Roy Orbison rules.

Or, perhaps, the Poncho Of Indeterminate Spelling.

Quoth CitizenParasite (I hear he’s a really good poet):

The last major player to crack my heart made a remark that I thought was a cheap justification on her part, but as time wore on I began to see a certain wisdom in it.  She said:  “Love guides us to where we need to follow, but it may not be for love that we must go there, but for something else entirely.”

A more sublime and perfect carrot on a stick cannot be found.

I agree. I’d also add that just about everything in life is like that. We think we know what we’re doing and where we’re going, but we’re just fooling ourselves mostly. Little Red Riding Hood thinks she’s going to granny’s, but she’s really going to discover what puberty means through an archetypal encounter with lupine danger and sensuality. Big bad teeth, baby. And why red, of all colors?

Why should romance or relationship or fucking or nodding to strangers on the street be any different? What we want is of little consequence, except for providing a context of inflexibility and limitation. I want stuff, and I can’t have it the way I want it, and I don’t want to be a spoiled brat about it, because the Universal Causative Principle might listen to my pleas, but it sure won’t if I’m whining. And certainly, if I want something from/with someone else, there has to be consent from them. And they’re just as confused as I am about what they’re going to end up getting, right?

My problem isn’t lack, it’s companionship. I’m lonely in the sense that I don’t have any peers. It sounds so elitist or arrogant to say, but it’s true. I’m absolutely unique in a number of different ways, and for decades I’ve tried to pass as normal. I give up on passing. I declare it thus: I’m a freak of nature, and you’ll probably never understand me, and if you know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you’re more a freak of nature than I am, and you don’t mind acknowledging the unknowable in me and yourself, I want to ravage you in and out of the cold plunge at Goldmeyer hot springs.

The pool of people who might possibly meet such a requirement is very, very, very finite. The number of those people who are in my sphere is very, very, very small. The number of those people who I end up actually meeting goes up very, very, very slowly over time. Sometimes I rush the process with disasterous results, as with Hilary.

Suddenly, I have a vision. I can see her. She gets my jokes and can tell better ones. She likes the idea of driving across four states to go to a party. We stop at a rest area and fool around behind the restroom building while little kids from Minnesota who are travelling with their parents to see the national parks look on and giggle. I wonder where she got that pancho, but she won’t tell me because if she did, it wouldn’t be the Pancho Of Unknown Origin, and she wouldn’t be its High Priestess. She tells me about how eagles will drop turtles from up in the sky in order to break their shells, and I tell her about the time I watched bald eagles hunting in a pair around Puget sound.

And so forth. Do I want this? Is it the carrot or the stick? Do visions come to teach us to give up on visions?

As a way of explaining (if not justifying) all this relationship stuff:

Raw_Flame’s right to be my big sister and tell me to get over it, given what I’ve talked about in the ‘blog. But, there’s being over it, and then there’s being over it. There’s acknowledging the end and moving on in life, which I’m pretty sure I’ve done, and then there’s understanding, seeing, doing the kind of work that you can only do far after the fact.

I mean, it’s a certainty that you’ve got to turn over the compost pile every now and then. Or every five years or so at least.

Recently, life has given me reason to get the pitchfork and see what’s underneath. Stuff has happened I need to deal with, and I’ve found myself questioning my motives and not trusting my good sense.

So you fine folks get to watch me think it through. Luck you.

(Note: I tried to ‘blog this earlier, and it didn’t work, so it may appear twice. If that’s the case, this is the ‘official’ one.)

I don’t want to be a regret
As anybody’s fault, as anybody’s blame

I don’t want to be forgotten
In apathy or in denial

I want to be remembered
As “Oh yeah…” or better, “Hey, remember when?”


Once upon a time the universe conspired to send me exactly what I wanted in the form of K. She was that XTC song: “Little did I know that on that rainy day/All the little wishes I had put away would bring you” She was (and is) a writer, an editor, thespian, beautiful dreamer, caring and giving, and One Tough Broad. Cute, petite, ass-kicking. With the most sensitive bullshit detector ever, and an even more sensitive way of dealing with the bullshit.

I freaked. I really did. But I didn’t have the courtesy to do it in a small way. I moved across the nation to hang out with her. Me, with my wrecked life (and that’s not hyperbole or self-abuse; my life was wrecked), I was going to try and create a new identity for myself, a new way of being, and I was going to get to try making it all work while living in the apartment across the walkway from a woman who embodied pretty much all of my romantic dreams (geeky, sophisticated, beautiful, strong) while also being intimidating (actual, real, living, breathing). Yeah right.

It took six months (the term of my sublet) for me to finally realize that this was stupid. I isolated myself, lived in a curious mixture of happy anticipation that she might come rescue me from my emotional vapor-lock, and dread that she might come and implicate me in my own loser-ness. Never mind what her feelings for me were; I was like a frightened puppy lost in the world, except with an extra helping of shame. I seldom went over to her place. She was far, far more patient than she needed to be. She helped me maintain the myth a little, with occassional gentle jabs of reality to try and bring me around. If there is a God, he needs to bless K. for this alone.

