Neighbors...

Walking home from my appointment at dusk.  Walking down my street, in my neighborhood, on my block.  Group of kids in front of me, walking slowly, taking up the sidewalk.  I walk around them, between the parking meters and the parked cars.  Passing the tiny girl up front, she yells at me, "You best say 'escuse me!'  I got kids here!  An' you don't say 'escuse me??'"  I hadn't bumped into her.  Hadn't touched her at all.  Her kids, a boy and girl about five or six years old, were on the other side of her from me; I was nowhere near them.  She hadn't had to so much as move an inch to avoid me at all.  I had simply walked around her.  And now she's angrily demanding an apology from me, as if I had done something inexcusably rude.  Never in my life has anyone ever said "excuse me" for simply walking past me.  For bumping into me, or getting in my way, certainly.  But not for simply walking by.  Nor has anyone in my entire life ever expected me to excuse myself or apologize simply for walking around them.  She's deliberately provoking me.  And I don't understand why.  I haven't done anything wrong.  But I'm suddenly very aware that each of these kids is black, and I am white.  And this confrontation we're having is our neighborhood, to the core.  This is our home.

I've lived in my neighborhood for over fifteen years now.  This girl staring me down with angry eyes looks to only be about twenty, give or take five years.  It's possible that I was living here before she was even born.  I went to school in this neighborhood when I was a child.  I feel like this is as much my home as hers.  But she has no way of knowing this.  This has been a traditionally black neighborhood for over a hundred and fifty years.  Back then, it was the Freemen's quarter; the first people to settle on this particular piece of ground were freed slaves.  This has been a black neighborhood from the very first brick.  But a few years ago, it started to get very, very gentrified.  Rich, white developers came in and swooped up cheap properties, fixed them up with marble counter-tops and hardwood floors and halogen track lights.  Sold them to rich, white hipsters who wanted to live close to the burgeoning downtown bar scene.  Back then, I was the only white person living in my apartment complex.  Developers bought it and turned it into a condo.  We all got letters saying we needed to buy our apartments or find someplace else to live.  I bought mine.  Everyone else left.  And since then the neighborhood has been this uneasy mix of poor black living side-by-side with rich white.  And I've seen it.  Seen exactly this happening before.  But this is the first time I've experienced it myself.  She doesn't know me anymore than I know her.  We're both making assumptions about each other.  She has no way of knowing that I went to school around the corner, or that I've lived on this block my entire adult life.  All she sees is another doughy white, nerdy-looking hipster who had the fucking nerve to walk too close to her without showing her proper respect.

Things escalate very quickly.  "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to be rude.  I just walked around you."  "You best watch who you talkin' to 'for I smack yo' fat ass!"  There's no good way to respond here.  What am I supposed to do?  Fight these kids?  Let them beat me up?  Why?  So they can feel better about themselves?  So I can feel better about feeling better than them?  And there's clearly no reasoning with someone who, within a matter of seconds, is willing to resort to threats of physical violence with someone twice her size for something as minor as stepping around them.  Talking about it any further is clearly pointless.  There's no reasoning with a bully.  I learned that lesson the hard way, long ago.  No choice but to simply end this as quickly and quietly as possible.  I turn and walk away.  To more taunts and threats thrown at my back.  Victory cheers for having driven out the interloper, the outsider.  For having proved her strength and dominance to the rest of the tribe.  For having earned back the respect I somehow stripped her of by walking past her.  I'm instantly ten years old again.  On the playground again.  Having my dignity stolen by a pack of fifth grade delinquents again.  Being called "fat ass" again.  Feeling like an outcast again.  Feeling scared again.  For the first time in fifteen years, I feel scared in my own neighborhood.  For the first time ever, I feel like this isn't my home, and never will be.  I will never be welcome here.  I let them make me feel like an outsider in my own neighborhood.  I let these kids make me feel scared in my own home.  I don't feel like I had any choice.  And there's some part of me that feels I deserve it.

Discipline?...

My friend commended me on my self-discipline last night.

And I told her, "I don't feel like I have any discipline.  I just have a really deep bag of tricks."

To my mind, "self-discipline" implies some sort of forceful inner strength, which I don't feel I have.  (Though, a lot of what I'm working on with my Self right now is related to trying to learn it.)  And, regardless, even if I do have it, it's not what I generally use to change or better myself.

I'm not strong that way.  I'm slippery.

I don't just force myself to move forward with the things I know I should do instead of the things I want to do.  Instead, I figure out how to perceive the situation so that I end up wanting to do the thing I know I should do.

I don't make myself do things I don't like; I figure out how to perceive them so that I do like them.

I think an ounce of cunning is worth a metric ton of force.

When We Fall...

