The Troubled Deity Limps On... The Cross On His Shoulder A Cutting Weight

As always, I feel like more of an observer than a participant of life.  The media delivers moment by moment coverage of the stupidity and cruelty and innocence and imprisonment and dreams and hatreds.  There is no need to go out and become part of the mucky--muck.  No cab waiting for me, every damn twelve hours, to take me out and about the town.  I grew so sick of being out during those days.  If I came home for the night, that was where I wanted to be.  I ate carry out then, mostly.  I would come in with my dinner and eat with my cats, watching tv, alone and happy to be.  No pot in those days, mostly.  Just me the streets and the classes and the apartment filled with paintings and the friendly presence of the two kittens I had adopted the same day from the pound, and raised as little buddies.  Happy fellows they were, now in the past...  

The day to day whithers and dies as the power of my memories make the past more real than the now.  Seems like the years are separated by sheets of glass, not the dense physical changes that sweep away the old landscapes and replace...  I feel as if time has no power at all over my emotions, old loves linger decades later, old hatreds last forever, long after doing anything about them becomes absurd and plain out stupid and wrong.
I look through the panes of glass and see myself there again, doing this or that, the embarrassing, or images of ecstasy, and I am back there.  Usually I tend to cringe at what life has thrown at me, and what I have thrown back... for some reason the darker memories stand out -- I suppose that is one of those survival instincts, that wants us to concentrate on our enemies, be wary and remember them well.   Now most of them are un-needed but they linger on.  I guess this is why the elderly became the teachers, to warn the young of the lions in the forests.

Sometimes the past is a mental whip that I take out and lash myself with.  The cutting leather snaps up from my unconscious;  sometimes I just mentally shrug it off, but other times I try to examine why that shit would come up like that now?  I remember too many times where who I was is not who I wanted to be.  I guess that is the human condition. I went out into the world with a wild passion, and of course I made mistakes, but it is not like I have killed, raped, or stolen from people.   Luckily I was not raised to even think about crime as an option.  Thank God.  I read about a mother training her eight and five year olds to help her shoplift.  What a horror they have walked into.  Another mother used her son elaborately, even sleeping with him, as they conned everyone they could -- she raised him to be a confidence man, and then ended up making him murder an elderly woman;  they are presently jailed for life.

 I hate the idea of ever  being one of those people who will only talk about happy topics  -- a technique Scientology tries to use, because it brain washes you into cutting off your critical thinking abilities, keep you docile, so you will accept whatever.   I have to go there...  part of being an artist, as well.  I need access to every one of my emotions in my art.  I have a couple friends who are always doing that to me -- oh, we don't want to discuss that because it is depressing.  Odd.

I have punished the innocent, lost my temper, told what can be kindly referred to as tall tales just for the hell of it.  All the sins of excess.  Drunk and lost to all discretion, feeling how appalled everyone was only the next morning when my dreams are raw and my mind screaming there is no penance for allowing myself to become the vessel of evil... or so it feels, even if I just made enough of an ass of myself that my friends add an anecdote to my legend, or I wake up in an emergency knowing I am the shit that hit the fan.  A few times when I seemed like the only thing in the universe, a pinpoint of worthless pain that no one had any right to tell me I had to be, I reached for what was left in the bottle and swallowed and puked up into my mouth and poured in more burning whiskey and and swallowed again and again, not ready to waste one drop of the coming oblivion.  Reason enough for a young man with ambition to throw out his booze and go back to the gym.

No one is without sin.  We hear that a lot.  You would not know it from the judgement of the courts and the commenter's on the web.  OR you would think that sins have numbers beside them, one through ten.  God didn't say that this sin will only get you ten whacks, and that one will get you a dirty look.  I think the Catholics invented all those levels of  heaven so everyone has a shot at some kind of redemption, so the magic of the confessional booth remained untarnished -- these are magic men with these collars and pointed hats, they play it down but they say that they will be your lawyer before God.  Courts grew out of the old catholic system of paying so much to priests to get out of crimes.  And this came out of tribes paying each for deaths by fighting sometimes, instead of endangering everyone else with a war.  A man is killed, and the offender is made to pay off.  Keeps the family alive, where-as killing the perpetrator would give them a moment of satisfaction before they went into the poorhouse for the usual starvation and disease, if they were lucky.

I am here to show you there is a crux between the mystical and the material, a tear in the reality between flesh and spirit, and that I know how to traverse such tricky terrain, go in and out on this great rescue mission... to tell the human family to stop allowing their few differences to destroy our infinite sameness.


