Monthly Archive for March, 2008

I haven’t posted much of anything here this week. It’s not particularly for lack of time, it’s for, well, not wanting to put it down. I talk too much. It’s one of those things that comes with ADHD. The main reason reason for this, however, is that I never seem to be happy with what I say, meaning it never comes out in a way that really seems to portray what I’m thinking. It’s the perpetual curse that causes me to spin diatribes at a moments notice, but possibly one of the reasons that I can write with some ability. If you actually sit around on your night and take the time to read my rhetoric, thanks. You should probably be doing something more constructive with your time.

Cassie and I aren’t talking anymore. We don’t see each other, we don’t make contact. I killed my livejournal; I took her off of my Facebook list and thought to delete it, but the thing still might come in handy for school. Our last communication was somewhat depressing to say the least. I hadn’t heard from her, she backed away, I got pissed and felt like I was being given the runaround, the back and forth post-breakup female thing where they want to be friends with you so long as you don’t act like you still love them. It turns out that was exactly what it was. I broke the silence and asked if she was going to come see the kids, because they ask about her all the time and she said she would come over to talk first, then made it clear that she had a good time seeing me, but that finding out I was pursuing her didn’t work for her; that she just wanted to be single. I did what I really never planned on doing or thought I would – I packed all the rest of her things and told her I couldn’t do it. This killed me right out. I cut one of the most important people of my life out of it with willful intent. Why? I suppose I better offer an explanation. You’d better grab a beer or something. I recommend Killian’s Irish Red.

It’s not so much that I couldn’t deal with not instantly having her back; quite the opposite. I wanted things to work out between us, for the walls to come down and us to enjoy one another again. That takes time. It was the fact that I just don’t compromise who I am for people; not even for Cassie, she knows this and she deserves better. I’m fine with compromise, but not with compromising myself – there’s a difference. See, I could act like her friend, I could back right off and hold off every bit of how much I wanted to scream not to do this (I’ll explain the THIS later, it takes a while), I could choke down my feelings, but then I would be lying. I would be lying to someone that, to my recollection, I’ve never willingly lied to, and I just can’t do it. I can’t pretend things are fine and I’m getting over it then hear about her finding someone else or something. I don’t know why people thinks it works. They want you, everything about you, the good memories and love and support, they just don’t want you anymore – and, sorry to tell you this girls – when we know you don’t want us we know you want someone else and either you already are considering it or you’re already doing it. Of course, there’s the inverse (part of the THIS) – it’s the fact that they really do want you, but the consequences of it are too great – too much potential to drama and all that. Either way, you really don’t get treated like a friend, you get treated like an ex. Now, this can eventually come into a friendship, but only when your feelings for them go away, that it, if you don’t get dragged into hating them before that happens. This is a reason why I called it off – I’ve been that guy before, that weak, sniveling “why don’t you pick me anymore” guy and I won’t do it again.

Please Don’t Do This. Time to explain this part – it’s not something she said, mind you, nor something I said – it’s a breakup thing, particularly with long-term relationships and it’s more common than it used to be. The process of getting over someone when you’re not over them is downright nasty. I’m not exaggerating – if you really think about it it’s wet work, through and through. People grow on you, building a really good relationship causes you to have to accept part of them and them part of you. You have to become one in a lot of ways. Now, this can grow sick, wither and die – and in a lot of relationships it does. The tricky part is that, more often than not, it doesn’t happen to both people at the same time. Either way, when things end you’re left with that part of them. You can decide to live with it, nurture it and hope it grows, but without the other person it just withers and then it starts to poison you. Then again, you can cut that part out – which is generally done by disassociating yourself with the other, usually by indulging in things they hated, self-medicating, running through one night stands and all that. This actually does work to a great degree, only its a hack and slash job and you have a tendency to lop off pieces of yourself along with their part, which generally comes back to haunt you. People change when they break up because they once again begin dealing with the single factor whether they want to admit it or not – the unknown, the uncertainty, the issues of being without. See, really, these things are real and if they weren’t issues, people would stay single, but they are. The greatest bitch about psychology is the rules do apply to you. No matter who the person was who left you, nine out of ten or more, the person you see again after however long the break was is not them – it’s someone else and usually someone you don’t want to see. Stop.

