THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GAUNTLET

Today has been both ridiculously exceptional as well as filled with abject desolation.  

The heady exception came in the other-worldly conduction of sublime inspiration and pragmatic execution that seamlessly unfolded during the course of the afternoon as I was preparing a post in answer to the friendly challenge J.D. Smith set before me yesterday.  The challenge mandated that I reflect my thoughts in poetry versus prose and was one I was, at first, reluctant to accept given the deeply personal content of most of my poetry.

But after a fair amount of time and some reasonable consideration, I decided, "What the hell!  Why not?"

And so I gathered up a handful of some of the poems I had written over the years, ordered them in a way that seemed most appealing and logical, and then proceeded to preface them with an explanation as to why I was posting them and, particularly, why I had been so reluctant to share them in the past.

Being the obsessive curator of words that I am, it took me several hours as I labored over both the content as well as having to troll the bottom-most layers of my soul to figure out, even for myself, why this poetic receptacle has been so vital and so dangerously personal to me for most of my life.

It was good.  I mean, it was really, really, really good!  Possibly the best writing I have done ever. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.....

At this point, most of you veteran bloggers (of which I am not) are feeling a slight gnawing in your abdomen and a tightening in the back of your throat because you know where I am going with this having likely experienced it yourselves; and if your reaction to it was as layered with black thoughts as was mine, there is a good chance you might still be in therapy right now questioning the seeming lack of justice in the universe.

About an hour ago my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent post was complete and my brilliant, exquisite, intelligent ego had come out of seclusion and was heavily imbibing in a large carafe of  AM I F***in' AWESOME, OR WHAT?

The preface was profound.  It was candid and salted with just enough grains of humor as to not be maudlin or affected.  It was rounded out to the nearest whole qualifier of perfection with the deft execution of God.

But there was something not quite settled about it.  Something that lacked the fluent grace of heaven and needed an ever-so-slight adjustment.   One poem just did not fit the mix, and so I made the executive decision to delete it.

If I had any questions as to the nature of and emotions in hell before that move, I need question no more.  With the exception of the last three lines of the final poem, I had inadvertently deleted my entire draft.  The whole thing.  Gone. Voided.  Eradicated.  Eviscerated.  Expunged.  Destroyed.  Decimated.
O-Fucking-bliterated!!!!!!

Pardon my use of such a raw expletive but nothing leaner than a fat, crude, street-invective can adequately convey the radical implosion of my sanity at that moment.

After an hour or so of frantically searching the net and every blogger help site and post available in the English-speaking world,  I realized that it was hopeless.  My words were gone and now no one would ever know the mind-blowing spark of pure, unadulterated brilliance housed between my ears because there was no possible way I could mine that particular vein of awesome again.

It's time to move to another cavern of promise and get back to digging.

In the meantime, here are those lousy poems and I am definitely keeping the one that triggered today's cyber-psychotic breakdown OFF THE LIST!   Forever!

No preface this time.

And no turning back!

