Tag Archives: meditation

As I simplify my life…

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As I simplify my life — throwing away, giving away, selling the extraneous — preparing for an offEarth trip, I briefly contemplate the past, recalling memories tied to inanimate objects.

With the objects out of my life there is less chance that the memories tied to them will resurface.

I won’t look at the dashboard of the 1962 Dodge Lancer anymore, remembering when my father drove the car across the local mountain and worriedly asked me if the brakes were going to work long enough for us to safely get to the bottom (my father’s fear of heights was triggered by the sheer dropoff that only a guardrail prevented a car out of control careening over).

The ATV/lawnmower trailer holds few precious memories for me.  I bought it from a man who needed money to move to his new job in Michigan, buying a lawnmower and trailer from him.  I sold the mower months ago and cut apart the rotting trailer this morning.

What is next in my life?

Do I write about it now or live it first and recall it in some nostalgic moment in the future?

I shall continue to write about life on Mars and other activities in the Inner Solar System many, many sols from now, over 100 marsyears in the future.

I shall write less about life in the here-and-now or in the next few Earth years.

I have dropped writing thank you notes to restaurant workers in this blog.

Let my interaction with them in the moment speak for itself.  I’ll leave the thank you notes to my friend, Julia the Thanksgiving Girl.

Part of simplifying my life is thinking less about how I’m going to write about it.

Enuf sed.

Back to Mars!

SOLD

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A few (many) Earth years ago, I bought a 1962 Dodge Lancer from Eddie Shimpock using profit I made from the exercise of stock options while an engineer at Conexant Systems.  Eddie had repainted the car after buying it from the original owner because the car had sat on the side of the driveway turning brown with mold/algae, ruining the factory paint.

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I towed the car from the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, to Big Cove, Alabama, and worked on shining it up some more.

I felt fortunate that the car pretty much had all its original parts and proudly drove it to a local AACA (Antique Automobile Club of America) event where the organisers encouraged me to enter the category for most original car of the 1960s [or something like that].

I beat out Ford Mustangs and some Chevys for first place.

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It was exciting,  let me tell you!

Well, I noticed the car overheating a bit on the trip to the show so I returned home and removed the radiator (after draining it, of course) to get to the noisy water pump.

The impeller inside the pump had rusted down to a nub.

Not having a welding shop of my own to build a new impeller and wanting to get the Dodge back on the road as soon as I could I bought an NOS (new old stock) water pump and installed it.

Refilled the radiator system and the car engine system ran smoothly.

Sure, the dash-mounted pushbutton selector for transmission gears was a bugaboo sometimes, with the plastic “buttons” (more like odd-shaped rods) falling into the dash, requiring removal of the dashboard to find and remount them.

Otherwise it was a fun car to drive to UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) classes and for my work commute.

One day, the car almost drifted into a busy intersection. Quick analysis showed that the brake system was not working.   I used the emergency brake to stop the car when I needed to and parked it on the side of my driveway when I got home.

Time doesn’t stand still for anything.

Sure, I meant to work on the car again.

But I didn’t.

I threw a cover over it and washed it occasionally.

Eventually the cover deteriorated.

I tossed the cover in the rubbish bin.

The car once again sat as a Petri dish for mold and algae.  It hosted hungry squirrels who left empty hickory nut shells piled on the engine block.  A mouse died in the floorboard.  Spiders left cobwebs behind. Poison ivy, vinca and Virginia creeper wound their way up the tires into the wheelwell.

It was time to give that metal love of mine to someone new.

Billy stopped by last summer and offered to buy the car and a truck.

I gave him a verbal agreement to sell both to him.

Six months passed by as he paid for the truck and said he’d remove it from the property, having not paid for the car.

Sadly, there will come a time in some relationships where trust is lost.

Time and again Billy said “I’ll come get the truck next week.”

Well, cry wolf too many times and trust disappears.

A few days ago a determined gentleman named Wylie stopped by, negotiated a price for the car and promised to bring cash.

He fulfilled his promise.  Not only that but he showed up with a friend and a trailer to remove the car yesterday.

The car was hard to get out of the side yard but he was able to drag it onto the driveway but not onto the trailer.

Wylie returned today with new friends, winched the car on the trailer and was about to leave when his friend Eugene offered to buy the truck.

