The cycle of past-mistakes reborn and re-lived gets nauseatingly familiar to me at times. Im taking a few days off from them, and just seeing how things go. I want to develop positive routines, and baring that, neutral ones. Like washing the dishes. I make coffee I dont need and food I dont want so that I may fill my sink with hot lava water and just the right dash of dishwater soap. That burgeoning matrix of bubbles grow with the steam, and the dishes clink to rest or attempt to float. Part of me wants to wash it all right away, but its too hot and I have to sit down for awhile. Sit down and wait for the water to be cool enough to plunge my hands into. The routine (a neutral one) stretches out. Its better than fucking when I shouldnt or drinking when I shouldnt or trying when I cant.
Some other recent things that are better than that include:
-getting out all my old pictures and tapping each and every one of them to my living room wall in half-hazard dorm-room style.
-talking on the phone with a new friend who thinks im a good person and JUST met me, therebye proving that its not just
something I used to be.
-taking out stacks and stacks of New Yorker Magazine and re-reading good stuff.
-listening to NPR
-watching public broadcasting
-riding a bike
-thinking about rain
We all fall into subtle categories for certain extended periods of time. Ive been a certain kind of Adam for awhile, and that was alright so long as I could be another certain kind of Adam at other times. Duality had become not only an addiction for me, but a necessity to mental welfare. I had to believe in Ohio while I believed in Portland; I had to believe in myself while I believed in the world. I had to be a healer of others during the day and a destructive twitch to myself at night. I want to be clear, I dont mean extreme alcoholism or drugs till 4am, yet even my minor discrepancies against so called normal living were taking their toll. Its just that if you need to be up doing something important every morning, it starts feeling stupid when you dont get to bed until daybreak. Even if I was just wandering the internet and drinking beers all night, the crusty eyes and sagging energy the next day are going to be making you feel like a fraud.
Work now is strange. Strange for two reasons. One is that Ive clearly committed myself to the place. I cant leave, not matter how unhappy or strange everything else gets about it. I made a commitment, and like the tattoos, Im really wanting to start committing to things right now. One year I said. One year I would promise to give them, at the least. Its only been a month. The second reason that work is weird is that Im not all that good at it. Im used to being impressively good with children. Im used to striking people with my intuitive sense of things. But much of my talents and skills with youth are diminished in this very poor, very black, and very different segment of society. The racial elements are legion, and I should write about them sometime. More important that race, however, is poverty. Im trying to adjust, and I refuse to run. I will learn how to be useful to my new clients and their parents. I will just keep asking them how I can help. I dont feel like Im any better at solving problems than they are, or any clearer in purpose or place. Being an answer or having notions of saving are absurd. I just want to be useful. I guess Im used to kids that can, at the least, expect one or more parents to love and feed them. That is no longer a garentee with the kids I work with.
Theres a sick kind of over-dramatisization that I have within me. Many of us do. But be it fantasy of fact, I feel like Ive really changed for the worse over the past six months. Im going to try and identify why and how, and improve.
Cycles. Routine. Change and change and change. To be who we want to be, we must demand that we pretend we are already it until we cannot tell the difference. Who do I want to be? I have no more of a clear image of that today than I did five years ago.
I have a new sexual fantasy. Im with a woman, and the face is mutable. Sometimes its somebody I just met. Sometimes its Lauren or Patsy or another of my friends. The woman looks up at me just after foreplay and just before I start to put on a condom. She looks up in my eyes and she holds my head and she tells me not to put one on. That I can trust her. Trust. Its funny that the condom becomes my daydream's answer to so many other issues. She stares at me and demands my trust. She holds my ears and my eyesight while she guides me into her, my skin naked and open to all the real or metaphoric taints that one can aquire from trust and openness. I cry when I come in her. The comeing is soft and focused.
She is never Marisa in my fantasy. She would, I suppose, never be somebody I actually had sexual access to.
The fantasy inpired me to break off some things in some satisfactorily definite ways. In some ways the ink on my arms helped me believe I could affect things again. I feel so weak about so many things, because I cant seem to make permanent impacts on my life.
