secrets in the dark

I was hanging out with a few friends the other night when one of them said “Now I know your tongue gets a little loose when you’ve been drinking, but I don’t want you to repeat this.”

I think my first reaction was to feel a little hurt, followed by the realization that yes I liked to “share” but that this was only done in moderation and then only when I was certain I was safe, followed only later but the self introspective thought of “what is ok to share and what isn’t?”

I’m going to tell you another story.

D. reminded me, however casually as we were driving down the road, that she knew that I was prone to semi-suicidal thoughts and that this was no time for such self indulgent thinking.

As you absorb that one I have to tell you I cannot for the life of me (no pun intended) remember what we were talking about or why she would have said this. But I was so stricken by the fact that my eleven-year-old daughter knew this very intimate and powerful detail about my psyche that I nearly drove into the curb.

You know, I don’t think I keep secrets very well.

I used to like to “play” at revealing secrets; that is I would pretend to be ignorant of the fact that I was revealing something about Christmas or a Birthday and then take a secret glee in the reaction. “Oh Patrick! Can’t you keep a secret?” For some reason Unknown to me, I used to think this was terribly humorous. And while I do not think it is funny anymore, it lead me to think that people thought I couldn’t keep a secret because I had conditioned them to believe it so.

But the more I think about this. I begin to wonder.

Let me ask myself this question and see what happens: Do I keep secrets.

Yes.

How do I know? Ask another question.

Are there things I would never tell anyone? You bet’cha.

But then if this is the case, why do I raise the question at all? Is the question rather can I be trusted?

I don’t think it is because I know that I can. Loyalty is very important to me and I am very loyal and would take your secret to the proverbial grave if need be.

I don’t, however, feel particularly secretive about things in my own life. And maybe that is where the incongruity begins to seep in. Because I will freely tell you about MYSELF things that I would never repeat if they were about you.

I am not an exhibitionist. I don’t know what I gain from this, but I don’t mind being vulnerable if I think it will strengthen the relationship or if I think someone can be aided by my own experience strength and hope, especially when it comes to being human and making human mistakes. I am an expert here. That and, if you know me at all you will know that I love to laugh, and laughing at my own mistakes is joyous!

That makes me think too that I am a bit lousy at keeping secrets that are themselves joyous hence the Christmas, birthday, expectant baby kind of secret breaking.

I asked J. if she thought I was a good secret keeper and she said politely “I think it is an area that you struggle with” and then went on to say that when it were spelled out in no uncertain terms “Do not share this” that she knew me to be the kind of person that wouldn’t say a word.

The thing for me, that I struggle with, as my wife so adroitly puts it is that I like to process my experiences and have a hard time setting boundaries with others, so when other people have expectations about their own boundaries that are different than mine, I find difficulty.

(I find myself holding my head between my hands in shame thinking “I am a terrible secret keeper” as if to say “I am a terrible friend” or “I am a leper”)

I keep thinking about this when the solution is right there. I need to clearly define what needs to be “secretive” with others when those situations occur. Because the real shame is not that I might be a poor secret keeper. The real shame is that I might break a friend’s trust. And that is something I do not ever want to do.

Still the notion that I am a flibbertigibbet nags on my conscience and is unsettling to me, and I suspect it will for sometime. I think the question I need to resolve for myself is: Is this a character defect? And right now I don’t think I have the answer to that question. SO I resolve to wait and see, to be a better friend and… as a dear friend recently told me “never miss an opportunity to shut the hell up” even though he was talking about his own excessive know-it-all-ism and not secrets, the similarities are striking.

Crazy

Editor's note: Crazy, written by Willie Nelson and sung by Patsy Cline, is the song I used to rock my children to sleep with


What do you do with your spare time? Anymore “spare time” is time driving from point A to point B, and so my quality time is time spent in the car. Still, I shouldn’t complain, because my drive time isn’t loaded with kids as I am mostly driving to work or driving to school, whereas my darling wife is driving to the kid’s school or is working on the kid’s problems.

