Tag Archives: meditation

Latest trend — song lyrics in my dreams

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As my wife can attest, my dream state is full of nightmares — she shakes me awake when I’m thrashing around in my REM moments.  I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in decades, my subconscious world full of being chased, being lost, falling, trapped, monsters, demons, demonic insects, abandoned interstellar outposts, etc.

Sleep deprivation that has consumed over half my life has driven me to find temporary relief in products like fermented grapes, sour mash, cough medicine and overexerting exercise that pushes my body into deep, dreamfree sleep (or at least with dreaming I do not recall).

Lately, though, my dream world has shifted due, I assume, to the fact that I’ve been hearing popular music more frequently than I ever heard before.

This morning, for instance, as I woke up, two songs’ lyrics were competing for attention in my thoughts: The Carpenters’ “[They Long to Be] Close To You” and the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post”:

Why do birds suddenly appear
Every time you are near?
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you

Why do stars fall down from the sky
Every time you walk by?
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you

On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair
Of golden starlight in your eyes of blue

That is why all the girls in town
(Girls in town)
Follow you
(Follow you)
All around
(All around)
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you

On the day that you were born the angels got together
And decided to create a dream come true
So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair
Of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue

That is why all the girls in town
(Girls in town)
Follow you
(Follow you)
All around
(All around)
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you
Just like me, they long to be
Close to you

(Why? Close to you)
(Why? Close to you)
(Haa, close to you)
(Why? Close to you)

Songwriters
BACHARACH, BURT / DAVID, HAL

Songwriters: ALLMAN, GREGG L.
I’ve been run down
I’ve been lied to
I don’t know why,
I let that mean woman make me a fool
She took all my money
Wrecks my new car
Now she’s with one of my good time buddies
They’re drinkin’ in some cross town barSometimes I feel
Sometimes I feel
Like I’ve been tied
To the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Good lord I feel like I’m dyin’My friends tell me
That I’ve been such a fool
And I have to stand down and take it babe,
All for lovin’ you
I drown myself in sorrow
As I look at what you’ve done
Nothin’ seems to change
Bad times stay the same
And I can’t run

Sometimes I feel
Sometimes I feel
Like I’ve been tied
To the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Good lord I feel like I’m dyin’

(Break)

Sometimes I feel
Sometimes I feel
Like I’ve been tied
To the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Tied to the whipping post
Good lord I feel like I’m dyin’

“Where am I going?” I ask myself, the online character who mirrors what I have called the real self who sees the largescale construction projects as he travels around the world — big farms, skyscrapers, freeway systems — and wonders why he’s content to be an anonymous fly-on-the-wall of life rather than a bigger-than-life architect, business mogul, artist, or athlete.

My wife and I had seven hours of time together on the road traveling from the St. Louis Airport back to our house, time to talk, time to drift in and out of daydreams, time to nap.

My wife says I don’t give her the attention I used to, reminding me of a conversation early in our marriage when we discussed I was her only true love whereas I had several lovers before we were married, spending the last year comparing the women in my life against my [future] wife and, despite some women having advantages my wife did not share in the big waters of the dating pool, I chose her anyway.

She still trusts me not to seek sexual relationships outside our marriage.

Yet marriage is not just about sex.  It’s also about the friendship we started 12 years before we married, being penpals for years before we had our first official date our freshman year in college.

Last night, as I jogged on the main road of the Hayes Nature Preserve, I had a strong memory of the PT sessions with fellow members of our Georgia Tech Navy ROTC unit, running on the sidewalks of downtown Atlanta, hearing prostitutes yell special offers at us physically-fit young men staying in shape to become officers and gentlemen, recalling the letters written to me by female acquaintances from high school who wanted my college mailing address so they could stay in touch with me, one of them going on to become a news anchor for a Memphis television station and marrying a prominent member of Memphis society.

That was nearly two-thirds of my life ago.

Those memories compete for my attention, which is more often diverted by flights of fantasy rooted and buried in my dreams, which all take up space and time in my thoughts away from my wife.

Life coaches use one question to motivate their students: “If you had all the courage and time in the universe, what’s the first [or what’s the most important] thing you would do?”

Most of my life, I’ve been a loner, keeping my thoughts to myself, living out my life in my daydreams rather than in physical manifestations of my thought patterns, which I have accepted are too weird and fantastic to share with others.  Besides, after all, they’re my thoughts, my dreams, not someone else’s, so I need not write them down in a vain attempt to explain who I am.

