Transvestites Make Me Philosophical

I exist; which is too say I have a series of experiences, experienced in a linear fashion, which are impossible to understand fully unless you experience them yourself. These include both internal and external experiences of emotion, time, maturity, intelligence and perception. But as my life begins to compound into a life lived I am left wondering if there really is any value in experience beyond the inherent developmental value to the experincer? 


What I am, in a convoluted way, trying to ask is a question about loneliness and a life lived in conjunction, or 'in experience' with another. Despite the fact that human beings are fundamentally unable to fully understand another existence as a personal experience, the question still remains; why do we all seem to innately have a desirous nature for companionship and how does a dualistic existence ( that is to say one that is both simultaneously introverted and extroverted, though necessarily more extroverted) change the experience of experience?


As a person confident in there ability not only to do things alone, but too be content doing so it still amazes me how persistently I call the value aloneness into question, generally through the following train of questioning:


Will anyone ever care that I know these things? That I have these passions? Does anyone else share these passions, ideas and desires? Where does this experience go, after it is finished being experienced? Does it still have value? Does it even have a value outside of me? Is there someone who will come to know me as I know myself?


In summary:


Will my experiences be understood and valued by another individual ?


I know that in many cases my exaggerated sense of self-importance and introverted nature preclude me from having copious and gregarious types of relationships, but I also have a suspicion that this fear, of being valued as an individual for our individuality, is not something I struggle with alone. 


So, I leave a question to the universe. If I wish to be independent, self reliant, self motivated, educated, successful, creative and productive, exclusive of whether I have companionship in which to celebrate and share these experiences, then why do I sense that there is something missing in the experience of experience experienced alone? And what do these feelings of loneliness, anxiety, fear, seclusion, paranoia, and depression mean? Are they an experience? Or a symptom?


Just a thought.

There is a Peace

Incomplete and perpetually restless I press on
for a morsel of the being of being,
that lives
that breaths
and moves outside
and within,
these footstep soaked streets
this foreign territory
this familiarity
and in these Dionysian entrails,
spilled onto the table,
between raw fish
and foamed beer,
and between syllables
of a conversation
I am all to desperate to have;

There is a peace.

There is a peace.

There
is
a
peace,

and it speaks.

Musings on Happiness

This isn't new, I actually just found this while I was looking for something else on my hard drive, but I thought it was worth posting.

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Sometimes we try too hard to have all the right answers. The pain and grief associated with the unexpected often comes from our own inability to accept that sometimes, we just don’t know. When unexpected crops up, we often have a habit of criticizing our lack of foresight or our mistakes. What we seem to be forgetting however is that it is these unexpected moments, these changes in the winds direction, that allow us to really heal from the things that bind us to the past and follow us in the present. It takes time to acknowledge and embrace moments of change but eventually, everything does. Eventually, everything you know and love and rely upon right now will change, grow, die or disappear. There is no certainty and there is no foresight when it comes to the utter complicated mess of existence.

If someone was to have said to me at thirteen, this is what your life will look like I would have been extremely disappointed. What I am trying to illustrate here is not that I feel that my life lacks something today, but about the expectations one has and how they constrict the capacity we have to be happy. Under my thirteen year old guidelines I could have and would have only been happy in a very specific set of circumstances., This idealism, this sense of right and wrong about how your life is 'supposed' to look worked to construct my interpretations my own happiness. How could I possibly be happy, if my life isn't exactly what it is supposed to be?

Its amazing then, that we even find any happiness at all, with the plethora of insane and impractical expectations and ideals floating around our minds. Constantly comparing this current reality with the one created in our imagination. Well, I think if I were to be completely honest I would have to admit that all those thoughts -the ideas and dreams of what does or doesn’t make me happy- change. They change and have been changing all along. They are in every way transient and unpredictable. As I reach back through my memories trying to coagulate some kind of meaningful consistency, I find none. If I am really honest what I remember loving the most as a child was drawing or crafts. Glitter and glues, mulch-coloured pens and a world of possibility. Then dance, merely by happenstance then somewhere in there writing, poetry, philosophy, academics, business, law, religion, marriage, children, materialism, travel. . . All these things and more crossed and crisscrossed my emotional and intellectual conceptions of what I thought would make me happy. And you know what? It is only in this moment of disillusionment, for all the things I have ever held dear, that I realize just how impractical these ‘ideas’ of what makes me happy really are.