I should be honest. I can really enjoy my drive to school. But most of that is my Ipod, and most of that is remembering to plug it in, charge it and getting the latest podcasts. Otherwise I am stuck with two and a half hours of yours truly, and that is, well, tedious. (At this point I should probably do an Oscar-like thank you to those of you who have spent serious time in the car with me) It can be an emotional experience. I don’t passenger well. Usually I get car-sick. I am prone to flights of fancy, or flights of fantasy. I can be joyful, bitter, soulful and annoying. I am highly critical of your driving, and I hate talk radio.

Let us pause here.

Talk radio is, well, horrible.

I hate it.

I hate Diane Rehm, though I listen to her constantly.
I listen.
I listen until the callers call in.
I can’t listen to the callers.
I can’t listen to the vitriol.
Can you?

The Republican Party is so…
(I like this)
(I hate this)
I turn off the radio.
I drive
I turn on the radio
I listen
The Democratic representative believes…
(I like this)
(I hate this)
The show continues…

I cannot stand the vitriol.
It makes me angry.
I do not want to be angry.
(I blame the radio.)

At this point if you were to stick your fingers in your ears and whimper “Na Na, Na Na Na Na” you would get the idea.

I hate vitriol.
I hate conservative god fearing republicanism.
I hate my slavish dogmatic loyalty to the other side.
I hate this.
I hate this.

I hate this.

How did I end up here?

Isn’t that the question I ask myself most often?

How did I end up here?

Is it the radio? The kids? The faculty? The insane look I get from people I think understand me?

Am I crazy? Or is “crazy” a word I made up to make sense of my misunderstanding of the world?

That’s crazy.

I read somewhere that acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today.

O.K. I accept that I cannot change the what people on talk radio believe. I can only change the way I react to it.

O.K. While I am waiting for that to happen, I turn off the radio.

The Birds of Appetite

Notes from Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite

We imagine two systems: Christianity and Zen. The first is language, the other anti-language; a radical reversal of philosophical logic. While diametrically opposed, these systems can interact with one another, to prepare the way for one another, and can be defined as the relation of objective doctrine to subjective metaphysical experience.

Because Language is rational, ordered, and logical, the nature of objective doctrine must be reducible to some form that can be shared, and is therefore easily recordable in a set of symbols that are easily accessible to others. Anti-language, or the metaphysical experience, on the other hand, resolutely resists any temptation to be easily communicable or conform easily to comforting symbols, and is acceptable on the basis of its absolute singularity. That it is un-communicable is only resolved in an awareness that it is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself, an awareness of being in the here and now in the midst of the world.

End of Notes

I woke up this morning or at least re-awoke this morning with the idea of writing a book in which the characters were resolved in creating two different systems which, while opposed to one another, could be used to define both past and future events, something akin to Asimov’s “psychohistory”. One of the systems I decided would be based on Dante’s Inferno, while the other would be what? I thought about this for a moment and then spied Zen and the Birds of Appetite lying on the counter. I flipped it open and found the description of my “world” lying right there on the page in front of me. Merton was describing the difference between the Christian and Zen Experience. Reading these pages I began to form the idea that my so called “world” already existed, and that rather than independent of one another, Zen and Christianity might be thought of as opposites that came into being because of one another, trying to balance one another out.

It occurs to me that I should 1)not have gone back to bed and 2)Not have done any heavy thinking before my pot of morning coffee.

what we must

Here’s the thing. What if nobody read my blog? Would I blog? The answer to that seems fairly self contained as I am relatively sure that there are only a handful of faithful readers, and only a few of those who can cut through the preponderance of B.S. that lurks in every writing to find themselves reading on a regular basis. but then:

I am not a writer.

I can’t even tell you why I blog or what my blog is about even though this fact in itself may be why only a devoted few will ever keep coming to the blog in the first place, but then, while I have felt the desire to attract readers and occasionally will yield to the temptation to publish something heartwarming or gritty, most of the time, my blog is just about all of the crazy s**t that is floating around in my brain, and a somewhat half hearted attempt to occasionally be analytical about my own self analysis.

