The Other Side of Patriarchy

 I am incapable of asking for help in a world that demands I be strong enough to be fine without it. This year has been so hard for so many, and I could easily list out all the reasons why it has destroyed every little bit of my soul, but I would rather acknowledge that maybe it wasn't a soul worth saving?

It's ok to not be strong enough. It's ok to need help. Who cares what the world says when you are a living, breathing part of something infinitely larger? If the Universe wasn't there to help you solve your problems, then she wouldn't have given them to you. Everything you need to know is right in front of you. Don't waste your life away searching for something that you already have.

Happy New Year. May you all use your powers for the good that we deserve.

... To Injury

 We had Papa Bear cremated, but we wanted to say goodbye to his body beforehand, so we had a little viewing, which turned into a number of negligent misunderstandings with the funeral home. They were finally able to get us in on Friday the 13th, with a full moon in scorpio. When we got home I went to upload the photos from the day and my primary photo hard drive no longer worked. I tried to get it recovered, but no go. Every single photo I've taken in the last year and a half are gone. Every photo I've taken with my phone in the last 6 years are gone. Gone. The day we viewed my father's body the universe took it all away. So many times I joked about throwing it all away and starting over. Well, here you go. The few that survived were all that was left in the website, blogs, and dropbox folders. All treated, 60% .jpgs; no digital negatives.

Control.

Alt.

Delete.

Something was meant to be.

Remember, Remember...

 

….. it had to be the fifth of November. We had just spent a week in Nebraska visiting my wife’s family, in this year where I have basically given up my work to connect more with family. Upon our return, I immediately went back to work, and my wife headed down the hill for an optometry appointment, you know, back to real life stuff. I spent the morning finishing up a brewing course that my boss had enrolled me in, so I was floating on that significant achievement and we planned to celebrate when she got home, then I got a call that someone plowed into her car at a stop light.

Suddenly the significance of the day turned to losing Cricket, the tank of a Subaru that made most of our adventures possible over the last five years. When she finally did make it home safe and was on the phone with insurance, I was contacted by my dad’s boss… in a frighteningly urgent way… a knowingly urgent way. My dad hadn’t shown up for work in a couple days and wasn’t returning phone calls, and anyone who knows my father and his amish work ethic can attest that is painfully obvious evidence that he has either quit or died, and he rarely quits anything. My dad’s boss knew this, so he was at his house, saw his car, heard his phone ringing from the dark inside, and told me I needed to come down. I sat with it for a bit while my wife was on the phone, demanding in my mind that he was just really tired, but I knew that he would wake up from a deep sleep, having not slept for days, to answer a SPAM phone call, mumble that he didn’t want to change his cable service, argue for a little bit with them, then hang up and go back to sleep. Still in denial, I called his phone and his voicemail was full, which also happens never.

I began to realize that he was tired, but nothing sleep could fix, so we packed up and drove the hour to his desert condo, already knowing, and gradually coming to terms with what we would find. Our last significant conversation was after my oldest daughter’s wedding. He missed the ceremony, even though he was informed that it had changed places, and spent the reception primarily blank and staring at the table, then left early after wandering aimlessly around like he was lost. I called him a couple days later to see if he was ok, and he opened up to me like he had never done, ever, as if I was the only person who would understand.

There was a ton of shame, and guilt, and remorse, about how he had lived his life and the choices he made, and I completely understood. I told him he could change that in his immediate life and we invited him to our youngest daughter’s birthday a week later. He sat in the corner and didn’t really interact with anyone, to the point that I had to disengage from the party to talk to him and make him more comfortable, and my wife tried to include him by having him hold the piñata rope. He left pretty blank. Something was definitely missing, and I felt it.

What I found on the floor next to his bed was not, in my mind, the body of someone who had a heart attack, or a stroke, or had even died. I couldn’t help but see someone who laid down on the ground and gave up. I saw a soul who had tried for 70 years and was just done. My wife went and sat with him, and I just stood there. What I felt most was abandonment. I felt left behind. When the only person on the planet you knew would always be there for you, no matter what, is gone, it is pretty difficult to not want to give up, too. When we have little souls who are dependent on us, we can’t do that, though, can we?

