When the swimmer splits his suit

It's funny how a single thing washes over me the feelings of regret, even when that regret is misguided, inappropriate, useless, not real. I pursue, at a minimal but pervasive level, a subconscious "slicefest" against myself, deepening as I don't address its violent tendencies and subliminal aggression. It is what makes me want to write. It is what makes me want to open all the windows on my psyche and air the place out. Abandon the aggression and cutting, the judgements and poor treatment. But I have to wake up and see it first. There is always a sour, painful feeling first. I look at it and ask myself "What is that about?" then I begin to unravel the half truths and blatant lies that are the food for my discontent and malice. It is what makes me miserable, what digs at me and suggests that I am no good. It has always been a staple of my life, and not in a good way. My perspective is that I am not that messed up individual, that worthless person that those messages suggest. I just have to be vigilant in this moment to challenge them and deny them the air they need to survive. It is not for the rest of my life that I answer but for right now. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? I may wake up free of the whole mess of it all. Until then, there is right now and I say "NO" to the madness....

When does it become problematics?

It's a day of remembrance, a day of washing-up memories of the simplest things. Funny how listening to a single piece of music, say, Marvin Gaye's 'What's Goin' On' reminds me of the days of working at the flower market at, like, 2 AM and Ginger, my supervisor, always played the local R&B station. Now it's George Michaels' 'Careless Whisper' and how my prom date and I danced(sort of) to it in 1986. Not "happy" nor "sad" memories, but sweet in the remembering. The Eagles 'Lyin' Eyes' was a song from an album that my mother used to put on(when she was feeling "secular") around the house, mostly on Saturdays, to fuel her cleaning frenzies. Funny how I still smell the Pine sol and hear the vacuum just now. And of course her yelling at us to clean our rooms and put stuff away when we are finished with it. She didn't devote tons of time to cleaning, mostly spastic and periodic, which is just how I am today. She's gone now and if I could just get back one Saturday morning cleaning with her, I would scrub the crap out of every surface just to have her in the same room, even if she were yelling at me. I miss her ginger mullet and need to vocally dominate our behavior as her way of trying to ensure that we turned out OK. She was doing her best, no matter how flawed. And when she played Creedance Clearwater Revival she liked to get us to dance together with her in the living room. The negative emotions and upset that we all lived through has washed away and I can sit with what is good from those days. That ridiculous olive green, heavily textured carpet in the living room was actually a good piece of vintage flooring for dancing on. She used to listen to such a wide variety of music that inspired so many different things for her, from country, to gospel to rock and roll, often would put on something unexpected to inspire something which we, as children, couldn't conceive of nor understand but were paramount to the moment for her. I often find myself doing such things too that inspire good feelings, rich and pure and quiet and personal. Things that I can write down, but to speak of these moment-by-moment reminding would be sort of boring, or hard to explain to others. I am awash in good feelings, fueled by coffee with hazelnut and good music. David Sedaris writes like I think. I enjoy reading his missives because I can clearly see the minutiae of the moment and know it is how my mind runs along around small things.

In the beginning was......was......hmmmm...who was there?

A life of yesteryear's, folded neatly and stored in the brain, a life of promised tomorrows, imagined to be like what they can never really be like. It is indeed just a movie script, all that I see, with players set to play particular roles, even the ones whom are designated to believe that what I write is foolish. Of course it is foolish, because it rails against the scripted beliefs that they hold to and claim as their "truths". Who am I to try to convince them that they are living foolishly, that they should try to convince me that my ways and beliefs are mistaken. It is not my job, but some of those around me and in this larger world feel they are duty-bound to offer course-correction, insights and platitudes into my particular way of living. I am flabbergasted and yet so familiar with this way of thinking. We all always believe we know what is best for others, but is that true? Isn't it really true that we are deeply inflicted with a need to change others, manage the chaos of this life, make the right decisions to prevent others from mistakes, as though we could answer for their need to learn what it is that they need to experience.....to be continued.....

There's gold in them there hills.....