Billy promised again to get the truck this week.  I’m sure he thinks he means to — after all I gave the title and keys to the truck to him on faith he was going to haul it away months ago.

We’ll see. I want to trust Billy.  I really do.

Actions speak louder than words.

As I get rid of more stuff in my life to lighten the load, so to speak, giving me the courage/opportunity to travel to Mars, I make decisions that aren’t going to make everyone happy.

If Billy doesn’t get the truck this time, I can with a clear conscience say I gave him ample time to do so and seek a new buyer.

I don’t have time to be Mr. Nice Guy to people who [un]knowingly test a reasonable time limit on my patience.

If I am who I am, then I shan’t say anything about those who are who they are and aren’t like me…

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I need to let my thoughts drift this sol on this electronic slate to work out ideas beyond semantic wordplay, determining how much, if any, I should distance myself from my physical connections, my social network, in order to contemplate the concept that if the universe is here only as a manifestation of the projection of the reactions of my set of states of energy in the form of a mirror reflecting who I am, then I am returning to examination of the reflection to tear apart the image and reveal the pieceparts.

Oh, how the presence of Jenn and Abi, together and separately, has changed my thought patterns for the better!

Brenda, the woman who revealed her lesbian/self-love core to me over the course of years, making me fall in love with her even more, opened me up to the possibilities of agape love between a man and a woman, even if eros got in the way sometimes, turning me into a ram butting its head against the wall in a poetic/literary testosterone rage.

But that’s the joy of teasing one another in our daily lives, especially when we know there’s a line the teasing won’t cross, making the game much more fun as we push each other to the point of falling over the line.  And on the occasions when we fall over?  Well, someone once sang, “Let’s give ’em something to talk about!”

As the songs and poems have said over the millennia, we can get lost in the game and forget who we are.

But that’s okay, too, in the cycle of life, giving each other room to learn who we are.

I’ve learned more about myself holding the hands of Jenn, in that freedom of being myself with her that shuts out the world in a way I’ve tried to describe in our imaginary lives together on Mars 100 marsyears from now.

With Abi…well, it’s almost beyond my ability to describe what holding her hand is like.  How many times have I tried?  How can I tell you what wanting her is like?  I don’t want her body.  I want her core being.  I want her ability to go past all the negativity in life and power through to success amidst failure.

I can’t remember when I’ve loved my wife and wanted two women, two distinct best friends, at the same time, neither one my spouse.

How many years did I love Monica and my wife (before we got married) while dating another woman at the same time?  How many women/girls told me they would gladly have been the third woman/girl in my life?  How many told me, “If it weren’t for Monica…” they might have been my first?

Alas, all of this musing upon my muses is just my form of self-love taking up space on a computer server out there in the world.

The best way to give credit where credit is due to those who inspire me to see more in myself and inspire ideas for the gifts I can freely create for the universe is to make the gifts and give them away.

The clock shows 13,248 days to go.  How many sols is that?

Well, an average Earth day is 86400 seconds long.  An average sol is 88775.244 seconds long.  Thus, a day is 97.32443% of a sol.

Therefore, only 12893 and a half sols left.  Where does the time go?

Jenn and Abi, I’ve got work to do — thanks for your inspiration!  Meeting you 100 marsyears in the future is what drives me to write stories, logically compose computer code and create robotic creatures (Erin Kennedy keeps my creativity going on overdrive).

Going crazy again

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In my life, I have lost my sanity a few times:

  • at age five, when I realised I was alone in the universe and had to create my own version of something to make sense of the cluelessness around me
  • at age ten, when my best friend/girlfriend died, leaving me more alone than ever
  • twice in high school, when my girlfriend broke up with me and, more significantly, after I suffered a head concussion in a car wreck
  • at age 23, when I, against all the teachings of my youth (especially the one about coveting a married woman), made love to a married woman
  • at age 27, when I cracked under the pressure of having to appear on television to promote a community project I created, sensing a number of contradictions within my personality that was perceptible on live TV and out of my control once it was broadcast to whomever was watching
  • at age 44, when my brother in-law died

I return to a familiar place on this path through life — a crossroads that branches off to unknown destinations.

I feel like I am being ripped apart, with tendrils/roots from my past pulling on me to give people I’ve known the affirmation that the lives we shared contained and shall continue to create happy times.

