HEAVY MENTAL

Over the past few days I've established a tentative truce with my soul:  It will no longer sustain such lofty ambitions with its cloying and relentless quest for goodliness, cultural valor and artistic recognition, and I will no longer hold it responsible for screwing everything up.

 It is a treaty only two days old but bearing up well considering the odds for successful transpersonal mediations are rare, particularly if done sans the aid or blessing of an accomplished guru or highly-paid life coach.

However, I've yet to test drive it in the real world as I'm still clinging tightly to that boulder of compromise while remaining mired in the quickening sand of afterthoughts; and as of this moment, I still have no plans of climbing out.

It is surprisingly warm bathed in the thick, slightly coarse sludge of mental and emotional despondency, and I find a fair amount of solace in being held above muck-level by the finicky physics of raw anxiety and non-clinical depression. Besides, I am fascinated by the uncanny strategy in their collaboration to outwit the gravity of apoplectic despair by merely shifting sides.

Anxiety drills hard from the inside and creates a sort of neurotic buoyancy that elevates my mood through chronic activity while the soft grinding of apathy provides a kind of stationary landing that holds the body steady and prevents the head from slipping completely under and drowning in the grasping mire of non-being.

Of course, my daily dual hours on that damned elliptical have ameliorated any excessive physical frustration as well as taken up a handy chunk of my mornings, which leaves me fewer daylight hours in which to brood or slam the world with bursts of misplaced anger.  It's all good.  Theoretically.

Now, if I could only get out of my way enough to just work for work's sake, I would likely be further along than I am.  Apathy is absolutely my worst enemy.  It underscores all creative musings with the broad black stroke of what for? and leaves my senses to idly scan the room for clues of purpose while those naysaying nodes of thought race to my frontal lobe with objections to every possibility no matter how lame.

But I'm not panicking.  I've been at this place throughout my life in routine doses and durations (although the timing can be fairly random and unpredictable) and I know historically that my karmic addiction to change precludes the permanency of any disposition; maudlin or otherwise.  The only constant is change.  The only constant is change.  The only constant is change.....  I wonder how redundancy feels about that?

What really needs an adjustment is my resolve, as it appears that dredging up the resolve to bring forth better days is the first step in the transformational process.

If only I just weren't so full of  f***-you's,  I'd stand half a chance of willing myself to take in the world from a point of acceptance instead of from this hastily-crafted divot of marbleized regret with all these veins of bad habits, poor choices, wrong turns, unfinished business,  broken promises, useless undertakings and all-out failures converging to form a solid slab of Who-gives-a-damn.


I could pave an entire city with that slab.  Perhaps I have.

There is also the strong symbiotic collusion between the elements and the soul to take into consideration; which, if you examine the unusually lengthy rainy season we've been subjected to here in the Midwest,  it provides my present dark night with a plausible foundation.

As if the continual injury of heavy winter snows was not enough, there comes the additional insult of all this spring rain.  Perhaps they've adjusted their attitude meters for such a dismal meteorological pallor in Seattle and are able to thrive in spite of the relative lack of sunshine, but we've been given no choice nor preparation time in Tornado Alley and can't seem to shake the idea that we've been sucker-punched by Mother Nature in a big way.

I'm not the only one trapped far to the left of happy around here, and you can tell the level of desperation on the infrequent warm and sunny days when everyone with an independent option and half a brain is spending as much time out of doors as possible.  The parks and sidewalks are so dense with pale denizens- clearly exhibiting signs of deficiency in vitamin D- that it looks like a city under siege after a long drought.

There are definite needs not being met by nature, by me or by man; and God is not nearly as comfortably close as I'd like Him to be.

But tomorrow is Friday, and for some ridiculous reason, in spite of the fact that Friday- and weekends in general- have long outgrown their significance for me in terms of being days of respite and reverie quite different from the rest, I still feel those tendons of residual hope tense in my heart at the memory of it all and that unoccupied seat of freelance abandon begs for a willing rider as much now as it ever did before.

I suppose that the learned patterns of joy are just as tenacious as the acquired experience of sorrow, and if the constitution of hope is more resolute than that of pessimism, then the short odds are that I will get my mojo back soon; or at least retrieve enough of it to rejoin my imagination and create again, as well as resume a more reasonable regime with that damned elliptical.

