Burnt coffee

Finished a midnight shift,

Serving my species by helping to save strangers’, maybe stranger, lives.

Sitting at the tire and oil change shoppe,

Sipping burnt coffee,

The styrofoam cup covered with black sugar sludge…

Listening to one man bragging,

His son having completed Navy Seal Team 7 training,

The father, a firefighter, keeping up, tandem skydiving nearby.

What does the coffee grower know of this?

Or the person picking coffee beans?

The coffee processing plant workers have an opinion, surely?

Do I?

Do I want to be sexy?

So I think I can dance…

Tonight, standing under a starless sky, clouds reflecting a pinkish-purple glow of city light, I wonder what I want my independent happiness to reflect.

So I think I can dance, and, given music I can discern a rhythm through my tinnitus and hearing aids, I can dance…

Well, I can dance, even if I know few formal dance moves, but…

Do I want to be known as a sexy dancer?

Do I want to attract that kind of attention, when I’m a married man who hasn’t had an orgasm with another person in over ten years?

Doesn’t the juxtaposition of looking sexy and getting sexually aroused while dancing publicly but having a sexless private life interfere with my Happiness?

It does.

So, yes, I think I can dance but if the joy of dancing causes side effects detrimental to my mental health then I might have no choice but to isolate myself from social situations that might lead to dancing.

Just because I can dance, just because I can socialise, just because i know how to make other people feel good about themselves doesn’t mean I should.

I know it doesn’t make sense to hear myself say that having a good time and making other people feel good is actually bad for me but it’s true.

I really feel better here, writing to myself, not analysing another person’s behaviour to figure out what I can do to say nice words to that person to build a protective wall or smoke screen of “feeling good” between us so that that person can’t see my happiness is fake, that my true desire is if I’m going to remain childless then I might as well be dead and not using resources that somebody else’s child could be using to be a successful procreater.

At least I’m no longer depressed because I’ve found a way to live as if I’m already dead and just label it happiness to project a socially acceptable set of states of energy to hide within.

Smokers patio

Sunday evening meditation midst the swirls and curls of burning fags, bearded men smoking ciggies, checking mobiles for messages ’bout their social standing, drinking booze with babes, the air electrified with lightning nearby.

What day this has been, my friends, when you’re awarded for your hard work, and I am handed the reins of a quiet life with which I choose to treat my friends and family to the wellspring of love within I’ve hidden for too long?!

Why hide that treasure trove from You?

Why deny one’s gift, one’s destiny?

Nothing left to fear.

Life is short.

Although but sets of states of energy in motion, how those states interact say everything these words merely skim the surface describing!

To say I love you has never been enough.

To show I love you by giving my love to everyone we know and to those we’ll never meet…well, the pipe smoker next to me, a wise old blues musician, understands.

You and I are performers, to the core.

Our performance is an act of love, unselfish, in service to others, sometimes sacrificing our mental (thus, our phyical) health until we paid attention, putting our love for each other to practical use.

Look at the result!

Years hiding love we cannot recover.

Let’s wisely share our remaining years with unfettered love.

The solar system brought us this far.

Adding core workouts to my physical therapy

Time to add core body workouts to my physical therapy?  You mean, other than sleep, eat, and breathe? Lol

I think I’m ready!

Here ya go:

“3 exercises for the core developed by Dr. Stuart McGill, that will increase your endurance and protect your back: modified curl-up, side bridge, and bird dog, collectively known as ‘the big three’.

“1. Modified Curl-Up

“Lie your back with one knee bent and one knee straight, this puts your pelvis in a neutral position and the muscles of your core in an optimal alignment of pull to avoid strain on the low back. Place your hands under the arch of your low back and ensure that this arch is maintained throughout the curl-up. Start by bracing your abdomen; this is different from flexing your abs, bear down through your belly. Now make sure you can take a breath in and a breath out while maintaining this brace. If you cannot, stop there and practice doing just that until you’ve got it mastered! Now, pretend that your spine in your neck and your upper back are cemented together and do not move independently. Pick a spot on the ceiling and focus your gaze there, lift your shoulder blades about 30° off the floor and slowly return to the start position. Take note of your neck, and ensure that your chin isn’t poking forward when you do a curl up. If you’re struggling with that, focus on making a double chin. Perform 3 sets of 10-12.