We have to find a way to fight through all of the feelings and push forward. My family means far too much to me to leave them feeling the abandonment I’m feeling right now, though it is inevitable. I am also feeling the regret and shame that my father seemed to prepare me for in that last significant conversation. I don’t feel like I was a good son, and I know I wasn’t the best friend I could be. That’s my own stuff to look at. It is strange to think that he was about my age when I was displaced from LA to this little mountain town because his work moved to the ass end of the Coachella Valley.

After 30 years of hearing him complain about how miserable he was in the desert, and trying to talk him into heading back home, or anywhere for that matter, his time is finally up. “One day,” he would always say. One day I’ll get an RV and travel like I always wanted to. One day I’ll go back home. He had so many excuses, and he simply ran out of days. He was eating healthier and putting his life in order, like he was ready to get out of here, or maybe he was just finishing things up the best he could because he was done?

What I do know is that I feel something significant missing from my life, and now I can’t call him to talk about it. I know these little memories are supposed to be all butterflies and rainbows, celebrating someone’s life, but I don’t feel like I need to tell anyone what kind of person he was. Everyone who ever met him loved him. He always went out of his way to help, to a fault, and I don’t feel like he was ever truly appreciated, though I know he was by those closest to him, which were few. He never really accomplished anything significant. He just kept going to work. No matter what happened, he would be there getting things done. That is causing me to look at a lot of things, and it is more difficult than I thought it would be.

What am I actually doing, sitting on this mountain that I’ve been trying to escape since I was a teenager, and why does the universe keep giving me beautiful opportunities to keep me here? I feel like I’ve already wasted 20 years of my life sitting here, waiting… for what? All I ever wanted to do was get in my car and drive, and just keep going. I wonder if that was a seed planted by my father? We used to get in the car when I was a kid and just drive around, but we never really went anywhere? There was always work to do.

That joke I always told about my having the soul of a wandering nomad and the mind of an Amish farmer isn’t really funny anymore, because both of those characters have stopped fighting each other, and are staring at a lifeless body on the floor. One day he’ll get up, crack a joke about how tired he was from working so much, and get mad at me for driving all the way down there to check on him, because he’s fine. Then he’ll leave everything holding him back, get in his car, and drive, until he simply can’t anymore.

Any day now.

I think the fact that it has taken me this long to even recount the events of that night is evidence of how much this has affected me, but I really haven't been able to process any of it. My father never really showed much emotion. He just kept going. When asked about my childhood, my father would always joke that I cried a lot. I've always felt like I needed to be stoic like him in order to survive, but I always felt a lot, and I still feel a lot. Now I'm realizing that no one ever showed me what to do with that.

I am always trying to be better, but I am human and I trip over myself a lot. All this work and this blog and this everything seem so pointless now, but I still feel like I should be doing it, so I don't really now what to do anymore but love my family the best I can, and just keep going. For those of you who don't understand the significance of the 299 pin: my father loved bowling, and a perfect game is 300 points. The closest he ever got to that was 299, a strike in every frame except that last "lousy 10 pin." They gave it to him, and he kept it next to his desk in the office of a lumber yard in Thermal where he worked for 30 years. If that doesn't sum up my father's life, I don't know what does. That was his joke: one pin short of a perfect game. Keep driving, papa bear. I'll pack my beautiful little family up in the car and meet you out there...

...one day.

Existential Vacuum

To generalize the way people choose to live their lives, there are two basic types of people in the world (in that cliché way): those who listen, and those who question. Those who listen waste their lives away chasing a delusion that only exists as a matter of subjective perception, which is quantum physically sound; id est, if you believe something is true, it is… for you: you will live a happy, or societally-driven unhappy life based on your own definition of things, which is nothing more than the definition that has been given to you.

