A first entry

 
Is free association allowed here I wonder... This looks to be more structured than that. As though a linear line of organized thoughts are expected. Clearly executed, coherent communication to a point. But what if your head doesn't work that way. What if you think in spirals? What then? I suppose the worst outcome is to receive little support for your efforts. Well then, so be it. I could spend weeks trying to arrange the text correctly on a single page and still feel as though something is lacking... Not unlike the line my life has taken up to this point. There is no thought to action. No straight line from point to point. My thought process feels more like the steam at the top of the kettle I have in the kitchen just now... Boiling intensely, but to no good purpose... 

 
This is my first entry at this site. Perhaps a first declaration where I publicly drop any pretense of normalcy. A declaration of an inner life I feel so completely uncomfortable with. I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to be and confess to spending  week's looking at the entry's of the rest of you. Searching for clues as to what is commonly appropriate. I do so because of a tendency to over disclose in the real world... The world in which we look each other in the eye, has me so full of anxiety, that I tend to want to push all out my life out there at once. That and the fact that many of my thoughts tend to blow away with the slightest distraction, means I tend to be doubly afraid that I will lose some little thing... Like your name, or something our conversation would remind me of... The overall effect is I am wracked with doubt and possess little confidence about most things. I no longer have any real relationships and feel isolated most of the time. Except for when we talk... You and I... The moment there is another person to speak with, the nervous chatter is pushed back and the other side of my head steps in... This witty, funny, people pleaser, steps forward and displaces the sad for a few moments... Of course its still there, that loneliness is ever present... Still being judgmental, still telling me what an ass I am. That I am without worth... That this other person is not enjoying my company, but is in fact humoring my need to reach out... While thinking all of this, I am completely aware that it is simultaneously true, and a neuritic fabrication of my psyche. This ongoing battle of a nervous mind that knew no rest as a child, has matured into this jittery, broken adult. But  for a moment while we talk, all of that is displaced... And for the space of a robins song at day break, I am free... Brief snatches of time in which I attempt to assimilate. And then, moments later, its time to move on...And that lonely tide rushes back in to submerge that place we stood together to share a moment, and I become an island again, inaccessible to most. I hate that.
  


What a day, today is. I live in Portland Oregon, and just now, can hear the sound of the gentle, warm rains, dancing outside of my window. I have a little pond out front and every now and again there arises the giddy croak of a single frog. I love that frog. Its a placid, peaceful day I would normally enjoy if I could, but I just finished an email to a woman I have been seeing for three months, telling her goodbye and so I am feeling quite alone just now. Breakups are never a good thing but this situation feels unique to me. I tend to have depression that at times is quite severe, and have long been diagnosed as mildly bipolar (which, all things considered, would seem the best type to have, I suppose). At any rate I tend to be moody and have been going through many swings lately. 

This woman I met last summer had a plethora of issues, but then, so do I, so the two of us started seeing each after a chance meeting at a neighbors garage sale. She told me about a lot of things that I had never encountered before. She would tell me strange things, such as no one had ever really listened to what she had to say before. A lot of things that I would tend to take for granted, she said she had never experienced. To shorten a lengthy story, we dove into the deep end together and had a turbulent 3 months of it. Some was quite good and some pretty painful as you would expect. In the end, I had to make for the exit when it became apparent that several little little fibs she had told me, were growing into an interlinking web of fabrications. This person was stuck where she sat and determined to remain so, asking that I build a life around her untenable positions. To be with this person, I allowed myself to briefly do many things I previously thought myself incapable of, such as sharing her with other men and being subject to her often erratic schedule. However, at the end of the day it came down to her offering me the shortest end of the stick in regards to her availability, because of her need to care-take her primary lover, a man she had known for 5 years. This as well as other things about her I discovered gradually, as she, gently revealed more and more about her life to me. She was a woman with many secrets. She told me that everyone she knew, understood something of her past, but that I was the only one to which she had entrusted everything. I absorbed this turbulent life's story, of a desperate woman in the space of a few months time. I was playing counselor, confidant, friend and lover, to a woman who had spent 46 years, running from a childhood of neglect and abuse. I had hopes that she might take some action to heal her life, if only someone would help her make some sense of the confusion and allow her some of the appropriate tools. But this was not to be. An echoing refrain I heard ofter towards the end, sounded a bit like "I want to stop selling my body, but I'm not ready to take action, just yet." On a personal level, I had come to care for this woman quite deeply. I told her that all I really needed was to see her take some action, to care for herself. But her answer was commonly, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.  By the end, I had come to know her so well, and she became so completely exposed, that she began to seeking refuge within the little fibs, and so sadly, it was time to leave.