I’m always looking for an easy escape route from every moment I spend with other people, knowing that eventually the internal insanity that has defined me since I can remember will show itself — the disjointed, at-odds-with-itself set of thoughts that have kept me alive and in touch with people who, God help them (I’ll get back to that last phrase in a moment), are probably just as fucked up as I am but I sure as hell don’t want to know, allowing myself the illusion that other people have it together.

One girlfriend said knowing me was like peeling back layers of an onion and she was never sure what she’d find next, as protective I was in controlling people’s access to the “real” Rick.

Do I always know what I’m doing?  Rarely.  But I know where I want to be and have plans to get there.

Otherwise, the “real” me is an illusion, changing moment by moment to passively accommodate people’s perceptions of me so I can reach my goal while giving them whatever makes them happy.

What if giving them whatever makes them happy contradicts certain parts of me that are partially set in stone?

I know I am insane to think I am alone in this universe which, God help me (okay, time to address that last phrase — if I alone in the universe, then, by extension, there is no deity other than myself for myself, leaving others to find the deity belief sets in them that satisfy their needs for self affirmation?), leaves me with zero friends because if friends are merely sets of states of energy to bounce against like pinballs to get us moving again, well…

I am caught between seeing that I am a nice-enough looking guy who makes many people feel comfortable in my presence and thus able to believe I will help them affirm their beliefs, and seeing that what I want may not make many people happy.

One girlfriend, when I finally was able to share with her the dystopian visions that haunt me and chase me constantly, wondered why I was such a joyful guy on the outside but such a hard-nosed, scared-to-death conservative type on the inside.  We discussed the whole fight-vs-flight concept and, despite my best (worst?) efforts to want to control the conversation, I let the girlfriend dissect my view against my deepest desires not to hear what she saw in me.  She finally agreed that I was more fucked up than she was, taking strange theories, mixing them up in a cosmic comic worldview and applying them to my own fears and aspirations without concern that they made no sense in the real world.

It didn’t stop her from wondering what having a child with me would be like, able to compare the two kids she already had against one we could have.  A couple of days after we agreed to stop seeing each other (after all, I was banging her best friend, too (the aforesaid married woman), which made the both of us feel a little guilty (okay, maybe not too much; more like we should do the decent thing and call it off before her best friend found out)), she had sex with a guy she’d just met and ended up pregnant.  Because the guy professed his love for her without question and he was one of the heirs to a bread company fortune, she told me that even if the baby was mine, she was going to call it his; I happily agreed because it was sure going to be an affirmation of my worldview that nature-vs-nurture is a false dichotomous construct about childrearing and I didn’t have to worry about paying child support (I was a broke college student at the time).

As an opportunist looking for escape routes living in my thoughts, I recently plotted out a course of action whereby the possibilities of hitting the eject button on my current marriage might be facilitated by solidifying relationships with a dance partner; thus, I saw the person I liked laughing and dancing with the most, heard her say that her beau was looking for someone to join a fraternal organisation with and told myself, well, if it makes him happy that I join the organisation with him then I might get more time to dance with her and from there, who knows.

Damn it if the fraternal organisation’s requirements, including a main one about hosting a belief in a deity hasn’t put a burr in my side and, in the process, turned me into my father and his more conservative/religious views.

I know that portions of my personality were formed from contact with my father and I have fought tooth-and-nail internally to reject those portions because of the compromises I had to make to protect myself from his passive-aggressive treatment of my mother, sister and me, hearing from his colleagues, friends and family, however much I don’t want to, how kind and considerate but opinionated my father was and how so many people from my past want to welcome me into the fold now that I, as a legacy, have joined my father’s fraternal organisation and cemented my place in that subculture.

I am a mixed-up dude and I know it.

I’ve never been forced by a child of mine in my household to construct a consistent view of the universe in an effort to give that child the best opportunities for success with an easily-repeatable narrative about how/why life is.

I have been able, instead, to successfully slide through life, hopping from one better-paying job to another, accumulating wealth along the way without giving the shirt off my back, to arrive here in this comfortable middle-class hovel in the woods, always having an escape plan at the ready should something I had imagined happen (for the unexpected, I am probably completely unprepared).