I don’t play computer games.  I’ve essentially stopped reading fiction.  I watch movies less often than I used to.

I am on that slow descent toward death, my youth clearly behind me, my [sub]culture giving me the freedom to pursue esoteric thought patterns instead of trying to survive a sustenance-level existence.

Today is one of those days I wish I was dead and didn’t have to live with my thoughts another moment.

I’m tired of meeting people’s expectations of me — my wife’s expectation of me paying attention to her, included.

I live in a cabin in the woods.  How do I get back to my childhood dream of a hermetic life and tell people I’m scared of them and their thought patterns that clash with mine?

A few years ago I was at the happiest moment in my life, sleeping as late as I wanted to, waking up and taking a shower, drinking a cup of Earl Gray Tea eating a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, taking quiet walks in the woods, writing in my paper journals, seeing as few people as possible, snacking at lunch, eating dinner with my wife, sitting down at the computer in the living room while my wife watched whatever TV show helped her calm down from her workday, brushing my teeth, pecking my wife’s lips and wishing her “sweet dreams” as I climbed into bed, holding her hand for a few minutes and then rolling over to sleep.

Why was I happiest then?  Because I know I am a chameleon personality who blends in with the people I meet in order to reduce conflict so I can think my thoughts without having to carry on superfluous conversations about subjects of interest to others that take me away from my thinking — if I am around people long enough, I feel obligated to discover more about them so I can write stories that include them and hide me from myself so that I don’t accidentally start talking about the wild fantasies of my imagination that nearly blind me all day and night.

Last night, I stood on the edge of a four-lane road, waiting for a break in the traffic so I could jog across the highway to the nature preserve.  One part of me, a tiny thought, proposed the idea that stepping out in front of a speeding truck would end it all and I wouldn’t have to deal with people anymore but a bright image of maimed me recovering in a hospital ICU room ended that fantasy.

Sadly, there’s no escape from being me, not even in my [day]dreams.

My wife is home today, working on her papercrafting hobby, watching “Inglourious Basterds” on TV.

I have a nearly morbid stage fright that I try to hide with my comic antics.

I told my wife during our road trip yesterday that when I am at a party or dance club, I am happiest sitting down and “chair dancing,” a 51-year old bouncing baby boy bobbing his head to the music, drifting in my thoughts, not having to look a dance partner in the eye, not having to worry about being a good lead, when I am in the mood to listen to pop music.

I can look people in the eyes all day, holding my breath until I am blue in the face because I am scared.

I married my wife because I knew she would not challenge me to become a public personality.  She wanted dance lessons for our 25th wedding anniversary two years ago.  I agreed.  It led to a weekly activity that is the only thing she looks forward to in her life right now — our dance lessons.  I have a light in me that tends to shine when I look other people in the eye, which attracts attention for reasons I haven’t been able to fathom, maybe because I am so nice to people as a chameleon personality who reflects people’s best view of themselves back to them.  Our dance lessons have led to me attracting the attention of some very good dance instructors who have expressed directly to my wife that they want to make me their dance partners in upcoming public showcases/competitions.  My wife is very unhappy that other women are asking for my attention and I didn’t tell them quickly and definitively “No!” when I know my wife has been feeling ignored lately.

Thus, I am where I am right now, fearful of every person who exists, including my wife, wanting to hide from public view in my previous happy place — the cabin in the woods.

What am I to do, where am I to go, when even my dreams are no happy escape?

I see our planet from the view of a distant galaxy, which has always put my personal life and my fantastic fantasy-filled thoughts in true perspective, willing to keep them to myself, helping others fulfill and make into reality their wildest dreams — the most perfect highway system, the quickest-built/most-safe skyscraper, the most environmental-friendly/productive farm, the best public showcase/competition dance that ever existed.

Yesterday, I told my wife that if I could, I would find a better dance partner for my dance instructors if it would make her happy.  She said she just wanted more attention from me.

Do I still have it in me to fall in love with her again, which builds a desire in me to give her my full chameleon personality attention, as it does with other people I meet, all of which takes my attention off myself and the internal bazaar of weird bizarre thoughts that I have had with me from my first memories onward?

I don’t know.

The clash of my public persona given to me by my [sub]culture against my internal thought set is greater than the sum of these words.