“2. Side Bridge

“Lie on your side and prop yourself up on your elbow. Ensure that your elbow is directly under your shoulder to avoid any unnecessary strain through your shoulder joint. With your legs straight, place your top foot on the ground in front of your bottom foot. Place your top hand on your bottom shoulder. While maintaining the natural curve of your spine, that is to say, be sure that your upper body isn’t twisted or leaning forward, brace your abdomen, squeeze through your gluteals (clench your bum), and lift your hips up off the ground. Don’t forget to breathe! Hold for 8-10 seconds, repeat 3 times. As the exercise becomes easier, increase the number of repetitions as opposed to the length of time. There are a number of ways to modify this exercise in order to increase or decrease the difficulty such as the example below on the right. If it’s not challenging enough, try putting that top hand on your top hip, or straight up in the air, but again, be sure your body stays straight!

“3. Bird Dog

“Start on your hands and knees with your hands shoulder width apart directly under your shoulders, and knees hip width apart directly under your hips. Maintain a neutral spine. Brace through your abdomen and squeeze your gluteals. Ensure you can maintain this while you take a breath in and out. Lift your right arm in front until it’s level with your shoulder, squeezing the muscles between your shoulder blades as you do so. At the same time, extend your left leg straight back until it is level with your hips, squeezing your gluteals, and keeping your hips square to the floor. Return to the starting position in a slow and controlled manner, and perform the same action with the left arm and right leg. That is one repetition. Perform 3 sets of 8-10 repetitions. As this exercise becomes easy, focus on co-contracting the muscles of your forearm and arms while you extend, the same goes for the muscles of your legs. For an additional challenge, instead of putting your hand and knee back down on the ground between reps, try just sweeping the floor and performing the next rep right away, or draw a square with your arm and leg and then sweep the floor.”

Delta, Dawn, Dune

Connections.

Networking.

Talking Sister Rosetta Tharpe with one friend, capacitors with another, and how to properly brew Piper & Leaf branded tea with a third.

All within the greater community connection that is dancing.

Yes, dancing has connected me to the following, at the least:

  • Cosplay/Dragon*Con
  • Oil change discounts
  • Barcode readers
  • Weekly social gatherings
  • Outdoor photography with friends
  • LGBT rights
  • Rocket/missile engineering/engineering in general
  • Juggling multiple jobs
  • Local Maker movements
  • Online roleplaying/multiplayer gaming
  • Massage/physical therapy
  • Haunted buildings/locations
  • Multiple emotional/mental conditions (depression/bipolar/dissociative/schizophrenic, etc.)
  • Traveling for weekend dance competitions (not unlike car racing, gymnastics, tennis, etc.)
  • Recruiting
  • Promoting/marketing
  • Local art communities
  • Municipal growth planning
  • Extraterrestrial exploration/colonisation
  • Greater exposure to different music genres
  • Polyamorous relationship management skills
  • Watching young people expand their talents into other fields
  • Watching people 40 and older rediscover the simple joys of living
  • The international language of dance overcoming all socioeconomic sub/cultural barriers
  • Myself

In times past, I spent Sunday mornings meditating on a subject or two, often asking more questions than reaching conclusions, setting up thought trails to explore the rest of the artificial seven-day block we call a week (trying living without a watch or calendar and see if you recognise a week; you might tune yourself into periods of a day and a lunar month but will you feel a week go by if there are no specific days you need to do anything?).

My latest electronic project has turned into the next evolution of the personal care chair, a seating device that senses your posture, wrapping itself around your torso and gently correcting your posture, working pressure points to ease muscle/ligament/tendon pain, keeping you alert when you need it and reminding you to relax occasionally, as well as push you up to exercise your body, tied as it is to your fitness tracking device (smartwatch, phone, wristworn activity tracker, etc.).