I don’t know what my very next step will be, except to take the bathmat out of the clothes washer that the cat had pooped on and hang it up to dry (the bathmat, not the cat (or the poop)).

I still want to get to the Moon and then on to Mars and dance in low-gravity conditions with my literary characters Guin and Bai.

Whether I join reality or whether reality gets in the way, I cannot say.

If I don’t even know if sanity is an illusion, how can I know if reality is real?

Every time I see her, I fall in love again…

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How many people remember Oliver Hazard Perry?

Master Commandant at age 27.

Are we prepared to say goodbye to the era of major sea battles?  So long to land wars?  Farewell to air sorties?

Is it possible that the paranoia of our species, the heightened fear of territorial and tribal losses, is waning?

Haven’t I already bid adieu to our species in general, spending less time analysing fractal patterns in the local solar system?

For the past three days, I have looked at nothing, my eyes closed, my neck and shoulder muscles tensed in anticipation, my body under blankets in the sunroom, waiting…

 

How much courage does it take to write outside one’s comfort zone?

What is a set of states of energy but an illusion, an imaginary boundary?

 

Giving unlimited time to my thoughts, letting them ebb and flow in and out of my seeming consciousness, wondering why an insane person like me can and does still exist, fighting day after day of self-elimination ideation…

 

Watching the decaying wave patterns my written thoughts have appeared as pebbles in the pond of society, knowing every word we make and pronounce in front of others is more significant than we notice and often less significant than we want.

 

Caught, or lost, in a maze of my own making, creating conflicting pathways, one centred on the social precepts of a supernatural being, the other centred on the naturalistic worldview, with decisions branching out and crisscrossing paths.

 

Voicing characters based on personality snippets within me — a happily married man, a celibate husband, a court jester, a woodsman, a wanderer, an eccentric wealthy hermit…

 

Face-to-face with sexual desires I cannot express because extramarital love is out of the question and intramarital love is no answer.

 

Waiting to die because killing myself is not an option.

 

Knowing I am the humble nobody I felt like as a kid, happy for anyone just to smile at me, a smile meaning more to me than gold or food, a person willing to hold my hand or give me a hug worth more than I deserve…

 

I meditate upon the meaning or the meaningless of it all, aware that everything, especially me, does not exist.

 

Oh, to be rid of these depressive moods once and for all, to slip quietly under the surface, making no more waves, this pebble taking one final trip to line the bottom of the pond, soon covered in mud and forgotten…

= = = = = = = =

To write a prose poem in opposite terms, reversing the sentiment for posterity’s sake, takes love to another level, here in this hermit’s rundown cabin in the woods, slowly rejoining the random fractal patterns of nonanthropogenic nature, centered everywhere and nowhere.  I’m getting too old to fall in love, less deserving of others’ attention when I was a young, entertaining lad, thumbing his nose at school authority.

It is time to return to my daily meditations found in books and woodland hikes, mentally preparing the older self for his exit, make room for youthful enthusiasm to take centre stage, scratch philosophical treatises in dirt before a storm and peacefully fall asleep one last time…

Stemless glass

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I once thought being a millionaire, even a very miserly one, would bring me contentedness, if not pure bliss or eternal happiness. What I’ve slowly realised…well…I am not that man with those thoughts anymore.

Being a millionaire is indeed a comfortably contented place to be but not a final destination.

Sure, my wife and I bought into the whole “reward yourself financially first” philosophy in order to achieve this goal, using the power of delayed gratification to get here 10, almost 15, years ahead of schedule, by, for example, buying a new car every 10 years or so.

Now that we’ve been here a while, enjoying the fruits of our labour, what’s next?

Unfortunately, I get bored easily and lose interest in subjects/topics after I’ve dissected them and determined their root cause.

Over the course of the past few months I mentally walked through the prospects of life outside the WASP monogamous lifestyle I was trained to support.

I asked myself if going out of my comfort zone was worth giving up my financial status, releasing the golden handcuffs and starting over, once again competing in the marketplace for your attention and money to feed my new habits of happiness fulfillment.

I thought I found the answer in new friendships.  I wanted the answer to be with my new friends because of their enthusiasm and strong belief in doing what they love — dancing.

This morning, in the sunlight reflecting off concrete, glass and steel structures of urbanism, I see that my friends’ infectious enthusiasm moves me to encourage their pursuit of momentary happiness and longterm financial security but my journey takes me in a new direction.