SELF INDULGENCE  Some things are never meant to be Those brittle limbs of misspent dreams Where consequence is always freed From knowing all that sorrow means The sweet allures of 'self' and 'choice' Obliterate the Sacred Mind Denying access to The Voice That speaks of 'fair' and 'truth' and 'kind' Instead we cultivate our plans To counterbalance discontent With lies that fashion and demand More recompense than we have spent We stake our pride in vapid ground To circumnavigate our trials And when no solace can be found We counteract by swift denials For every choice a price is paid A judgement, fair, for every hand But once the soul has been betrayed There is no Truth on which to stand Yet if we knew the somber cost Of trying to outwit our pain We gamely suffer any loss To earn the grace that it contained THE MARITAL BED Extracted from my sleep I disavow The conjugal mystique behind his bliss What alabaster prayer can stop it now; that trace of rage unfurled within my kiss? This life, with dreaming dormant through the day, has sanctuary sacred in the night Its funding of forgiveness strips away the rancor I exhibit as delight. But now redemptive pleasure takes me in and holds tomorrow as I hold my breath Recovering the mask beneath my sin I dance with silence like I'd dance with death.  THE LANGUAGE OF HIGH SCHOOL We were so vocal then  Bold and Fly-high-ing Marking with world with a language We invented Fast and incisive Taking corners on two syllables Carving our initials with loud vowels or invectives Deep into the commitment of unspoken trust Each one of us Rounding out words in those spaces between thoughts Fresh verbs that carried to resonance Codified lingo we lived by or folded into memory Our sentences Fully varnished In the common care Of friendship. Surviving The Plan Recovering a carefully labeled midlife My hours committed to blanching displeasure Preventing the truth from revealing the strife In language whose texture’s too common to measure The play of good conscience restores as it’s able The loss of our substantive need for each other It buries the facts of this misguided fable Dismembering dreams we will never recover Survival increases my lien on deception The debt of the hollow and human design It alters by count all the fractured perceptions That challenge my plan to perfect and refine It weathers this shallow, truncated devotion As need resurrects my expandable sinning By polishing myths that I set into motion With the lies that I spoke from the very beginning  Dead Ahead At seventeen we were mystics; peace reapers Posed in The Lotus on hardwood upstairs Walled in by paper columbines, sun-faded and fraying Gilting our innocence in Kansas with transcendental leaves Culled from Siddartha and Shiva Sung out with Hendrix, Jimi or Dead, Grateful The Blissfully OM Our language became a cathedral, fabled and fertile Expandable deities shingled with prayers Not anchored but hinged to forgiveness Funding forbearance with decorous chaplets Sounded out, poised In dead silence Religiously OM Choking on souls swallowed whole we would sing Strapped into denim, hip-high, urban-wide Aching to break from that Midwestern amble And stride toward nirvana..or at least The Coast Strung out on hope Not Dead. Holy. Supposedly OM Now as midlife bears down on light-seeking, we pray For a lightness to aging; rewinding the distance from then to deliverance As routine supplants revelation; and sanctity, Desperate and thin, is shameless like voices Screaming out in fear Of dead endings Repeatedly OM DARBY'S STAR Darby O'Shea longed to live on the star he saw in the distance while driving his car. His mind often wandered when traveling at night A salesman by trade is a pretty dull life. Though how we would get there was not very clear he somehow could sense that the answer was near. And as he gazed up at that beautiful sight, his car veered off left but the road angled right. Darby O'Shea now resides on that star, and he knows he arrived, indirectly, by car.

HELLO, MY NAME IS SUSAN, AND I AM A WORD-AHOLIC.

Hello.  My name is Susan, and I have a confession to make.  I am a Word-aholic.


I don't know how it happened.  One word at a time, I guess.  But now my life is a mess; littered with split infinitives and dangling participles, raw vowel sounds and harsh invectives secretly stashed behind every tentative idea.  I want to stop, but I can't.

For years I had it under control; or so I thought.  I could sit for a brief stint at my journal then walk a way  without thinking much more about it.  But as time passed, I saw myself slipping into obscurity after a long, suppressed life of manageable, moderately recorded, verbal sobriety;  and I began to feel invisible.  Even to myself.

Oh, I had my family, my dogs, my artwork; but they were not enough.  Nothing was ever enough.  So, when I reached that point when my life appeared to be on the wane rather than full of promise, and my bouts with dissatisfaction came with more frequency and heightened levels of abject despair, I began hitting the words with much more regularity.  In fact, I couldn't go a day without hitting them.  It became an obsession.

Suddenly, I would find myself trolling the internet in search of linguistic content and literary sustenance in which to drown my repressed articulations and frustrations.....in the middle of the afternoon!


I couldn't help myself.

It is not something I am proud of and I feel such shame every time I think about the many journals I have; their pages stuffed with adjectives and verbs and countless run-on sentences, hidden under my bed.  I don't use them much, but I think about them all the time, and it is a comfort knowing they are there just in case I need a fix in the middle of the night.

Until a few months ago I had everything on a manageable frequency, and very few people were even aware I had a problem.  I was able to remain in my studio and work on my paintings or drawings or my mixed media pieces of found objects and copper wire for a few hours everyday before my compulsion to write drew my attention back to my journal or my laptop by early evening.

