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tiredofvampires

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It's taken a lot of waffling over quite a lot of time (years, actually), to decide to start a public journal here.

 

This is the same feeling I've had countless times with a blank canvas in front of me. Or the blank page, before beginning to write. It's all bare. It's a state of pure potential. Pure resting potential. Of fertility. It's a slate where anything could happen. It could turn into something I stand back and look at, when it's busy and full of color (or in the case of writing, segues and detailed description, and corrections) and feel...this is saying just what I wanted to bring into creation.

 

Or, it could turn into something I rake my hands through my hair over, thinking...uuuugghggh!!! It's so not what I envisioned, in my head. And I can't seem to get it right. Every correction only makes it a little less of what it was I was trying to do. Toss it, throw it away, I can't bear the sight of it anymore!!

 

I guess in some ways, that's symbolic of life. How I've experienced the two faces of Life.

 

But it's the New Year, today. New Year's Day. And if starting with a blank slate in front of you ever wanted a day just for itself...this socially-officiated marker of the Earth's return to a point in space, arbitrarily assigned a date...this would be it. And while I don't consider myself a slave to ritual...this is really one of my favorite "holidays." Maybe even above Halloween.

 

It's about starting again.

 

"Beginner's mind", as they say in Zen, and other related traditions.

 

It's about the freedom of knowing you won't be able to predict or even control the entire outcome of the work...but knowing that every mark you place, every brushstroke, every word you choose...you choose for a reason, with the best knowledge and ability you have at that moment to make your "painting" or "story" one of meaning.

 

There's a progression that can't be stopped, even when it feels as if you're standing still for a while. Just since midnight last night, the earth has been spinning furiously on its axis at 1,038 mph (at least at the equator, where I'm close to), dying to the yesterday, birthing to the 'morrow. I'm running always, to catch some moving train, it feels. Which sometimes feels exciting and exhilarating, sometimes desperate, sometimes fearful and anxious, and sometimes hopeless.

 

Truth is, I've been a devoted journal-writer on and off throughout my life, starting in earnest at age 11, when my mother gave me my first hard-bound "anything book". It was a small green volume of completely blank pages, but edged in gold. A latticework of gold design graced the cover and for a while, I was afraid to mar it with my writing. I wanted it to stay pure, pristine. I loved the golden-traced leaves...and felt that my handwriting could not do it justice. Let alone all the things I might put to words in there about a life that was not edged in gold, but soot.

 

But it became my best friend. Every entry was a letter...a letter from my soul back to my soul...but also back to god, which I both believed in and capitalized at the time. "Dear Diary," or on superlatively demonstrative days, "Dearest Diary," I always began. This was the only friend I felt was listening. My younger sister, L, was my closest, best friend and playmate in reality...but my diary was my confidente. I could describe things to my diary that normally I wouldn't have tried to articulate to anyone, and didn't. My diary was a sanctuary. A haven. Unconditional acceptance. And the only place where I was not judged, condemned, criticized, mocked, and where nothing was expected of me. I didn't have to be anything other than what I was there. I had nothing to prove there. It was a benevolent wellspring of receptivity.

 

That's not to say that I didn't once in a while apologize to my diary for neglecting it. We had a relationship, you know. Maybe I should say "her" not "it" -- because it possessed a strongly feminine energy for me. Of course, that was entirely a projection of my own female psyche...or it was the sense of feminine nurturance that it embodied. But because it was ultimately asexual, and contained all aspects of human nature, I'll call it, "it".

 

The privacy of this confidence was every bit as important to the bond as the things said.

 

That book became the most important book in my collection over the years. I never put it in storage, and it was always the one that I imagined I would run out of the house with, if there was a fire. But my last memory of it was reading a passage from it to a therapist about 8, 9 years ago...and since then, it seems to have dematerialized. I've searched all the shelves in my apartment for it, and it's just nowhere. Maybe if and when I ever move, I'll find it shrouded in dust bunnies behind an item of furniture (though I've moved the furniture around here many times). In the event that never happens, what I'm left with is the heart-stabbing question, "Is it possible I left it in the cafe where I had that tuna sandwich after my appointment?" The little shack shop downstairs, in the lobby of the building where I went for my therapy. I can't stand the idea of having left my lifetime best friend on a wobbly snack table, walked away, and not turned around. In which case, it would have gone to meet it's maker, and I would be left with the thought I have every time I think of it...

 

That nothing material can be relied upon to remind us of who we are. Ultimately, we have *this* and *that* in our own hearts, and that is what matters. That's where all the data is stored. All the important stuff. And in the most organized way (unlike my own habits which incline towards clutter), the heart knows when it's time to let go of what, to discard what is no longer being used. All the stuff that's kept is the most important.

 

Do I really need to see a visual or read something to remind myself what and who I am? In fact, why do I need to write it? I only need to know it. It would seem.

 

And yet...I've started other journals and diaries as I grew up, sporadically. Including here, privately. But I've noticed over the years that something's changed about the process. It's hard for me to write completely in privacy now, because it feels as though I'm just churning over things in my head that have already been ruminated ad nauseum about. And I'm a ruminator! So it feels like a stagnant pond sometimes. Like I'm going in circles in the brain, making crazy donuts.

 

So back to the ambivalence about making a public blog or journal, and how tough that feels when I'm inherently such a private person about things I'd put in a journal, I've wondered if I should start one in the Solo section, or in the regular section. I asked a good friend here years ago what his Solo journal (where people can read but not comment) did for him that a private journal couldn't, and he said something that immediately rang the bell, "If I write it where it can be seen, it feels like it's no longer stuck in my own head." Ah, that made so much visceral sense to me.

 

It's possible that I may move this eventually there, so this feels rather tentative.

 

But I figured, as this IS the official "blank slate day", I'd have to wait another whole revolution around the sun to have this particular opportunity of symbolism again.

 

So here it starts...

 

And I don't honestly know what my intent is for it. There is so much of my life and thoughts that I know I can't put here. But there's stuff that may be worth it.