Today I had a strange and rather unpleasant meltdown after I got home from riding 33.16 "in town" miles. I am fairly confident that it was "sourced" from my not eating enough and being tired, not from any kind of long term paranoia and such. I just basically had a panic attack, based on nothing, really: The world is going to end in my lifetime, I don't have enough money, the floors are dirty and need sweeping(which I did), the garden is dry and the water bill is due(paid), there are clouds in the sky, the freeway is too close to my house and I can hear it, nobody likes me, the cats are needy; ever feel like that? Not about the cats but the overall madness that I have written of? It is passing now. I have not had such anxiety in many a year and so it is unpleasant but it is manageable. I doubt that I will be crushed by it as, since the world is ending in my lifetime, all will be settled!!!

Of course I am a fool. And I know it. So, if there is any reason to doubt me and my ability to manage my particular "crazy", you can rest assured that it will not be visited upon your doorstep. Of course, I know all too well how it is for others to be exposed to my grand dysfunction. But is it "dysfunction" or am I just a little peculiar? I don't really have an answer but I have seen how people get when I am honest and open. Friends suggest I "edit" myself and I suppose I see the potential benefit from that. Ultimately, I am just living my life from an open perspective(I think) and it is not for everyone. There seems to be a reason for my honesty, my openness, that supersedes the need to connect superficially with certain persons. I do not know....

I am delighted to report that my Eulophiella roempleriana has 3 new growths. This is a plant that I got in the spring because my friends Mike says it is a "must have" but it also gets quite big. I am sure that there will come a time when I either get rid of it or some other plants to make room for it. At the moment it is in a 4 inch pot, so I have some time. I actually have a lot of things in bloom right now. This is the first time in my orchid growing lifetime that so many plants have bloomed for me. It is with great pleasure that I survey my kingdom and know that I am indeed fortunate. I think that I am done now..........writing, that is, not done living.......

And the day comes when you just no longer know

I think what is by far most interesting right now is how I have had such a steady flow of habitual actions that I am trying to end and just the slightest hint of it makes me want to dive back in. Just the slightest suggestion and that part of my brain cries out: "What am I gonna do with myself? Oh GAWD.............................!" and I "see" minor pictures in my head of things remembered, things that I used to do that bounce around in there, begging to be done again. It is true what "they" say to newly recovering addicts: "Always Have Something To Do" since I find myself wanting to go back to the familiar, time-filling visual journeys that always leave me destroyed in some way. I am nursing a minor tendinitis issue in my right foot, so I have to stay off my feet and not ride. I have been planning to ride 30-40 miles today since Friday, and the day arrives and I am not going anywhere, so I have time on my hands to do "stuff" and it has been a subtle but aggressive effort to get me to do what is familiar to me and that is just what I am not going to do.

I am cruising orchidspecies.com for information about different orchid species that I have. That is a good and wholesome pursuit....................

If you just want a special place......

On Friday, July 10, I hit the hills of Oakland and Berkeley. I had promised myself that I will climb more hills now, since I made my goal of 3000 miles before July 15. I rode 31.84 miles that morning before work and it was just as grueling and spectacular as I had recalled, although the decent is not exactly comfortable, since any small pebble, pothole, other detritus can throw one off the bike when speeding down the hill at such speeds. I think I hit 32 miles per hour but think about the smallness of the tires and how easily one could become "dethroned" by some little debris. I have set a new goal for myself now of 5000 miles by March 24, 2010. It breaks down to having to ride 3 days a week, 18 miles each day, until that date. I suppose 5000 miles in 2 years is not all that spectacular, unless you are like I was before Mar 24, 2008: not involved, not riding, not goal-oriented toward something like that.

The garden is in a state of gentle summer gladness, with lilium 'Black Beauty' starting to bloom, angraecum sesquipedale and cycnoches chlorochilon in full scented bloom. angraecum dideri has a flower right now as well and the coelogyne barbata has 2 flower spikes. It had bloomed nicely in the spring, so I am surprised by the newest spikes. dendrochilum magnum has several new growths, so it might also make some flowers for me. My cyrtopodium polyphyllum has 2 new growths, which means I may have 2 flower spikes come next spring, instead of just one. I have such a great garden!!!!

6 days and counting......