But that all changed when I decided to create a website for my artwork.  It was supposed to be a selling platform for my creative endeavors and for a few poems ONLY.  I swear!  I had no intention of becoming enslaved by my thirst for words or falling off the wagon any further than I already was inclined to do.

However, it was suggested to me by a few people who seemed to know a good deal about websites and e-commerce that I start a blog right away, before the website was even finished, in order to perhaps create a small following and draw attention to the site when it finally appeared.  I had never really considered blogging or even specifically knew what one consisted of, but I was desperate to hold my life together and attempt to cloak my increasing inner-dependency on words, so I complied.

That was when everything first began to fall apart.  It was the beginning of the end, and in a very short time I realized I had a serious addiction that I could not conquer through willpower alone.

Not being a hugely proficient computer-phile, I found a user-friendly blog site at e-blogger.com.  It seemed innocent enough and I was quickly able to design my homepage and figured out how to upload images of my artwork onto each post, which gave me the false assurance that I was still maintaining a healthy balance and honoring both my passions, the art as well as the writing, since I could justify each post with an appropriate illustration.

I even added a link from my website right to the blog, so that whomever wanted could have access to the entire me and see that I was not concealing anything; therefore, I could not have a problem.  Right?  It was a terrific foil.  I even duped my own conscience.

For a while emptying my words into those blogs was enough, but it wasn't long before it became obvious that readership on this particular site was difficult to attract and sustain and that my 'followers' consisted mainly of my mother, a few of supportive friends (still in ignorance as to my 'problem') and an odd spattering of random strays who found their way to my page by mistake or out of curiosity.  ( And a goodly portion of those came from other countries leaving me wondering if they even could even read English.)

Eventually, I added a statistics counter to the blog so that I could track how many visitors viewed the posts and see which entries they favored or how many times they returned for more views.  Of course,  this strategy only further fueled my addiction and increased my compulsion to share my words with others.  No one wants to write alone.  'Misery loves company,' you know; and as long as a handful of readers showed up to drink in my words, I was compelled to provide them with more.

Soon all of my convoluted schemes at trying to appear in control began to unravel because it wasn't long after initiating the first few posts in this new world of the blogosphere that I began thinking ONLY about what I was going to write next or slaving for an unconscionable length of time in rapt effort carving, culling, expurgating, crafting and parsing every entry I wrote; often spending upwards of six or seven hours just on ONE piece!  You'd think I was in the running for the Pulitzer, my passion was that highly charged!

By the time my art website was operational, it was already too late for me.  I was drowning in a dictionary of words and eagerly bailing them onto the paint-splattered screen of my little macbook as fast as my shaky fingers could scan the keys.  I could have cared less about the website and thought only about he next bundle of creative nouns that could spice up my increasingly abnormal dependency on semantics.

I've already taken much criticism from my husband and my youngest child (the only one remaining at home but within weeks of leaving for culinary school two states away!) who've noticed and become resentful of my chronically distracted state and the frequency with which I tiptoe off to another room or a quiet corner of the house where I feverishly indulge my out-of-control dance with my own internal dialogue as it falls from my mind onto the screen of my trusty macbook.

How many times in the past couple of months have they casually walked into my studio and caught me hunched over my drawing table in a deep, linguistic trance, frantically thumbing my way toward just the right word in my wretchedly overused thesaurus?  All around me are just-begun paintings, half-done illustrations and a work table littered with un-consigned ephemera just waiting for my impaired focus to finally shift and complete the picture of a well-ordered life of bohemian enterprise.

My reaction to their intrusive insertion into my word-funded revelry is immediate denial.  I will nervously slam closed my laptop, concealing my guilty indulgence and when queried as to my actions, I reply only that I was checking my email or tracking an order on Amazon.  Then I casually mop the perspiration from my graying hairline and mechanically begin plotting the next set of fabricated circumstances that will provide me the soonest opportunity to resume my wordy intoxication.