 

I do know that it's not likely to be entertaining in the least. And one look around the contents of this forum, it's clear that for the most part, the problems I deal with are so uncommon, that this journal will in a sense remind me what an outlier I end up being. That hasn't changed much since age 11, either. A lot will relate to my grief -- past and present. I imagine a lot about mortality (as I was born with a heightened awareness of it, and it's acute these days), a good deal about mourning, and the existential issues that come up around that. It might even seem morbid or lugubrious to many.

 

Mostly, I see this as a scrapbook of sorts. A scrapbook of memories and stories and recollections and accounts that touch me in ways that I feel the need to express. A scrapbook of noteworthy quotes and inspirations. But there is a lot of shadow there. A lot unreconciled. Maybe in some way, the patchwork and the recountings (to the extent I can bear) will cauterize them with light and the "not staying in my head" magic.

 

And as usual, I'm at least in theory, devoted to organization. Should there be themes? Titles? Topics? Aah, it'll all degenerate sooner or later into the kitchen sink and as they say here, "chop suey", so probably best not to start with such meticulous plans.

 

I think what I'm doing here is creating a container, more than anything else. A container to put the odds and ends that have no other place, or outlet.

 

Maybe I'll return often, maybe this will be my first and last entry. Again...a metaphor for the wild unpredictability of being alive.

 

I'm just feeling contemplative, pensive, spontaneous, and daring enough today to "celebrate it" this way.

 

I think I'll dedicate this to my green and gold friend not forgotten....which I dedicated in careful cursive at the beginning to Anne Frank, my muse at the time.

 

God, this sucks having an edit window here though. Typos gonna kill me...why are they always so invisible until a day has elapsed? Not to mention all the things I would change or add...always in the afterthought stage...

 

1000 words...because the biggest challenge for me is getting a piece of writing into the requisite (and most common) word count of 1000. WORD JUNKIE that I am.

 

1000 words...because I've exceeded that by about 5 billion times over here, and so, well, it's kind of an lol. Some people (the minority) finding my motormouth endearing and appealing, and others, well...being the majority. haha.

 

And 1000 words because...well...if I were brilliant enough, I'd paint a worthy picture and maybe obviate all of this. But for my love of tapping away and poetry, I'm here anyway.

 

And now I've taken the mystery out of the title by explaining...tch tch tch...bad, bad artistic move. heh I've just seen the title so many times in my mind's eye, it feels time to see it for real.

 

Some favorite quotes about telling stories:

 

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ~ Maya Angelou (someone I quote a lot -- I think we share a soul)

 

"We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are." ~Maya Angelou (see what I mean)

 

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

 

I think we we built to do this.

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I just realized...thinking back to my old green and gold friend...that there, I often committed my writings to the pages in red ballpoint pen or magic markers.

 

So you'd think this edit window deal would be a piece o' cake.

 

How come I didn't worry about perfecting what I said then? I just...wrote. And it was good.

 

I had no fear of the indelible.

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Aw, hey Cap, thank you!!

 

A lot of people in "real life" too say, "Oh my god, you have to write a book!" when I describe something that's going on...but the thing is, I need some kind of unifying theme, lol. Like what's the point I'm trying to get accross, and what's the ending about. So I guess I have to figure that out first. heh.

 

Then, there's the fact that I just need more time to devote to it, instead of all the insanely stressful stuff that keeps happening. Then, there's all the other writing I do...

 

But it's a sort of "must-happen" bucket list item. Maybe I'm waiting to become wise enough to have that "ah ha!" moment where I know EXACTLY what the book's about.

 

 

---

 

I don't know why it feels SO much like Sunday, even though it's Thursday. I'm glad the weekend's ahead.

 

And the weather for once is PERFECT. I love that I'm shivering...it's cold enough that I'm actually feeling chilly most of the time. WOOOHOOO!! I wait all year for this.

 

And I must say...I had perhaps the one good night of 2014 last night, on New Year's Eve. My friend had given me a ticket to Bill Maher, live, for Christmas. Knowing of course that he's just like, one of my favorite comedians in the whole cosmos.

 

He's been performing on New Year's Eve here for the last 4 years, and I went for the first time last year. Man, it's the gift that keeping me in fits of laughter even long after the show's over. It was almost nonstop ROFL, and he was definitely playing off the high energy of the audience (which was a diverse bunch -- great people-watching before the show.) I just love that guy -- he makes getting up in front of a concert hall and hamming it up to hundreds of people look like he's just jesting for a few friends at a bar. It had the personal banter, venting feel, which I loved. His energy and being on these rolls just was superb. On his A-game, and not slowing down. You know how some comedians start to write sort of half-baked jokes after they get older (this even happened a wee bit with the mighty Carlin)? Not him. Fresh as an uncured pickle. He brought the house down, peppering the show with some local off-color jokes, too. He's every bit as good live in stand-up as on Real Time. Tight.

 

If I just had a fiftieth of that stage presence, and I don't even smoke weed...siiigh....

 

And he got heckled! At one point, someone off on the side yelled out (I have no idea why), "Can't hear you!" Weird! The sound system was flawless. So Bill yelled back, "You can't hear me? Well then get the s&*! out of your ears, because everyone else is doing just fine. And you know, that isn't even my part of the show -- " and got down in front of the stage speaker, with his stomach flat on the stage, pretending to tinker with it, saying, "Can I get an allen wrench? A dime, maybe, this thing isn't working..." I couldn't hear half the stuff he was improv-ing, people were clapping, laughing, and whooping so wildly.

 

While most of his quips aren't printable here, one that I had to commit to memory was when he got to the topic of immigration, he brought Justin Bieber into it, and said, "Do you guys listen to him? I mean he sounds like a munchkin giving head to a busy signal." HAR HAR!!!! so off-the-wall and random, but so true...ah, I guess you had to be there to hear the whole context, but I couldn't. stop. laughing.

 

Good medicine. I wish I had a shot of that every night.

 

I don't think any of the comics I love could ever be thanked enough for the times they made one evening of my life GOOD.