Here’s where I tell you all of this is bullshit – and you know I wouldn’t lie to you. It’s total bullshit, but we swallow every shovelfull of it nonetheless, because we don’t really know it’s bullshit. If you know a person, really get to know them – go through the shit with them and look deep into that place they don’t like to show, then you know them, because people don’t really change all that much deep down.If you fell in love with a great guy and found out he was an abusive psycho, but you got back with him a few months later because he “changed” you shouldn’t be surprised when he beats the shit out of you: because deep down he was an abusive psycho and, as they say, the tiger don’t change his stripes. So when you look at that person you really know and you see them acting completely different, or you see only where things went wrong and pain and you tell yourself they’re different now – it’ll never work (or it will work) because they’ve changed, well, you’re sawing at that part they left behind and taking a healthy dose of bullshit, but it’s ok, because when you spoon-feed yourself bullshit it tastes like ice cream.

I was ranting about this last night with Steve and Felix. Guys night is Friday night these days – I’m not gaming so much anymore. We were talking about how people’s perceptions tend to fuck everything up and whatnot. See, one of the major factors in why I cut it all off with Cassie is because I’m succumbing to that bullshit and so is she and I’d rather us just move on, because it breaks my heart enough to have to walk around with that bit of her she left behind without having to see the aftermath. In that month I spent dealing with not talking to her really, wondering, stressing and dealing with it all, I did my share of placing the distance, of trying to say this isn’t going to work out, things got really bad so they would get bad again and all that crap. You do these things; you start getting over it – it’s how it works. The problem was the dreams. See. I kept having these dreams about her. I don’t dream about people that I know very much. In these dreams I would see her and I wouldn’t see any of the walls, I would see who she really was and it was alright. In dreams I don’t think we can lie to ourselves very well – we raise that spoon and, well, it smells like bullshit. I have a good comparison for this because when my ex wife left me for another guy and I was fiercely trying to get her back, pretending to be her friend and support her and degrading myself, I used to always dream about her as well and it was always like a nightmare – a definite obvious pervasion of the fact that I knew, that I should have known, that she was not what I really wanted. People can convince themselves of anything – with breakups this usually falls into the fact that things will work out or that they never were going to. Thing is you know whether they work out or not if you ever knew your partner, which is why this bit doesn’t apply to relationships that lasted a very short time or even long ones that had little to no real communication. If you know deep down that you love a person, but you can’t deal with it now because of all the shit that happened, the baggage and everything that caused the breakup, well then you’re probably lying to yourself. Why do I believe this bit?

See, I knew there was something about Cassie when I first met her – there was this thing I’d never seen before, but I was jaded. I’d just spent a year or so out of town getting away from whatnot, finsihing my book and trying to really get over all of that shit with my ex and I wasn’t over it yet. I felt something, some instinct with Cassie, strong enough to make me really pursue her, which I really didn’t do much anymore, but all the same I wasn’t exactly falling straight over. Even when we got together it didn’t take long before I started thinking it was nice, but probably wouldn’t last. We got into it with one another, our personalities clashed here and there and we were in stress from the onset of all of it. Honestly I thought it would be nice for a while but, if it lasted that long, I would probably break things off with her before I went out on tour to promote the book. Thing is, after all the shit, when it came to be that time, I couldn’t let it go. For all I said I missed my space, I still asked her to stay when she was talking about finally getting her own place. For all things went downhill after the kids moved in as unhappy as I was I was still happy with her. This baffled me time and time again, as did many factors of our relationship because, to confess a bit, I really didn’t think much of it for a long time and it was an uphill battle for me to care, to get over things, my issues, my walls, myself. I saw who Cassie was, despite her issues which easily stacked up against mine and I saw myself with her and I had to come to grips with the fact that I was alright with it – more than alright. Against everything I tried to put up against it, I still in the end had to accept it. I’m not doing a good job of explaining this, but I’ll spare you another page. Suffice to say, despite a few things she did her and there that really tore me up, I really did look at her and smile to myself wondering what she might look like as an old woman and that was something that never in my life had I done. every time something happened that made me furious, when we got into fights over and over again as the stress went way up, I would find myself later wondering why I would argue so hard, when really I knew deep down it wasn’t complicated. This isn’t placing her on a pedestal – I know her faults and there are many as she knows mine. It’s not hoisting her up above other women. What I’m saying is that I know who she is and I’m more than alright with it. I think when she backed off its because she realized that about me as well, but, as I said, we spend a lot of time building up our defenses so we can be justified, so we can be right – and it’s a lot easier to move on and start over than it is to face up to the pain of trying to work things out with someone, which is why I think we as a society consistently work on things less and less.

All of this comes down to why I cut it all off: because, in the end, you have to have both sides to work it out and I won’t try doing it again by myself – it never works. I can’t pretend I don’t feel the way I feel and I can’t lie to her – she deserves better, as does anyone. I want her to see the kids, but I can’t go with her and act like we’re alright, because we’re not – we don’t even talk anymore and, other than our first meeting after a month, all of our conversations would have had subtitles that read something like “I really miss you, but it’s so complicated now and I don’t want to deal with it.” Maybe she really has killed it off and I’m all wrong, but my instinct says I’m right and it’s been treating me well these days.