I have even recently invested in a lager purse to accommodate my laptop, which I now cannot be parted from for more than an hour before my normally sedate countenance becomes visibly wracked by the perpetual lusting in my brain to convert basic prose to iambic pentameter at any time of the day or night!

Is it genetic?  Possibly.  My father was an English major at Dartmouth, after all; and my mother has an elegant fluency with language that is obviously above par.  And one of my brothers has had an on-again/off-again collusion with verbosity;  however, when last I heard, he was squarely reformed.  So,  as far as I am aware, no one in my immediate family struggles with this same disproportionate preoccupation and highly-charged, chronic dependency on literary expression.

I am the sole possessor of this unfortunate depravity.

It has taken control of my life.  Even right now, as the morning is only minutes away from becoming afternoon,  I am sitting in front of this cyber template filling the frustratingly small box with my HTML composition and completely putting aside the fact that I have yet to clean the house, workout on that damned elliptical (which, anymore has become merely another conduit for thought, an incubator of words and ideas for future blogs rather than the means to sustain balance between body and soul, as I  frequently dive off into a pool of compositional promise sometimes in excess of two hours!); and my morning shower must necessarily be now deferred to late afternoon once I reconcile the time lost.
Of course, there is still the matter of how to compensate for my afternoon obligations, which now also are at risk of being extracted altogether from today's agenda.

And for what?  All for the sake of WORDS!

Can I stop?  Do I want to?  The answer to both is a resounding NO!  Particularly now that I have fortuitously stumbled onto the Open Salon site and discovered that I am not alone; that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other blessedly obsessed Word-aholics who have both given themselves permission to live life in that state as well as to support one another through the blissful and sometimes torturous process of exorcising their demons of thought and emotion into concise and thoughtful verbiage recorded for all to partake and process.

It is a glorious literary and very real consortium of candid and captivating word-aholics that inspires, consoles, humors and satiates the need of all there to remain visible to and ineffably connected with one another in the highest and best possible sense through the language of their own unique and perfect souls.

It is the Salvation Army for the terminally verbose, and I am saved.

My deep and profound thanks to Scanner and J.D., Catherine, LittleKate, Thoth, CrankyCuss, JustCathy, Fred, and to all those of you only time now prevents me from listing who, in the short space of a few days, have welcomed me into this special circle of essential trust through the rare, genuine and gentle bond we all share in our precious addiction to Words.

I can't think of a more profoundly inspirational substance to abuse.

Cheers!

WRITING MY INSIDES OUT

There is no doubt my writings of late have been culled from the darker side of light, and while they have not been full-board litanies of disconsolate life relations, I can't escape acknowledging their unquestionably murky perspective.

Humor intrudes here and there like the designated driver you pretty much ignore while out partying and only fully appreciate the next day after you've been delivered home and have had a chance to sleep off the majority of your impairment.

In retrospect I am grateful for the automatic insertion of that steady blade of sarcasm in both my attitude as well as in my writing and can appreciate the full value of owning such a skeptical and hardened edge once all the whining has been sorted through and put to rest.  Nothing puts more of a damper on a pity party than a solid blast of comic cynicism.   It can be a real buzz kill.

However, closing each post on an optimistic note or peppering the odd paragraph with comedic allusions does not a resolution make.  There still remains a fair amount of slogging and purging to do, and I am going to do it come hell or high water....she says.

But for those of you who have expressed concern, don't worry.  I am far from suicidal and 'hopelessness' is not part of my vocabulary or considered an acceptable disposition.  And for those who have lamented the missing pulse of consistent and irrepressibly, light-hearted musings, welcome to the real me.  I'll still make you feel good, but you might have to do more than just show up to earn it.

 Having denied myself permission to publicly exhibit any signs of frailty, fear, frustration or expression of the f***-yous for most of my life, I have decided it is time to lift the ban (at least in terms of literary expression) and am now sifting through the fractured bits of a life designed to please everyone but myself in order to discover just who myself  is.  For the time being at least, Pollyanna has left the building.  Deal with it.