I started physical therapy recently to work my upper body, hoping to build muscle and bone mass in an effort to stop the bouts of vertigo my general practitioner/primary care physician believes is caused by pinched nerves in my neck/spinal column.

One of the physical therapists I also met through dancing.

Is there anything anymore in my life that isn’t related to dancing?

We live on a small planet, third cooling molten rock mass from the Sun, so I know better than to feel or act shocked that we humans connect through common interests.

Yet the child in me enjoys amazement and awe.

The teenage boy in me enjoys his own amazement and awe that is kept at bay for no other reason than I am what I am, an awkward nerd whose looks, age and ability to deflect people away from the real me through the art of conversation gets tiring after a while.

Sometimes I wonder why I carry an eclectic set of social data in my thoughts from which I can parse sentence structure and make sense in general conversation whether I know what I’m talking about or just am interesting enough that people ignore my ignorance, inferring from the few words I blurt/write that I know more than I do.

The wisdom of aging has its advantages.

Time was when I wished I was wise enough to seek wealth.

Then the training of my youth kicked in, driving me back to the monkhood for which I was destined.

I don’t know how to live in two worlds and the confusion has clouded my weekly meditative writing.

Two worlds, one which is the monkhood with my marriage that I gladly enjoyed for ten years, the second is the sexual attraction infused in dancing that counteracts my celibate marriage and draws me to see human bodies in a way that constantly confuses me since the nerd in me has no experience seeking out sexual relationships with others.

The denial of sex with others has fueled my creativity for decades, including writing and electronic gadget construction.

Dancing fuels my writing but takes away from my laboratory time.

At my age, 55+ years, and in semi-retirement, working for a local nonprofit, what or who am I?

Does anything matter anymore — labels, symbols, philosophical stances, subcultural beliefs?

The child in me and the future geriatric self wait for an answer that may not exist.

I return to the mantra that I do not exist, therefore I am not important.

I am at peace in my thoughts.

That much I know.

At my age, that’s all that matters.

I spend the day with my wife, give her the attention she seeks from her life partner, a person who lets me be me as long as she feels important (the primary person in my life), a person who feeds me and clothes me, for the most part taking care of me and my health.

What else am I to do because I don’t know how to care for myself?

I sit here and write, that much I know about feeling peaceful.

Everything else is just random interaction in the connectedness of the dance world.

I need not find patterns where they don’t exist.

I need not project the future in hopes of saving our species from global destruction.

I will die soon enough, might as well remain as peaceful as I have in the past, enjoy the ride and not question the beneficial/detrimental effects of the transportation device.

I no longer struggle with who I am.

My actions speak louder than words.

No need to be confused.

Breathe, eat, sleep.

A set of states of energy in motion which needs no overlay of symbols to justify its existence; i.e., the secret to happiness.

Live and let others live/die as they please, interference from me unnecessary.

[On a side note, I wonder if the Meclizine and ondansetron, combined with physical therapy easing decades of pain, have led to this new calmness in my thoughts…certainly, uncertainty about my vertigo and the piercing pain in my neck for 40 years have made me feel like I’ve always been running away from something; now that I have a solution, I don’t need to run away anymore, no need to pretend to be someone else in order to hide the real physical pain that has defined me since high school, from which I used to think there was no escape.]

Claw marks

Last night, stopped at a local pet store to buy food, stopped at another to buy a rescue kitty from Forgotten Felines. 

Today, a hike in the north Alabama hills (or mountains as they call them on this part of the planet).

Observe scratches and spots of blood on my arm from playing with Papier, the cat who adopted me over two years ago.

A day for action, less thinking, more hiking and socialising, extending my mental relaxation period through the end of this week, focusing on my art and not on my mesh network of thoughts.

A good weekend, in other words.

This

I woke up this morning,
The smell of your hair shampoo lingering in my nostrils,
That scent which mixes with our sweaty bodies
After dancing for an hour and I kiss your forehead.

I see your glistening face looking up at mine
When you’ve fallen because I’m not always the best dancer,
Losing my grip in order to complete a spin or turn.

This taste of cigarettes on your lips lingers in my moustache,
Our kisses drunkenly misplaced between dances.