For now, however, Friday also signifies garbage day, which means I have to trudge through the soggy, backyard terrain with my trusty bucket and garden shovel to pick up the dog poop, collect the trash from all the indoor containers, cut up the boxes for the recycling bin and gather and tie the large, black plastic bags containing another week's worth of our detritus.  As much as I distain the mediocrity and drudgery of these pedestrian waltzes with normalcy, they are also providing necessary distractions from my temporary march with the f*** you's, and I'm trying not to hold too much of a grudge.

The other day I received a very unexpected but lovely Mother's Day card from an old and dear friend I don't often see or hear from much anymore in these days of newly-redefined filial demonstration; and in the card was a holy medal that had once belonged to her deceased mother; a terrific woman with the resiliency of the tides.  My friend wrote that she had wanted to pass the medal along to me in the hopes it would help me in my challenges with my son.  It could not have come at a more appropriate time, and I was deeply moved and filled with gratitude for both the gesture and because of the significance.

It is a beautiful, contemporary medal of The Blessed Mother, and I immediately placed it on the chain I wear and never remove that holds a few other very precious medals and charms I've received from friends and family over many years; all of deep importance to me.

On the back of this one is inscribed:  Our Lady of Mental Peace.


Who says the universe never hears us?

Everything is going to be alright.

THE QUICKSAND AND THE DEAD

I've noticed lately that my blog posts are coming fewer and farther between while my time on that damned elliptical has increased exponentially. I am now remaining on the bloody thing in excess of two hours daily and am reluctant to dismount even when that respectable milestone has been met.

This might indicate a couple of things:  1.) I have nothing more to say, and  2.) I am running away from home.

Of course, my leave-taking is purely theoretical, as my body is the only part of myself given permission to actually do any running.  Yet it is definitely being egged on by my mind, which got the idea from my emotional state because, quite frankly, I'm fed up with trying to manage them all.

I'm fed up by many things these days.

Perhaps I should rephrase that.  Stating I am "fed up" implies that there has been an erosion of patience brought about by the million small inconveniences and adjustments I've had to oblige and make room for in a soul already crushed by the weight of its own shortcomings.  That isn't entirely accurate.  Not entirely.

Those millions of small hurdles are normal and perfectly acceptable especially given the lengthening bones of clarity and understanding they lend to my psychological stride once I make it to the other side of enduring.  Who cannot wade through a lifetime of pedestrian near-misses and patient side-stepping and not emerge having developed some level of passive assurance that it will all make sense in the end?   You almost have to or the alternative option of an early check out would be overwhelming.

No.  I'm not fed up.  I'm foreign.

Suddenly, I have forgotten my own language.  My thoughts pass through the same portals of interpretation as they have for fifty-four years, yet I no longer understand what I say to myself.  It is almost as if I've been summarily saddled with a Mandarin guide for my English-speaking psyche.

Even my body, once so patently reliable and subjectively native, lately functions more as an extrinsic vessel of questionable origin whose operational capabilities seems less internally orchestrated but instead are responsive to some remote organizational force with which I have no real communication.   It would seem I am no longer present in my own skin.

Last week I lived in the world as me.  This week I am a foreign exchange student from another dimension wondering just how long this midlife inculcation will take before I will finally be able to communicate through more than my eyes and exaggerated gestures alone.

There aren't very many reasons to continue manufacturing dialogue when the only one listening is you and you can't understand yourself anymore.  I've gone quiet for lack of interest; self or otherwise.

Ironically, during my protracted galavanting on that damned elliptical, my mind never ceases producing words and trying to string them together hoping for a yield of useful thoughts and concepts.   It is done mostly out of habit and while it produces little that I have been able to successfully translate into my former tongue, the effort remains sincere and steadfast.

After two hours I usually come away with the faint skeletal etchings of at least one poem, two blog posts, a half-dozen correspondences (to people I no longer know but will never forget) and one suicide note just to remain in touch with my edgy, tortured side.

While my insatiable curiosity as to how this life will all turn out prevents the consideration of suicide as a viable exit strategy, I find it important not to thoroughly dismiss the commotion generated by those prosperous inhabitants in the dark corners of possibility or they are likely to well up into probability.  I learned when my son played football that the best offense is always a good defense, and there is no tactic quite as disarming as to engage an attentive ear.  Just ask Julius Caesar.  "E tu Brute?"