What can be said for my emotionalness these past few days? It is so reminiscent of the days when I was in the mental health system, taking "anti-" everything drugs, feeling hopeless and like there was hardly a reason to do anything more than coast along. I have been terribly bitchy at work since Friday. I have gotten things done as needed but have seen the world around me through the eyes of misery and discontent, as opposed to seeing the simplicity of "nothing happening" that has really been the truth of what is going on.

I went back to porn briefly because, as any good addict comes to believe, I can handle it. I suppose I am addicted to the idea of "love" and being "in love". Do I want to be in a relationship? I don't know. I don't really know if doing so is a realistic and useful thing, an ingrained instinctual reality or structural/cultural training from early childhood that says we all must strive to cohabitate with someone else. I keep running into the wall over it, bloodied and persisting, and I have no way of knowing if the action of pursuit really is worth the trade off.

Are people really happy in their relationships? I cannot ever know. When confronted with it as a question, "they" will declare their happiness or "they" will declare their misery, but one does not really ever come to know the truth outside of living in that other person's reality, and obviously, that is totally impossible. It is within themselves exclusively that they know happiness or not and barring my ability to "get in" and live their experience, I will always just have an outsider's view and will always have to take their word for it.

So, it is a highly personal experience. I do get caught up in the ideas and pictures of how it looks from my outside perspective, how they spin it to look prosperous and healthy or "happy-making". I have no inside perspective right now on a good relationship, as I am not in one, and I wonder if it is not just "training" that drives me to great effort to fulfill this "dream". I do not "know" how it can be, "should be", "should look like", "should feel like", "how" it is achieved, where to meet people, if the effort to try to put myself in the sights of others is worthwhile or futile, if the reality is that "it" will just "land" in my life of "its own accord". I don't really know.

The belief that "it SHOULD HAPPEN" is a damning weight so great, so destructive to the soul. It robs me of creativity, fluidity or purpose, compassion and goodwill. This belief makes me small inside and miserable, bitter and jaded, ugly to the core. My belief in the ideal of it kills me slowly each time it is put before me and then ripped away again. My belief that I "should" be in a relationship, that it is "right" for me to do, that it is "natural" means that every time it is still untrue and I continue to believe in it, I am damned by my own perceived failings.

I am bombarded constantly with the images of companionship, the notion that is is a regular part of life, and without it I have always believed something to be wrong within me, making me feel "less than", crazy, wasted, useless, "it's all in vain", etc. I have friends who seem to be living in the same kind of mental state. Is it more usual for us to be single and act alone in spite of the near-constant barrage of messaging that drives us to seek fulfillment in relationship? How much time am I wasting daily, "on the hunt" for whatever(which leaves me feeling empty and blue, bitter and useless), as opposed to putting that energy to work toward an actionable goal? I do not know what that goal would be for me but I do see my activities around relationship pursuits going unfulfilled and offering a view into futility defined. It is like the proverbial banging one's head against the wall, to the point of (daily) bleeding, yet being told by some great aspect that it is good and right to expose one's self to the grind of the hunt because "We all belong with someone"! Is that true?

I am finding that I need a break from the effort. I need a sabbatical from the torturous effort that twists my heart up into a loaded and painful wretch and makes me miserable toward others, negative, hurtful, hurt-filled, believing a message of lack and emptiness. I am stunned as I read my words just how clearly I am self-abusing and calling it OK because, well, "WE all belong with somebody" but it is not the reality in which I sit, I live. I almost wish to be rendered emotionless so that I do not feel compelled and driven to pursue the "good feelings" associated with this particular effort to join someone else.

It is also not of great value to me to try to repeal the sadness by living with the creed of self delusion that "it's OK to be alone" because trying to prop myself up with that sort of "logic" is the other end of this issue which keeps me locked up in the yo-yo, boomerang effect that goes along with the effort to logic my way out of this situation.

The truth as I see it:

1) I am alone. Is that true? YES! The pitfalls and dangers begin within the meaning I assign to the word "alone" and the subsequent value as well.

2) I should be with someone. Is that true? Clearly it is not true, unless I am trying to predict an imagined future, which by its very nature(imagined) is based outside of what is real(I am alone) right now. There is such a great danger in trying to tell a story based upon "should". It becomes too easy to "dream" and then punish the dreamer(me) for not having what is dreamt about. Unequivocally A tool of destruction.

