It's Only Temporary, Jack
A Reminder in One's Quest for All the Experiences
To some extent I’ve always peddled misery somewhere. I’ve always had to fight a war against myself. It’s embedded in me. My war games were against myself. My toughest nightmare villain was a sort of Lich version of me, looking something like rot and exposed muscle—nearly impossible to inflict pain upon, resilient to everything but holy fire.
I may soon have a link for you in which I recount this fight directly in an old blog post. I fought this undead version of me in the Winery, where I was first swept up from an ordinary life and dared to be something greater than my parents’ son, or the corporate limit of the county seat I was born in.
I am more than my Mother’s resolution—through her fear of appearing stupid—that would enrich both my love of knowledge and my habit of self assault despite her attempting to protect me from the same. I am more than my Father’s anger—his feeling of being trapped and his need for freedom—from a woman more manipulative and overbearing than his own mother, hidden beneath a veneer of beauty that would last beyond his and until they both commiserated about “what to do about” their only son at 20 as he quit college, at 28 when I needed rent just before he was hired by a Big-Five pub house, at 34 when I quit the same job to go my own way, at 39 when my wife missed her family and we sold our house in a state that was never really our home.
My parents talked to each other post-divorce only to fight in the early days. Only to lament my progress in life in the last 20 years, during the three periods in which my non-linear path in life has held some constraints for me…but never them since I was 18, if we’re honest.
My mother and father are both married to their 4th spouses. Both filed for bankruptcy after their divorce from each other. I was on welfare from seven to ten years old. That didn’t really bother me (nor, thanks to extended family did I ever really feel it,) and thanks to my wife—after my first job in publishing I never really felt ‘poor’ again until I chose to, recently.
Three years ago, I chose to unleash myself—for the worse if we’re being completely honest—to the public at large. Here I’ve posted my thoughts for the last 18 months, which is extremely appropriate: my life has always seemed to work in these 3, 6, 9, 18, 36 moon cycles.
I’ve always tracked it, but I’ve never shown what I am in my journaling—highs, lows, self-assaults, deeply clever manipulations that point to a thorough and deserved failure…all through everything I ever asked for.
I saved DMT for later, but not much else. All of my relationships, bubbling hot or boring-as-fuck, lasted 2-6 months except for my wife—together now for 20 years and change.
I have worked in almost every type of entry job except fast-food…something I rectified last October when I took a maintenance job at McDonalds. I have managed people at UPS, FedEx, and HarperCollins Publishers. I got poor-rich on Crypto last year and did FUCK ALL but hang out with my kid, wander in the woods, and put on an event for people I admire while barely-holding-my-shit-together.
And I still admire them, though I understand now that I have been seeking belonging in a place where I was to receive wisdom-in-passing, as I am anywhere else. I lash out because I expected belonging in a place where I chose not to belong over and over. When I fear myself most, I stand on edges and make sad hedges…and these last three years have been too shiny and too beautiful for me to say yes to.
That’s fucked up, right?
I’m in therapy. I shit on it in writing because I want to let the beast out to someone. I want to hear the cosmic prosecutor and speak with its tongue. That has a place; it always has…but perhaps it can be a paring knife in the kitchen used for a charcuterie instead of a safety razor in the bathroom used as a story aid in the ongoing traumas in the infinite pretend teenage life of Fauler or Joe or s——h or whoever thinks it is riding the core of the meat.
The thing about healing or repairing or making-amends is that no one really wants to hear about YOUR STORY OF HEALING if you fucked up with them, and I fucked up with a lot of people by not showing up. We actually owe it to each other in some odd way that I will pivot against by not showing up with impunity…
…which is why I’m here, dear readers.
My story of healing is my story of healing my union to this world and to the people I find myself twined with by not being a little bitch who needs to tell his story of healing.
Oh my god, fuck.
Listen, this is NOT a story of healing. The truth is, I’m just fucking sad I’m poor. And when you’re sad you’re poor, rich people get nervous. Sad poor people do dumb shit. This isn’t me being sarcastic—this is true.
Rich people who got rich because they grew up around sad poor people doing dumb shit and no longer wanted to see sad poor people doing dumb shit ALSO know that almost ALL sad poor people must break out of the sad-poor loop MOSTLY BY THEMSELVES in those first steps in order to be invited to places where poor is fine so long as sad isn’t terminal, because mix almost any genuine mastery or deep interest into ‘not terminally sad’ and you generally get an interesting and enriching person to communicate with, in my lifetime and dataless canvassing of people who work all kinds of jobs and/or have all kinds of hobbies.
Some terrible and ancient machinery seeks the cessation of spiritual momentum whenever I get close to people or opportunities. I will not dwell on examples nor recount my own petulance as a means to bludgeon myself later…but holy shit, some part of me thinks it doesn’t count in words.
Some part of me says it doesn’t matter who sees it because I’m ‘algorithmically suppressed’ which is something only someone who has a critically unhealthy relationship with digital instant media says.
I make fun of a man thousands of miles away that I don’t know. I make fun of his ‘self control’ in a particular dietary dimensionality as if this was central to his value or career. I make fun of him…maliciously, really—and I have no reason to other than I’m being a little signaling monkey picking a side in an ideological fight I don’t really understand the bases of, because I don’t bother to read.
Then I ragepost for two days, snap on friends, attempt to shame myself by exposing all, coming to catharsis, feeling better because the volcano erupted, apologizing real nice to everyone, writing about how much I’ve changed…
And then, shit—it’s Monday again already! Time to ragepost and snap again.
I have to redefine my relationship with social media. Nothing can hinge on it. Not my livelihood, not my support system, not my moods.
I have to redefine my relationship with expression. I’m not writing about a topic. I’m not writing about an event. I’m writing about me.
Me. Me. Me. Me. How I feel. What I think. Meeeeeee. Me. Love me. Hate me. Reply to me. Engage me. I deserve what you have. I deserve what you make. I’m better than you. Meeeeeeee. Me. pout ME! ME, Damn it! Meeeeeeeee!
And then swirl into that—a nice turd of self-hatred.
I don’t want to be that way anymore. I want to create again, and I think I have to forget people and expectations for a while. I have to approach again completely differently. I have to be my heart and my architecture and in so doing, be so certain in it that I feel no need to tense quills at myself or others.
I sat with the cool kids in Freshman year of high school. I was a shithead. I was in my own brain. I was tense. I was worried about my skin. I was everything then about my body that I am now about my mind and career—and in that parallel, I know I’m doing nothing but terrorizing myself.
I exiled myself for 2 years. When I returned, I wasn’t perfect…but I was more opened. Blooming before I rot. I took my emotion to a literal dramatic stage and found my ground of friends—a few of whom were the people I ran away from when I just wasn’t ready…
…when all I could think to do was mentally beat the luck out of myself.
So in this outward and upward spiral, I don’t really hate myself. I don’t really hate anyone else. I am seeing it all aligning again—the whiny crybaby at the middle school dance and the Soph-hop date that never left the dance floor; the tagalong convinced he’d never charm a girl and the psychedelic smooth-talker who played puppy dog to a cute British Cornell student who “has a boyfriend” but was content to board me for a night when the alternative was literally sleeping in my friends’ car; the born loser who won when he had the interim helm of two magazines and then beat a handful of college grads into a publishing job, who won when he found the love of his life and likely three other lives, who won in the fucking height department and should be in stocks for ever whining, who won in the gift of forgiveness for what I know is the wrong way…what I know is unevolved.
I just know a lot of words and I’m not afraid to use them
or tattoo myself…
but the time has come to say more words and make more marks that we wish to see and feel for eternity.