I’ve enjoyed meeting so many people in the social dancing subculture, gladly knowing that those who learned to dance as kids have been able to monetise their love for the body art/exercise of dance and become successful adults as instructors of social dance.

However, the source of their enthusiasm is not mine.

I tried to adopt their thoughtset as my own but I was only able to hold it for so long before I switched to building robots.

Finding a new hobby and realising it’s time to go on to another one is like breaking up with a girlfriend, which was never easy for me.

It’s time for me to say goodbye to competitive dancing and move on, figuring out how this miser can focus his wealth on something that will rejuvenate him while in his comfort zone (cliche is my forte).

Financial success before I die is one thing, still being alive and figuring out what to do to maintain my meditative state of bliss is another.

Regardless, I live in my thoughts, as my thoughts, with my thoughts.

Tomorrow is a new day, a new opportunity to find a new distraction from the ennui between now and whenever I die.

Is there another planet or species I can play with?

A life not my own, a dream my own

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Two lives intersected at a restaurant — a patron and a server — sharing their autobiographical information with the freedom that social etiquette did not suppress.  This is an approximation of their conversation:

Patron

I got pregnant with my wonderful daughter when I was 13 and had her when I was 14.  You want to know why?  Because my mother was a whore and my father was a perv.  I remember when my husband and I were in Egypt.  He hired a Turkish maid for the trip.  I say “maid” because she didn’t do a lot the whole trip but sit on his lap, if you know what I mean.  By that time, she and I were the same age, 19.  My husband, when I complained about his relationship with the maid, told me he was comparing the two of us to see which one of us he was going to leave in Egypt.

Server

That’s cool.  When I turned 19 I took off with a friend to Israel.  We lived on what we made.  I worked as a bartender for a while.  Once, my friend and I decided to go to Sinai in Egypt on a whim, sneaking across the border.  We had a great time.  My friend was better-looking than me and one of the men we met offered 100 camels for my friend.

Patron

An Egyptian general, who told me that he was supposed to kill me because he had talked to me alone in the dinner tent without my husband present, offered my husband 100 camels for me.  My husband said he would have taken the offer if he knew what to do with 100 camels.

Server

You’re lucky.  If you’re not a good prize, they only offer 10 camels.  I said the same thing to the man — I had no use for one camel, let alone 100.  We stayed and played [لعبة الطاولة?], or backgammon, and had a great time.  My mother about died because I didn’t talk to her for several days — there was no cell service in the part of Sinai we were in — she thought I’d been kidnapped.  After two years of bartending, I got bored and saw my life was going nowhere so I came back here, got an associate’s degree in engineering technology, and am working on my mechanical engineering degree, hoping to graduate with a 4.0 GPA.

Patron

Good for you. I’m proud of what I did.  I raised three kids on my own while working at Columbia Records.  You can do anything you want if you have the determination.

= = = = = = = =

People’s lives are innately unique no matter how much they may be led to follow social trends.  After all, the patron and the server were inside P.F. Chang’s, a chain restaurant located at an outdoor shopping “mall” with other franchise stores.

How many of us do what I’m doing right now, cocooning myself with thoughts directed at a computer screen, talking about our lives or playing computer games rather than living our lives?

If I decided that I no longer enjoy dancing with my wife, that listening to her voice now that I have hearing aids has enhanced my desire to escape to this computer screen, that her desire to spend more time with me is not reciprocated, where does that leave me?  What determination do I have to do anything I want?  What do I want to do to accomplish a goal 13271 sols from now?

When I heard the conservatory students of Robert McDuffie describe what they’d accomplished as musicians, I realised that when I decided to marry my wife, I had given up on what I wanted to accomplish when I was a ten year old boy who had just viewed his dead girlfriend in a coffin — honour her life through my writing, turning my thoughts into action, conquering the known universe or as much of it as I could before I died.

In the Earth year of 2014, half of the marsyear I’m labeling Marsyear One, it is time for a new beginning, sol number 4 of 668.

It is time to determine if I move out on my own, perhaps sharing a place with friends, increase my number of labour/investment credits and give a little attention to the dreams and aspirations still cooped up inside the happy, hopeful boy who’s part of me.

I am responsible for making my dreams come true.