until again

i got rather lost in the flux, lately. i’d offer some sort of humorous observation on the eccentricities of life and time, but yeah, that means very little. my on-again, off-again relationship with giving a shit about things outside of my control has fed into this as well. i’m trying to keep it more to off-again, but that requires a type of mental discipline for which i seem to have so little time.

i haven’t done a broadcast in a while, now. no one seems to miss it, and i’m not sure i do, either. i haven’t found anything insightful to say, nor have i found anything of seeming importance to promote. i haven’t been looking incredibly hard, either, though. i’ve been distracted.

i retreated into the online world years ago, completely by my own choice, and with specific intent, because up here, the inherent overlayment of impermanence and superficiality is transparently obvious, unlike the “real” world, where it all gets skewed and twisted somewhere out of sight before you ever get to see it coming, let alone recognize it for what it is. i can handle the bullshit up here because the bullshit is immediate, obvious, and usually very direct. real life is usually something different, or at least it has been.

but now, all of the sudden, life in my real world has become something both more and less than what it was for me, for so many years. the simple expedient of having someone interested in me–even demandingly so, sometimes–has changed everything. i’m actually having to think about how to better use my time, how to take care of myself for more than just the obvious reasons, how to learn to love again. it’s not something i ever really expected, even when i ended a marriage for lack of anything resembling mutual, interpersonal concern.

it’s different at this age, the falling in love thing, but yes, she’s keeping me away from you, my friends, and while i miss you, there’s just no contest there. i’m not so needful of attention that i couldn’t survive without her and her impact on my life, but by the same token, she’s here, she wants to share my time, and i want to give it to her. so, i wonder how many of you are like me, spending so much time on the internet, waiting/hoping/searching for something better to come along. yes, my prolific tweeting and occasional blogging have largely been escape mechanisms, i’ll admit it.

underneath all that, there has been some discussion of late about my morality. this is a laughable thing to me because of how little anyone online actually knows me, what i do in life, the communities i serve, and the people with whom i’m interconnected. somehow, it was deemed inappropriate of me to look for a relationship after i had ended a marriage that had been loveless for over a decade. somehow, for me, it was wrong to pursue those relationships via twitter while also using twitter to simply interact with people and learn more about the world around me and the people in it. somehow, i became anathema for actually taking the time, trouble, and expense to meet some of those potential relationship partners and deciding after some consideration that we weren’t compatible that way. in fact, i am apparently morally bankrupt for having done such things, despite the fact that i maintain good relations with those people, except for the one who bailed out of meeting me after i’d driven for 16 hours to meet her.

yeah, people’s definition of “morality” is pretty whack, and that’s true even amongst us freethinkers. i must have been the only person in the world drawn to other people via our interactions on twitter.

puh-lease.

then, i had to go make things worse and take loud, public exception to what i perceived to be the desire for the touchy-feely version of humanism to operate as a trump-card to all other forms of interaction freethinkers may have with the deluded. i handled the situation immaturely, apologized for it several times in several different media, and still, i’m the bad guy not just because i temporarily lost my head in an argument, but because i disagreed with someone who has more twitter followers than i do. funny thing is, that person and i were able to see through it and past it, and carry on being friends. it’s just some of her followers who seem compelled to continue “protecting” her on her unasked behalf, or who make entertaining, loud noises as they unfollow me.

which brings me to the last thing i wanted to say today. for all the shit i’ve been going through in the past year, it continues to amaze me to near speechlessness, the amount of willfully ignorant fools we have in our “ranks” as atheists and freethinkers: people who have really only effectively traded one adamant belief system for another. i received more rude, threatening and demonstrably unthinking tirades from fellow “freethinkers” due to the altercation i mentioned in the paragraph above than i have ever received from theists responding to something provocative i’ve posted in the past. these people (and you probably know who you are) serve to remind me that it is the simple human condition which is the overriding factor to everything we do, and within that human condition, intelligence has by no means been necessary, let alone an exclusive requisite, to the survival of this species or any of its individuals.

but yes, my friends, some wear the label of “freethinker” inappropriately: embarrassingly, ruefully, depressingly inappropriately.

ugh.

of course, aside from the accidental duplicity, there’s really nothing wrong with that. it’s part of what being human is about. perhaps “freethinker” can be a label that some people wear as an aspiration: something to work towards. a silver lining on the clouds of a bullshit reality which they may, indeed, someday take hold of to reshape themselves.

was that touchy-feely enough for you? probably not. o well.

at any rate, as with every autumn, my real-world life takes me away from here. and this woman with whom i’m falling in love is an additional, highly welcome distraction in whom i already find comfort and release (and that’s….refreshingly scary). i miss my frequent interactions with you, my friends, but there is no contest in the consideration of whether or not this is right for me. we’re two fiercely independent people who somehow manage to complete each other in all the right ways despite our insistence on our respective independence. there’s no way for me to describe how attractive that is to me, and so far, it’s working out beyond any expectation i might have been inclined to have.

