Sloth is my predilection. I would rather sit around all the time and stare off into space, sleep, let my brain rot in front of the television. This, I fear, is my mother's gift to me. My brain is genetically wired to desire apathy and vapidity. At least on some level it is.
On some other level, it's geared wildly toward pleasure. All physical pleasures that don't exhaust or kill. The taste of morbier or the fire of bourbon. The loveliest launch of semen across the face of a lover. An hour long massage. A full belly. A good and willful shit.
Yet again, it longs for supremacy over others. I have an abiding longing to be right. But to be right, I can't sit around all day and drink bourbon and take good and willful shits after a nice, long fuck. I must also be productive and successful, even a little bit wealthy.
When I finally rouse myself to be useful and productive, I usually have more energy to be about it than others. I find that I spend long hours at various works, good works for the common good, for the good of my tribes: my work tribe, my church tribe, my Welsh tribe, my neighborhood tribe, etc.
Another gift from my mother, but one she purchased at the Future-Nutcase-Store with my father's credit card: Anxiety. Deep and roaming. It lives with me like a fetid lump of puke on the bathroom floor... one of those pukes that colonizes the provinces of the toilet like the lost tribe of Israel - always showing up when you least expect it and long after you thought it was gone for good.
There's no way to deny Anxiety forever. It's hard-wired into me like breathing. I spend many long hours tempting my fear to be real. I stand it down as though it were Goliath. I David it daily with Valerian Root, booze and Pennsylvania German tenacity.
Life's a stage...
I play the role of my aunty when her boyfriend stuck a gun in her side and told her to come away with him or he would shoot. "Go ahead and kill me then," she said. So do I. Every day Anxiety says my heart is stopping, my lungs are filling, my food is poisoned. So I say to Anxiety, "Then do it, kill me. If this my time then take me into the Question Mark. Let me know who was right: the boring and listless skeptics or the fundies who cling to their primitive religions like crabs to the crotch of the cosmos."
Just like her boyfriend did, Anxiety lets me go, backing down like a momma's boy bully. My Anxiety desires life, and it can't live without me, so it backs down every time. When I finally die, it will go with me into the furnace at the crematorium and be extinguished with me.
Yet, I do not find the emptiness others do. No hopelessness. I just find a not-knowing-ness. I take my vitamins and do my exercises, check my blood levels of this and that every year just to buy myself a little more time. Death may lead to a million things, but it may also lead to nothing. I see no reason to rush for no reason. The others can keep their novenas and jihads, their smug self-righteous platitudes whether based in myth or so-called facts.
I always remember the wise words of the Druid of Landévenec, who said to the Abbot of Landévennec, "When we cross that final threshold, we may both find out we were wrong." So tomorrow I will awake in the morning and curse the very existence of the unviverse, but when i finally pull myself into the shower then anoint myself like a modern day Roman with oils and tinctures, I will embrace the day as though I were a Viking praying to live to fight another day...
dissabte, de setembre 06, 2008
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I relate to so much of this. I, too, rise to fight another day, not always certain of that for which I fight. I suppose it's simply to continue. Whether it's oblivion or Valhalla at the end of it all, I'm in no rush to find out.
-Tree
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