We moved the world last night.

Yes, you and I.

We.

Us.

Our skills include dancing,
But we also know sawing, drilling, sewing, hammering, cutting,
Words, of course, with double meaning,
Words which become memes instantly,
Words we understand in the loving look only you and I share,
In the funny looks we shared when we were alone together on my birthday.

Never say you’re empty inside
Because I’m always there,
Listening,
Laughing with you,
Sharing jokes, but,
When you fall,
There to pick you up again and keep dancing.

I’ll catch you this time, next time, you want to run into arms.
Everytime you do, I don’t want to let go.

Marching to the beat of my own drum, at my own pace…

Lately, I have used “lazy” verbs in my writing, variations of “to be,” “get”, “use,” “have,” etc.

I focus on conversational tones to set the tone of this noncontroversial tome.

Because I live in my own world, my own word combinations (but not my own words), I march to the beat of my own drum, at my own pace, sometimes in synchronisation with others, and sometimes not even in syncopation.

I seek no audiences.

I seek no paying audiences, that is.

I seek the audience of self-entertaining writing by being here, writing and reading what I’ve written, knowing only that the self will ever truly understand itself in what it sees in its reflection here in these words.

I nearly died twice in the past year from some random poisoning effect.  Theories abound as to what might’ve killed me — spoiled food poisoning, food allergy, tick/mosquito bite, rat poison or some other industrial waste in manufactured food.

Possibly, my thought process shifted because of those two events.

I do feel a little more desperate to father a child before I die than I did a year ago.

Because of that desperation, I chose not to touch a woman last night when I attended the weekly Monday dance class I thoroughly enjoy.  I only hugged or shook hands with guys.

Last night I didn’t want to be human, I didn’t want to believe I am merely a reproductive set of states of energy seeking a mate.

I gave myself the perfectly acceptable excuse that I don’t really exist and will die childless, walking away from the person(s) who give me the strength to believe it’s possible I am human, after all.

It’s easy to put these words here on electronic scratch paper, arrange them to entertain myself and give impressions about what goes on inside my thoughts which generate these sentences, paragraphs and blog entries.

None of them are real.  They are arranged sets of “zeroes” and “ones,” binary digits or bits.

Anyone who understands the quandary understands why I know I don’t exist.

Any person who first drew a set of lines and circles, recognising the image of a stick figure, understands the quandary.

We are approximations, models, of the ideal person.

We build subcultures around ideals.

We assimilate with what we believe are the best approximations of the ideals we most want to assimilate with.

My problem (and I am not the only one) is I am the only me, the only approximation of myself with whom I most want to assimilate.

That in itself is a quandary.

I want to live with another me.

I have looked.

And looked.

And wished.

And hoped.

When I find a person or persons who best match(es) the approximation of me, I freeze, because I really don’t like me, thus making me afraid that I’m not going to like the person(s) most like me.

I don’t like being me.

I don’t want to bring another me into the world.

It takes a lot of mental processing to handle being with other people.

I can throw so much stuff at people they can’t see who I am or who I’m not.

Even now, I write this blog in dissociative mode, aware that one or more people I know will read this and it bugs the hell out of me because I can’t really, ever, be me in public, if there is a “me” at all inside this everchanging set of states of energy in motion.

I am an approximation of my self to myself, adjusted to entertain those around me.

Some of the labels I use to describe myself as a social being:

  • The chameleon.
  • The people pleaser.
  • The contrarian.

I find the prettiest, the most handsome, the smartest, and/or the most lonely person I can find and focus on that person as if that person is my whole world, in hopes that it will temporarily erase myself from my thoughts.

Currently, I find myself seeking the freedom to be a polyamorous person (meaning more than one person with whom I actively have sexual relations, including the relationship management issues of deciding who is the primary, secondary, tertiary, etc., sexual partner), when, in the past, I had the same opportunity and walked away from it very decidedly, unwilling to sacrifice my mental “intellectual” freedom for the constant mental struggle to manage emotional relationship ups and down.

I have been here before, in other words, with a whole other set of friends and had chosen to walk away, marrying my childhood friend, instead.

