So many things break my heart constantly.  It is not a complaint.  The salt of tears is an essential flavor to accompany the banquet of living.  And sometimes I get bitter about it, as if it were not invited, as if I did not seek to squeeze the precious emotion from each and every moment, as if I did not embrace the heartbreak with all the verve and gusto of a passionate lover.  As if I did not love to cry. 

On this longitudinal slice of the Earth, it is now dark in both places, North and South of the equator. The night unifies–briefly–the American continents under softly starlit skies, twinkling tears in the eyes of heaven.

Forgive my fumbling efforts to make something significant happen, before it is over.  Be patient with my uninformed anxiety that pretends all of it matters, my tension as the end approaches–even if it is not near, it approaches.  Be tolerant of me, please. 

I only wanted to …well, I guess I never really had a plan.  I never thought this life through.  But I knew beauty.  I knew love–though often from a distance.  I knew you. 

And now it comes time to make some sense of it all; time to make an attempt, at least, to reach for an anchor point; time to find a handhold in this tumultuous passage, or perhaps only a hand to hold.  It is not as if this is the end.  It’s not as if there even is an end.  But there are turning points, not actual events neccessarily, more like convulsions in a life, birthing moments in which something else comes to exist.  An effort that arises from the dust of complacency, a spasm resulting from the immobility of a life unlived. 

Sometimes, just pretending something significant is happening can be enough.

People don’t believe it when I say I hate myself.  They giggle.  They seem to think it is cute, or comical.  Or a joke.  I know it is not their problem, but I am forced to interact socially, and that is always disastrous.  So I always try to explain why it’s disastrous by telling people I hate myself.  You can say we are not forced to interact socially, but we are built to; our faces are designed by evolution to display our emotions–our inner climate–to the world.  And our culture is built on social interaction.  Do you generate the electricity you use?  Someone else does.  Do you grow the food you eat?  Someone else does.  Our survival is based on social interaction.  And as individuals, the degree of our success is based on how well we interact socially. 

I am two hundred pounds of torment in a society that demands I do exactly what I can’t do: be socially competent. 

Or maybe I won’t do it (be socially competent, that is).  Social competence demands that I first stop hating myself.  Which is an option.  But that now puts me in conflict with the reasons I hate myself.  And we are not going there.  Not here.  Suffice it to say that one who hates oneself need not have compassion for oneself.  Injuries need not be grieved, sorrows can be left un-felt, and so on.  You don’t clothe, and feed, and care-for those you hate, usually.  True, you might do so out of an altruistic motivation, but our primate ancestors were not so inclined.  Indeed, hating is itself a product of our higher natures; we have been given the capacity to withhold love.  Who knows why.  I guess it is one of the steps to becoming divine.  But it does enable me to accomplish all that I have said, to evade all of the pain, to ignore all of the need simply by not loving–more commonly known as hating–myself. 

.

It is a lovely shade of gray outside right now.  Seasonable, and in a time when the seasons seem a little confused, that is almost…  nice.  But the gray emanates beneath from bulbous clouds above (to be honest there is some purple there, but only just a touch), and it is a gentleness of light, a soft serenity that says there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, and it makes none of the insistent demands of joy that come with bright sunshine, demands that say, “you should be happy, you should be with someone, lying half naked on a beach, you should have something to do, somewhere to go, some activity, some life…”.  Bright sunshine says you should.  The grayness only says you are. 

Only it was not cold.  And it was never dead.  And it was precious, but made repugnant by some twisted contortion of humility that became a grotesque and deformed self-debasement, a kind of shyness taken beyond rational limits, a pathological withdrawal further away than a room, or a town, or a country apart, beyond even the furthest continents, to an indescribable distance which cannot be measured by physical, or temporal means.  Hiding there was safe.  Was.  But safety is an illusion.  None of the therapists will tell you this.  Indeed, much of human sanity depends on the illusion of safety. 

Some day, I will know that I should have written dangerously, with reckless abandon, with made-up words, fantastical grammar and screams, and throbbing erotic laughter.  Some day I will know that writing on my prison walls in my own blood might just barely have been sufficient.  Some day, I will know that I should have written like my life depended on it.

But not today.  I am not ready to go yet.  Until then I will pretend that writing is just something insignificant, something I do in the quiet hours before dawn, when all the demons pull up chairs and gather round like my only friends, and watch in rapt amazement at how I still don’t know. 

The last letter I sent, I rewrote three times. I can never know, but I suspect that at least one of the unsent ones was the best. In fact, I imagine it shines like a diamond, overflows with wit and wisdom, flips cleverness through several somersaults, landing on its feet. On a high wire. Spinning plates. It was good, and long, and…

I didn’t send it. I sent something bland, and moderate. Safe. And there was no reply.

If correspondence is to be worthwhile, it needs to be dangerous, reckless, spontaneous. Stained. If I am to create a letter, it must be improbable, unexpected (even by me) and surprisingly revelatory to both the one I address and me.