Reality is meaningless to me because I don’t see the world in black-and-white or rainbow colours — the entire set of waveform structures interrupts any connection between our sets of states of energy we call the shared sociopolitical environment that a primate species like us claims is more real than string theory.

I am shivering right now because there’s so much more I want to write about but choose not to.

I can doze on the sofa in front of the TV with my wife, instead.

As a nihilist sometimes, any one activity should be no more or less worthwhile to me than another.

Does it matter if what I really want and have never written about, never hinted in my writing even once, that would require a lot more work than this lazy life in the cabin in the woods, is simply tucked away and forgotten in a few fading synaptic connections?

If you think on galactic scales yet you exist as a small set of states of energy on a single planet…well, best let my thoughts drift unwritten once again.

Thinking, continued

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I have been a celibate monk for the past six years, our cabin in the woods a virtual monastery, my wife refusing to have sex with me if I won’t provide her financial means to pay for health insurance.

What is my life to be from now on — the same as the last six years or something else?

Points to ponder, sitting here in a steakhouse restaurant in West Frankfort, Illinois, temporarily burned out on dancing, waiting for my bluegill fish dinner.

I am surrounded by boundless, abundant blessings and luxuries.

What more can a simple man like me want?

I remind myself the universe is not about or for me.

I am an illusion.

Free Coffee Day

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As this dance competition weekend winds down, my wife and I prepare our return to what we’ve called our normal lives back home.

Every day is a learning experience for me, the past few days combining my acceptance of the life I could have had had I pursued an acting career and my acceptance of the life I chose, marrying a woman who is still shocked by all the exposed bra/slip straps and “skimpy” outfits she frequently pointed out to me while watching the female dancers around her.

Not quite a dual life.

An ordinary life of reality tempered on the fire of a “what if…?” imagination.

I was a type of BMOC (big man on campus) in high school, attracting a number of people of both sexes because of my stage acting, so I early experienced the life of a male sex object.

My wife says she never was a sex object, depending solely on her intelligence to attract attention.

That, in a nutshell, describes our lifelong relationship, my letting her self-criticizing self-image “keep me in my place,” so to speak.

I don’t know how much I can grow as a self-actualizing person based on the internal model of our relationship in my thoughts, caught in a whirlwind of thinking I can become a better dancer for my wife at the exact same time on the dance floor listening to her constantly verbalized inner voice of “I’m short and fat and slower than the pretty women who dance so well in your arms.”

I just don’t know if I have in me any more to pretend that I care about getting my wife to improve her self-image and mine at the same time.

However, financially, I am relatively stuck to my wife if I want to continue to live the comfortably lazy life of a “kept man.”

It’s as if I’ve personified the cliche “misery begets company.”

If my wife does not want a husband who’s a sexy dancer, then I’ve got to change our lifestyles.

She wants her turn as the “kept woman,” desiring me to be the financial support of us.

She never noticed that when I was her financial equal, I was attracted to and attractive to a large number of fish in the sea, one imaginary step away from making my independence and self-actualization a reality outside of my relationship with her.

I quit working in part because I couldn’t handle the idea that the possibility of making myself happier might include saying goodbye to a marriage with my childhood friend on whom I depended emotionally and supported emotionally my whole life.

I’ve got some heavy thinking to do over the next few weeks, wondering what the cost to my happiness is tied to financial laziness on my part.

Not to mention a yard sculpture, Kickstarter campaign and other projects to push forward.

When rocket propulsion and engineering program management met

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Sometimes, the awkward, bullied grade-school nerd in me shows himself, his tiny, insignificant self-image forgetting that he’s a full-fledged grownup male who has traveled the world and negotiated multimillion-dollar deals.

As I’m oft reminded, a simple “thank you” for a compliment means more than a humorous attempt to act modest.

The awkwardness has declined with time and maturity but appeared this weekend.

So, too, saying thank you as a compliment is not easy for me in realtime, despite my frequent use of gratitude in this blog.

I can’t go back in time but I can record here my thanks for the hard work that Jenn put into not only the hours of practice she provided for our dance routine, but also the great effort she put into a costume for our performance.

It’s been rare to find such a good friend in someone like Jenn, who’s willing to play grownup pretend (or cosplay, in today’s parlance) for a public show, purely for the sake of fun exercise.

I appreciate her husband’s and my wife’s patience during the past couple of months.

Here’s our video, posted for posterity and eternity on the Internet, turned rightside-up, with titles and credits to identify us when we’re old and gray (and a little forgetful — “You mean that used to be you, Great Uncle Rick/Great Aunt Jenn?” “That’s what they tell me.”):

Lindy Hop fun!