 

Bill's the best.

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I love that you have a journal here as I tend to relate and learn from your own journey (no pressure.. hee hee..)

 

I imagine a lot about mortality (as I was born with a heightened awareness of it, and it's acute these days), a good deal about mourning, and the existential issues that come up around that. It might even seem morbid or lugubrious to many.

 

I'd be very interested to read your thoughts on that. I am reading on death anxiety at the moment and I feel particularly absorbed by existentialist thoughts, both in a helpful and unhelpful way.

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Quirky, thanks for following...yes, we do have an uncanny parallel of experience and relating to the world in so many ways. A lot of the things you describe about your journey I find somewhere in myself, as little or big trolls I did time grappling with. I think the artistic soul is certainly kindred...and entirely interlocked with that, the desire to peer into the bowels of human nature with a ready scalpel. It's not for the faint of heart.

 

Care to share the nature of the existentialist thoughts that have been helpful and unhelpful for you?

 

 

If a picture be 1000 words...music is 100,000,000 words.

 

[video=youtube;F8FvOuM1FbY] ]

 

Volume up

 

Fetal position

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Hi Lolita! Thanks, and you guessed right...I do have some strong hippie leanings (though not solely so...just one color to this calico cat), so if that's coming through, it would make sense. It's hard to know what my "style" sounds like from eyes outside my own.

 

It takes a while for thoughts to condense for me.

 

I was just thinking in the shower last night how much I had to write...to say...and yet it's still all too caught up in a whirlpool.

 

Waiting for the dust to settle...the water to grow more placid.

 

 

Today, I'm feeling that everything is always just one arm's length from reach. Everything I'm striving for.

 

And that there is no "place" -- as in, amongst people -- I truly "fit." This is of course no revelation. It's been in the works for oh, about 35 years. But it's just been particularly intensifying lately...I think largely due to the questions on my horizon about whether I'll ever find a lifetime partner -- a "search" that I've put intentionally on hold for the last 5 years, and which has been on hold by default more like 8 years (since my last serious relationship.)

 

I'm acutely aware now, more than ever -- especially since I've done further evolving in the last years of singledom -- that I feel there are too many sides to me, too many odd contours, to be able to fit any particular person, or "kind" of person -- as unique as people are.

 

It's like shoe shopping (which I loathe, for the low-yield results and bending up and down 200x in the span of a couple of hours).

 

This one doesn't pinch my toes on either foot (yayyy!)...but it feels like after a quarter of a mile, it'll turn my Achilles tendon into a red, puffy wheal. How do others get used to this?

 

This one leaves my heel to move freely and is SO comfy except why is the right front strap scrunching my baby toe more than the left?

 

This one isn't rubbing or pinching anything, and the straps have some blessed give...but this slight heel feels tipsy, and I just know at some point, I'm going to get it stuck in a groove, and pretzel my ankle, with my coordination. If it just had a sturdier heel! Or I had a sturdier gait, so I could wear cute things like this and own these heels! Then it'd be PERFECT. But a shoe that feels perfect, but you can't walk in...?

 

Now this one! THIS feels right. Really right. And it looks good on my foot. Profile, side, front. Yup. It even accentuates my arch. And I can sashay back and forth through the shoe department, picking up the pace. I'll take it.

 

*goes home*

 

I can't wait to take it out for its first spin! Goodie! Maybe other people will notice I got new shoes, too. They'll guess by the perk in my step. Certainly, I'll be emitting a "new novelty item" aura.

 

*back at home*

 

So all I did was a few sundry errands, and walk through a few parking lots, and a 4 extra blocks for good measure, and already there are angry red marks in spots I couldn't have imagined. I'll have to wear 5 band-aids to suffer these shoes in the future.

 

And oh, that scaled down the perk factor, too. I wonder if anyone could tell that my new shoes weren't all that I'd hoped.

 

Did anyone notice? Surely someone must have seen the limp, and recognized themselves in me. Right?

 

This is the state of things right now.

 

Though the frivolity of this analogy doesn't do the subject justice. It's not even a blurb.

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Borrowed and credited to someone else's quoting (on a dating site profile):

 

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

 

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you'll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

 

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life..." — Elizabeth Gilbert

 

Yes.

 

To all my soul mates who have come and left, or with whom I still grapple...I send you the greatest love and gratitude, over time and space.

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Of course, I failed to mention that that sound above...^....that mesmerizing, deep bass drone...is the "sound" of the sun, as it has been recorded using technology converting radio waves into sound frequencies. Since sound itself doesn't travel through space.

 

Space...that vacuum of sound...like a throat closing during a dream, allowing visions to appear, but silencing the utterance.

 

As the caption underneath it on youtube says about the visuals:

 

"New [well, it's not so new anymore] video released by NASA from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) which was launched February 11, 2010. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) takes these images accross 8 different wavelengths (out of the 10 available wavelengths) every 10 seconds. NASA SOHO recorded sounds of the sun added."

 

To me, it's like suddenly being able to listen in on the hum of a sleeping beast whose breathing can't penetrate our narrow auditory spectrum.

 

The sun's voice! If it could speak of the turmoil it secretly goes through in its contained cauldron of hydrogen. How must it feel to be this pent up? And preparing to explode? With plumes and flares breaking through it's skin?

 

Like this. Which is to say, like the original, of which it is a descendent.

 

OM. There's something to that human replication. Human beings have been hearing it for eons, and transcribing it, as above. One of many versions that I think capture something you almost can't.

 

It just sometimes stops me in my tracks to think that this spotlight we take for granted hanging in the sky, as if lifted each morning from the horizon, will at some point just cease to be. And we will have to have another solution...though I'm pretty certain by that time, a solution may well have found us.

 

It's interesting though that in nearly all the mythologies of different civilizations, the Sun has been seen as a masculine force, not a feminine one...a radiant outward force, scattering itself in all directions...yeah, well, maybe there is something a bit masculine about that.

 

There are similar videos of the planets, and I may post those at some point...each of them spooky and alive. The one of the Sun though somehow feels like a heartbeat...a viscerally compatible sound.