What can I say?  Lately these maudlin toads of dark sentiment and emotional dysfunction have been beating my ear.  But I'm polite.  I listen, and even though my ability to interpret much of anything is presently stymied,  I understand enough morose-ese to have momentarily succumbed to the hard blow of failure and temporary confusion as it shoves me into the quicksand of apathy.

 At least I'm not so clueless that I don't remember that as with any quagmire, earthen or otherwise, the best resolution is non-action because the more you struggle, the deeper down you will go and so quickly you won't even know what happened to you.  A lesson learned through experience as well as observation.

So while the surrounding inhabitants of the moors sleep soundly under the moonlit wash of a night sky and wake expectantly to the warm swagger of promise in another day, I remain motionless; wedded to the lone boulder of compromise that will eventually be my method of escape as soon as I recapture my resolve and restore my mental footing.

For the moment, however, I'm forced to consider anything beyond breathing as a liability.

Where the hell are those Mandarin guides when you need them?

RELATIVE BEAUTIES

I grew up surrounded by great beauties: my mother, her mother and my sister.  I look like my dad, which is perfectly fine, except that I have always been aware of the difference, particularly after stumbling upon the photo album of some of my ancestors on my father's side of the family; most especially the women on those branches off my Great-grandmother's limb.  Putting it bluntly, if strong underbites were correctable one hundred years ago and I were a plastic surgeon, I'd move to Fall River, Massachusetts where I'd have enough money to retire on just from this one family.

Fortunately, I was spared that specific feature; however, not so the round, soft-edged, ruddy-cheeked, moon-pie visage of my Irish ancestry with its marginally comely but very indistinct impact not unlike that of vanilla pudding.   Everyone is indifferent towards vanilla pudding.  If it is in front of you, you'll eat and enjoy it, but otherwise it is an entirely forgettable experience and one you seldom find yourself repeatedly craving.

However, growing up with these extraordinarily attractive women alerted me at an early age to the beguiling and mesmerizing power of beauty while at the same time making me cognizant of the danger in accepting physical comeliness as the standard of beautiful.  Not that any of them were vain (well, my grandmother was, but it suited her larger-than-life, operatic presence), but I saw that, from most people, nothing more was expected or required of them.  They were easily accepted because they were easy to look at and in most cases, popularity was a given.

With my younger sister I was aware from the moment she was beyond drooling that there was a definite visual disparity between us based solely on the response she elicited from the friends of my parent's and even passing strangers.  In point of fact, she was usually readily noticed while I was regarded more like a beige carpet in an all-white room, if I was regarded at all.

My sister was more apt to be feathered with fascinated fingers; fawned and cooed over with gooey delight in a seeming uncontrollable response to her considerably ample adorableness.

In those awkward times when recognition of me was obligatory, it was all very polite and was often accompanied by a remark of vague neutrality like, "My....um... you've grown!"

This dynamic held throughout our childhoods and adolescence, (although the cooing was eventually replaced by deep, heavy sighs) and while we are quite different, in some ways, it remains the standard even today.  However, my sister is a very kind woman and did have the great charity to move to England many years ago, thus sparing me the frequent indignities of direct comparisons.

Actually, I remained emotionally scar-free until our twenty-one-month age difference placed us in the same high school simultaneously.  Then with the predictable burst of teen angst, I became officially bothered by this genetic injustice.  But that goes with the vapid and tentative emotional terrain of high school where vast quantities of otherwise healthy egos are consumed, so that, with few exceptions, by graduation day what remains are gilted facsimiles of peer pressure in corporeal form; all with an attitude.

In retrospect,  I was probably more comfortable than most with my own external shortcomings because I had never know anything else.  I was born into and could not escape the field of physical perfection that was genetically stamped on the women surrounding me and had no other choice but to find a way to individuate myself by other means, which I am sure was a major contributing factor fostering what became a full-scale, drug-fueled, counter-cultural rebellion throughout my teens and early twenties.

Yet even as I staked my claim to radical individuality, I was not unique.  My grandmother was not only beautiful but also a card-carrying eccentric as well as a matron of and participant in the arts.  She was a painter and a cabaret singer at Bill's Gay Nineties in New York City for many, many years.  Never one to shirk a challenge she then trained her voice for opera, and was a frequent performer at venues as well-known and respected as The Waldorf Astoria.