Here’s hoping that we can find the time and energy to put another routine together.

Torn between two lovers, feeling like you can rely on the old man’s money

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There’s always the misconception that the Mafia is either fake or real.

So we turn to a band’s name for identification purposes:

Charles Pettigrew died of cancer on 6 April 2001, at the age of 37.

[Eddie] Chacon is currently residing in Los Angeles and fronting the electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair, with Sissy Sainte-Marie. In 2009, The Polyamorous Affair released their album, Bolshevik Disco.

Call forth the phrase, “Dagnabbit rabbit!”

Unobtanium beer is pulling a sentence out of a dream: “I want a case of pickled anger.”

Why?  Because of a new storyline, a new personality that says, “Hey, you know what?  I don’t need nobody to speak for me.  You know why?  Cause I own my own business.  I’m what they call connected, like in ‘the mob,’ know what I’m sayin’?  I’m puttin’ on a show wit’ my girlfriend ’cause that’s just what I wanna do, show her off, tellin’ you fellas that she’s off-limits.  You wanna touch the merchandise?  It ain’t for sale.  She’s spoken for.  Yeah, she says she polyamorous but you get close to her, you burn.  You know what I’m sayin’.  I don’t need to spell it out in frank’n’beans or nothin’, do I, Lee?”

But then, the dirigible crashed into the Alps, spilling Earhart and Lindbergh onto the icy peaks.

The Mad Hatter spilled his tea.

To get out of the oxygen-thin heights, the daredevil flyers decided to put on a dance, mixing the cream components of melted white caps into the overflowing chocolate rivers flooding the Bavarian valleys, creating three new flavours that the people had wished for but never seen — dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate — not to mention Bavarian cream cheese, creamier and cheesier than ovarian, Ovaltine or oval saltines.

Yeah, it’s a crazy night for mixed-up storylines, seeing as the dance rehearsals went well, as intended, throwing the scent off the trail and the hound dogs off their common sense, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waiting for Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien to share their opinions as constructive criticism disguised as front page news stories, as, as, as, pretending that Jay Leno has any intention to call up Rich Little or Benny Hill to serve a substitute role for Jimmy Fallon who wishes Phyllis Diller was not related to Matt Dillon, Marshall Dillon, dill pickles or pickled relish.

Shaking the pepper shaker out of the Shaker’s household of a head-hold on the no holds-barred barista barristers barred windows, Windows 8.1 claimed ownership of the UI of iOS 7 which laid claims on the gold rush of iPhone sales diverting our attention in the divertimento window of opportunity in opportune opera tunes out of tune with the times listed in the back section of the New York Times hidden behind paywalls that are walled-in nonwalls with narwhals and ne’er-do-wells in wishing wells and cockle shells.

Love is a four-letter word.

Word is a four-letter love.

Letters are words of love for is is is an a.

The typewriter rhythms of grandmothers with multiple mobile phones and boyfriends saying “meow meow meow” like dorks worried they’ll be forgotten when they leave the day before their birthday — what else is of importance when conversations become fermented in the likelihood that a man’s wife is disinclined to dance the blues when she has a costume to finish for her dancing husband, the mannequin, when drunk Jenga games turn skyscrapers into pick-up sticks?

Seduction is not the answer.

The madness of one’s thoughts rules all.

When one dives into the abyss, what is money or love or love of money?

The clock watches the watcher who counts the hours before the next dance practice, wondering if spaghetti dinners are more important than uninvited guests entering the bed chamber.

But a tired perspirer whose partners don’t make him a manwhore make the whole man slimmer, if not younger.

The tick-tock-tap of the plastic keys play songs that drummers and lead singers, even two-to-three weeks’ preggers, can feel the lead beat in one’s core bouncing into the floor rather than bouncing back on one’s heels.

Type, type, type, tap, tap, tap, the music paces itself out of nothingness, into existence and back into the background noise of a universe in flux.

Time lost to hair dye and leather straps, slapped wrists and insanity at the end of madness one step away from workplace report revisions and shoe holes.

Waves in oceans turning water molecules and colloidal suspension into conflict, resolution, drama, comedy and tragedy as atomic energy is recycled, the medium medium tasting like one’s breath fresh with the cigarette taste of a lover’s lips or the scent of bath gel.