 

But this was more an excuse to post one of a growing body of videos in my collection of this guy...Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom I'm so enamored of in the last few years, it's just wild. I don't agree with every last thing he says (such as his stand on GMO's, which I think he's simply not well-educated enough on -- no, Neil, we haven't been doing genetic modification for thousands of years of this type; we've been hybridizing for millennia, yes, but not in the way we're doing it NOW), but to me he's the paragon of scientific brilliance and humility, wrapped in the most hilarious, culturally-relevant, and passionate package.

 

Oh yeah...and he's one sexy mofo. For all the reasons above, as well as the voice that delivers the message. He always makes for a few more degrees Fahrenheit in here, especially when he has me rolling on the floor! (God...I'm so sapiosexual it's ridiculous.)

 

I could do a lot of writing and not approximate this so well:

 

link removed

 

Well said, Neil.

 

In the end...the question of the Meaning of Life gets so bogged down in a chemical soup of theoretical exertions for those suffering from depression, the life raft of an answer sitting right under our noses gets lost.

 

Smell the coffee, yo.

 

And be healed.

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TOV....another voice for please just write. Reading your journal is kind of raising in me a long dormant urge to write again. About the blank canvas and the swirling chaos in the mind....just sit down and start writing, pour it out in perfectly random chaotic order. You'll find that the beginning and the end and the point in the middle become quite clear and the ideas somehow fall in place.

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What a wonderful thing to hear, DF...thank you, and I'm so glad you feel inspired! I can tell from your posts here that you must have a very strong basis in writing (and I'm almost always nodding fervently to your posts -- spot-on, sound advice that's straight-shooting, the way it should be done!)

 

It sounds like you're pretty familiar with the process -- and how to approach the "chaos" of ideas. Have you ever written books? I've written (and published, just not prolifically, lol) essays, editorials, articles, poems -- but a BOOK feels somehow soooo intimidating. And I think it's at least fair to say that you've got to have some germinal idea that you're trying to get accross about something specific -- when I'm all over the map when I think about it. So...maybe the problem is there's more than one book here. Haha? Or maybe my mind just doesn't have something clear enough to settle on.

 

In your process, with distilling ideas, how have you started? With a clear vision of at least what the message was going to be? How specific?

 

In some ways, this journal does feel a bit like playing around with that, a bit...looking for some order in the chaos and randomness that is the flood of my mind each day. Which is one reason (but just one -- the other being I've been horrifically distracted with life pressures to write about them) I haven't posted much yet. It takes me time to distill things.

 

I've gone to a number of writing classes and workshops...and once I was in a writer's group...and it's so strange to me that I simply couldn't write in those formal set-ups. It was like...stiff, wooden, forced. The best things I wrote came out of moments of reverie, when I wasn't trying to think up anything (I just wish those would come along more often these days! When you're fighting for survival...the brain doesn't really prioritize such luxury.)

 

But I like what you've said. It's kind of scary, but it makes sense.

 

And it does tie right back in to these last couple of posts, and their inspirations.

 

I've recently started to converse with a young, aspiring astrophysicist, whom I haven't yet met in person. We've only been talking online so far. It's rather a different story altogether how we chanced to strike up a conversation, it seemed so randomly (on a dating site -- OKCupid, of all places). It started completely without any sort of intent, some time last summer, when I noticed that he had visited my profile. How this would have occurred to him to do I still don't know (but I may find out), when I am far out of his age range and furthermore, have no picture uploaded. He left no comment for me, but in reading his profile, I found myself thinking of all the times over many years I've wanted so badly to find a kindred spirit in someone who is studying the skies, so I can peer into space with them and pummel this poor person with all the questions I have, to the extent my feeble layperson knowledge could take me. Maybe such a person could even tap me with a magic wand (much like Swami Muktananda tapped me on the head with a peacock feather when I was about 8 years old so I would receive "shaktipat", the Sanskrit word describing the psychic "energy" of another being transferred -- this being a yogic master revered by my dad's friend's family, living in our neighborhood. More about Swami Muktananda later, perhaps)...only in this case, maybe I would actually feel something shift within. I'd feel some lock click open in my mind, opening to a wider vista, where mathematics would just flow lyrically through my brain and I'd wonder why I'd ever been so rankled by it. Because in the case of good ol' Muktananda, mostly what I felt after being tapped was disappointment that I wasn't any different. Not that I had an idea of what to expect, but I guess I thought SOMETHING would feel different. On the other hand, I also felt somewhat confirmed in the growing suspicion that I wasn't like other people and didn't feel what they did. It might not be going too far to say that it's possible the major skeptic in me was born at that tender age. Peacock feathers and wordless brown men with strong gazes, draped in orange robes were dazzlingly exotic, and boy, did they smell good, like spices and smoke...but they weren't magic.

 

Mostly, I just felt shy and bashful to be standing in a line-up (which I was only in because it was so auspicious, the grown-ups were adamant that I go up there), and it was just kind of embarrassing to be in front of this mysteriously smiling guru wearing so many robes. Making eye contact with a supposed manifestation of the divine who doesn't blink, when you're a small child? Forget it. So that was the main result of the shaktipat experience for me. (And who knows, maybe I should be blaming him for all this -- ! Who knows what that shakipat did to my life, after all!)

 

But back to the physicist in my dreams...he would somehow find a way to explain equations and math to me in a way that I could finally get it. And be expunged of the curse that is my weakness in hard math. That would be my hope for an osmotic shaktiput experience!

 

It's just been in my mind for years...some guy in a drab laboratory (of which I've seen a number, my late dad having been a laboratory scientist and professor in mechanical engineering) with a ponytail (because you can get away with long hair in science and math, especially if you're a tech geek), where we could talk about the relationships of earth to all the rest of the cosmos...and the relationship of the cosmos to the human mind, and consciousness...and the relationship of the human mind to the existential questions that science is, for its own part, trying to give us an explanation for, in material terms. Which at last does come down to the emotional realm, the psychic realm, my struggle as a human being, and that of others. All this stuff -- the study as well as the phenomena -- being ultimately inseparable.