Earlier today I got a phone call from my beautiful mother who, after reading the blog, expressed concern over my untenable relationship with that damned elliptical saying, "Boy!  You must be really frustrated!"  Of course, we laughed, but then the conversation turned to one about the pros and cons of honesty and disclosure.

I brought up the personally cathartic exercise of challenging myself to withhold nothing (at least insofar as it does not intentionally expose or wound others) as I write my insides out, and she brought up the valid point that most people are very uncomfortable reading about the raw, un-retouched, dark or ugly sides of others because it might remind them of their own and not everyone is willing or able to look at themselves in that way.  Plus, it can be a real downer.  She also warned me not to fall into the trap of chronic negativity where suddenly nothing is without a problem and grousing becomes the proprietary filter through which all communications are sifted.

She was perfectly correct in her observations and comments, and I fully agree with them.  But I'm not writing for fun and profit here, which means I have no obligation to produce epistles of happy talk or to cater to the fickle preferences of an audience who would choose to engage life like an egg on teflon; keeping the charred, over-cooked or unappetizing bits from sticking at all costs.

In addition to making light and sense of a life that has more living behind it than it does in front of it, there is the aspect of accountability and conscientious examination that is of absolute necessity in crafting the full recital.  To leave those parts out would be like playing the Heart and Soul  piano duet with one person or one hand.  You might still be able to pick out the basic tune but the full melodic resonance would be missing.  It simply would not be as good or a fair representation of the actual song.

Nothing happens by chance or without purpose.  Nothing.  Even the ostensibly tragic things.  Once we can wrap our minds around that concept, we are closer to peace and the cynosure of all the truth in the universe than any marathon meditation or ring around the Rosary beads could ever produce.  And that is not to dismiss the real and powerful results in these methods and rituals, which are valid and necessary.

What I am referring to is a root-level acceptance of whatever we are faced with or without in life and that level of acceptance is hard to gain without endeavoring to establish a prayerful connection with the transcendent.  Meditation and prayer are certainly solid corridors that can lead one towards that kind of acceptance and subsequent peace.

But what is equally as crucial is a willingness to look at and be accountable for the elements within us that are not terribly pleasant or appealing.   We all know that these prayerful forms of passive union make us feel better, calmer, more in sync with the world and the universe.  That is a given because in addition to the metaphysical implications, there is also the physiological exchange of energy and a measurable shift within the body.  It makes us feel centered and rested.  But so does a good night's sleep.

The point being that these practices and rituals are just that: practices and rituals.  They have no value unless you can take whatever peace and feelings of sacred unity you've assimilated and bring them with you onto the crowed subway train at rush hour or to the inconsiderate neighbor who keeps backing his car over your newly seeded lawn when he leaves for work every morning or to your wife who nags you and is unhappy or your boss who expects too much and pays too little or to your friends or relatives who are addicts or alcoholics or otherwise ill or a nuisance.

In other words, you have to be willing and able to face and to live graciously, authentically, respectfully and discerningly in and among the dark and disturbing factions of all life; including those within yourself.

In many ways I am at that point right now and am allowing the acid rain of sub-par emotional intelligence to wash over me with the obvious hope that clarity will eventually be reached.  But in the meantime, I am sodden with regret over the sheer volume of lamentable revelations that are cresting on the surface of this existential puddle as it expands around my feet and am applying all the concentration I can muster towards the process of bailing lest I drown in a pool of unexamined ignorance.

Perhaps the fact that I am trying to flesh out the dysfunction at this advanced stage of the mortal game might provide an impetus for other mid-lifers to do likewise and not to mechanically devolve into a crystallized version of their surface qualities.

You see a lot of that in homes for the elderly.  The complainers become withered fleshpots of carping and griping; the authoritarians are forever reaming out the staff and attempting to reorganize Bingo night; and the indifferent are, well, indifferent and have lapsed into a coma of complacency that requires nothing from them but compliance, which they readily abide by.  There is no hint of striving toward understanding the other in life anymore let alone one's self.  It is very depressing.