The substitute role of a trumpet player or the renewed role of a professional’s professional plays into one’s hands on the keyboard of life.

Microcosmic cosmic revelations.

Word.

Of all the visual stimuli in this room

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Two dance practice videos slowly transfer from the notebook PC to the place called YouTube.

Not content to sit and wait for CPU cycles dedicated solely to blogging, my left forefinger types inefficiently but effectively passing electrochemical signals through me and the smartphone screen to the e-ink splotches here.

As I fell asleep last night, before dreams bestirred me consciousness into confusion, I wondered if dying today would be okay now that my wife’s dream of a financially-secure future is set in motion, my task as a quasiresponsible husband completed.

I have enjoyed rewinding myself 15-20 years lately, participating in activities that my current body finds taxing but my younger body enjoyed just as spastically — dancing about like a flailing two-year old running through the house in pure abandonment.

In a few days, the dance lessons will cease, my wife’s only activity she looks forward to no longer fundable (or fungible?), returning the two of us to our lives over two years ago, back when caring for her mother was more mentally than physically demanding.

Saturday morning I woke up to find the house empty of my wife, taking over an hour to see the note she’d posted on our bathroom mirror that she’d gone to get her toenails repainted.

In that hour I let myself feel the pain, fear and loss of abandonment, wondering what I’d done wrong, what I could have done right to have kept my nearly lifelong companion I call my wife.

For my wife, life next week will feel the same way when she no longer has weekly dance practice to look forward to.

My diversions from waiting to die that I call my creative moments sitting in front of this blog are not providing financial means to alleviate my wife’s pending depression, dampening both our moods.

At this moment I don’t know what to do.

She wants to keep going to see UT football games, which she enjoys and which takes up much of our fall budget; I chose a largely unfunded midlife retirement from corporate life (it was partially funded the first year) that has lasted six years now, thanks to my wife’s reluctant generosity and patience.

What do either one of us have to look forward to after this week is over?

I don’t know.

What hope do we plan to lean upon in our relatively comfortable middle class suburban lifestyle, free from but the most minor of worries?

Blogging in bright sunlight

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Yesterday: an auspicious beginning, the novel.

 

I exist in a thought bubble that illusion sometimes make [semi]permeable.

For decades now, as my acceptance of external cues that we call education has given me an internal workshop of sharpened tools, I’ve tried to figure out why I feel like I’m numb all the time, like there’s a pillowed barrier between me and whatever is not-me.

I don’t know how many people have told me, “Don’t you know what [he/she/they] said they think about you?”

I don’t feel special.

I feel unformed, my connectors created for a different set of receptors in my daily interactions.

Must I externalise my internal universe to show that I am and am not any different than every other person who lives solely as an imaginary being?

I am neither sane nor insane, learning long ago that sanity is a matter of conviction about your illusions/beliefs in relation to the generally acceptable set of illusions/beliefs professed by the people in your proximity.

I look straight ahead and see an image that makes perfect sense to me, a computer graphical representation of electromagnetic transformation in process that we call the change in the state of bits on a hard drive better known as a set of files being copied:

File copy in progress

At the same time, images from yesterday flicker and change — Canada geese flying overhead, a turkey vulture circling a mobile phone tower, duck feathers floating on the surface of a pond inside which carp/koi drift, waiting for food,

20130915_104124

a real spider web next to a roped spider web, temporarily capturing the captured image of an acquaintance…

20130915_120426[1]

Is it insane to see a few pieces of rope tied together and imagine a spider web?

Is it crazy to move houses built in the 1800s into an enclave in order to preserve the appearance of a way of life that may or may not have existed the way we imagine?

“If image management is all you’ve got going for yourself, your only set of skills a desire to control your image by manipulating the [re]actions of people around you, are you any less out-of-your-league than a moth, its image well-camouflaged against a tree that about to be consumed in a large wildfire?” — that question bothered me every day I worked as a midlevel manager at a global corporation where I overheard employees below me in the corporate hierarchy complain about forces working against them (including conspiracies about the “Black Mafia” and the “Church of Christ clique” that I found little in the way of evidence to support), my going on to meetings with fellow managers about whom the employees had specifically complained and wondering why people complain about others — saying people in upper management only spend time managing their image instead of doing real work — rather than act in support of their personal self-respect and positive self-image that is reflected in their “real work,” which includes their voiced thoughts and opinions.

Is that last paragraph nonsensical?

I can only do what I can do, having not done a lot of things I haven’t done.