It's amazing how quickly you can fall back out of shape.

Just a few weeks of not working out (one week at the AGM, one week recovering from being sick, one week having all free time and energy eaten up by work, etc.) and suddenly I feel like I'm back to square one.  I know it's not that simple, and experience tells me that I will actually bounce back into form a lot quicker than it took to get into shape in the first place - but, still, this morning was... kinda scary, if I'm honest.

I thought I was taking it light.  Not even considering the weights at this point, since I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things after such a long absence.  Just figured I'd do my usual fifteen minutes on the elliptical (with a five minute cool-down afterwards) that I start every workout with.  Maybe I'd push it to twenty minutes, if I was feeling up to it.  That is really not much at all; I used to do thirty to forty-five minutes on the elliptical, before I started incorporating the weights into my routine.

But this fifteen minutes was hard.  Much more difficult than I expected.  I was really pushing myself with everything I had just to get through it.  But I did it; I made it through the whole thing, and was relieved to reach the cool-down afterwards.  (No way was I going to try for twenty!)  But as soon as I slowed my pace, I knew something was wrong.  My heart was racing much more than I'm used to.  And I could feel my pulse in my head.  I was having a hard time catching my breath, and I was starting to get dizzy.

Pretty immediately, I climbed down off the machine, and went and sat down on the floor with my back to the wall.  I held my water bottle (which, thankfully, I fill with ice-water before every workout) all around my neck, to cool down the blood in my carotid artery, going to my brain.  I tried to breath slow and deep and even, and waited for the dizziness to pass.  Which it did after just a couple of minutes.

Now, admittedly, I was having a hard time getting a decent reading off the heart-rate monitor on that machine.  (For the whole workout it had been giving me all these low-ball readings that I knew could not possibly be correct, and that made me mistrustful of the other readings that seemed like they could possibly be reasonable.  And then at the end, after not giving me a reading higher then 155bpm for the entire workout, it suddenly gave me a reading of 180bpm, which is way into my red zone, and much higher than I would ever usually let myself get to.  So, was that an anomalous reading, like all the low-balls?  Or was that the first true reading I'd gotten all workout?)  But, still, just a matter of a few weeks ago this was my warm-up, for crying out loud.  And it just floored me!  Literally!

So, obvious lesson-learned is that I need to take it easy, and start slower.  At the same time, my little brother and his girlfriend just challenged me to a contest to see who could be the first one to lose fifteen pounds.  And that's definitely a motivator.  But I have to remember to be careful.  I'm not twenty-five anymore.

And I won't be able to gloat if I'm dead.

What I Should Have Said...

I realize now that I failed at SMART last night.

Because it was my last meeting before the AGM, I felt like I should continue talking about my concerns about that (which unfortunately I can't discuss here - erg).  But, since my meeting with my old Temple the weekend before last, and my reflections on that meeting over the last week, I largely don't have any more concerns about the AGM left to discuss.  I feel pretty confident and excited about it right now.  So, I mentioned that.  And talked a little about how tired I was because of work lately.  And that was about it for my sharing.

But now I know that what I should have talked about, was the fact that throughout the entire meeting, I couldn't stop thinking about how badly I wanted to get the Tuesday night ribs 'n' wings dinner special at the bbq place around the corner as soon as the meeting was over.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with this bbq place.  They are Satanic.  Even their name sounds sinister:  Black Hog.  Their bbq is so good and it is so not what I should be eating right now.  I live very nearby the place, and it seems as if they've intentionally timed their cooking to coincide with my commute, because every night when I get home from work, the first thing I notice is the smell of woodsmoke and charred meat.  Fucking bastards.  Here I am, trying to eat right and get in shape, and every night they viciously assault me with their deliciousness.  It's cruel.

And last night was no different.  As soon as I got out of my car - BAM - like a smack across the face, there came that intoxicating aroma of flame-scorched flesh.  And what's worse, I had a pretty shitty day yesterday, and by that point I was tired and wasn't in a very good mood.  And all I had to look forward to for the rest of the night, was a SMART meeting that I really didn't feel like going to, and a pre-packaged, frozen dinner afterwards.  And that made bbq seem like an even better idea.  A little treat, just to pick myself up.  I deserved it, didn't I?

But that's exactly the problem, and exactly why I couldn't stop thinking about it all through the meeting.  I wasn't really hungry, and I wasn't really craving bbq.  I was trying to make myself feel better.  I was trying to elevate my mood.  And I've found that now that I'm no longer using mood-elevating substances like drugs and booze, I'm more and more lately turning to food to achieve the same results.  It's just another example of my inability to endure any unhappiness at all, and my compulsive use of external influences (or substances) that I know are not good for me in the long run, just to make myself feel better right now.