 

And so it happened that someone like this came accross my profile, visited, and left. But his profile was engaging...and different...especially for HERE, in this place I live...and familiar to me, to my sense of things. I had to wonder if he'd somehow found it on a search for anyone with a high match score, because in fact, he's the highest match of anyone, bar none, I've seen in my little, isolated state. (I only check out profiles 90% and above for "match", and below 10% for enemy -- and he was/is 97%, 9%, respectively.) I never see that here. Let alone, with someone who I find remotely attractive from a physical standpoint. He said that his favorite movie ever, the best movie ever made, was Forrest Gump, and one could try to talk him out of it, but it wouldn't work. And aside from that, he had an unhealthy mancrush on Tom Cruise, so pretty much any of his movies. That made me smile. Said that he liked to spend hours out by the pier, or sitting on walls, near the ocean, just thinking, meditating. There were a number of other things as well, a pinch of sarcasm, a bigger pinch of humility, clearly a voracious reader whose latest favorite read was -- yes -- Neil deGrasse Tyson's book, "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier." He ended his profile saying, under the canned site heading, "Contact me if that "if you have more than 4 words to say, you're golden."

 

So I just couldn't resist. I couldn't. I COULDN'T.

 

I sent him a message saying, "Neil. deGrasse. Tyson. Rocks!"

 

And well, I said just a little more. I added that it was a crying shame that there could be no warping of the spacetime contintuum for us, so that time could either hasten for him, or slow down for me.

 

To that, he replied. To my great surprise. Saying that yes, it did totally suck, because I seemed really cool and very interesting (referring to my picture-less profile write-up.) He did remark -- without my prompting -- on the match %, that he doesn't encounter anyone that high here (yah.) And was I watching Cosmos?

 

Well, of course I had to tell him that I was watching freakin' "Cosmos" -- was I watching the hell out of Cosmos! And approaching the last episode, which was killing me because I wanted it never to end.

 

And from there, we found out we are each amassing -- slowly, and meticulously -- a library of Neil deGrasse Tyson (who I'll henceforth just call NdT). As in, anything and everything we could find on the internet of him. (And I'm quite certain he's ahead of me, because every time I mention a link or sighting, he's already seen it!)

 

I was just waiting for that to be that. I was trying to figure out which one of us would drop first. But from there...we talked a little more. In a kind of hedging, low-key way. Just the roughest of basic, surface outlines of eachother being sketched in. Very casual, very unassuming -- though with a few glimpses into eachother's personalities. We agreed that we both had a latent shy streak (though manifesting a bit differently), and loathed small talk, and that the whole dating process required that in spades, which was one reason neither of us was fully invested in the process. And then...at some point, he just didn't write back. I thought to myself...that was par for the course. Oh well. After "Om," the next best mantra is "Oh well."

 

And then not a month ago, some time after New Years, having totally long forgotten about it...I get a message from him. He says he'd been cleaning out his inbox and deleting old messages...and came accross our conversation. And how was I these days?

 

UM... (not om, UM.)

 

We've been chatting ever since. Still haven't met, but I think it's going to be inevitable. Since our discussion dropped off last year, he's moved up in the world -- gotten a job at the University Astronomy Institute, working as a student of course under his professor. And so I joked with him that this was all a ploy on my part to get access to the telescopes. (Not that there isn't some truth to that -- not the ploy part, but the years-long-wished-for opportunity to present, part). "That's all this is about, access to the telescopes", I said.

 

Well, it sounds like he hasn't even been given access to them yet, but I have to admit, I'm feeling a kind of buzzing excitement...just at the thought. The possibility. I'm not hanging my hat on anything...but in these "Letters to a Young Physicist", which the back-and-forth has turned into, I can't help but hope I get some chance. It'd be so amazing. It was very clear from my write-up on my profile, where I described some of my greatest passions as looking up at the night sky, and amateur quantum physics/mechanics, neurobiology, and consciousness studies that I'm already there, in a way.

 

But this isn't so much about this dude. It's about what we've talked about most recently -- and this gets back to what DF was saying. We were talking about Einstein, and how many people don't actually understand who he was and what he was like. And that if more kids really were told, they would be more able to identify and think of going into the math and science fields (STEM disciplines).

 

Einstein cut class. His professors hated him. He passed enough to graduate, but after that, he didn't have strong academic prospects. His parents and his dad in particular felt he was a loser. He got married, after doing a bunch of random teaching jobs here and there, and when nothing stuck, he started a job as a patent clerk. Dry, tedious work...that allowed him to continue his childhood habit of daydreaming -- riding on a lightbeam, and how he could do that. Because his job was so boring and his future so unremarkable at that point, he was free to just scribble and work things through in his brain, which was a stream of ceaseless fanciful problem-solving. He would basically mentally doodle complex math equations all day. And they were called "thought experiments", which his biographer (Walter Isaacson -- who also wrote biographies of Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs -- note to self, must read!) said were just daydreams to you and I. But being Einstein, these were "thought experiments."

 

Moments of reverie...

 

I have watched this amazing documentary on him, and it's an at-the-edge-of-your-seat account. He took all this chaos, these crazy, unlikely ideas that no one would have so much as bothered to spit at before, and channeled them into coherence. Equation after equation after equation -- the documentary shows the same frenzy that I've seen in the notations of musical geniuses who can't stop once they start with an idea. Just a frenzy of hours and the hands of the clock losing meaning. How many failed equations, and wrong answers, and dead ends he ran into, crossing things out, writing on the paper frustrated things like "nonsense!" And it took what, 10 years for him to reach his theory of General Relativity, and I believe 15 years for it to be proven, and enshrined. And all the disastrous experiments along the way, with the few scientists who were on to him trying to trot all over the globe, to find the eclipse that would prove without a doubt what his theory was saying.