I wrote a song about it – it uses us as an example, but its really a song about my feelings on the situation in general. I only write a song once about every five years or so. Generally it gets stuck in my head and, like the sculptor with the stone, I try to get as much out of it as I can. This one I got just about all of it. It seems to sound kinda like and older Counting Crows song, which is odd, because I never listened to the band, other than what I heard on the radio. I’ll post it when I’m able to record it. For now I’ve taken enough of your time.

If there’s a sixth sense, I’m willing to bet this is it. See, we humans sort of lost our right to instinct. It makes sense: we think too much. Animals don’t have this problem. You never really see an animal doing something against its better judgment. The animal does what it feels drawn to do, what its instincts tell it to do. In some cases, the animal will forgo previous patterns of behavior on such a basis. There isn’t a lot of evidence supporting Extra-Sensory Perception as the sixth sense, but there is a hell of a lot of evidence for instinct, documented or otherwise. It’s really the source of the phrase “hindsight is always 20/20″ – meaning when you look back on some monumental change, horrible occurrence or otherwise, you realize you had a feeling all along something was coming, though you didn’t know what. It’s vague like that, which is probably the reason we don’t think much on it. See, if instinct told us in vivid move prophecy images or even flashed of what was going to happen, we probably would pay a lot more attention to it. Such is not the way of things, however. Instinct gives us arguably a sense of something. It doesn’t work by itself, it requires faith, a precious commodity these days. Even more so instinct works probably the same way in us as it does in the rest of the animal world, that being an insistent feeling that assaults more often than not, which, like many other factors of the human condition, is immediately met with indecision, defense, self-doubt and questioning. Seriously folks, I swear if we were in the wild in our present state the predators would give up on us because we would be too easy to kill and that’s saying something. Think about a gazelle standing out in the great savannah of Africa with a lioness creeping up on it. The gazelle stops, becomes immediately aware of a pressing sense of danger. Its hackles stands on end, muscle tenses…of course then the gazelle wonders what teh meaning of this is? What is the feeling of danger – there’s obviously no danger about, after all, it’s the middle of the day and one mustn’t spend all his life worrying about such things – it’s probably nothing and there’s no sense in getting all riled up about it – blood pressure, you know and it’s not – of course at this point the Gazelle is missing half of its guts because well, you just don’t debate shit like that when you’re a gazelle, the lions don’t really care too much about it.

We are taught from a very young age to ignore our instincts. When our imaginations run a bit wild and we are developing our danger sense, ergo we get the willies at night over one thing or another, we have our parents to assure us not only that it’s alright, but that it’s always alright – there’s nothing to worry about, we’re safe. Of course later we’ll be told to be scared of cars and predators and many other things that, statistically speaking, are not extremely likely to happen to us (but they might and to some people they do), then we are taught to ignore and suppress impulses and then taught to fear other things. In the end, we are given instincts, or rather rote paths of understanding ingrained by nurturing, media, government, religion or many other factors. It’s not just about fight or flight here, it’s not always about looking out for the lion, it’s about the fact that we like to pretend that we aren’t animals, that we are separated from them. Let’s face it: we are, very much so, but not necessarily in the best of ways. We are content to say that we exceed the standards and surpass the world of animalia because well, we think too much. Hell, I know I’m a prime example. What we don’t realize is that our instincts, like those of our quadruped family members, are still there, insistent and seldom wrong. No matter how much we repress, we cannot destroy. The funny part is that when you really listen to these instincts they generally don’t make you feel better or more self-aware; they scare the shit out of you, because they have a tendency to defeat rationale, which is the foundation of why we don’t need them after all. Herein lies the problem – instincts are based on faith – a thing we humans have precious little of to go around. Some of the most religious people you know (I can almost certainly guarantee) are devout out of the concept that they don’t know more than that they believe, which is enough for the majority of people. It’s one of those things that go back to what I describe as the nature of true magic, that being the stuff that makes everything work. Even in this world of banality we, being just as much a part of it as anything else, are connected to that stream that may be inclined to throw us a little hint in the grand game of life every now and then. Those who are keen on hearing such things generally are well rewarded and generally then look for more, as is the way with humans, and consider that they must be psychic, can divine the winning lotto numbers and cure all of your ailments by breaking an egg on your stomach. In actuality it’s not that it’s a great miracle, it’s that we ignore it the other 99% of the time so, when we listen, it’s some kind of life affirming experience. The Gazelle begs to differ, as does the lion. It’s all the daily grind to them.Try talking to them about angst, by the way – the gazelle won’t bother, he’ll get the hell away from you, as most people want to (they feel that impending whiny drama – but don’t listen to their instincts). The lion, well – see the previous example of the gazelle trying to think things over.