I came to this situation by my own circuitous route. The oldest son in a Mormon family of five children, I was raised in a home where introspection was suspect and people rarely spoke about the elephant in the room. Often finding comfort instead, hemming at the margins of of what I often considered, critical issues. Being adopted, my younger brother made certain I understood from an early age, that I "was not really a member of this family". Children can cut you so deeply. So there was a deep sense of rejection from the beginning, with my drift towards an agnostic world view seeming to alienate me further from the place I was told over and over, was my home. My parents were both good people who did there best, but really were two lonely souls who married to escape savagely dysfunctional families of there own. Two people uncomfortable in the extreme, with any social setting outside the confines of there faith. My father spent his time at home, hiding from his son's in his office, while my mother, infinitely more accessible, had her emotional development arrested at the age of 10 by childhood traumas so severe, she chose never share them with the rest of us. Because of this, I have always felt as though I grew up absolutely isolated and alone, in a house crawling with people. I had no one to look up to, and no roll models to emulate, with the two people responsible for my upbringing, a pair of social isolates.


Fast forward to a birthday, threatening to consume my all like a firestorm, ten years ago. Crossing the threshold to my 40th year, I was painfully aware that I had never been married, had no children and in many ways seemed to be living a state of extended adolescence. I could see the midlife crisis laid out before me. I met the friend of a friend at a sisters wedding,and after dating several months we promptly married. Shortly thereafter I started a business, bought my first new vehicle, and eventually purchased a decrepit crack house in a soon to be trendy portion of town. I looked at all of these things clustered around my 40th year as a coming of age experience. A place to measure a lifes growth, not unlike the painted marks on the wall of the laundry room in our old home. The fact that it all felt 20 years late in arrival was offset by the fact that it had occurred at all. It all seemed to work with the exception of my marriage, which savagely imploded in the space of a year and a half. Losing my wife was a hard blow, calling into question every other achievment assosiated with that time of my life. No single person has the ability to hurt you so deeply, as the one you would draw so near. I can honestly say that I have never known such emptiness, such complete and utter sadness, as the time I was married... I began seeing a therapist 3 time's a week for the next year and a half in an effort to heal my life and learned quite a bit about my place in the world and it was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. While I made a lot of progress in that time, I was drinking too much and acting far to random in many ways.

There is an artist in here somewhere... down just below the surface, in the murk. Or perhaps not. Perhaps just another soul with artistic tendency's. A man lacking inate ability but for the desire to express some of the magic he sees in the world, or perhaps the magic he would like to see. But without the gift I simply do a lot of mucking, with the help of clay and brush and found articals... Every attempt is a failure... But sometimes within that failure, there is the accidental discovery of grace. That is the type I art that I find comes from my hands. And so I embrace it. Because it is mine and perhaps all that I will ever truly have in this world. I want for this life to mean something more than material goods. I want joy... And I want art. Are we allowed both, I wonder? There is a person here, who can find no value and no place in this world. I often feel I am simply seeking a refuge... Looking for a place to hide. A cloak to pull around my shoulders to shield me from the whistling loneliness of this place. A purpose, a function, a way to channel all of this discomfort into something that I would feel good to wrap my life around. Something that I could point to and say... That... that over there... that is what I do... their is my value in this world. There is my reason to exist. There is my justification for sucking oxygen the rest of you could perhaps put to a better use... I don't have that today. Today as in every before, there is no reason for my existance. No justification for my consumption of carbon.



My dog is making the most delightful howl out front just now... I love it when he does that... I love my dog... To be continued