Not that you can trust any of this. I am not an analyst. But I do believe that we need to listen to ourselves, to our thoughts and to our dreams. Especially to our dreams as dreams are just parts of our own self talking with one another. That being said:

I don’t dream about dating my sister (which she will be glad to read because I know she is one of the half dozen or so that does keep reading) but I did dream about smoking a cigar last night, or at least SUCKING on one like some G.I. gung-ho sergeant from any of a dozen war movies. In fact the dreams have been powerful lately and when my sister was here the other day I recounted a dream to her early in the morning in which I was arrested tried and nearly convicted for rape, theft, and drunk driving. The dream really got out of control when the jury of my peers ended up being my siblings who materialized out of the columns and absolved me of my sins just before the dream wrapped itself up like a day time soap opera when the whole thing became a dream within a dream.

Blogging isn’t always all it is cracked up to be. Neither is dreaming or painting or any of a myriad of other activities, but then, really, nothing ever is. It just is what it is. Our job is to get used to this fact while occasionally adding rhetoric or poetry or something. That I can do. But usually it is at the expense of common sense.

A close friend recently told me that he was probably going to stop blogging soon, if he hasn’t already because he felt his readership was compromised. I felt perfectly at home in this conversation because he was quoting me when he made the decision to turn the machine off. So many friends these days have dropped off the blogging bandwagon, either because of personal problems, time constraints, or that blogging just isn’t what I thought it was going to be.

Gradually anyone who puts him or herself out there begins to realize that the things that we say have a way of coming home to us. But this is true whether we are blogging or walking through the halls at work or in the grocery store. There is an inverse relationship between the closeness of the people we make idle comments to and how quickly those comments find their way back.

The choice here isn’t what do I say or not say on facebook or in my blog or in twitter or in any of a dozen other outlets. The choice is of choice. How much do I risk. We start out thinking we can risk it all and gradually pare down the list until we think “this is all I have” and “this is not enough” and rather than admit the futility of the whole thing we just walk away. But really the fault isn’t in how we risk ourselves it is in the what. I see this choice as a flower. Choose this. Choose some aspect of yourself. Start small and let it grow. Risk this and watch it bloom. Watch it develop. See where this thought can lead and everything else is, well, personal or sacred, then the choice isn’t about what needs to be cut away, but what else can be added. Otherwise, nothing is risked and nothing is ventured, and so, as they say, nothing is gained.

So I persist, even though I am sure to get a phone call from my sister, and my analyst (if I had one) I wander through the ah ha-halls of my imagination, tugging on the strings of arrant thoughts that seems to sometimes blossom, other times whither and mostly come up from the soil so easily because they were never really as fully developed as I had imagined them to be. They never bloomed. But that this, as my friend Chauncey Gardener might have said, is how the garden is tended. This is how stronger roots are made. We clear out the old growth, the over growth, the neighbors competing for resources and the weeds that were never meant to be there in the first place. We keep writing because adding poetry and meaning to life’s little biscuits is what we do.

“Dude. What is up with your Blog?”
“Why.”
“You, um, had a hard week.”

And another said “well, you seem to have had better days.”

To which I say “Yes, but when I stop blogging, painting, or otherwise creating, that is when you really need to start worrying.”

work and play

There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.
There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.
There is nothing wrong with guilty pleasures.

The coffee gurgles as I log in to facebook, update my pithy morning comments on the status line, make a quick check that the baby isn’t choking on a piece of cardboard, and dash off to the restroom for a the morning “constitutional.” Some things feel like habit. Other things feel like guilty pleasures. When the boundary of understanding between the two begins to dissolve, then I am spiraling into excess.

Back at the computer I sip on the coffee and peruse a Times article on Jung’s “Red Book” and find myself half fantasizing half imagining Jung as alternately mad man and Buddha, the Red Book a blend of the “Celestine Prophecies” and the Holy Grail. Is this fantasizing just me being self-indulgent? I scan my thoughts and decide “No” instead the author of the article has done his work. I am a believer. I have been swayed.

Why am I so concerned with the self-indulgent/over-indulgence? The answer rises from the gut. Everything seems so crazy right now: School, Work, New Home, Old Home, Life. I am fearful of self medicating. Of letting my guilty pleasures become full on distractions that keep me from feeling the reality of the moment. There is nothing wrong with a face book status line that makes me chuckle. Nothing wrong with a sliver of chocolate or even the whole damn bar washed down with a beer. It is when I do these things at the expense of everything else that I know I have disappeared down the rabbit hole. I am in la-la land.

I want to play.