She was also a major drama queen whose insatiable lust for attention knew no bounds and often resulted in considerable residual damage being inflicted upon us, her only family; especially my mother, her only child.   But she was ours and that fact alone qualified her for lifetime benefits of unconditional love.

However, I noticed that among her wide circle of eclectic and eccentric friends; both celebrity and non, how willing they also were to repeatedly forgive her unbridled self-absorption no matter how often they had been cornered by the egocentric beast of her indifference to them.  It was obvious that, at least insofar as her friends were concerned, this forgiveness was more readily forthcoming because she was simply so beautiful and such a dynamic presence in the world.  Even so, I found it a confounding pattern.

My mother is different.  Her beauty radiates from a place of deep refinement and class and the older she gets, the more stunningly breathtaking she becomes.  She was voted the "Best Looking Girl" at her high school, and although now into her late seventies, she shows no signs of becoming less so.

Unlike my flamboyant grandmother, my mother's beauty is carried with an understated and perceptibly regal bearing that staggers onlookers almost to the point that you'd half expect them to ask for the privilege of kissing her ring or to bestow them with knighthood.

In fact, it is not at all uncommon for men or women to approach her when we are out somewhere and ask her who she is, if she is a celebrity, where does she get her hair done and comment on how beautiful she looks in the clothes she is wearing.

When my children were young and we lived in proximity close enough that we could occasionally go shopping at a mall or department store with her, I used to joke that I felt much like Quasimodo must have felt all hunched over slogging after Esmerelda while surrounded by these snot-nosed little gargoyles that passed for my kids.  It was a humbling experience, but also an extremely joyful one in that I was so proud of her and of the fact that I could also state, unequivocally, that I was not adopted.

But I was more inspired by the fact that she took herself and her appearance lightly.  She could have used her disarming beauty to manipulate and acquire whatever she wanted, but she never did, and I know she never will.  Of course, this humility makes her even more beautiful.  Darn it.

I remember when I was in high school complaining to her about the seeming inequity in the heart of God that he would place an average schlep like me in a family of favored graces like she and my sister, whereupon she would remind me of the story about the Ugly Duckling and how he grew to be a beautiful swan.

While I knew she offered this only as a helpful tether of hope to harness my woes to, I don't recall being much comforted by the idea at the time.

First of all, it was a fairy tale and everyone knows fairy tales were written to amuse, appease and morally instruct the masses.  They were a means to placate people into believing that there is always a chance you'll lose that frog face and take breakfast in bed with the queen (or king as the case may be) in that castle on the hill one day if you just keep a handle on that glass slipper, make nice with the seven dwarves, avoid indulging in gingerbread and steer clear of bad-tempered elves named Rumpelstiltskin.

Second of all, who wanted to wait for some unknown future date before they even found out whether they were in fact an ugly, life-long dependent of the Duck family or a truly long-necked Odette under wraps?

Everyone knows that high school is a short-lived, highly demanding time period without any do-overs, and from what I was told, beauty is fleeting!  I didn't have a very big window of opportunity there, so if the Makeover Fairy were going to visit my pain, I was hoping she'd get her ass in gear well before I turned eighteen!

Evidently, she took a wrong turn in Cleveland.

Oddly enough, it has only been since I've begun the half-century waltz with my fifties that I find myself suddenly being singled out and decorated with adjectives and accolades more in keeping with those I've heard directed at my mother and sister these many years.  It is purely genetic.

Rest assured, the irony in the timing of it all does not escape me.

I find it perfectly in keeping with my latent development to experience that blush of appreciation long after gravity has become a major shareholder in my future options.

To finally find myself on the receiving end of positive notice only now that gray hairs dominate blonde;  close observational demands require glasses;  and my abdomen has enough residual scarring from three C-sections and several surgeries that it looks like the switching yard of the Chicago Train Station, will not a narcissist make.

Honestly.  My body is far more tormented than toned, and the girth of future promise is notably eclipsed by the potential girth of my waist, should I ever decided to abandoned my resonant dance with that damned elliptical.  It is a blissful irony surely visited upon me for a reason.  Perhaps some ill-conceived life of hubris in the past or as a preventative measure against conceding to one now?  Who knows?

