November 16, 2011

There's a heavy tension behind this silence. Everyone seems angry, even though they're just quiet. Inviting words makes it clear that they harbor no ill will, their light and shimmering voices belying some innocence, but the silence returns my suspicion. I know it's only a reflection of myself. It's only the weather that I'm much too sensitive to.

We're preparing for the apocalypse. Vacuum-sealing packs of beans, rice, sugar, salt, flour, cornmeal, pasta. Dry goods, spices, basic commodities, fuel, and some things we can barter for a greater value. We suspect the monetary system may collapse, so gold and silver are important. We have plenty of bullets, guns, knives, and knowledge of hunting, fishing, skinning, tanning, butchery, and basic survival skills between us. Honestly, I don't have much of those things, but I believe in my instinct. There may be time to learn, motivation to learn, and room for trial and error. And surviving that way in a cabin isn't that complicated. You're working on the bottom tier of the hierarchy of needs, and discounting electricity as an option. We've got little guides to salt curing and smoking meats, and in an ideal world, we'd each have our own truck to take up there. I doubt I'd want to stay long, regardless of how bad it gets. Either there's no problem, the world either stays as it is and I learn to cope, or it actually improves, in which case, there'd be no need to stay on the mountain, or else it will truly be armageddon, and nothing we do will matter. Fuck it. The world's handing you a chance to die with impunity, offering it on a silver platter, so just shut up and take it.

I haven't been able to write very well lately. I've experienced a great dearth of ideas or a complete unwillingness to elaborate. Maybe it was both. I've thought that I should read more, learn story structure a bit better, work within the ancient archetypes, try to write escapism rather than always examining myself. But I take for granted that any art is an examination of the self, and that putting it on display to the world will show off all the things you wouldn't want to say. It's just another silly facet of my paranoia. Even so, I believe that is one of the reasons I can rarely make it past 1000 words. It may have also been my horrible excuse for a book that I wrote a couple of years ago.

I pick up styles by osmosis. It's good and bad; I only pick up the superficial qualities of a voice, but not the subtler genius of actually directing a narrative. I think I was unable to appreciate it until a few years ago, even though I've been reading since I was three. It's sort of like watching movies since you're born, but only seeing Jean Claude Van Damme and Pauley Shore and Whoopi Goldberg until you turn 20. I did get into more advanced stuff out of high school, but I've been reading on the Internet too much. And most of what I read is non-fiction, DIY, self-instruction sort of stuff. I have to keep up credits for my certification right now, so I go a long time between reading fiction, and it tends to be bite-sized, like Happy Cruelty Day! or Razor Wire Pubic Hair. (There is the odd erotica, come to think of it, but those are rarely by award-winning authors.) Cracked and E2 are clogging me up a bit, possibly. It may be kind of an addiction.

Reading deprivation can do me good, but when I do, I just go for a walk, play guitar, draw, paint... I've started to hate words. I hate concrete thoughts, and I long for the abstract primordial space where all these phantom sounds and shapes get pulled from. Words are the worst choice for escapism. And all this introspective stuff ruins escapism. That's what I love about Razor Wire Pubic Hair -- there's lamps powered by fucking, human sex dolls straight out of H.R. Giger's wet dreams, a society really based on sex, not like our money-powered world. It's on Eraserhead Press for crying out loud. It's what Jhonen Vasquez would read if he wasn't asexual. It's such an awesome retreat from not only our everyday reality, but sanity itself. The pretense of sanity I have to maintain. Anime used to be good at that, but somehow, somewhere they got corrupted. I mean, You're Under Arrest was incredibly mundane, but it was still fucked up in such a subtle way that I could watch a bit of it, at least.

I need to connect to people again. Leave my house, put myself out there. I'm getting better at it, but everyone else isn't. I'm not sure I need to change. I'll try to invite some people out, start meeting regularly, draw and be friends, have a fancy love-in. I'm bored. I feel like I'm waiting. There's nothing left to wait for, but I'm waiting all the same. I don't think it'll happen. We won't have to go to the mountain. But the world won't improve, either. Everything will work as it does now. Maybe I'll change. Maybe it'll make more sense to me. That sounds like I'm inviting insanity. There's no other way to describe it.

I went for a walk today, just when it started to rain. I can feel something on a day like this, and I remember it very well. This is normal to me. Clear days aren't. Since I was a kid I didn't understand why everyone called sunny days "beautiful", and snowy and rainy days "dreary" or frightful. I may really need Vitamin D, since I only go out when the Sun is hidden, and I like to keep my arms covered, and the rest of the time I'm in doors. I meant to look up the symptoms of Vitamin D deficiency, but I forgot. All I did today was shred and go for a walk. I might have sat around thinking, paced around, sang for a bit. I spoke to the neighbor about hardware stores and security clearances. I did nothing substantial, and I don't care. It's only an observation of fact, not a judgment.

Grundoon calls me on Tuesday morning. I tell her that the beau broke up with me about a month ago. She talks about friends in California and what she is doing. I have the thought: "She has her husband and friends and caregivers. She doesn't need me."

I wake in the morning Wednesday and think Grundoon doesn't need me. The beau doesn't need me. The kids need me a bit, the introverted thinker at 14 and the extroverted feeler turning 19, but not that much. That is, they are separating as they should. I am probably helping some patients, but they would find another doctor if I disappeared. No one needs me. I don't feel lonely or sad. Instead, my longing has lifted.

I've been swamped with longing for years. In the emotional process of individuation as an adult, I've unearthed and recovered and processed grief, fear, humiliation and others. Unearthing any bit of old stuffed emotion is rather like hitting oil, an overwhelming geyser for a while. I don't seem to run out. I have less and less anger as I do it, because anger was the capstone on the stuffed emotions. But the whole thing has been suffused and underpinned and overlaid and overwhelmed with longing. For intimacy, I suppose. If you stuff/bury/hide large parts of yourself, then intimacy is a challenge, right? Meaning "in to me see". How can you get close to someone when the closeness may uncap one of those deadly oil wells? I have gone after the wells once I figured out that they were there, like a magnet towards iron, like a homing pigeon, like an arrow from cupid's bow. But longing did not feel like a single well. It was just there, as if the earth was made of it, as if the sky was full, the very air made up of oxygen, nitrogen and longing. If there are many emotions and thoughts that are not safe with your parents, or whoever is there when you are a baby and need to attach, you still have to go through that developmental attachment stage. As an adult, you have to parent yourself until some core part believes that it is not only lovable but loved.

Feeling not needed, I would have thought that would give me the opposite feeling. Depression, loneliness, feeling useless, I'll get old and die alone, I'll follow my children and grandchildren around begging for attention. Instead, I feel light. Happy. Slightly high. Untethered, weightless. I swim laps in the morning and I am light in the water, float higher than usual. I want to hold on to the feeling even though I know one doesn't hold on to any feeling. As soon as I want to hold onto it, I tell the feeling to return to the Source and give a good report of me. It waffles and then stays for a while.

I watched a musical last night, Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Daddy Long Legs. Romantic and dancing. Longing returned, but more like a habit, an old coat that I was pulling on. I took it off again.

What next?