Now, I’m not saying that if we listened to our instincts more we’d have some supernatural predetermination ability or that life would go our way more often or whatnot, I’m just saying that we might feel better about all of it. At the very least, listening to our instincts requires that we cut a lot of the worrying down and that would make all of our lives easier.

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It’s snowing in Texas again.

When I was a kid, growing up in Houston, it snowed once maybe every five years, if that. It was the sort of thing that was a really big deal, but really meant that the snow we got turned to slush halfway to the ground. Since I’ve lived in North Texas it happens more often, but it’s still not anything to really be impressed by if you’re from an area that actually sees snow. Still, it’s something to behold and I still love it. I stand outside a bit and watch it come down and let my mind wander here and there. I go from contemplating my rant last night on magic to wondering about the things I need to get done tomorrow to how Cassie’s doing. I float around cycles of thought that spin into theories, ideas and philosophies and return to simply staring at the snow. If nothing more in my life, I thank the gods the most for allowing me the ability to maintain a concept of simplicity and the appreciation for it, even if I sometimes lose it. I sat up talking about magic with my son – we spend a lot of time talking after his sister crashes out ever since my marriage split apart and he started staying weekends with me. My daughter and I have fairy tales and imagination time and art, my son and I have philosophy. But both of them have Shel Silverstein, as I did when I was young…so here’s one you should pay attention to, because maybe you read it when you were a kid and forgot how to get back:

Where The Sidewalk Ends

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

That’s right kids, don’t believe in magic. It’s bullshit; I promise.

Now, those who’ve read any amount of this crazy site or who know me personally are probably hitting the OMGWTFBBQ button at this point, wondering if I’m off my rocker, or if I’ve been faking all along and I’m hitting the post-breakup psycho sauce after all. See, I’m a believer when it comes to magic. I’ve seen a lot of evidence when it comes to it and I experience it often. So why, pray tell, would I say something like the above statement? It’s pretty simple: magic is misconstrued, filtered, bastardized and generally FUBAR. It’s dead folks. Not really, but you might as well stop looking for it, because your looking wrong. Yes, you eyeliner-sporting pentacle-brandishing overweight Wicca kids, I’m talking to you. Stop trying, the magic school bus already left for the trip and you’re left once again screaming for attention by dancing naked around a fire and swearing up and down you hate Christianity, but you and I both know when you hit 45+ you’ll be back in church every Sunday For those of you who are older and just recently quit church to go to the Wicca drum circle party, you’ll be doing it at 70, or whenever death starts getting a little too close for comfort. New age bullshit has the name for a reason. Don’t get me wrong – I’m no Christian and have a general distaste for Abrahamic religion in general, but I’ve seen this happen in Western culture – folks drop out of Christianity, Judaism or whatever for a dip into the “Old Ways” and find out that the people teaching those Old Ways are doing so out of books written by folks in the ancient days of Woodstock and only wishing they could be half as cool as the folks in The Wicker Man.

So why am I dogging on all of this, being the preacher of hope faith, belief in the beyond laugher-at-science that I am would I say all these things? See, when it comes down to it there is energy about people, there is a force out there beyond comprehension of such indescribable power as to baffle the philosopher and the scientists alike, to bring us to our knees, it’s just not what we think? Why the hell would I know? It’s everywhere – it’s easy to see and base with logic. That’s right, I went there. Logic does apply and is an important factor in this. Logic and faith do go together, in fact they work extremely well together. You know what simple observation and logic can tell us about Magic? It’s not what you want it to be.