These set of thoughts in this blog represent my celebration of freedom, willing to write about behaviours that I would and wouldn’t do because the universe is much grander than our subcultural expectations — in the seven-plus billion of us, sanity is as much crazy as the illusion of the self.

For instance, should an atheist who believes we are truly only sets of states of energy in temporary confluence care at all about the concept of caring, saying that what is socially taboo, such as rape, incest, bestiality and paedophilia, is as perfectly normal as a comet indiscriminately destroying every ecosystem on Earth, all social concepts an illusion of proximity rather than immutable laws of the universe?

Yesterday, I showed up at a local civic center to join a group of people, some whose faces looked familiar but whose personal lives I knew nothing about, to jump around, somewhat in unison, in order for a person (or persons) to assemble a collection of motions captured in bits and bytes into a coherent story told in dance and music — a person’s “vision” turned into what our culture (and most subcultures) would call a sane, socially-acceptable reality.

No one is going to look at the resulting music video and accuse the director of witchcraft.

Should they?

20130915_122426 20130915_123336 20130915_123434 20130915_123002 20130915_122753 20130915_121014

Schooled

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Connie Evingson sings “Si Tu Savais” on the Internet app.

A school of small fish move about the sandy shoals this Saturday afternoon while hundreds of miles away Tennessee plays Oregon and Texas A&M plays Alabama.

Moss grows between tree roots.

A mother, smoking a cigarette, walks with daughters behind me, enjoying the early fall day, their voices joined by their father, bearded, wearing an Auburn ball cap

image

A pin oak hits the river surface, attracting a striped fish.

Grass/reed patches grow along the river’s bend.

Dragonflies chase prey.

Casual bikers pass by, their heads barely visible behind the opposite river bank.

Do banks bank in the bank?
Does prey pray?

I suppose I ought to head on down the river trail, find my way back home to wife and college football on TV.

C’est la vie.

Bridging the gap between generations

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One day not so long ago my father and I took a trip through the country of our ancestors — the mountains and tidal basins of Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina.

Standing on a bridge overlooking a body of water I can’t remember, Dad asked me if I knew much about our family.

Being the smart-ass teenager that I was, I mumbled some remark that almost made my father keep his mouth shut.

Instead, determined to make me see how serious he was, that this moment, more than any of the others, was his reason for taking us hundreds of miles from home, Dad began to talk while the sun set behind us, the dark purple horizon over the water rising up into the sky as stars blinked into life.

We could not see each other’s faces so we both leaned against the railing of the bridge, our hands hanging over.

The details of the conversation have faded.  Being a determined writer who likes catching conversation on paper, I wrote a few snippets down after we talked but lost or rather, threw away, a large portion of my writing sometime after that trip and don’t have a single note to reference, depending on my middle-aged memory to capture now what he said then.

We talked about the girls I was interested in at the time, including Monica, with whom I had attended several proms and spent a lot of time in various groups such as Sing Out Kingsport; Janeil, who I had stopped dating before the trip with Dad; Alice Ray Knapp, a girl from my calculus (or was it Accounting?) class; one or two others whose names escape me.

Dad told me that he had no issues with the girls I dated and figured I was smart enough to choose a woman with whom I would spend the rest of my life — he could give my approval if I asked but didn’t think it was absolutely necessary; in other words, if I wanted to elope with someone, he would support my decision.

But he was interested in more than my love life.

He used my dating scene as a kicking off point, leading us to imagery of why to have a family at all.

I was noncommittal about having children at that time.  Dad didn’t push me to name a number of children but wanted me to think about the purpose of marriage in all its social context, including responsibility to go to church, belonging to the right social organisations, climbing the corporate ladder wherever I worked and devoting quality time/money toward family.

That, too, was still the opening act of our conversation.

With the sky pitch-black, the Milky Way galaxy clearly visible, Dad decided we had better find a restaurant in the seaside town we were in, wanting to avoid seafood because of his shellfish allergies.

We found a place that served burgers and steaks and settled into a corner booth so Dad could continue the conversation.

He let me order a beer to show he was treating me like a man.

At that point, I told Dad my opinion about having kids with the various girls we had discussed, the whys and why-nots.

He nodded his head the whole time, not once interrupting me or criticising my opinions, a rarity for conversations between us, so I knew there was more in his thoughts he wanted to share.

