Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...

Probably Not the Best Example of Loving Kindness

I called somebody a "stupid fucking asshole" on the way to yoga class this morning...there in the middle of the street--him in his car that had careened in front of me, shaking with indignation, yelling, acting like he was gonna run into me on purpose, though I'd had the right of way...men, women, and children standing passively at the bus stop on the corner as I unleashed my invective, yoga mat slung over one shoulder.

Probably not the best example of loving kindness. Then, that well of rage, so easily tapped, might have something do with why I go to yoga class in the first place.

Joe Strummer sang

Let fury have the hour
Anger can be power
Know that you can use it

And that's true, up to a point, even if the number of oppressive regimes overthrown by punk rock seems to be securely locked at zero. I've been known to rage against people with positive attitudes, though it's generally only those who desperately want to have positive attitudes that are the problem; y'know, people who say "keep your bullshit negative attitudes away from me," without the least hint of irony. Smiling organic types who, if you're suffering, will tell you it's just your own bad karma, all your own fault for putting out negative energy--as if anything could be more negative than substituting rejection and judgement for kindness and empathy. Then, who knows, maybe all those people in Darfur need is just a good New Age seminar.

An American Tibetan Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron (yeah, I’m at least as dubious as you are about Westerners who become Buddhist nuns and change their names, though, as far as I know, she didn't drop nearly as much acid as Richard Alpert did before he became Ram Dass) (not that there’d be anything wrong with that if she had) wrote this about a Zen teacher named Bernard Glassman who works with the homeless: “he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected.” Could it be that all self-righteousness is, in essence, a refusal to accept what we see in the mirror?