There you go. There isn’t really too much more to it than that, because this is the end-all driving factor that I’ve seen in just about every modern interpretation of magic there is (especially magic with a k on the end). Magic will not bend to your will, your whims, fancies or ideas about it. It does not make you special and it will not grant you anything. You will find no epiphanies from its existence, nor will you come into knowledge of some prophecy. Because, to wax into Fight Club, you are the same decaying matter as everything else. Seem cynical? It’s really not. True I am cynical about it, but I’ll lift this all up in a bit. Those spirits you feel in a candle-lit circle with all your black-clad friends, the heat that comes off objects, the sinister presence you all feel standing alone in the dark, well that’s called hysteria folks – even in a small form. You can psyche yourself up into anything – mobs and individuals alike have killed over this stuff. The magic here, the wonder if you will, lies not in the practice, but rather in the laughable ignorance of it all. Do you really think that if there is a power so great in the universe that you can possibly comprehend it, much less bend it to your will? We humans sure are proud of ourselves and we sure are gods-damned dumb. If you think you have ever seen magic in your life that involved any practice of witchcraft, any concentrate-till-you-zone-out, any “do you feel that?!” or anything that was influenced by someone else, you have been duped I’m sorry to say. The universe has not duped you. Gypsies didn’t do it, unless you paid them. While the universe may not care about you in particular enough to laugh at you, the nice Romany lady you paid to read your cards sure as hell is. She knows what you don’t: Magic is not what you want it to be.

There is no making folks fall in love with you. There are no invisible cords connected to other people that can be used to do you metaphysical harm. There are no spirits whispering to you the secrets of the universe. The dead do not talk to you when you ask them, I promise. I can list a million other examples for you. The idea of magic as it is commonly considers relies on the proposition that we might actually be able to exert some form of influence or control over the core stuff of existence, of the universe. That idea is an egotistical fallacy of epic proportions, one almost certainly only capable of being perpetrated by humanity. Folks say you can learn about magic from animals, that they have ways of knowing things that extend beyond our ability. I sure as hell don’t see why not, because they operate within the parameters of the system, because it is relevant to them. Because to an animal, to the world, to the stone, magic is what it is. Magic is not what you want it to be.

I will, however, give you a little insight into what it is. The funny thing is, you’ve probably heard a lot of it before. There is an energy in you, but you are not special. My cat has probably just as much energy as you, as does the big dumb dog next door who barks and drives me crazy, but all in all is a very amiable animal. You also have about as much proverbial metaphysical energy as a rock. It’s not an insult, actually, it’s an illustration. Here’s where it gets hokey, here’s where you’ve heard it all before. Magic is in everything, in the flow of rivers to the ocean, in the creation and destruction of mountains and plains. It’s in the canyons, in the sky. You see it at sunrise and sunset, you can catch it just between, dancing in the breeze that blows in the seasons. You used to know this. When you were a child, before you watched Lord of the Rings and the Matrix, played Dungeons & Dragons and read Aleister Crowley, you knew exactly what magic was. You knew back then. Your instincts are raw, powerful magic, and if you listened to them, really listened, you might find life carrying you in a direction that will lead you from harm and to contentment: not success; contentment. There is a power out there that we all worship on some level. You might call it God and Jesus, The Goddess and the God, Mohammad and Allah. Ask Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung, they knew what I’m talking about. Magic is not what you want it to be, that is, it won’t do what you want when you want it to. See, this is the reason why people don’t believe in it or want it to be more, because they want to have power, to understand, to feel special or important. We all want our kids to be Indigo Children, but they’re not and this is fine, they understand magic in a way that they will sadly forget or worse, will grow up and misinterpret to a gross degree.

There’s more, of course, there’s “black magic” as well and we are fundamentally aware of this also, but we sadly disregard this as superstition, not because it’s not what we want it to be, but because we are afraid it might be just what we think it is. I’m long winded as it is, and I can go off on this stuff forever. By now I’ve got some people locked into defense (not generally the people who read my ramblings, but the potential is there). There are folks who could read this and get mighty mad – steaming at the ears mad. There are folks in my life, “powerful” folks who’ve sworn up and down that they could and would curse me, that they could do me supernatural harm, but they’re incapable, they become impotent in the face of my power and I laugh, because I really don’t have any power, but, then again, neither do they. Or rather, we both do, but it doesn’t care what we want it to do, it serves to aid us in where we need to be in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. Want to argue? Want to scream at me that you saw ghosts, that you once made someone trip and break their leg or ruined their life for a month. Prove anything I say wrong – prove this revelation of the nature of magic wrong. There’s the bitch of it – it’s all faith. You can’t really prove me wrong. Of course, I can’t really prove myself right to any degree either. I can, however, be content with who I am as much as possible and try to trust that things turn out as they do, which I think you might find is usually alright when you align with the course. I can’t really tell you how to do that. I’m sure you’ll hear me talk plenty more about magic here and there, but today I got a little hacked about it, as I tend to do and thought I’d blow off a bit of steam. All-in-all, I think if you really cleared your head of all the worry, stress and questions about your existence for long enough to sit at that moment just before sunrise or just after sunset, you just might feel something you have felt before, and, if only for that moment, things might make a bit of sense. That’s magic folks, take it or leave it. It’s there either way.