Finally she quoted Richard Thompson to me: “You? Me? Us?” I didn’t have an answer after six months. I wanted her, I wanted to be alone, I wanted a job, I wanted a place to live, I wanted for everything in my life to just start working. None of it seemed to be coming true.

When my sublet came to the end of the term, I looked and looked for a place to go, but no place happened. So I decided to move to Seattle, for the simple reason that I knew people there. I can’t even remember saying goodbye to her, though I’m sure I did. Freaked, I was.

I talk to her sometimes. We’re friends, I suppose, though if I want to keep that much of it I better get back in touch soon. She got married and try as I might, I couldn’t go to the wedding; I had an anxiety attack and couldn’t turn my car into the driveway where it was being held. The XTC song also says, “If wishing is bad, bad, bad/Then send me to hell, hell, hell”

Helas. Mourn with me now the missed opportunities, and join me in attempting to forgive myself for not knowing my reach from my grasp.

Howl along!

Ecstatic, the world undfolds, stretches out, breaks apart
Disintegrates into vast and limitless

Pained, the self rises, a totem to a clan of experience
Unified, galvanized, purposeful

Big-M Mind and small-m misery.

Watchful eye sees it all. Who sees? Who feels?
What is misery in the context of what is ecstatic unfoldment?

Toss stone. Ripples. Frog croak. Poet write haiku.

Toss stone. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Pick up stone. 5. 6.
Return. 5. 4.
3. 2.
1.


A longish while back a woman named Hilary confessed that she’d been interested in me for a long time – for about as long as I’d been interested in her. Two ships passing in the night, not getting the signals, not sending the right message. My epic insecurity, her married status. Irony of ironies, I found out she’d been going through a divorce the few months in the interim. How differently things might have been. Dot dot dot. Well, in this case, probably not that much differently, come to think of it, but still. I finally understand what Breszny means when he sings, “Kick in that open door.”

What do I regret about her? I regret that the only way to learn it was to do it, and there’s not a lot of point regretting such a thing. I spent a week and a half in this woman’s private hell, and ended up getting called dispicable. What’s the meaning of dispicable in the context of emotional, psychic, and material assistance?

There’s a Neil Finn song called ‘Truth,’ and the chorus is: “Truth/Is worth more than pride.” It’s one of those obvious things that you never remember until you read where someone else said it, or hear it in a song. The sort of thing that applies to truths you’re telling about someone else, but not to the truth someone’s telling about you.

The truth is that beauty and ecstasy and pain are inescapable, no way to argue or charm your way out. They all bring each other to the melee, too. Pain and beauty and ecstasy and everything else you find in Pandora’s box. They gang up on you in slow motion, over time.

Then there’s hope. Hope and love are the two most abused four-letter-words in the English language. We force hope at gunpoint to promise us something we might never get, just so we can feel better about the present. I mean, there’s the kind of hope that comes from seeing that something is working, but that’s not hope. That’s more a kind of certainty. You know that your work will reward you with what you want, because you can see it. It’s right there. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t imagined; it’s actual photons from an external source striking your retina. In contrast, there’s the hope that ‘everything will be OK’ or ‘will work out’ or whatever, and it’s this sort of hope that I wish to shit on in this ‘blog.

I had that latter kind of hope about Hilary and her private hell. I had a plan in my head that didn’t account for, well, uh, you know… the reality of the situation. My hope was to find an eccentric genius friend and perhaps romantic overtones with whom I might be able to commiserate, to make plans, to egg each other on. The light at the end of my tunnel (as opposed to my propped-up hope, which you just read in the preceeding sentence) was that she’d get the restraining order against her husband, that she’d be able to change the locks on the house, and then I could say a polite farewell and get the fuck out of Alameda, California, drive north two states’-worth as quickly possible, and then drink a bottle of scotch on an empty stomach. The reality was even worse than that, but that’s what hope is like.

And yet it’s just one of the many back-and-forth points in the ten-point turn required to put the giant limousine of my own being into the tiny parking place of whatever relationship reality the universe has alloted to me. I’m trying desperately to see it as a skill, instead of merely banging my head against a wall, but it’s not easy.

Homespun recounting of area and national news, worth reading because it’s a guy writing for whoever will read:

Another Foggy Moment.

Imagine Mark Twain grew up in or near Puget Sound, and you’ll be approaching the gist. Particular highlights: Old Yeller Goes To War and Mondo Vaticano.

If I have Premium, why does my private page ask me to click here to upgrade to Premium?

You hear the sound in the middle of the night. Loud and sudden. It wakes you up, the shock is still hanging, energy becoming entropy in the psychic world.

You wonder what it was. Something bad? Something good? Probably bad, but you can’t tell. Is it worth waking up fully? You were dreaming of something nice.

You decide that, since you’re not dead or disfigured, things are reasonably under control, and you can go back to sleep.

As you drift off, you consider: When I wake up in the morning, and the sun shines down with its big golden beaming, I’m going to look outside and see a crater. And then you’re asleep.

And you wake up, and you look outside, and the crater is far, far bigger than you imagined.