if my past is any valid comparison, i expect what you’ll see is a bit more focused input from me in the future weeks and months. i’ll be using this internet thing a little more responsibly, which is to say, not as much, because i’m actually not trying to evade my reality any more.

and that, my friends, is a very, very good thing.

peace.

would that i not be independent: that i couldn’t stand without your support, for a small, selfish part of me would very much like to just lay down.

would that i not be self-reliant: but as much as i like having your arms around me, i have to hold myself together in order to be yours.

would that i not be self-motivated: i could easily live my life for you and you alone, but only i can be responsible for my successes and failures, and i certainly wouldn’t pin the latter on you.

i feel incomplete without you, but i can’t feel helpless when you’re gone, for the hole you leave inside me is covered by all the things i appear to be and do.

and that vacancy is quite large, echoing with the sounds of my self-reliance, resounding then fading, as if they were searching for you, calling your name then chasing after you until they disappear over the horizon.

left alone, i return to myself somewhat, but it is, in truth, something less than what i am, when you are with me.

i might hide it well.

perhaps.

but i miss you already, and you’ve only just departed.

i live in a moment of barter which makes no sense, for nothing has been tangibly exchanged. yet it seeped through me, runs over me, and the only word that comes to mind as description is barter: i have traded something away and gained something very much more. describing it, defining it: these things are beyond me today.

there are no storms, as if August came and swept them all away so that my center would lie elsewhere. i do not grieve for them, and yet, for a while, they reconnected me with my past in their warm, wet, intimate way. and that, of all things, was the healing i needed. i am not groundless in this. i do not waver constantly without my center. i know where it is, and what it awaits, and that, today, is centering enough.

it is a different time now, a different place, a different measure. all the might-have-beens were washed away this summer—all the could-have-beens, the in-betweens, and the waiting for them that bled and bled and bled my life away. even alone, i live more fully now than over the past decade.

and that word. that rarely-seen, unfamiliar word that has come to me infrequently over time, came up again in my last writing. and it has interpolated itself into something more than it ever was before. recalescence: that ever-ephemeral glow of molten iron as it cools. somehow, over the years, i’ve managed to keep my own core malleable, workable, changeable, adaptable, and to keep that recalescence alive. i thought i’d lost it, yet it burns within me still, though it seems like something close to forever since i last saw it shine.

i thought i’d traded it away for stability—for that constant, inconsequential insistence that all is well. if i’ve failed at anything in life, i’m pleased to have failed at that, then.

and she—she only begins to know, to understand. she hasn’t been a part of all of this, and she didn’t know she could be burned by my recalescence. i try to shelter her from it, yet having failed at least once (at least partially), she remains, voluntarily, and pulls it—pulls me—closer to her heart. i cannot fathom why, or even pretend to. i simply cherish it, and cherish her, and walk alongside her, hoping neither of us burn.

for i’ve traded the insularity for brightness, and that brightness came with the death of the all which never was.

there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

i sit beneath the rain again. it pages down, an unwritten book that so many have read since time forgotten.

on nights like this, it hollows crevices in my mind, and slowly fills them with melancholy, nostalgia, and stupidly even hope.

i am of that nature, possessed of the ability to dream, but not only to dream, to segment the dreams from the reformulated memories, the fears of what remains unknown, and the brief foreshadowing of insights i will later fail to recognize.

i don’t see everything, but what i do see, i see quite well.

which is not to say i always glean the right impression. especially when the rain comes, and then with it, the thunder and the lightning redefine every thought before i ever have a chance to set them down.

i breathe an air that is flavored with, colored by, comprised of this rain, and i remember all the things i wanted long ago, and none of them stand in my future. and no matter how deeply this rain saturates this moment and me, i come no closer to bringing them back to life.

and everyone else, having read these pages since time began, probably knows them for exactly what they are.

Sometimes, I wonder why I do the things I do. I don’t refer to myself in the third person very much at all, but I do quite often stand outside myself and become at a loss for what’s going on inside. Perhaps my communicative problems from the past really are grounded within me. I think I sometimes fail at giving myself the fuller insight as to what’s going on internally.

As a result of that, when people ask me what something I’ve published up here means, I don’t necessarily have an answer. While I’m not saying that not asking is the better course, just be advised I may not have what fits your definition of “clear answer.” I work a lot from the subconscious; it’s nothing mystical, it’s just unplanned. I feel no real need when it comes to the creative process (and my life definitely fits under that order of precedence) to direct every action, every movement, every response.