I have lost time being miserable. I have lost beautiful, precious time wasting my thoughts and my feelings on how ‘incomplete’ my life is without one thing or another. If I had just had more stable parents, more money, more time, more freedom. The hours whittle away beside my failure to meet my own demands. The things that hurt will always hurt. Change will still come as a surprise and will still cause me to question my ability to govern my own life. I don’t know that I won’t look back through the past and try and divine some meaning . Still try to find some kind of linear evolution leading upwards towards. . . well anything. But I can’t hang on anymore to the belief that I know what happiness means, or that I am able to facilitate change in its favour.

The Harder You Try - Charles Bukowski

Picked up a book of Bukowski's poems in Soho this weekend and this one has been etched in my mind ever since. The last four lines will live side by side in my consciousness with the indellable words of Walt Witman in his poem Song to the Open Road:

". . .forever alive, forever forward."


the harder you try

the waste of words
continues with a stunning
persistence
as the waiter runs by carrying the loaded
tray
for all the wise white boys who laugh at
us.
no matter. no matter,
as long as your shoes are tied and nobody is walking too close
behind.
just being able to scratch yourself and
be nonchalant is victory
enough.
those constipated minds that seek larger meaning
will be dispatched with the other
garbage.
back off.
if there is a light
it will find
you.

Nap Time

I sit here in a moment which my life feels out of my reach. In which I look at the conundrum of daily existence and with an final exasperated breath I say not just why, but how? How do we go on living? If we cannot connect to a happier place inside ourselves and inside the world then what is the point? There is no hope for someone who does not have the emotional, or psychological will to participate in life as it is designed; in yet craves every ounce of its existence. Everything to want costs money. Everything in life costs money. There is a price to pay for everything. My 'head-space' as it were is just an excuse for my procrastination from the artistic endeavours I don't want to know I'm going to fail at. Everyone fails. Everyone who tries anything fails, because none of us ever really figure this out. We just keep plodding along day, after month, after year, after generation, after epoch. Down, down, down.

I am a morcel in a menial spectrum.

I remember feeling good. Sometimes. I also remember a lot of feeling like this. So tired of feeling like this but I honestly don't know how to stop. Though I am not without my faults, two of which being fear and a fragile ego, but I am not stupid or insincere. I am trying to have fun. I'm trying to do this right – by me. I'm trying to have a good and happy life. I'm trying to access the fundamental piece of my soul that makes me burn and let it go. You want to sing? Sing baby! You want to dance? Dance baby! Learn, grow discover, create. . . . burn, burn, BURN!!!! But only after the dishes are done. And only after work, and before yoga, and after the kids are asleep and you've paid the bills and saved for retirement and made a nest egg and saved for a rainy day and put a down payment on a house and bought a nicer car and right after the promotion that they promised next year. Yes. In between all that very important business and before you are too old don't forget to give yourself some time to do wants important to you. Only without merit, or resources or direction. Only with out love, true love and guidance and support. Only without anyone having a clue, how fucked up you really feel. How lonely. How lost. How weak and scared and alone you really are. Staring at the inside of your squishy mushy brain and all its little whims and how you are the biggest victim of your own stubbornness. You are the biggest victim of your addictions and evasive personality. And how hard you fight, everyday to give yourself the opportunities to be happy and explore the avenues of life you wish to suck up. But how even with everything perfect and every moment of everyday available to you, how the time just slips by like ceaseless waves. Untouchable symbols lapping up an invisible shore.

And how you truly feel like you have nothing to live for, if you are going to be as useless as you feel right now. Useless to meet people head on and with honesty. Useless to say sorry. Useless to allow yourself to let someone down. Useless to cry. Useless to give. Useless to try. Hopeless and so, incredibly, hopeful. It burns a mustard seed hole in the pit of your lungs like little a little firing squad. Shwing Shwing Shwing. Past the body and right straight down.

And there is lies. And so do I.

Cute Kittens!

Symmetrically insane. There isn't enough space in the world, to give me the room I need to breath. Can't think in this mess. What is it that I am looking for!? A wispy line of forgiveness, it tempts me to the troughs of exsistencelessness. There are no answers there, but it feels so good, to sit inside a suicide. Feeling the weight level off, slinking away calmly like hot sand through outstretched hands.

I would like to say this is a crisis. A breakdown for which, or at least from which something can be saved, but it is not in the moments of distress and agony that the call of the emptiness sings the loudest. For in those moments we are filled, at least, with something. Though a gaping wound bleeds and burns, one is aware that pain is transitory and finite, flesh up against the knowledge that it passes.

It is in the quiet solitude of daily existence – over breakfast, the middle of a gregarious burst of laughter, in a lost passage we weren't really reading – that the real threat pokes through. A strange paradox, more hope in hopelessness, than in this handshake.