03.20.02

you can talk a great philosophy
but if you can't be kind to people every day
it doesn't mean that much to me
it's the little things you do
the little things you say
it's the love you give along the way

when we patch things up
they say a job well done
but when we ask why
where did the rips come from?
they say we are subversive
and extreme, of course
we are just trying to track a problem to its source

because we know we can't sit back
and let people come to harm
we owe them our lives
each breath is recycled from someone else's lungs
our enemies are the very air
our enemies are the air

we are looking for the holes
the holes in your jeans
because we want to know
are they worn out in the seat?
or are they worn out in the knees

- Ani

--

I am looking for the holes in my mind – I have been inspired by Helena’s note to her stalker. She writes: “you have no respect for boundaries so why the hell should I be inoffensive to you? - I think you are a psychotic freak and you need help cause this has nothing to do with me - it could be anyone - it's all about you and your narcissism and fucked up psychic vampire habits. It's intrusive and it's childish and desperate and unrelated to love of any kind.” She is obviously correct in her assessment of her stalker – however, I have acted the same before – acted childishly, intrusive and desperate. I know exactly where and how and why I have acted in these ways – most recently with regards to Seth Bernard, singer-songwriter and illuminated child of the universe.

The thing is – I’ve experienced love – I’ve known love and I’ve given it and I’ve received it – but it’s been ephemeral and often times confused with obsession. Love and my work life are directly related – and I’m trying to find the source of all the problems, because I believe that by penetrating the source of my issues, I will find the root cause of being selfish, of being beautiful, of my giving and my taking, of problems with work, etc. I am not here to tell myself that I am a bad person. I know I have beauty that is real and viable that I can give to the world without sucking in too much beauty. I know that I am not a bad person, but I have bad habits, and I let my self-centeredness intrude on my beauty. I often act in one moment in a way that I find reprehensible later.

I’m trying to find the root of my childish, narcissistic and fucked up psychic vampire habits. I know they exist deep within me and they need to be examined very closely and then expunged. I cannot afford to react to the world in these ways. I need to find new ways of communicating with humanity that aren’t me-ocentric, that are more interested in community and giving, and less about taking or grabbing.

The thing is – I always see it in hindsight, and then it becomes bloody obvious to me and I am ashamed of my behavior. Never IN THE PRESENT am I aware of it – I’m always more obsessed with being in the present, being in the ecstatic now, but that ecstasy is the same as playing: as having fun. I realized this this morning as I laid in bed – the whole reason why I have problems with jobs is because I prefer to have fun and I prefer to not drown my mind in mundanity – I care about my mind, obviously, and I don’t like the idea of working a job whereby I’m paid for being bored. I’d prefer to have a job where I’m mentally stimulated and allowed to be creative and have fun – but is it possible to be ecstatic, to have fun, and to be giving and mindful of other people and not be narcissistic in the revelry while maintaining complete surrender to the ecstasy, meanwhile not succumbing to outside pressures to conform to norms and expectations to look proper, act properly, dance according to fashion?

Tod said to me once that the true artist must stand in complete opposition to humanity – that the truest artists, the heroic artists, the saints are those who are complete individuals, completely at odds with humanity, estranged and pointing a dirty finger at society saying “Look at how ugly you are – I am making beauty – I am beautiful – I will save your ugly society from its ugly societal norms and prohibitions and laws and tier of wealth and privilege.”

I’ve lived in complete solitude – I’ve lived the life of the artist that’s consumed internally – the being that walks on stilts on sidewalks around a humanity that is corrupt and vain – that refuses to look me in the eye all too often. However, I’ve had enough of living internally and being disconnected and not giving love to people. The love of ideas is not love – The passion for photography is not love – passion for writing and music and everything else that will save my soul is not love. WHAT IS LOVE? I do not know.