However, what is obvious is that this perfectly-timed system of checks and balances will ensure that my humility remains intact for the duration of my natural life no matter how wrinkle-free my complexion is.

Aging offers what no other consequence of sentiency can and that is the opportunity to drop all pretense and simply function as a mortal aggregate of all we have assimilated in a lifetime and as a dispensatory vehicle for all we have culled that is good.

Of course, this premise is valid only insofar as we are willing to deeply examine ourselves and rightly decide to end the game with more presence of mind and compassion than when we began, which is a lot easier to accept in theory.

In actuality, the lineage of egocentric behavioral models is long and wide and can be a much stronger opponent than our lilting altruism, especially in moments of weakness or faced with the prospect of one day melding into the faded and brittle-boned pit of geriatric anonymity.

Given the eventuality of our one day hobbling into that walker-laden realm of senior dimensions, it takes a whole lot of grounded focus and dogged introspection to refrain from wanting to lap up every last drop from the fountain of youth and cling to the worldly notion of beauty for as long as we can.

For the most part, I am very pleased to have reached this age and stage in life and don't begrudge the fact that experiencing the youthful, belle of the ball- status was not part of my earlier resume.  It granted my imagination and intellect, however limited, free reign in the experiential processing department and enabled me to discover some precious and invaluable truths about what beauty truly is; and, more specifically, about what it is not.

So, even though I may occasionally be graced with a compliment that has little to do with who I am, what I do or how I see myself and everything to do with what others believe they see on the surface, there is little danger of my assigning any great value to the observation.

And should there ever come a weak, indulgent moment of vanity when I am tempted to think otherwise, all I have to do is remind myself of one other reality:  They have never seen me naked.

Reality?  Check.

SWIMMING TOWARD SHORE

Most people have more apprehension about facing an unknown future than they do re-evaluating a questionable past.  They fret over potential problems, calculate the odds for survival and success and wrestle with the widely variable prognostications for personal happiness in an ever-shifting, unfolding paradigm of local and universal expectations.

Even with the utmost at our disposal in terms of our personal arsenal of preparedness, the idea that we will face all of our tomorrows with only a wide grin and giggles is absurd.  It is all those little black holes of the unforeseen with their impartial and seemingly hard-hearted tendency to throw us an anvil when we're expecting a feather that derail our confidence and shake our hopes the most.

Those inevitable pit stops in hell that we know await us and lurk perhaps within the upcoming month or week or hour create, for most,  an uncomfortable subtext of apprehension and anxiety that is so routine we simply accept that each anticipatory glimpse into tomorrow is accompanied by a slight tightening in the gut or precipitates the alternate: an instant anodyne (and my personal favorite) of compartmentalization.  Nothing relieves apprehension more effectively than sheer denial.

Perhaps it is just another earmark of this middle-age conundrum that has come full circle and again places more emphasis on the future than has been the case for many of us in the past two or three decades; distracted as we were by the demands and expectations of those passages that might have included the pursuit of higher education, carving out a career,  raising a family, self-reflection and introspection or spiritual exploration.  In short,  the general maturation that urged us to seek out and settle into the bones of the person and the life that reflected who we thought we were or wanted to become at the time.

But whatever the reason, it would appear that the present has shifted just enough to make the future a little less reliable than we might have assumed it would be at this point in our lives when we considered it thirty years ago.

At twenty-four, we assumed that what awaited us at fifty-four was fairly predictable and routine in much the same way we faced a day of classes when in school.  You knew your class schedule and the familiar faces you'd pass in the hall; you knew you'd have homework and a quiz or two; that certain classes would be a bore, lunch would be met without any enthusiasm for the culinary fare, and that, finally that blessed last bell would sound releasing immediate title to your time and mind but holding you to the obligation and promise of a return visit tomorrow.  There was just enough structure and routine defining those five days out of our week that it mitigated our fears of the unknown with the gentle stroke of predictability and life was manageable.

So what happens now?  There are no class bells to signal it is time to shift our focus or the expectation of testing to keep us on task and striving for a higher ranking and a passing grade.  There are no children, adolescents or teenagers clopping through the house with a boatload of half-met needs that your parental instincts compel you to assist.  There is no external structure that regulates the passage of time by a series of imposed conditions. At this point, conscience is our only taskmaster; common sense, our timekeeper; and integrity, our guiding principle; which leaves a whole lot of freedom to consider tomorrow and decide how we want to define and design it.