I'd rather question myself, my life, my beliefs and the world now while I'm still active and viable and can make the necessary changes and apply the accumulated wisdom rather than wait until I am dependent upon someone else to get me dressed and mash my food.

The fact that all this questioning usually leads to a few bouts with the blues or periods of despondency, feelings of detachment or disassociation from the norm, known, or familiar and even all-out anger is all part of the process.  The status quo is no longer acceptable.  I'll do whatever it takes.

And, yes.  I do wish I had gotten to this juncture much earlier than now, but it wasn't time.  I wasn't ready.  Even among the boomer generation, I'm probably one of the less progressive ones.  A late boomer, I suppose.

My dad always told me I had the classic curse of always being "a day late and a dollar short."

I think my day has come.

Anybody got a dollar?

A ROOM FOR MY VIEWS

Today is the third consecutive day of clouds and rain.  While it is not the sort of cast most people appreciate this many days in a row, I'm sure my neighbors in the home directly behind us are taking a small bit of comfort from being shrouded in this fine drizzle.  Yesterday their house caught on fire.

It was a fire that began at the kitchen stove, although I'm not sure of the specifics.  Beth, my neighbor, said it had something to do with what she had on the stovetop and a nearby candle.  However, within seconds there were flames too virulent to control and smoke filling the house and billowing out from all the windows.  Pat, her husband, was at that moment airborne on a return flight home after a business trip and, obviously, could not be reached...not that he could have done anything other than pray anyway, and she was home with their two small children and two dogs.

She did the only thing she could or needed to do and grabbed the babies, the dogs and her cell phone and exited out the front of the house to our small cul de sac where she called 911.  Being a very intimate enclave of only five houses we are all very aware of and friendly toward one another so she was immediately aided by all the neighbors who took the children and the dogs and comforted her as she tearfully watched what she feared might have been the end of life as she knew it.  

Within minutes several fire trucks, ambulance, police cars, etc. were crammed into the circle taking care of what, blessedly, turned out to be a relatively minor fire, all things considered.  They will need a new stove and some minor repairs to the surrounding walls and the house smells much like McGonigle's Meat Market on the days they have the huge smoker out in front of the store cooking ribs and chicken, but other than that, everything is fine and they were all able to sleep in their house last night.

My job is now to provide dinner for them at five o'clock each night until their kitchen is fully operational again.  I am happy to do it since I've got to make dinner for my remaining family anyway, plus I still remember the excruciatingly long eight weeks when my kids were all under ten and we were reduced to a microwave and mini fridge in the downstairs laundry room while our kitchen was being renovated.  I did the dishes in the downstairs bathtub -when our Newfoundland, Frodo, wasn't sleeping in it, that is.  And while it began as sort of a campy, quirky alternative to conventional living, the fun of it all went out the window within the first three or four days, as soon as the kids realized their persnickety cravings and favorite victuals could not be sufficiently satisfied under those conditions.

I don't want my neighbors to have to experience that any more than they are already bound to do.

Whether it was precipitated by the near disastrous events of yesterday or by some other subliminal yoke strapping a weighty claim on my unconscious, I can't say; but last night's sleep was riddled by nightmares of nomadic wanderings in all manner of dark places.  Caves, underground tunnels that served  full-scale trains rather than the expected subway cars, and above ground places where there was a supposed sky overhead but one that was so dark and thick it left the impression of being more like an inverted (and dirty) Mason jar.

In any case, there was nothing familiar or comforting and a vigilant regard was paid to being perpetually on the move.  I was by myself, but there were hundreds of thousands of others there with me.  I knew no one, although many of those around me appeared to know each other.  It didn't seem to matter because the mood was so somber that the only connections were those of commiseration, so it wasn't like alliances could have been forged to alleviate the heaviness anyway.

Even though there was this hard dread and physical evidence of uselessness, senselessness and despair in all the grim and abstract images of dead-ended beginnings and never-begun endings, I didn't feel trapped as it seemed the others did.  I was aware that it was a dream and would summarily end in time, with or without my complete comprehension or endorsement.