I do know that I’m more interested now in learning how to give love. My dad said to me on the phone last night, in reference to my horrible financial situation, that I must work, work, work – do work I don’t enjoy, scrape and save and put aside money and figure it out on my own. I think I must do the same with love. I must work, work, work – scrape and save love – do everything for love – even if I give love to only one person. I must choose to love rather than to be selfish and run the other way out of fear. Why? Because I don’t want to live the life of a coward. I don’t want to live the life of a person who’s never grown up enough to see that I’ve been behaving according to the same whims and insecurities since I was six. I know that it all stems from my mother and the lack of love I received from her. I know it’s all about being six years old and wanting to kill my brothers, due to the jealousy of the attention they received from mom. (What I failed to realize at six was the reason they received so much attention from my mom is that they needed to be breast fed and diaper changed.)

My mother is the root of my emotional and mental problem. I know that by coming to grips with this reality, I can let go of it. But I wonder if I need her to love me unconditionally, and for me to love her unconditionally, in order for me to be healed. I wonder if I have to go to the source and work very hard to create a strong connection of love between her and I in order to create a healed heart within my own life wherein I can learn how to honorably and fully love another person. I don’t know the answer. I know my mother and my father both love me unconditionally, as I do them – but is even that enough? Is it more important to treat each other in a spirit of giving? How do I, a person who spent 18 years of her life unloved and unloving and sad and internal, learn how to step outside of myself and, using discipline inside my mind, find the path to empower a relationship with myself that is at peace and loving, and loving with just one other person?

How will I learn how to be aware of where my mind is at every single moment – to see its selfishness before I act on it and learn how to not overstep my boundaries with everyone, and act as a psychic vampire, sinking teeth into strangers and lovers and friends and family? I have come to the revelation of being in the moment, but is it possible to be both in a state of submission to revelation / ecstasy meanwhile be attentive to the needs of others? How do I live / exist on a fine line? And how do I refrain from teetering over, as I’ve done so many times?

I see the results of my selfishness everywhere I turn. Most notably, I see them in Helena’s journal where I’ve left strange cryptic responses, that have lashed out in some times, and in other times, been supportive. How do I maintain awareness of what I think and say before I inject it into the world?

However, I think it is simply not enough for me to be aware of my own ego at every moment when everyone else in the world is supported in their egocentricity – the very culture we live in is the most self-absorbed culture imagined, aside perhaps, from the Roman Empire, of whose narcissism I can only imagine and allude to from cartoonish books and epic 60s movies. However, I’ve seen a number of people in my life who are capable of seeing other people’s ego gratification and self-absorption and lack of mindfulness, meanwhile totally bypassing their own and casting blame everywhere but within themselves. The first example that comes to my mind is my housemate D. D is an artist- musician that’s very busy. He’s extremely behind in schoolwork and is in a band that constantly tours – so he’s doubly behind in schoolwork because he’s always on the road – and we never see him around the house because he’s always out somewhere doing something. Recently when he was home and I found him in the kitchen, we started to talk about art and artists and I said to him “I’m just amazed by the incredible amount of talent I see everywhere in my contemporary generation” (alluding mostly to the prevalent creative furvor I see at livejournal) and He responded snappishly and made some remark that deteriorated into him telling me about why he wasn’t going to be a musician any more, except to do it on the side – that he would just teach and make music for kicks. I asked him to elaborate, and he did, wherein he told me that he can’t stand to make music with his band any more because they’re just doing it to feed their enormously large egos. I saw where that was synonymous with me. I nodded my head as he made a pan of instant rice and chicken nuggets in the oven. The next day, the skillet he used to make instant rice in was still on the stovetop, with half of the rice unused and laying limply & greasily in the pan. The cookie sheet he’d used to cook the chicken nuggets on took up most of the space in the sink, as it was still filthy and greasy – and the bowl he’d eaten the rice out of had sat out overnight in the living room and had hardened to a crusty brown. It was a revolting sight. How could he so obviously see the enormous egos of his bandmates, whilst entirely overlooking the mindlessness of his own behavior?