Personally, I find that oddly intimidating in the sense that since there are no obvious external conditions to blame for my failure to complete those hidden goals, the burden of how my future will unfold rests squarely on my shoulders, including the one suffering occasional flare ups of bursitis.  If a day passes where nothing has been accomplished, I can't fall back on the acceptable excuses of being overly-burdened with work in one class or misunderstood in another.  I can't even fall back on the standard loophole I've consoled myself with for the better part of three decades, which was the all-consuming obligation of raising my kids and managing four lives in addition to my own.  That was golden, and believe me, I dove behind its ample circumference of forgiveness on a regular basis.

Right now the future lays like a narrow band of gold-colored beach in the distant horizon as I fend off razor-toothed sharks of insecurity and bob like a weathered cork in a sea of waning excuses.   Although I'm equipped with oars of reliable mental acuity, in a relatively stable emotional raft  (albeit one seasoned with several generations of necessary refurbishments), and enough reserves of providential dreaming and imagination to navigate my way to shore; the reality of my actually reclining with mimosas on the beach one day still seems like a long shot.

I think this is true in part because, as already stated, there is no prevailing superstructure here.  I am in free-fall mode off the high dive and it is only now, in midair, that am I realizing I forgot to check the water level in the pool of possibilities below.  And for the first time, probably in my life, there are no swim meets or coaches;  teachers or classes; kids or domestic deadlines; and I am left to decide whether to sink or swim; to keep paddling toward whatever beach head is within view or sacrifice myself to the sea and the respectably noble excuse of going down with my ship.

No one would fault me or think twice if I were to completely submerge myself in an ocean of menial diversions and pedestrian preoccupations.  In fact, it could easily be viewed as a well-deserved retirement from a long career of loyal service to the firm of Domestic Allegiance and Freelance Meanderings, Inc.; and I could dodder off into the sunset with my AARP card and a generous fruit basket without the least concern that I might be letting someone down.

 People do it everyday, and in light of the ominous and daunting prospects of facing an unknown future with diminishing eyesight, joints narrowed in range by arthritic corrosion from too many years pretending that being chronically knock-kneed was not a legitimate deterrent from doing daily six-mile jogs, and the blatancy of my advanced years advertised in both face and form like the enlarged LED readouts on the side of the Goodyear Blimp, the thought of drowning in obscurity grows more appealing by the minute.

However, just as with everything else, there would be the tenacious foil of conscience heartlessly preventing me from attaining any real satisfaction or peace by relentlessly reminding me that the standards and promises I held for myself take effort and discipline to achieve.  As well as the fact that nothing of any real benefit or consequence ever evolved from the patent acceptance that gardening, reality television, scrapbooking and monthly runs to Costco are all that is required of a life once the high-gaited tempo has been leveled to a somewhat more rambling and unreliable trot.

At this juncture the future looks rangy and undefined and the past looks patchy and incomplete.  Retrospection has it's benefits as a tool capable of altering potential missteps in the present, and since today's present will be tomorrow's past, it quite naturally becomes the perfect strategy for baby-stepping our way towards what will come.  Of course, this all goes back to our obligation to lead a life of consistent and quiet examination, which is the foundation for personal success and peace on any front,  and because it is not a technique solely endemic to these mid-life years, it should be a pretty routine undertaking if we've put in any effort at all up till now.

I'm fully expecting to weather the rough seas of renewal and manage the tides of transition with pretty much the same random aplomb and sporadic enterprising that brought me to this point and has provided me with enough remaining chutzpah to still consider risk-taking to be a reasonable platform toward advancement and enlightenment.  I am definitely a lot older than I was the last time this level of unrestrained freedom and such an ill-defined future loomed before me, but I have no doubt that I am up to the challenge.  At least on a good day.

I've lived on the edge, unintimidated by open waters for most of my life.  For me, following whatever force next captivates my attention has been the best way forward, and I see no reason not to dive in and continue the process.  I probably won't change a thing with the possible exception of now having a lifejacket on hand.  This erratic bursitis in my left shoulder can be a real drowner.

What.   So doing standup will not be part of my future.

I think I can live with that.