If you are afraid of something, which in our modern world is just about everything because of the media loop that we are all plugged into, you are more apt to just do your job as a gear in the machine and keep things as they are, where basically nothing happens outside of what you’re told is supposed to happen, and if something happens that we didn’t expect we fall into at least a mild state of panic because we aren’t prepared to respond to it. The conundrum is that those who question based on the societal conditioning of absolutes, also waste their lives away demanding that things are never what we are told they are; so even in questioning the absolutes that we are force fed, we are demanding that another absolute exists. Those who listen often question, but more as compliant, and those who question listen more than they would ever admit, as is evident by their blatant opposition and obvious insecurities.

Once you question long enough you stop listening, and you basically live in the madness of no one understanding that another alternative exists, but your alternative as an absolute is just as bad as everyone else’s reality because to truly question, in a world of absolute theory, not subjective reality (which I’m pretty confident are the same thing), you must also respect that souls may choose not to question and still be perfectly fine with that; to question is also to question yourself and accept that the solution only exists in the answers that work for the way you perceive things, whilst remaining in thus and not being afraid of that.

You either live in fear of what they’re telling you to be afraid of, or you live in the fear that nothing is what they tell you and we, as a society, are doomed to never understand and always live in this hamster wheel. The hamster wheel of the listener leads to misery because we either aren’t getting what we’re told we’re supposed to want or have or need after jumping through all the required hoops, or we do get what we want or “need,” only to discover that it doesn’t bring us the comfort or happiness that we were told we would feel because we’ve let go of the comfort and happiness that already existed, but we were told didn’t exist because things are supposed to be how they told you they would be to keep us running our tired asses off on this journey to get what we never really wanted or needed.

The hamster wheel of the questioner leads to misery because nothing will ever be how we think it should be, so we keep searching. There is comfort in understanding that everyone is right if they want to be, and nothing will ever be what we think it is, but in getting off all the hamster wheels and just being, we are often creating an existential vacuum for ourselves. If everyone is right if they want to be, and you accept that the answers that seem so obvious to you only exist in your delusion, then what’s the point in attempting to change anything? Just live your life and accept the fact that while everything may be in question, everything in question is also true to anyone who believes it, right? That certainly takes any purpose out of my existence. Then Victor Frankl points out to me, in his defining logotherapy, the meaning of life, which can be found in three simple things: by creating work or doing a deed; by experiencing something or encountering someone; and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

What if those first two generally test the third? What if we need to eliminate the first two to avoid the third, or change your perception so drastically that you are throwing away meaning to find meaning or attain meaning, when the latter of the three embodies existence itself, though some choose to suffer in nothing, while others think nothing of suffering. Is this me failing at the third? Stepping back from my work and looking at myself is like getting lost in an Escher, and I don’t like it. I think I’m beginning to understand that I’ll never understand, and no one can understand that. The closer you get to a point, the more it becomes a circle.

The Dark Void Between Stories

I have obviously taken a big step back from all of this, but am so very grateful that the seed planted in Nadia grew into her beautiful insight. I have approached a few about shooting these last couple months, but ended up having the same conversation and dealing with the same misconception, so I just stepped back even further. The Universe is really just relentlessly kicking my ass right now, and I am learning so much about myself, my purpose, my usefulness, and my worth, which involves finally understanding that I need to take the “my” out of everything.

I have felt separated my entire life, forcefully, like it is my place to be punished by everything, but I have realized that I no longer need to worry so much about telling my story; I need to use my story to help tell a better one. That being said…

I was told the other day that I write like a girl, and I just thought… good. I was advised to read more Bukowski and Hemingway to get all the Greek poets out of my head, so I began trying to figure out a way to sort all my work in the galleries on this site under Greek headings (Θάρρος, Ψυχή, Χορός, et cetera), you know, like a girl would do.

Hemingway would just go on and on about bullfighting and Bukowski was a fucking pig. Maybe I should write like Miller and just say “cunt” every other line, or go into intimate detail about incestuous orgies? Would that be a better masculine voice? Would this community appreciate reading that?

Maybe going the Burroughs route and just vomiting drug induced and grotesque homo-eroticism all over this already drowning in toxic masculinity world would be more beneficial for everyone who needs a bit more Greek heart and soul? That was an awkward sentence; pretty sure there should’ve been a comma or hyphen, or ten, in there somewhere, but I don’t really care. Of the advised reading, Hemingway wasn’t all that bad, in his grunting and poking and fist-fighting, but he also ate a shotgun, so clearly that character worked out great for him.