I am however convinced of several things:

• I am dull. If you think so, let me know, I will cross you off my list. I only want pen-pals who have successfully disabused themselves of the notion of my dullness, successful schizophrenics are especially welcome.
• I am terrified of any kind of human interaction; this includes communication (of course!). Especially communication. Communication is the root of all trauma in my life. Unfortunately, as David Attenborough likes to tell us, primates (including us) are compulsive communicators. Blah, blah, blah. Some of you all do it so effortlessly. As if it were …natural.
• I am an alien. I do not belong here. I don’t fit in anywhere, and nowhere fits in me. (Yes, there’s been some of that.) That may be why I like typewriters; ostensibly they do not have a place anymore. This is not typed on a ‘manual’ (which by the way could very likely have been called automatic in its day). Electronic fits in. Typesmacking machines employing paper and inky ribbons, they don’t fit in. They make the NSA’s job more difficult. See? I’m an alien.
• I drink too much coffee, and not enough wine. This applies here only because I only write when I feel, and I seem to feel a little more when I drink wine. Maybe that is when the hall monitor falls asleep allowing the mischievous little boy to run around and be out of control. Blessedly out of control. Coffee keeps the monitor on his toes. That makes the little boy want to cry.

So, I write letters. And I don’t send them. I can write one to you. And I can avoid all the risk of it upsetting you, and making you dislike me, or making you think that I am odd (which I am). I can write you a letter, and pretend to send it, and pretend to be understood, and pretend that it makes you smile. I can pretend that I am on someone’s list to write back to.

I don’t understand why pretending is not better than not pretending. Not pretending is so, so scary.

This is just because.

What a failure of imagination!

We are there, now. Except that the current economic meltdown is not being caused by a draconian Versailles Treaty, which is what bankrupted Germany and impoverished her people after WWI and set the stage for the birth and subsequent domination of Hitler’s Third Reich. The significant difference is that ours is an ad hoc economic meltdown, conceived, implemented, and executed solely for the purpose of forcing otherwise unwilling free men and women to subvert their common sense and goodwill to the demonic state in exchange for a pittance of relief from the state’s threats of overwhelming harassment, illegal imprisonment, certain impoverishment, and inevitable death only after unfathomable suffering. Free speech will soon be illegal, and is largely so now. Due process is already severely marginalized in the zeal for imposing extra-judicial consequences for activities which heretofore have never been illegal, like owning a gun, having a baby, or refusing a vaccination.

When they come and do what we know is wrong, we will look the other way again and again until there is nowhere else to look. And then, when we have no choice but to face the truth, it will be too late.

Seek out the wrongdoing now! Confront it before it confronts you. And never look the other way. Never. Do something oppositional—no matter how small—every time you see an injustice, especially when those injustices are perpetrated under color of authority. And after one encounter, the second confrontation is just as difficult, but much more effective. Every moment of standing against what is wrong empowers you, advances freedom, and uplifts the human condition to the benefit of us all, not to mention the power of your example inspiring others to do the same. Eventually, standing up for what is right becomes a thousand times more effective than the first time, and the sooner we get that first confrontation done, the earlier we achieve total effectiveness in resisting the abuse, oppression and tyranny that these injustices are designed to impose.

Morality is the final law, and in times like these our consciences can be our only guide. And these truths are self evident, that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We are the new Greatest Generation, like our fathers and grandfathers in World War II, and the times we live in today presents us with the same great privilege they had—to save the World. Again.

That’s not a brag; that fact is not in the least bit significant compared to some of the champions of typing-machine collectors.   And the eleven are not a particularly impressive selection of machines.   They are unremarkable for the most part, and are a representative slice of those machines which are currently most plentiful and reasonably available.   No achievement there.  

Having eleven machines scattered around my tiny apartment, several with neglected typing stopped in progress, does make me seem—at least to me—crazy.   I am not a writer (even though they are sometimes also crazy).   Despite my fond hopes that I am an undiscovered author, all evidence indicates a fanciful fiction of myself as a writer.   Commonly called a delusion.   Delusions are clinically pathological, but this is not a clinical delusion.   This delusion is benign, which may be its worst feature.   Its lack of any damaging effect enables me to perpetuate it, forever.   A never-ending diversion.   Perfect when you have forgotten long ago what you are avoiding.

This fiction of being a writer is supported in many ways:

• This haltingly updated blog, and its many incarnations since the 90’s;
• two periodical articles I wrote and published, also in the 90’s;
• lots of struggling, imprecise prose hewn out of raw ego by wickedly imposed suffering in front of a typewriter and mercilessly whacked onto paper;
• and of course my mind, racing about desperately trying to escape something, like a tiny mouse trapped, together with a Maine Coon cat, in a cage.

But mine is a particularly incompetent Maine Coon cat.   She never seems able to catch the mouse, and never puts this shrieking, panicky mind out of its misery.  

So instead, I am touching my computer’s feint and inarticulate keys and not pounding the vigorous and decisive keys on any of the writing machines gathered ’round me.   And much to the same effect—diversion from the mortal fear trapped within me.   Only, at the computer keyboard, there is no satisfying ‘thwack’ with each character.  

I ask myself, isn’t this merely a petulant external display of some perceived suffering within?   And, if that is so, what distinguishes it from authentic art?   What is the difference between my masterfully executed delusion of writing, and any other more laudable creativity?   Has not the smelly, homeless person, begging on the street, achieved a virtuosity in the expression of suffering (or even just in the expression of self-pity, depending on your interpretation)?   Has he not conjured from the very substance of his life an expression of the same mortal terror held within?

That sort of failure to obtain some external media—like clay, or marble, or oil on canvas—and transform it in the act of expression is, I guess, just laziness in art.   But then I would never disagree that I am just a lazy would-be writer, content to let some innate flair for writing languish unattenuated and undeveloped, that lack of artistic achievement an artistic expression in itself.  

When I got on the train, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. It’s not that I slept–I couldn’t sleep. It’s just that I couldn’t move, or think, or type. Such is the effect of a McDonald’s lunch.