I also made some strange decisions regarding Seth Bernard. I will use him as an example, because the example is a good one. I saw Seth in November at the Ark, where he completely blew mind with his profound song lyrics, his voice and his guitar, the otherworldly ecstasy of his radiance as he performed, his compassionate presence with every fan. Everything about him glowed with self-illuminated beauty and I promptly fantasized about him. The fantasies died down quickly – despite me thinking that he was the reincarnation of Christ (I’ve seriously never seen anyone so present and humble with everyone he’s with.) Months passed between an email I sent him and an actual response. I knew he was busy and a constant rush of energy. He asked me for breakfast. I accepted and we had an hour and a half of a beautiful conversation. I promptly began crushing on him again, bigger than before. I saw him perform twice that weekend, and fantasies erupted anew, as he again treated with me with compassion and sincerity (as he does everyone.) I decided to try and befriend him and hang out with him. Every time I made any attempt, I was thwarted by his busy schedule and general erraticicity. At some point, I came to an enormous realization as I walked home from Jeff’s house stoned the last night I saw him. I realized I had to “Let it Go and Be With God.” I realized that I had to let Seth go and be with God. I realized I had to let the obsession go and be with God. I realized I had to let myself go and be with God. I realized that those unattainable desires remained unattainable desires simply by wanting to attain them. I thought that perhaps once I let go of trying to attain the unattainable, I would relax and be in a peaceful state and then things would happen on their own. This rationalization of my crush on Seth helped me for a while. But things eventually persisted, despite me telling myself to let it Go and be with God (the obsession, him and me). I still have a crush on him. In fact, last week, two days before he left on a tour of Michigan and the UP, I left him a quiet present on top of his suitcase. I left him a hat that I used to wear all the time, a navy skull cap with Vietnamese style trim decorating the periphery of the hat. I also left him a book I’d finished reading called “Minding Mind.” (a book about meditation and disengaging delusion.) I also left him a tiny letter I’d handwritten in a state of inspiration two weeks ago after I last saw him perform. The letter, very plainly, explained the gift of the hat and the book, and I honestly declared my crush on him, telling him that I realized I had to let him exist outside of myself and that I have to support his existence by letting him exist on his own terms, and that we need to support each other in an ecosystem of liberation, ensuring that we all are able of living lives free of delusion and nightmare. I was slightly afraid, however, that I might come off as stalker-ish, even though he hugs me every time he sees me and I know he likes me as I like him. But I also know that it’s not love. I know and recognize the fact that I merely have a crush on his head and his heart.

Jeff and I had a relationship that teetered between love and obsession, taking too much and giving too much. I realize now that we were both in the relationship for (too often) entirely too selfish of purposes. It doesn’t help that he nursed my marijuana dependency, and I nursed him into mental stability via the aqueduct of conversation and caring and spending exorbitant amounts of time with him. It got to the point where I was unable to effectively do anything else in my life because my relationship with him took up so much of my time. It had left the arena of simply caring and enjoying each other to possibly being an addiction, an unhealthy codependency. He had to cut it off because the addiction made him crazy, obsessing over me, losing sleep over me, unable to eat food because of me, etcetera.

I’ve since lost the ground I stood on and now I’m free floating in a life without any profound engrained connection to anyone. It’s leaving me feeling empty and meaningless. I don’t know if I can return to my relationship with Jeff because with him it’s either marriage/lover or nothing. I can’t believe it’s come to that, but it has. Meanwhile, I’m in a vacuous soup of relationships with friends and strangers that are leaving me feeling like I’m solely dependant on myself, living internally and occasionally losing my inhibitions and blindly thrusting into someone else, despite their needs or desires – for example Helena and Seth.

I need to find the ability to love someone. I know obsession isn’t love. I know that the reason why I seek recognition and attention is due to 18 years of not getting love from my mother. I’ve crawled into the source of my problems, and yet I cannot find a way to let go and be with God. When I finally move into that final stage of self-awareness and exist and let others simply exist and support them in their liberation.

This reminds me – I pondered these Bob Marley lines: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. … All I have are these redemption songs.” This brings to my mind the very words I enscribed about mental freedom: “Is it worth it to liberate your self if you don’t break down the chains that bind everyone else around you?”

What is mental liberation? Is it reverting to childish whims, narcissistic fantasies, being free, uncaged, present inside ecstasy, living for the self and pleasure? I think this must be transcended, because it seems to do nothing to liberate others.

I don’t know how to answer my own question. Does anyone? Is anyone enlightened enough to see through this thick blanket plot?

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