scolded me, telling me “That was a perfectly good garden hose you threw out!” So I learned that, despite my good intentions, I was never good enough for a woman to approve of me and I carried that with me in life.
But then, an earlier memory opened up like a forgotten door. There are whole years of my childhood memories that are just blank and dark. This was a memory before that time.
I was however old I was when I was in kindergarten (I have a problem with tracking time). I had been put in a small, dark shed next to one of the neighbor’s houses. I was sitting on a wooden chair, maybe tied to it. There was someone else in a chair next to me. A boy, I think. There were two older girls there, one of which was my neighbor. I remember being told to stay quiet as they peeked out the crack in the door. My neighbor’s face moved in towards mine, filling my vision and then everything went dark. I have no idea what happened. I just remember having a crush on her and thinking it was important to impress her and do what she wanted. From that point on, I was attracted to girls and women who had a facial resemblance to her. If they were older than me, that was even better. There is nothing wrong with this attraction. It simply is. But that experience was ground zero for my behavior towards all women in my life since then.
I had speculated for a long time about what may have generated certain relationship issues and challenges in my life. I say “challenges” to protect my family, but some of you know what I mean. This insight tied so many issues together, it was indeed a missing piece of the puzzle and I cannot express the kind of freedom I feel having faced it.
Maybe if I put it all in one place, it will start to come together and mean something.
I guess I’m now “retro blogging.” Remember: you heard that term here first!
I’m in the home stretch for December. Just over a week to go. So far there have been only minor flare ups. Paranoia. Almost tore into someone at work the other day. Had to drive in an insane snowstorm early in the morning and then work with insane lawyers. Not the time to get on my case about anything.
Whack keeps getting delayed. New estimate puts it at the 27th. We’ll see if they come up with some new excuse.
Discovered the Wii sensor bar can be replaced with two candles. Now I play Zelda by candlelight.
Considering a new project, if only to let my mind play with something else for a while. Sometimes I need to go through the motions of a project to get it out of the way to do other things. Sometimes I end up with a story or a board game.
December is usually horrible, the worst part of my personal seasons. Apparently I have survived it all before, so I guess there’s hope. I’ve already begun to suspect my friends of dark betrayal. I lost Tuesday last week as well as one of my favorite shirts. Just vanished. I tried to work out the scenario of someone sneaking into my house and going after one shirt. Who knows how long it has been gone? Tuesday’s even trickier. On Tuesday it was Wednesday for everyone else, so I just rolled with it. I bought one of those special pill holders with the days of the week to help me remember. I have a job now, so I need to be there each day except for the “S” days.
December sucks.
Hooray, my shirt came back this morning! I was almost ready to buy a new one. Now if all my other towels come back too, I will be quite pleased.
I feel like I’ve just had a spiritual experience where information was communicated to me at a root level, data I have only begun to process. It’s as though Aronofsky understood my wordless inner dialogues and somehow translated them into cinematic language. The Fountain is a wonderful piece of art that is too beautiful to be called a film.
Outside the theater everything seemed quiet and desaturated. I moved through the supermarket, ghostlike, wanting to have a conversation with anyone at all or just sit down in the middle of the produce section and cry because some part of my spirit that doesn’t know English was trying to tell me something.
1. The Fountain
2. Brick
3. Inside Man
4. Day Watch
5. Night Watch
6. Howl’s Moving Castle
7. The Departed
8. Crash
9. Uzumaki
10. Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny
At the end of the day, “sanity” just means that you agree with everyone else, you approve of the arbitrary status quo. But I don’t. It’s like being on a rollercoaster, that weird thrill of having the ground just fall away, the whole world drop like a spinning plate and you realize you’ve never been standing on it. The rational machine is whirring away, doing its job to make sense of the data. It churns out rational explanations, perfect bricks of logic coming off a conveyor belt. It will happily slit its wrists with Occam’s razor.
A few years ago a scar mysteriously appeared on my right arm. It was the rune Raidho, backwards. I showed this to people and they immediately began weaving incredible theories which they defended as a logical explanation. One friend explained that I must have gotten drunk some time back in college and as a gag one of my friends decided to carve the rune into my arm. I somehow forgot about it until I saw the scar almost a decade later. His mind recoiled at the thought of something just appearing from nowhere, which it had.
My therapist studied the scar very intently. I presented my theory about a demon leaving my body and he suggested that it left the scar as a mark of its passage. This seemed a more reasonable explanation than the drunk college night scenario.
The scar has been fading gradually over the years. Only the long back of the R is visible. What, don’t *your* scars disappear too?
So I don’t really have a use for your status quo. I shouldn’t have to apologize for the things I have witnessed, for the damage done to me. There should have been real help. Not the doctors trying to sell me some drug.
A manic day. Felt annoyance and even hatred for people I cared about. Cussed out a virtual stranger. Everything was overwhelming and full of possibility. Ideas unspooled from my mind, tangent upon tangent, a fractured window of possibility. Couldn’t ignore anything. Magazines unfolded the future, foretelling all manner of innovations. Couldn’t *not* think about it. Playtested the game again and things kept creeping in from the edges of the rooms, things that weren’t there, could never be there. Wine to take the edge off things. Drove home and chatted with new astonishlingly gorgeous neighbor. Sit in my apartment and sigh about distances measured in every possible way.
“33” is the name of the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, season one. It’s also how old I turned a few days ago. There was a cake and a birthday wish. And, like some kind of weird 80s after school special, my wish came true.
I feel like I’ve lived a whole lifetime in one week. I’ve witnessed such horrible, astonishing revelations. I’ve been confronted with the core issues, dissolved multiple illusions, and revisited more plot threads than anything “previously on Lost…”
I felt things fall away from me with a clank, like some heavy, rusted, leaden thing.
Wine tonight, I babble. ‘Night.