I remember the waiter giving us strange looks because Dad sort of shooed him away whenever he came up, a friendly guy who seemed to want to tell us what was going on in the area over the next few days.

After I finished talking, Dad sat back in the bench seat and paused for a minute or two.

I wasn’t sure what he was going to say.  I had grown used to Dad’s passive-aggressive personality, attuned to changes in his emotional state but didn’t sense any buildup of anger about to explode, another rarity.

Dad leaned forward and told me about his childhood.  I sure wish I had a copy of what he said — summarizing it does not do either one of us justice but it’s all I’ve got.

Basically, Dad tried to get me to see the difference between his childhood and mine, as well as what he understood about the difference between his mother’s childhood and his, knowing nothing about his father’s childhood nor wanting to.

He then told me about various ancestors of ours he knew or had been told about, putting together family stories as well as personality sketches that would fill more than a novel’s worth of interest to the general reader.

Seeing that I still looked interested, Dad talked about where we were, somewhere near the Virginia/North Carolina border, not far from the ocean, and asked me to mentally picture what this place must have been like 200 or so years ago.

There were no fast-food joints, no highways, no street lights or hotels.

There were villages, wild animals, deadly diseases, ports of call that might or might not have been friendly to our ancestors and living pretty close to whatever you could kill or grow yourself.

Dad wished that I could see his and my mother’s family weren’t that far removed from living off the land, meaning that they were closer to understanding what our ancestors were like than I, having grown up in the comfortable surroundings of suburbia.

He didn’t know what my kids would be like but he wanted me to know that I would probably have a conversation like this with my children and feel frustrated sometimes that a generation gap is not just a catchy phrase in mass media but also a real difference of opinion and priorities between parents and their offspring.

I have few regrets in life, this being one of them: after Dad finished talking, he asked if I had any questions.  I really wanted to know more about the ancestors he’d described but, for some reason, my teenage self felt the question was stupid because I knew that he and I were tired and had to get up in the morning for a long drive to our next stop, my feeling like an adult making me choose the responsible adult path of saying “Naw.  I’m getting tired,” and turning Dad off from any more discussion of this type for the rest of the trip; another regret is not asking Dad’s father (or stepfather, really — Lee Bruce Hill; Dad’s biological father was named James Horace Capps) about his adventures during 29 years in the U.S. Navy between 1929 and 1959.

Knowing what I know now, that my father is no longer here to be asked questions, I might have made a different decision or many of them.

I might have chosen to have kids so that I and them could ask Dad more questions.

But it didn’t happen that way.

So, here I am, again, writing to you, the invisible reader, closely related to the eternal nature, the omniscient, able-to-do-anything god figure unable to be described or pinned down.

These words are my children, my gifts to the world I give freely, unconditionally.

I have given more hugs and kissy-face time to our cats than to people but that has been changing lately as I learn to let go of old habits, good and bad, and allow myself to learn what actual human interaction is like, good and bad, opening myself up to falling in love with people again, exposing my emotions to the joys and sorrows of daily life.

It is good to discover I can love people without feeling that I have to owe them anything.

It is even better to discover that people love me back without expecting anything in return, willing to learn from me despite my internally-magnified flaws that come out as odd behaviour.

It was good to jog out to the greenway bridge over the Flint River tonight, looking at the stars in the darkness, surrounded by the sounds of nature and spark the memory of a trip with Dad sometime in the early 1980s.

I am not just a biological product of my father, which is weird enough in itself when men my father’s age who haven’t seen him in a while and don’t know he’s dead mistake me for my father.  I am also a product of our ancestral history — it’s up to me to keep our history alive, uncensored, readily-available to our living descendants, relatives and friends.

The words and images of my novels, short stories, poems, journals, blog entries and online videos are all I’ve got to record the history.

It’s also reflected in my view of the future, detailed in short stories or chapters of the ongoing saga of Martian colonisation taking place in this blog.

Sobjectification

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Sobjectification : (n) feeling sad that you feel bad about yourself for sexually objectifying people around you.

Lee’s body was shaking, his shoulders aching.  He woke up at 2:12 a.m., feeling aroused and disappointed.  Why had he objectified the women in his life yesterday, the old defense mechanism that almost went away but showed up again unannounced?

His body only shook like this when his set of states of energy were rattled severely — at the end of running a marathon on a 25 deg F day, the first time he kissed a woman and the first time he kissed a man, the first interview for a real desk job, the first time he made love to a married woman, standing in a funeral home parlour greeting friends and family of his dead brother in-law.