I purposefully selected a practical, intelligent life partner who would provide a stable financial home for me to express myself through writing without the struggles to make a living as a writer by myself; in the process, I made a professional management career of my own whilst carving out a little time to write, earning a few dollars as a newspaper reporter, and making a little pocket change as a published author.

Thirty years later I find myself here in a sunroom where I’ve written/typed many words for myself and to others.

I’m afraid I’m too much of a narcissist to ever love more than a reflection of myself in others, my self being my favourite person to hate and punish for being himself/herself/whatever.

I wish I had something to offer others but all I have are these words.  Sexually, I know how to flirt and dance and look longingly into other people’s eyes; I’m a sloppy kisser and get bored/uncomfortable having sex, wondering why I’m having intercourse if it’s not to procreate; I always think, “if we’re not procreating, then can I get back to writing cause this rolling in the sheets is interfering with an idea I’m processing for my next writing session?”.  Financially, I’ve got very little; my wife is the millionaire, I’m just along for the ride, with a small annuity to supplement Social Security payments in a decade or so.

I love to write only because I like recording my thoughts, even if I don’t like me.

I may or may not register a place on the autism spectrum.

I don’t know what normal is, having been told ever since I started hanging out in social settings (beginning with my first grade teachers) that I tend to drift off from others, losing touch with conversations and sometimes literally walking away.

I’m not a lone wolf.  I need the whole village to keep this idiot alive.

I’m not sure but I think I might want to cry right now, cry for the person I should be, for the human that might exist inside me, but I can’t cry.  I feel cold, mechanistic, an automaton, a fractal spinoff of a star.

I will always be alone in my thoughts.

I will always see others alone in their thoughts and know how to temporarily snap them out of their thoughts to share a space between us.

What is tomorrow going to be like?

I don’t know and I’m afraid to ask myself.

Living through today, this waking period of 10 to 14 hours, is all I can ask of myself.

I’m numb.

I’m scared.

I hate myself.

I don’t want to live another day.

Getting older was supposed to make me wiser.

I simply feel old today.

Too old for words.

Tiny yacht, big feet

Raubine’s legs wobbled on the floating dock.

A sign on a boat read, “Work like a captain, Play like a pirate!”

Her eyes tracked the flight path of a large white heron, hoping it was a whooping crane lingering on its journey northward.

She looked down into the water where aquatic plants surrounded the dock.

No fish.

She set her rod and reel inside the starboard rail.

Raubine missed her father and their fishing trips in warm weather.

She wanted him here now, telling her the best way to cast and draw fish out from under the dock.

He always caught enough to eat, never more, never less.

She choked up.

She could barely remember how to hook a worm so she asked advice at the bait and tackle shop on the highway, three short blocks from the dock.

They sold her a cardboard cup of nightcrawlers and a few artificial lures to try out.

She stopped by the adult beverage store and bought two six packs of craft beer, wanting the high alcohol content to drown her sorrows for the weekend.

Stepping down into the boat, she looked across the small bay where the local yacht club marina was hosting a Mother’s Day Gala featuring local celebrities auctioning off an afternoon with them on a two-hour regatta.

Raubine took a deep breath.

She and her father had sat on this dock how many times?

She grabbed the mast and sobbed.

Had he been gone five years already?

She looked at all the boats on the water.

The last time they sat together on the yacht, he had told her about the radiation poisoning he had suffered at the nuclear plant, guessing it was going to shorten his life.  They laughed it off because, no matter what, they were going to outlive every fish they caught that day.

Raubine removed the moorings and pushed off, leaving the sails furled.  She’d paddle around the bend, out of sight of the regatta, to a spot her father loved.

It didn’t take long.

She dropped anchor.

From inside the hold, she removed a large tackle box and opened it to reveal it was a container for her father’s ashes.

She poured his ashes into the water around the yacht, crying the whole time, knowing he was where he always wanted to be.

Raubine pressed her arms to her chest, wanting her father’s hug one last time.

There had been many men in her life but no one like her father.

She closed the tackle box and picked up the rod.  She still had time to catch something for dinner.