 

But it is a tale of painstaking messes and dashed moments and having to throw things out and start again, and hair-ripping out (maybe that's why it looked like that?) and going back to the drawing board, and not giving up. Those are the tales I love most. Those are the ones that often end with the euphoria of triumph.

 

You have to be willing to wade through your sweat and tears and blood, drink them.

 

So maybe...that process is an absolute necessity for anything great (at least of the "history-making" kind -- since there are other kinds of greatness) to be done. I'm convinced of it.

 

It's very clear, as my friend pointed out, that Einstein, in his lack of what others wanted him to be at first, was not put together like other people. And if he had been, he wouldn't have revolutionized anything. He would have discovered nothing spectacular, and might have just had some average job somewhere. He was basically a child who never grew up, whose thinking was too creative to fit into any structured mold. And that's why he was able to do what his professors couldn't.

 

I told him (my friend) that I see the creative process as identical, whether you're talking about writing (literature), or visual art (my first field; but any of the arts) or science. That I see creativity as the desire for exploration and discovery into realms we don't understand or haven't sufficiently explained -- and wanting to explain them better. To show them better. To reveal them. Whether it's painting something or writing music that makes you go "aha!" and feeling something, REALLY feeling something as it's meant to be understood -- or whether it's pointing to a theory that can be reproduced to explain something previously veiled to our full understanding -- it's the same motivation.

 

Taking the choas and turning it into order, and the problem-solving in each is the desire to make something knowable. Able to be KNOWN.

 

It's interesting to me that Einstein (like my ancestors/kin) also played the violin. A given, kind of. But according to this documentary, he found the sound of the cosmos in Mozart. Look, I don't wanna knock Mozart -- he was a genius equivalent to Einstein in my opinion. But he was sort of a pop star of the day and his music is often too frou-frou for me. I'm more of a Beethoven person myself.

 

I wonder what Einstein would have thought of the "Om"?

 

So...writing on envelopes, stopping your car on the side of the road to write down what just occurred to you. Zillions of revisions, feeling lost in the "blank canvas" and then the jumble of words/notes/markings themselves as you dive down the rabbit hole of your train of thought...it's a marvel.

 

And it's a marvel how during this time, as the world was erupting in war, the sun and moon and stars were doing their own thing, with these scientists chasing them all over the planet to verify Einstein's calculations about the heavens. There was the ugly stain of human markings, in wartime alliances and growing animosity over national interests, invisible lines drawn...and beyond that, the laws of the universe that couldn't have cared less, remaining pristine and untouched by it all.

 

Beyond strife.

 

Einstein, though flawed as a man in his personal life, got it. He got that science was so much bigger than the pettiness of this planet, the trashing it that science had the capability to do, and he tried to unite people around this. How can you be enemies, rivals, when you're trying to understand our common, unconquered, undemarcated universe?

 

The Universe always wins, and you know, it's always got the upper hand in any game.

 

It kind of makes everything here seem so comical.

 

When things get bad...very bad...I go outside at night and look up. The less ambient light around, the better. And I go, "Oh yeah. That's right."

 

Maybe if more people did that, and really sat with that, the implications, we could reduce the profits from Prozac.

 

 

 

[video=youtube;NyK5SG9rwWI] ]

 

Watch out Beethoven, you might be next...

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
TiredOfVampires, I just had to post to say: I

 

Thank you so much, Greggie. That's so very kind of you…sisters in journaling! I wish I could settle my thoughts more often to be able to transcribe them. Sometimes, it feels like a tornado in my skull.

 

'Cause it's overstating the obvious. Now if you saw "fun-hating cynical pessimist looking for someone who understands that the stupid glass IS empty and probably dirty too." .........

 

Haha, that's true! Like, duh, right?

 

And, it just seems so…nondescript. Fun is different for different people, so what is it you're exactly speaking to? Wild, party fun? Hang-out-with-your-friends-and-play-boardgames, fun? Make-an-origami-tea-set fun? It's unimaginative to the point that if you're saying you're fun-loving, you're probably not someone I'd be having all that much fun with.

 

FUN.

 

Do you ever just say a word over and over to yourself, and it loses all meaning? As it just turns into a sound? "Fun" is one of those words for me, big-time.

 

funfunfunfunfunfunfunfunfunfunfunfunfun

 

Only, with this word, it also loses the already-flimsy idea somehow.

 

It's a bit like the word "happy". It makes all the sense in the world, until you try to break down what that means to its essence.

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Tonight is one of those "tornado" nights.

 

I'm in a bad situation.

 

But this is not anything like my usual type of hang-by-my-fingernails-from-a-sheer-rockface bad situation.

 

No. This is a whole world different.

 

It's a bad situation for my heart. I feel it coming. Or, it's already here, but it's an anticipatory situation as well that only I'm aware of. So there is no one to share the complexity of it with me. In fact it is by nature something I cannot share, or everything would blow up on me.

 

I'm bracing myself into this storm. There are torn pieces of feeling being uprooted, splattering my insides, cutting me with broken edges.

 

This shouldn't feel bad or painful, either, that's the irony. Isn't this supposed to be good? Something a person might want?

 

This, this time…is a chosen pain. A discretionary pain. And so I have no one to blame but myself for stepping into this stream, with its rapids. I could have stayed safely on the shore.

 

It has to do with finding love. I'd use the word "dating", but for some reason, that word feels cheap here.

 

I don't want to detail it here, or right now. It's really uncanny though…how when I put my focus on something so thoroughly, I notice some force seems to often grant that wish, in one form or another. I don't even believe in that particular paradigm: "you manifest what you wish for." Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't, so I repudiate the fanaticism around that notion with a passion. But oftener than not, when I've gone about it organically and without the kind of religiosity some people use intentionally, I find that there's some experience that might validate it.

 

I'm at some kind of epic crossroads, and having wished for it, now I'm paralyzed. The arrows point in different directions, and now what? NOW WHAT?