G. and S. have taken to locking themselves in their room for long hours playing Polly pockets and Barbie’s. Play for children is essential. It is the rehearsal for adulthood. Play for adults is good too. The micro-vacation of the mind that allows us to get back on that horse where “horse” is a cubicle or a factory job or long hours pent up at home with small children, or the frustration of no job and no home. I want to play, I just don’t want to play all of the time.

Sometimes work feels like play, especially as I am struggling to turn my passion into my job. How to make money and surviving doing something you love? That is the question, isn’t it? But even then, work can feel work. I mean, its work, isn’t it. It isn’t play. Its just that, when you make play work, the temptation is to make play into everything, and that just doesn’t work.

Libertine Buzzkill

“Be careful Anais, abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.” -Henry and June (1990)

I like to think that embody the idea of "moderation even in moderation" but truthfully this is not how my personality works. Given a taste of excess, I find myself becoming overindulgent, an ever widening sphere of excesses, till excess is normal and normal is a distant memory.

Or do I?

Because I know that I can easily become exhausted by excess and yearn for greater and greater degrees of moderation and temperance.

It is as if the body has an internal clock of sorts that says "party's over." We know the internal clock that wakes us at 6:45, but is there one that says "your too heavy" or "your eating too much crap or drinking too much wine or your staying up too late."

Except that my clock is no Big Ben and I do not run on GMT. Normal can be all over the place for me and there is no one standard that I "return to."

The body has an internal roller coaster might be a better metaphor.

Perhaps the problem is that I don't live by a schedule.

The moderate need schedules. Not too much of this, just enough of that. Everything measured and in its measure.

I don't live that way, so do the rules of moderate or immoderate apply?

What would I do with moderation? Or is moderate just another way of saying "standard operating procedure." In which case one man's excess in another man's moderation. Is it all subjective or can these disparate lifestyles be reconciled?

this moment, now... no, now...

So my new mantra is “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

No small task.

I am so familiar with processing feelings in my head that it is almost impossible to put them anywhere else. The other day I was able to at least recognize that I needed a time-out, but whether or not I really got comfortable with my feelings is another subject all together. By nighttime I had fallen into my old patterns of “dialoging” my problems: feelings become personified by familiar faces and I begin to talk to them, often time reenacting the moments that lead up to the painful experience. Frustration becomes Professor no.1, anger become professor no.2. I have done this numerous times, and I have become very efficient at it.

I tried to find the link to the post where I first discovered that my brain isn’t trying to kill me and that this dialoging is actually just different parts of me trying to work through tough experiences, but to no avail. It was a really important lesson for me because it helped me to view people more compassionately. (I am not arguing with professor no. 1. Professor no. 1 is not here. I am arguing with myself.) However, this did not cause the behavior to subside, rather it merely rechanneled this thinking in a new direction.

D. and I had one of our blow-out explosive confrontations the other night. Later as J. and I were processing the episode she said “I think you were really angry.”
“When? With D.?”
“No before that. When you were unpacking in the kitchen. I heard you muttering to yourself. I think you were talking with your professors, and you were really angry.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I think you were so zoned out that you didn’t even realize how angry you were.”
I thought about this for a minute. I knew I was there, talking to them in the kitchen. Having one of my delightful instant replays. Was I angry? Damn right I was. Oh my God, I thought, I took that right into my talk with D. I felt like such an idiot. That little girl never stood a chance with me,

Walking through the grocery store yesterday I could feel the impatience. “Idiot” I thought of the man who was blocking the aisle with his cart. “Moron,” came my thoughts of the woman walking slowly in front of me. “Give me a break” came from staring at the old couple that was meandering about, not really buying as much as looking. When I think about how judgmental I was I feel dirty and I want to go and take a shower. Judgment is the greatest of all sins in my book. Perhaps second is indulging in it, relishing the sense of superiority it brings, and worse, pretending that those feelings of frustration are “being in the moment.”

I am making headway here. I am beginning to see again how my moments are manufactured. How the “now” I am living is not really the “now” that I am in. Another way of saying this is. I’m not living in the moment, because I am too busy judging it, or analyzing it, or processing it. Do you see what I mean by this? Regardless, I am not going to be too hard on myself about this. It may not be who I want to be, but today it is who I am. Acceptance is the first step to change.