Only this, perhaps: The majority of my life is spent in waiting for things to come. And the waiting for it bleeds. I am somehow both too active to wait indefinitely, and too pensive to force my own hand.

Time is the sort of thing that can beat you coming and going. I try not to chase it too hard, but that rarely means I’m doing it right. Peace and closure are unattainables: meaningful ideals that have little true function in the world.

I’m alone right now for a reason. I only hope it’s a good one.

things like dreams and dreams like days and days like things i’ve never known. there are no in-betweens when everything keeps to the edges. and there are no divisions when everything subverts everything else.

but there are no dreams, not truly. there are memories and a confluence of biochemical processes. there are phrases turned in wistfulness and the desire for pain to subside. and yet, a life without pain is hardly one worth living. and so the dreams, the memories, the processes all bring a pain that is both a comfort and a lie.

it’s raining again, like it always does.

not really, of course. no, never quite really, but it’s raining again, like it does, like it has, like it will.

i can see it: a small storm, far off, looking like some sort of soft, harmless little thing….a thing i would like to be in, despite the chill.

but the rain: always at times like this, it is the rain that pulls me back, even when it is somewhere else.

just: the rain.

just that, and only that.

i don’t know, in the deepest sense, what the rain truly means to me. it has always been with me, always a part of me, always around me, even on the driest of days. the internal meanings change as i age, and as experience dictates.

there are days like this.

and sometimes there are lifetimes.

and sometimes, i don’t know which are the longer.

part of my self-definition after i left home involved mnemonic devices in my writing: word-symbols which correlated to certain thought-forms more fluidly than i could say outright in English. one of these devices was the black moon.

over time, the black moon came to mean several things to me, but it started as being directly representative of an eclipse, and therefore for eclipsed thoughts: forms of creation which existed internally but never made it to the light of day. had blogging been around (read: common) back then (the mid-to-late 1980′s), i’d have been one of the most prolific bloggers on the planet, but even then, there still would have been creations that fell beneath the black moon. poems in particular had a peculiar tendency to creep up on me when i had no way to write them down, and songs seemed to always wait until i was either out of music paper or far away from any musical instrument.

but, at least those melodies would often stay in that mental playlist of mine, and would often be rendered sometime in the future, at least in some way. and especially after i enlisted in the Army, the most common way for a song to be written down was as a “poem”. these poems were actually mnemonic sequences, crafted for the sole purpose of capturing the song they actually represented. call me crazy, but the methodology works. i can still hear the song represented by the poem below (the title of which was an intentional double-entendre), despite a series of edits which, for me at least, lifted it from its role as mnemonic device and into something which might just stand on its own.

i’ll have to record the song itself someday. it is the melody that underlies the entire process of my departure from my unrevivable marriage.

this was written at a time when i still considered the possibility of reincarnation, multiple lifetimes, and all that other tomfoolery which is ultimately just as unprovable as religious dogma. for that, i must beg your indulgence.

within the realm of the black moon rising
~ October 2, 1989 in Lubbock, TX

called in and deeply hidden:
something more grand on this large scale
than wisdom;
and the changing patterns on the ceiling
mark the windfall
of the endless colors on the Wheel;
and for all that it seems,
something deeper hidden than the nightfall
is colored by the days it has failed to express.
so much, then ~
so futile ~ is the star-gazing wonder
of a few pale expressions of our doom.

so lying alone, i remain in wonder,
pondering for a while
the termination of the colder hand;
and gazing now beyond these wayward turmoils,
i symbolize the Law of Universal Doom.
it all shall end.
it shall.
and creaking like the back door of our memories,
slowly it opens,
and slowly, i begin to understand.
there is something more here than what is waiting ~
something more full of despair
and empty sadness;
and i search again the long streets of our wanderings,
and my memories fly the pathways
of so many lifetimes.
and so my question, unanswered still,
begs unasked upon my lips:
“when shall i be with you again?”

within the realm of the black moon rising
(and the planets all are melting),
i turn to see the stars,
and you are there again.
i lay my eyes upon thee, my love,
and thou art full of light.

days
pass by:
“cover me:
let me hide.”
fade away
into the world
~ it shall be this way
(somewhere).
and there:
there is someone
who loves me
~ i don’t know how.
tell me,
what can i do?
(this need for love….)
i have fallen
in this sway
~ someway.
and days
pass by:
the world
and all within it….
(and i cry)
there is hope.
there is fear.
there is sorrow.
there is cheer….
stand away, now.
let me part.
(i know what it is
that i remember)
for, it is over.
it is gone.
and it cannot hold me
any longer.

…September 2, 1985 in San Antonio, TX

this popped into my head this morning. i don’t know why, but i figured, why the hell not. those of you who tend to psycho-analyze me may at least enjoy it.