 

I am on the verge of loving someone. Actually, I already would say I do. I know it's stupid to "the real and sensible world" that I would say that. It's not supposed to be said UNTIL. Until I touch their arm, not just see it on a camera. Until I feel their breath on me when they speak. But this is not the first time, and I KNOW I'm not making this up. I know what love feels like, and this is its color, its tonality, its timbre. It's not some facsimile. Is it complete or full or time-tested? No. And no, and no. But it's in its own way a very pure and simple feeling. Of just having such a deep desire to want someone to be happy, to be a part of and contributor to their happiness, to join them and to feel joined by them. It's not a feeling of wanting, even, really. It's just a feeling of having the center of my body flowing and pulsing with "you! you are!" and celebrating that.

 

Oh god, did I just say "happy"? Yeah, I think I did.

 

But it doesn't end there, and that's why this is not good. Not good at all. Count on me to find ways to find flies in my honey. Or would this happen to anyone?

 

Anyone?

 

I don't get the sense I'm in gigantic company.

 

I don't know if this person is truly the right one for me. Yet, something about him, from the start, felt like a familiar knock on the door. Like a voice you recognize. He felt like coming home to something deep within me. But it's a heart connection. I'm not sure it's a SOUL connection. Something has felt like it is missing. Some ever-so-slight misalignment, so slight, I don't even want to count it. I don't want it to matter. But there it is, and I know it's bigger than slight. I just want not to think about it. I want to feel warm and comfy and homey, and done with this process. Done with searching and feeling unsure.

 

What's the difference between a heart and a soul connection? I'm asking. I'm trying to answer it, but I'm also probably in the end just asking.

 

A heart connection is when I feel emotionally integrated with another's emotional weave. We are feeling together, we are sharing some powerful chemistry of this bodily containment, and of our earthly experience. We recognize the feelings we share together as the same thing.

 

A soul connection? That's something almost beyond emotion. It's like you have sprung from the same seed and grown separately in this world from the beginning -- but your branches still have remained entangled. Ah…a quantum physics word for electrons that can be separated accross all the light years of the cosmos and still mirror each other, in their energetic dynamic. "Entanglement". It's like that. Like there is some elemental gravitational force that makes you and this person belong together, in some way, on this path. You and this other being are tuning forks, it's not just about the comfort and sweetness of touch and a hug, pressing your bodies together so that now, the contact is tangibly palpable (though that consummates it). There is a recognition of not just feelings…but some underlying existential substratum that this person embodies like no other quite can, and it fills you with a mysterious and inexplicable joy.

 

And this is the feeling I have about the other man.

 

I could see life with either of them at the moment. And somehow, I'm supposed to figure out how to proceed from here. Knowing at this point, this is all still fiction; fiction being created out of a sleep-deprived and battle-fatigued mind.

 

One is someone I could come home to. The other is someone I could come Home to. There is a need for both, a character to each that is vital and special and its own aspect to want to cherish.

 

But I don't know that either could provide both aspects. Or which one.

 

I am afraid of going further. How do people do it? I find one thing to love about someone, and I'm theirs. Secretly theirs.

 

Which makes it too easy to love anyone. God, I wish I was a polyamorist. But this dilemma only shows me how fanciful that concept would be for me. There's something about having ONE person be your special ONE. The ONLY like them, in the world. As if anyone can be everything to you. A wishful, silly thought as that is. Maybe this isn't my fault. Maybe this is society's fault. For brainwashing me into feeling I have to choose.

 

Blame someone. Blame someone else for this self-created pain.

 

For the pain of wanting my "one", too.

 

And now I have this ponderous secret. It's a ticking time bomb, it feels. A grenade. As I try to be honest, transparent, clear, clean in my integrity…I risk losing both.

 

Confusion of this kind is a dealbreaker, when exposed. Unexposed, it's deceit.

 

I feel trapped.

 

I can't believe I'm losing sleep over something that is supposed to feel like the lottery. Losing sleep over toxic fumes and cigarette smoke, losing sleep over shattering glass and howling hoodlums, and dogs that have the barking version of Tourette's Syndrome -- that's unbearable. This, now -- this is more bearable? Two amazing men (and it could be more, if I hadn't opted out of insanity) care for me, want me to get closer to them. Geographically. Physically. Emotionally. Spiritually. And I just feel sick and faint, and like crawling under the covers so far in, I fall into a covers black hole. Go away, impending heartbreak. Go away, adult decisions -- scrappy, punky little Sophie's choices. Go away, roulette wheel. Go away, mortality. Go away, samsara. Go away, prospect of happiness, with your way of dangling obscene price tags in front of the weary and ready.

 

Maybe I'll just play some Steve Stevens, another well-kept secret, and it'll all go away.

 

I want to say, go away, beautiful wish…but look what happened last time I wished. Better be careful with those wishes. So I won't say it. I won't say it. I didn't.

 

 

 

[video=youtube;ncOA5GbU-ZI] ]

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Today, I told my naturopath (who I've been seeing for over 20 years, and she knows me inside out) about this situation I'm in. And about the internet dating -- and the questions I raised in this thread (which I still feel I've not properly completed -- a few posts I didn't get to yet, at the end):

 

 

 

I told her that I just feel so stymied by the man scene here; that it's just impossible to find good men here, on my wavelength. She and I have not really talked in depth about this topic before, as in me making some kind of solid plan, but she said, "I know! I hear this ALL the time from other patients and women I know here. I know a lot of women who have left because of it."

 

SO, WOMEN LEAVE OVER THIS. I JUST DON'T HAVE THE KIND OF MEANS TO DO THAT WITHOUT IMMEDIATELY SEVERING MY CAROTID ARTERIES OF A SAFETY NET.

 

It's possibly important to point out that she serves a certain type of clientele: progressive-minded, educated, ambitious, health-conscious. I don't know what the IQ average is of her patients, but I'm guessing that because people are specifically coming to her because they've researched their options and are more savvy/literate than the average patient, it could be a bit higher than in the average patient population of a regular GP. And she serves a lot more women -- her practice, while for men as well, specializes in women's care.