At his age, shaking could be the early signs of many neurological disorders, not just psychoemotional moments.

Lee’s chest felt like a tree trunk being struck by a hammer.  He needed something to calm his nerves.

He turned to the script to check where in the current round of world politics his thoughts were supposed to be aligned…

23 November 1957. Open Letter to Eisenhower and Khrushchev by Bertrand Russell,” published in the New Statesman, followed by a response from Nikita Khruschev on 21 December 1957, with a reply on Eisenhower’s behalf by John Foster Dulles, published on 8 February 1958.

Lee’s shudders got worse.  He wasn’t supposed to see he was stuck in an endless tape loop, the sound quality deteriorating playback by playback, his thoughts disintegrating into repetitious nonsense.

Shouldn’t he care where he stood on the alpha male hierarchy of his times?  “To know is to do” he was told by the advice of history.

If the universe was here for Lee’s entertainment, why wasn’t his body as entertained as his pondered theories of social engineering?

Why did he revert to objectifying women’s bodies just when he was making a breakthrough?

Why did he let his wife’s withholding of her body for sexual activity influence him in any way, make him feel unwanted, unused, unworthy of attention by the opposite sex?

Was his body’s uncontrolled shivering related merely to caffeine withdrawal?

Yesterday, Lee was sitting in a room with his wife and two people interested in closing a deal to manage Lee’s finances for the rest of his life, taking his hard-earned millions and returning to him an annual “salary,” pension or annuity as a monetary security blanket to hold until he died, depositing his funds in a bank that contains the wealth of others in the entertainment business, from Hollywood to Nashville.

Money had no meaning to Lee.  Never had, never will.  He only understood purchasing power.

Money never bought Lee happiness.  Lee was always happy in his pursuit of knowledge to aid his quest to reorder the words in his vocabulary, long ago knowing that something as mundane as the changing patterns of dust on a wall could entertain him for days.

Money bought Lee new knowledge — he could overwhelm his senses with knowledge or he could add to his knowledge base one coal pitch drop of tar at a time.

Nervousness had crept into Lee’s thoughts yesterday that he had shifted into the habit of sexual objectification to give himself the false impression he was above the petty feeling of being nervous, one of his passive-aggressive attitudes he wanted to change.

What if he had told the investors that he was nervous about his life’s fortune being managed by complete strangers and hadn’t turned to seeing one of the investors, who happened to be female, as sexually desirable at the very moment he needed to concentrate on third sigma distributions of financial risk management and Monte Carlo simulations?

What if he had told his dance partner, who complained of aching body parts, that he wanted to say he’d rub her foot if she’d rub his because his foot was really hurting but he was afraid admitting his foot hurt would sound like a weak excuse and worried, too, that the request to barter one foot rub for another due to his lack of cash fluidity would be mistaken as a sexual come-on because he couldn’t get the confusing sexual objectification out of the thoughts of the new Lee?

Self diagnosis of one’s thought patterns in the mental game of self therapy could or could not be as slow or fast as professional psychosocial therapy.

Lee was a cheapskate.  His visions of life were not grand enough to include hoarding vast sums of institutional level financial security.  He knew he had to depend on someone else’s financial expertise to keep him out of debtor’s prison but it didn’t mean he had to like the idea or be able to sleep fear-free at night.

How was Lee going to deprogram his sexual objectification when he was nervous?

He finished a mug of Earl Gray tea, never quite sure if the caffeine calmed his nerves, his writing calmed his nerves or if an unknown script writer gave the actor Patrick Stewart a character named Jean-Luc Picard who moved a lot of people to drink Earl Gray tea because they really believed that they themselves discovered it tasted better than other flavours of tea, coffee or sources with “natural” stimulants.

Lee mentally apologised to the women he saw yesterday, setting in motion his newly-minted curmudgeon self to tell the next woman he saw, “Look, I’m a bit nervous.  Either I can share with you what’s really going on in my thoughts right now, which are really not socially-kosher at this moment, or I can stare at your boobs and ass.  It’s your choice.”

Suddenly, an image of the J.K. Rowling character named Dobby riding a wrecking ball while nude and speaking Russian passed through Lee’s thoughts.

Lee smiled, the shaking subsided but not completely gone.

History may repeat itself but Lee was going to enjoy the ride, even if it meant he was going to throw up because he was dizzied by the scenery flashing so quickly through his thoughts.