I should write that down as issue number one. Become more affirmative about what I want and need. Stop seeing Marisa being action number one towards mastering issue number one. Sucks that I needed Dusty to point that out to me. Im usually so self-checking. But its good to have a friend like that.
This could just go on and on. Ill stop for the evening.
Adam
Some other recent things that are better than that include:
-getting out all my old pictures and tapping each and every one of them to my living room wall in half-hazard dorm-room style.
-talking on the phone with a new friend who thinks im a good person and JUST met me, therebye proving that its not just
something I used to be.
-taking out stacks and stacks of New Yorker Magazine and re-reading good stuff.
-listening to NPR
-watching public broadcasting
-riding a bike
-thinking about rain
We all fall into subtle categories for certain extended periods of time. Ive been a certain kind of Adam for awhile, and that was alright so long as I could be another certain kind of Adam at other times. Duality had become not only an addiction for me, but a necessity to mental welfare. I had to believe in Ohio while I believed in Portland; I had to believe in myself while I believed in the world. I had to be a healer of others during the day and a destructive twitch to myself at night. I want to be clear, I dont mean extreme alcoholism or drugs till 4am, yet even my minor discrepancies against so called normal living were taking their toll. Its just that if you need to be up doing something important every morning, it starts feeling stupid when you dont get to bed until daybreak. Even if I was just wandering the internet and drinking beers all night, the crusty eyes and sagging energy the next day are going to be making you feel like a fraud.
Work now is strange. Strange for two reasons. One is that Ive clearly committed myself to the place. I cant leave, not matter how unhappy or strange everything else gets about it. I made a commitment, and like the tattoos, Im really wanting to start committing to things right now. One year I said. One year I would promise to give them, at the least. Its only been a month. The second reason that work is weird is that Im not all that good at it. Im used to being impressively good with children. Im used to striking people with my intuitive sense of things. But much of my talents and skills with youth are diminished in this very poor, very black, and very different segment of society. The racial elements are legion, and I should write about them sometime. More important that race, however, is poverty. Im trying to adjust, and I refuse to run. I will learn how to be useful to my new clients and their parents. I will just keep asking them how I can help. I dont feel like Im any better at solving problems than they are, or any clearer in purpose or place. Being an answer or having notions of saving are absurd. I just want to be useful. I guess Im used to kids that can, at the least, expect one or more parents to love and feed them. That is no longer a garentee with the kids I work with.
Theres a sick kind of over-dramatisization that I have within me. Many of us do. But be it fantasy of fact, I feel like Ive really changed for the worse over the past six months. Im going to try and identify why and how, and improve.
Cycles. Routine. Change and change and change. To be who we want to be, we must demand that we pretend we are already it until we cannot tell the difference. Who do I want to be? I have no more of a clear image of that today than I did five years ago.
I have a new sexual fantasy. Im with a woman, and the face is mutable. Sometimes its somebody I just met. Sometimes its Lauren or Patsy or another of my friends. The woman looks up at me just after foreplay and just before I start to put on a condom. She looks up in my eyes and she holds my head and she tells me not to put one on. That I can trust her. Trust. Its funny that the condom becomes my daydream's answer to so many other issues. She stares at me and demands my trust. She holds my ears and my eyesight while she guides me into her, my skin naked and open to all the real or metaphoric taints that one can aquire from trust and openness. I cry when I come in her. The comeing is soft and focused.
She is never Marisa in my fantasy. She would, I suppose, never be somebody I actually had sexual access to.
The fantasy inpired me to break off some things in some satisfactorily definite ways. In some ways the ink on my arms helped me believe I could affect things again. I feel so weak about so many things, because I cant seem to make permanent impacts on my life.
I should write that down as issue number one. Become more affirmative about what I want and need. Stop seeing Marisa being action number one towards mastering issue number one. Sucks that I needed Dusty to point that out to me. Im usually so self-checking. But its good to have a friend like that.
This could just go on and on. Ill stop for the evening.
Adam
You're not alone.
Tell me something in my journal that you might not normally.....
Thanks for getting in touch,
David.