 

She got her medical degree from the most prestigious naturopathic college in this country -- which happens to be in the state I plan to be traveling to, where these two guys are located (the incredibly sticky part of it being that they live in adjacent cities, a stone's throw of one another -- it's as horrible as it is convenient). She lucked out -- she met her now-husband while in school there, and she said that they were one of the few couples that made it. Many of them got divorced because her med school curriculum was so demanding. But basically, she imported someone like her husband here. Well, good for her! You couldn't find someone like him here, that's for sure.

 

You'd have to live here to really "get" it. But she's not the first one who has said this. A couple of therapists have said this to me, about their women clients' fears and concerns. I've had single women friends tell me, but I take it more from professionals who hear it consistently accross the board. And years ago, when I used to hang out with this guy (a super intellectually sharp iconoclast type with a European sensibility) at the health food store I frequent, he told me that in his discussions with college girls that come by, it all sounds the same: where are the guys? The girls who come from out-of-state to study here find themselves suddenly in a bonefield, with a dearth of choices. Shipwrecked.

 

So this is something that I felt validated about again, today.

 

If you have any of those qualities I listed, you are going to have a VERY rough time here. The vast majority of people who live here are here for the outdoors, and professions that are not incredibly innovative. It's a city/state of workhorses...with fields often 10 years behind their counterparts elsewhere in the country. They're "I go to work and then go home so I can be with my kids/surfboard" jobs. Which I of course don't look down on at all, we need those jobs and workers. I'm just saying that you're happy to stay here if you're not very ambitious. We even have something here called the "brain drain." If you're really hungry to get somewhere, you don't stay here. Of course we have professionals in all fields, but at the top rungs, there's the drain -- unless they're returning for retirement and a semi-residency, where they get to travel a lot. Or, there's a very strong commercial element to their work. Money is a pretty loud talker here, which the general self-impression of the public doesn't want to admit.

 

It's also an ethnic issue, which in some ways feels the worst. Caucasians are in the minority -- but when I do see a Caucasian man with a girl, 95% of the time, he's with a woman from another race/ethnicity than me (usually someone Asian, i.e., the majority), not by happenstance but by preference, and my particular ethnicity is in the minority of minorities here. It gets one day of recognition once a year downtown at a festival, haha. It's so conspicuous an awareness for me (either as a background hum in my psyche, or consciously) that when I go to a big metropolitan area where more me's are far more common, I feel like a fish out of water. Like, what are all YOU doing here? It's an insurgency, lol. I don't feel comfortable around my own kind because for so long, I have been the alien, and accustomed to being an anomaly.

 

Not that I'm looking to find someone of my particular ethnicity to couple with necessarily -- but the point is that there are cultures here that people gravitate towards, and they are literally on opposite sides of the planet from my roots. So this sense of profound alienation has followed me everywhere. It brutally smacked me awake with overt racism as an adolescent, when I was bullied in middle school, and since then, it's just been this soft, chronic wound.

 

So culturally, ethnically, intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, personality-wise -- an anomaly.

 

Men are not seeking women like me, here. PERIOD.

 

It's just the plain truth.

 

They are seeking other traditions, traditionalism, and a comfortable, easy, "laid back" life. Laid-back being the ubiquitous word here on dating profiles. Even though I can be laid-back, too...it's not going up front and center.

 

Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, within my own cultural leanings -- and social affiliations -- I find too many cookie cutter types that go way off the deep end. Like, I talk about "spirituality" and its centrality in my life, and yet nearly all the people who get heavily into this topic where I live fall into certain "camps" of beliefs that feel like alternative religion. And there don't seem to be many shades of grey. And just the lifestyles, and goals -- here, if you're "spiritual", what that means is that you HAVE to be a hiker who is at least vegetarian, if not vegan, and wanting to "live off the grid", immersed in barefoot running, and showing off how you've ditched your TV and want to devote your life to self-sufficient agriculture, drinking coconut water straight from the nut that you've harvested yourself (because you've learned how to climb up the trees), and by the way, you also do "ecstatic dance" and drumming circles on a regular basis. You might experiment with mind-altering substances, tantric orgies, and heaven for you is devising a system of rainwater catchment. Plastic is the enemy, under all circumstances. As a rule, you have a tattoo of a sea turtle anywhere from the back of your skull to your little toe.

 

CLICHES ENOUGH TO DROWN IN.

 

It almost makes me want to become the antithesis. But the antithesis is where I live, in my ghetto -- men out of prison, going to prison some day, or good enough that they didn't let life beat them into crime, just resignation.

 

Sounds like a promising range of options: live in the bush, or live a life of quiet desperation in a beige day-to-day life that only can be offset by the bright colors out the window. Living the dream.

 

I'm going to find a "soul mate" in that?

 

HAD to get that off my chest.

 

It just feels good to know that I'm not alone in this, and that this is a real, actual problem I'm facing. I just don't have the resources others do to solve it.

 

I have an approach though...

 

Whether it can work...I don't know. It'd be a miracle, I think. But I've put it out there. I'm putting it out there, with that kind of focus and concentration.

 

Watch out what you wish for.

 

And here's Steve again, this time for driving.

 

Say what you will. The mood today is ass-kicking.

 

 

 

[video=youtube;r1VacSU8kFA] ]

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I really enjoyed reading your last long post. I felt happy for you reading that. I had got the sense like you were starting to feel increasingly frustrated about trying to explain the situation and I personally didn't pipe up about that before (in your other thread) because I honestly do not have a good grasp of what the situation is like there and for you.

 

It just feels good to know that I'm not alone in this, and that this is a real, actual problem I'm facing. I just don't have the resources others do to solve it.

 

I have an approach though...

 

Whether it can work...I don't know. It'd be a miracle, I think. But I've put it out there. I'm putting it out there, with that kind of focus and concentration.

 

This is what made me feel happy for you. That you don't have to carry this on your shoulders now; you know the lay out. You have a map of sorts. What you choose to do now is up to you, but at least now you have a broader insight into the situation. It isn't just you - iknowing the actual facts, funny how that can sometimes put the mind at ease.

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