I was a watcher, yet at the same time I experienced a definite emotional accord with everyone and had a visceral understanding of all that occurred, all that was felt, all that was missing and all that could never be in this nocturnal confederation of the damned.

This wasn't my first visit to this place.  I'm taken there regularly by whatever force it is that captivates all those unspoken thoughts and caches of denial I subscribe to inappropriate or selfish behavior in my waking moments and then compels them to expose themselves deep in the unconscious night when all pretense and contrivance sleep soundly.

I think we all go there because we all withhold more of ourselves then we should in the staid rounds of our day, and were there no releases or receptacles for these untended particles of thought and emotion, implosion would be the chief cause of death everywhere on earth.

My conscious walk through the world at the moment feels not terribly unlike those sepia colored, stained containers of non-being my soul travels to at night, which is giving the stoic in me a pretty rigorous workout.  It's a good and valuable exercise I don't regret undergoing, although it would be nice to have a better grasp on what it is all about.

When I was a kid I had these All About books:  All About Mammals, All About Birds, All About Reptiles, All About Dogs.  I wish they had not stopped there.  What I wouldn't give for a book, All About Apathy or All About Where To Go From Here.

Many years ago we had our driveway asphalted by this buoyant and wise character named Delacey.  He could neither read nor write and for a time my husband, who is a reading specialist, tutored him.  But what Delacey could do was put things into perspective, and one of the things he said that has always stayed with me was said after watching all the traffic clogging the local highway:  "Nobody knows where the hell they goin', but they all goin' like Hell to get there!"

I'm not what you'd consider a 'type A' personality, but there have definitely been periods in my life when I felt that way; that I had no clue where I was going or why but that I was getting there on a souped-up bullet train of discontinuities.   Perhaps this is why I've come to such a screeching halt now?  I've used up all of my "get out of jail free" cards and cannot pass 'Go' without one, so the game has come to a stalemate.

But as I sit waiting for the bail bondsman of enlightenment to return me to the world of productivity and purpose, I am not idle.  My brain is working overtime and taking me to a non-linear zone where thought all but obliterates despair, as well as keeping reality enough at bay that it loses it's immediate relevance.   I suppose if you're stuck in jail, it's better that it is the one of your own making.  At least you know your way around and are on friendly terms with a couple of the guards.

Music also helps, and Friday night I reveled in a live dose of it delivered as it was from the recording- studio basement of my stellar rocker friend, Chris; where I was treated to healing decibels of jams between four solid musicians and friends.   I even got a playful stint on the drums, which is something I have not done since the seventh grade when I decided that pursuit of the male species would be more challenging and less redundant than seeking proficiency even on Ludwig's best percussion set (although I later and regularly question that assumption) and was prompted to abandon my drum lessons after only three years.   But let it be now noted that while vodka can substantially loosen inhibitions, it can also impair coordination; although I managed to hold my own, albeit not without backup.

However, my favorite spot was sitting on the floor with Chris's old dog, Duke, where I could happily scratch behind the the old boy's ears and drift away on rockin chords of possibility.  It was an absolute Be Here Now evening that I am grateful for.

And now that I have returned to this odd place of indeterminable boundaries, I am thankful that my neighbors still have a house with walls.   Beyond that, today not much else matters.

I'm confident that at some point form will again be apparent in my life and around me a structure of clear perspectives and sturdy objectives will once more provide shelter for all these quaking doubts and finally put them at ease.

 I don't doubt that the process of building a whole new exterior attitude on a house without any interior walls is going to be challenging.  What will this new building resemble if it appropriately reflects my thoughts?  One thing I do know is that it must have loads of windows without any locks.  I've had enough doors slam on me to recognize the value of open windows and fire escapes, and I want to ensure that plenty of air will be circulating opinions and ideas from the outside intersection at the corners of Conventional and Dissenting.

In the meantime I've got a foundation to put down, which could take quite a while to put together given the importance of making certain that it is a solid one; and if I remember correctly, the first step before laying any foundation is to dig.

If I had a hammer.....and some nails, some two by fours, a rotary drill, reciprocating saw, self-leveling concrete....