3) I am doing just fine alone. Is that true? YES! Emphatically yes. Unless I am swept away into the dream of "should", then I am perfectly fine with what IS right now. If I succumb to the deepening and damaging mental lifestyle of an imagined future(see#2) then I doom myself to not being able to know just how successful(what is the meaning of this word to me?) and OK I am right here, right now.

4) I need something more in my life. Is that true? If I lose myself in the dream of how "it should be"(see #2,3) then I fall victim to my own thinking, doom myself to misery and have no good, until I wrest myself from it and regain the reality of what is. Until then, my body suffers, my mind is swirling in the "stories" and I can see nothing good coming out of anything, which is also to future-trip.

If there is courage to be just what I am right now; no stories of how it should be different, no belief that it is wrong in its immediacy, then shall I find the courage to be innocent again, compassionate, tender, easy with others, generous of spirit, not quick to cast aspersions, loving and open. All of this is who I truly am which gets hijacked by the negative campaign of "how it should be".

"I told you not to trust her!"

I rode 63.35 miles today, to Pinole and back via the Bay Trail, to Richmond Parkway, which goes into Pinole. I stayed put on that road, found myself quickly jettisoning along at a good clip. The wide open of the Parkway is so welcome. I found myself in a residential area of Pinole, stopped and asked a utility worker what city I was in(as I did not know) and he informed me, followed by an inquiry as to where i had ridden from. He about poo'd himself when I told him West Oakland. Anyway, I rode down a street called "Sarah" with a hill that is short but steep. I was so sure I would not be able to get back up it as I have on 24 gears(2 cassettes) and it was truly steep. Like San Francisco steep. Well, it was only 2 blocks long and I huffed and puffed and managed to get up it. Took a side street called "Atlas", which had several hundred 'prefab' homes waiting to be purchased and brand new roads waiting to be ridden. A deer9fawn, really) ran across the road, there is a regional UPS site there and Pinole Business Park but not too much else. Few cars, lots of blue skies, sweating like a mad man, and just exactly right in all ways. The Bay is viewable from the hills I climbed and it spreads out so nicely for as far as the eye can see. I am just still in a bit of heaven over today's ride. I was struggling to get home but I did manage to ride those miles in 4 hours 25 minutes. A friend who is in thew know(apparently) said that that kind of riding is CATEGORY 3, but I have yet to figure out what that means. I am just very pleased with the results. And damned tired. Such a good tired, though........

The garden....hmmmm......lilium Black Beauty is beginning to open(all 9 plants), dendrobium sanderae major has 2 flowers(a bit out of season, I believe), masdevallia hirtzii(mounted) has 5-6 flowers coming on it, the mystery epidendrum has 3 new growths, sobralia violacea has 5 new growths, angraecum sesquipedale has 3 flowers(and smelly!!), mystery hoya is blooming, I need to Google that one, Hmmmm.....running out of juice.....

as the end approaches, do your best......

It has been a productive day. I saw the ghosts of illusion rise up and try to take me into their darkness, but I just quietly said "No, thank you" and turned from them. It was subtle, soft, easy, simple and without pain or regret. So that was that. I have spent a considerable amount of time on the couch today, napping, emailing, research, exercises, relaxing, "jonsing" for a ride, knowing it was profitable to wait. I will be rising early tomorrow and going out to do some more miles. I need 58.66 miles before July 15 to make my goal of 3000 since mar 24, 2008 a reality. I am in no way concerned that it will go unmet. I feel success already in my grasp, just for the fact that I have done so much riding already. I am pleased that it has been so fruitful and I just hope that those who follow my work are inspired to take a few extra steps to make their lives a little richer with exercises as well.

I am quite bored with my garden as of late since it needs no work done in it lately. Almost no weeds, everything growing and prospering as expected. It seems that I am not currently needed, although I do need to tie up the tomatoes since they are getting so long and outside their cages. Well, that is no monumental task, so I just keep looking at them and knowing what I need to do and doing nothing in response. I am have tempted to just let them be the vines that they are and crawl along the ground but I do not know that Gerry would be too happy with that. Of course he will not find the time to get out there and tie them up either.