And it's really pissing me off.

I'm working really hard to try and get in shape right now, and every time I give in to my need to make myself feel better by eating some totally-delicious-and-totally-bad-for-me food, I feel as if I'm un-doing all of that hard work, and making all of that pain and sacrifice worth nothing.  And more and more I'm feeling like a failure whenever I do this, for once again failing to endure even the most minor of emotional discomfort, and for sacrificing my health and shooting myself in the foot just because I cannot abide any unhappiness.  And those feelings of guilt and failure end up tainting my experience of the meal, so in the end, I don't end up feeling better anyways.  It's the exact same cycle I'm experiencing in my recovery from drug and alcohol abuse.

So, I sat there throughout the meeting, dreaming of ways to get out of there early and sneak off to get high on bbq, and knowing full-well that I shouldn't.  But I managed to stay until the end.  And then the whole walk home I wrestled with it.  I wanted so badly to keep walking and round the corner and pick up a bag of ribs and wings and bring them back home and devour them.

But I was too aware of the problem.  Too aware of what I was really doing, and what it really meant.  In the end, I couldn't bring myself to do it, in the exact same way that I can't seem to bring myself to take a drink, even when I really want to:  it would cost me so much self-esteem and self-respect to do it - to fail at this task and take that drink, or eat that nasty-delicious food - that it's just not worth doing anymore.

So, instead of making myself feel better with food, I tried to make myself feel better by focusing on the positive aspects of my decision.  I tried to feel good about the fact that I was saving money by not eating out, again.  (We eat out every week, sometimes two or three times.  There are a dozen great restaurants within a two block radius of us, and it is so hard to make ourselves eat our crappy grocery-store dinners when we have money in our pockets and stupid-delicious food all around us.)  I tried to feel good about the fact that I wasn't undoing all my pain and effort from my workouts.  I tried to feel good about the fact that I was making progress, and actually succeeding in my efforts to endure unhappiness for a change, rather than immediately balming it away by any means necessary.  And I did feel good about those things.  But none of them helped to improve my mood the way I wanted, and I was still feeling like a grumpy old shit when I went to bed last night.

But today?

Today I feel good.

Today, I'm proud of myself for what I accomplished last night.

And just like with my working-out, I feel stronger today for the pain I forced myself to endure yesterday.

We May Just Go Where No One's Been...

This is a song about magick, life, and the endless possibilities inherent in humanity.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
Lets me see.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn beyond the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will
to feel that moment.
Drawing way outside the lines.

Black
then
white are
all I see
in my infancy.
Red and yellow then came to be,
reaching out to me.
lets me see
there is
so much
more and
beckons me
to look through to these
infinite possibilities.

As below, so above and beyond, I imagine
drawn outside the lines of reason.
Push the envelope.
Watch it bend.

Over-thinking,
over-analyzing,
separates the body from the mind.
Withering
my intuition,
leaving opportunities behind.

Feed my will to
feel this moment
urging me to cross the line.
Reaching out to embrace
the random.
Reaching out to embrace
whatever may come.

I embrace my
desire to...
I embrace my
desire to
feel the rhythm, to
feel connected
enough to step aside and
weep like a widow, to
feel inspired, to
fathom the power, to
witness the beauty, to
bathe in the fountain, to
swing on the spiral, to
swing on the spiral, to

swing on the spiral of
our divinity and
still be a human.

With my feet upon the ground
I lose myself between the sounds
and open wide to suck it in,
I feel it move across my skin.
I'm reaching up
and reaching out,
I'm reaching for
the random or
whatever will bewilder me.
Whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and whim
we may just go where no one's been.
We'll ride the spiral to the end
and may just go where no one's been.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

Spiral out. Keep going.

               -"Lateralus"
                 Tool, Lateralus

Three Diamonds...

:   i have realized something

:   i have realized the distilled essence of all of my desires

:   is simply to be able to Love you

:   or, more honestly, that you would be able to let me Love you


:   and i have realized something else

:   i have realized that this desire of mine

:   to be free to Love you completely

:   with neither regret nor remorse

:   will never be fulfilled


:   and so now i have a choice


:   i can let go of this desire

:   to save myself

:   from constant rejection and disappointment

:   i can accept that you will never let me Love you

:   the way that i want to

:   the way that i try to

:   i can let go of this desire

:   accept my fate

:   and simply stop trying


:   or


:   i can take it

:   i can endure

:   and keep Loving you

:   knowing full-well that Loving you means

:   an oft-broken heart


:   and i have realized one more thing

:   one final thing

:   that for a life spent Loving you

:   You

:   for that I can be

:   for that I will be

:   for that, I am


:   Strong