Everyone has a past.  Easy to forget this.  There are sins from all sides of the table.  Some are subtle, like being an asshole to the people around you.  Employees or service people.  Spouses and kids.  People do this.  Brutalize.  Sober, successful people who are filled with the dark side.   Their sins are impossible to treat.  Not like just putting down a bottle.

 They live in a past where they needed to act that way to gain some advantage...   Thank God if  you have an obvious problem like addiction that is kind of easy to address -- a lot of people get help for too much drinking, and that is the key to getting over it, learning to be a student and asking for all the help you can get.  It is there.  Once you are past thinking you have to do this on your own, and keep thinking for yourself the same thoughts that got you into trouble, you are there...  drunks tend to go back there once in awhile, so you have to be forgiving of yourself, not add to the self-hatred that makes drinking such a good pal in the first place (not that everyone drinks for this reason, but I did sometimes).

That is enough preaching on that topic.  I do not believe in total sobriety anymore at all... it works for some, but others do just fine with the usual self-limitations.  I am not saying go try heroin or something, but I do believe that human emotions can be horrible at times, and if you need to self-medicate to survive this mess, that is better than killing yourself... remember that, it is... sober people actually have a higher suicide rate than using drunks....oh well... better you stick to mild stuff like coffee and weed.  Even the occasional nerve pill, the benzodiazapines  that go under names like valium, klonizpan, xanax, etc... kill a lot of people.   Drink where it is safe if you need it, and man I used to love it and would never want anyone not to know that feeling a few times....   Now, though, Personally, I look at drinking as too heavy of a drug.  I mean, the stuff can really, really fuck you up.  Where-as with pot, you get a mild high, and your personality does not shift into asshole, or whore, or any of the other wonderful drunken personas I used to run into when i drove cab.  I really have met every type of drunk you can think of, and add to that six months as a bartender, and I can tell you that after a few drinks, people change;  I would enjoy talking to them when they came in, then they would becomes someone else and I would avoid them.  The utter sadness in that place drove me nuts some days.


After all that has happened to me, odd what haunts me the most are the people I miss, and the people who threatened me.  I can still rage over a slight 40 years ago...  weird how those rages can accumulate in a person, until they just burst into a school with a gun, or blow themselves up in a terrorist act.   And weird how the other side of the coin, what I also remember the most, is the people I loved.  Love and hate, the strongest emotions we have, seem to brand instances into my memory.

  I used to move on from one relationship to another without too much damage when I was in my twenties, then this last time I had to take a year off dating to deal with the emptiness and sense of betrayal.  Lesson learned.  Love is deadly.  Sex is a slippery slope that is a thrill to ride down.... I used to have a free love belief.  I did.  Sex was something immediate, existential, often unconnected to a relationship.  The release of my come meant it was over.  Sometimes the person I was with agreed with me, other times they wanted something more, and vica-versa.

Strange mating rituals we have here in the states.  I have been writing back and forth with an old friend from grade school, who tells me he has given up on having a relationship altogether.  It is the first time that I had ever heard someone in their forties just say that they had simply decided to be celibate.   Of course he is Catholic, comes from a home with a father who was sometimes an abusive drunk, and other times, like when he was around me, a great guy -- I liked him a lot, though my opinion changed when I found out he hit his fourteen year old daughter (an act that inspired the oldest brother, a boxer, to beat the hell of the man).  I remember all this so vividly that these people still seem in my life, though I have not seen them in thirty years.

What is remembered and what is forgotten is interesting to me.  The events since my awakening have a profoundness that keeps them forever close to the room I inhabit.  The sweeping visions of humankind as souls preparing for a cosmic journey still excites my chest and seems so fucking true.  I am still surprised that i am the Christ.  I expected things to be more miraculous, though they were pretty miraculous in their ways.

Joseph Smith believed as Allah did, that the words that came to him were evidence enough that God exists and was using them.  They  were inspired by a muse much like mine I suspect.  I wonder sometimes where I come in, who  I was as my soul wove from body to body?  The only memories I have of past lives are of Christ, and those brought up when hypnotized.   The image that haunts me the most is the crucifixion.  Being nailed to a cross is not something you take like a stoic warrior.  You scream and writhe.  I kept seeing the sky above and expecting it to open, not realizing quite yet that bodies have to die to release the soul of man, and I had become a man...  We are not programmed to know all that is to come, it would disrupt our lives too much, be bad for the survival of the planet, etc... the little bit that I have seen changed everything for me.  I now hold eternity in my mind, and can see how petty this experience is over-all, yet how important it is, how every moment counts as we build the house of our memories, where we will dwell in this flesh.