From One Messed Up Dude To Another

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
Nietzsche

I can still hear momma say: “honey, don’t let it go to your head.”
Kim Gordon

...one thing I’ll say about Michael Jackson, he was one messed-up dude...and I say that without judgment, as a fellow messed-up dude...even if messed-up in very different ways...Tolstoy didn’t say that normal people are all alike but messed-up people are all messed-up in their own particular ways, but he might as well have...

...Michael Jackson’s problem, some say, was that he didn’t get to have an adolescence...my problem, it could be said, is that I did have one...and yet, like him, I suspect, I’ve sometimes felt that true happiness was lost with some important formative experiences I never had...

...I’ve certainly tried to remake myself...at least in terms of the ways I thought other people looked at me...more than once...even if I haven’t had any actual “work” done...nor have I managed to get obscenely wealthy...but, as with Michael Jackson, as has been made all too clear, I found the same problems remained right there where they were on the inside no matter what was done to hide them on the outside...

...to be honest, can’t say I was ever much of a fan of his...then, to the best of my knowledge, he was never much of a fan of mine...so we’re even....besides, if one thing’s clear about Michael Jackson, it’s that whatever stardom did for him, it wasn’t good...so, guess I can be glad I didn’t contribute to it, much...

...and, anyway, this is really only meant as a salute from one messed-up dude to another...and to all the other messed-up people out there struggling to love their messed-up selves...

If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill*

*stolen from Yogadork

Rachel Getting Married (Kind of a Movie Review #5)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

I know I can’t be the only whatever I am in the room....
Ani DiFranco

...went to see this movie last night called Rachel Getting Married, in which Anne Hathaway comes out of rehab and in to the heaving bosom of her painfully fractured family for a wedding....really captured the dynamics of dysfunction...the deep, festering wounds that only those within the circle can see...the ways something that might seem so harmless to any onlooker can explode so suddenly...as well as, even in its brightest moments, the excruciating awkwardness of always being the most fucked up person in the room, even in the midst of such of a family...or at least to feel that way...even in a wedding hip enough for the groom to start singing Neil Young songs in the midst of self-written vows...to feel like nobody else there is or ever was or ever could be so out of place...to simply wanna, needta get out...

Another time or place, another civilization
would really make this life feel so complete....
Neil Young

O, wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't!

Miranda (The Tempest, Shakespeare)

...apparently, the movie was originally supposed to be called Dancing With Shiva...after the figure in Hindu mythology who, according to yoga teachers I've known, dances in fire without being burned....this morning was in yoga class, where, like in every really good yoga class, I found myself going into surprising new areas of this place where I’ve been so long but have never, as long as I can remember, ever felt very comfortable...that I’ve never really gotten to know in 42 years...and that’s the real issue, isn’t it? That, often, the only place we really need to go is in....