The only thing Bukowski really had going for him was that he never gave up; the man who has “give up” on his gravestone never gave up; but I’m pretty convinced that anything remotely beautiful in his work was purely accidental because there was so much of it, like a chimp locked in a room with a typewriter. I often wonder how many times he read something he wrote, in some obscure publication that had given up on accomplishing something beautiful with their platform, and thought, “when the fuck did I write that?”

He was so mind numbingly wasted 110% of the time that I guess his greatest accomplishment isn’t that he didn’t give up, but that he was able to form coherent sentences while pissing himself and throwing up in the waste basket that probably had all his good work in it, but he was too stupid and “manly” to realize it. Most of the masculine voices I read are borderline offensive, usually annoying at best because of the “manly” things obsessed over, in a world where heart has become a place where men are not supposed to venture into, and if they do, it should only be attached to shallow physical attributes or activities.

It’s ok to have your “heart in the game,” but it is a sign of weakness if you make decisions in your life with your heart. You don’t hear many “men” say that their heart is telling them to do something, and if they do it’s because they’ve learned the benefit of being vulnerable with women. Men don’t talk with each other like that. They talk about instinct and intuition, manly things separated from emotion, because it’s not ok to feel anything with your heart; it is not ok for your heart to hurt, unless it has been “broken,” but even then it is severely misinterpreted, usually pertaining to losing something that “belongs” to them, when the only thing that really belongs to any of us is how we choose to perceive things.

Even our own bodies are simply borrowed molecules that are kind enough to do what we ask of them, mostly.

We are the gods we worship, so if you worship those voices and attitudes what are you becoming; what have you already accidentally become? Funny thing, I am perfectly capable of writing in those voices. I played those characters my entire life. I’m bloody good at those characters. I have also been fighting myself and my reputation for decades because I am not those characters. I’ve never been those characters.

It is easy to assume the worst of people when so many of those mindless, heartless, grunting cavemen are relentlessly in your face, bred by this society and given no other option or escape from MAN. I had to learn to play those characters when I was very young to defend myself from what I was surrounded by, but the primary reason I have always fought expectation and all this societal bullshit is because I was never that, and I’m pretty proud of the fact that I’ll never be that. In all of this pandemic scare, stepping back from my work and climbing out of my creative rabbit hole, I have realized that I have put all my worth on what I can do, because I can’t be what society told me I was supposed to be.

I was always good at what I could do, and I was always praised for it, so I grew up in a world where that was my only value. The twist to that is in heart: if ever I was good at any of these “talents” I collected over my lifetime, it was never because of technical prowess or practiced skills, it was because I would close my eyes and feel it; feel the music; feel the character; feel the dance; feel the photograph; feel the words; which is heart, deep heart and soul, and that, ladies and cavemen, is a feminine trait, which the Greeks et aliae (ooh, a feminine joke NO ONE will get) understood to be a valuable resource, especially in little boys. There, a mildly offensive masculine joke.

You are welcome. I was never proud of the asshole (see what I did there?) character I played, but I was always pretty proud of how effective I was with it. I am tired of fighting what I accidentally became. It was all in good fun for decades, but I have not-so-gracefully evolved past that, and I will continue to evolve until I transcend time and space. That is what I really want this community to be: evolution and growth through vulnerability and support, for everyone, regardless of who you think you’re supposed to be, and without the fear of being called a “retarded faggot,” which I might as well have had on a name tag when I worked in a kitchen, and I was second in command, but it was that aforementioned heart that got me so many compliments on my “retarded faggot” food while my “boss” (who wasn’t really my boss, but he thought he was) stood over the fryer with his arms crossed in the typical manly, king-of-this-domain pose.

If a woman in or near the kitchen were to complain about being treated like that, it would quickly be addressed, or it would be written off as “kitchen talk,” which is a “man’s” place, so if you don’t want to deal with the pigs, get out of the pig pen. If I were to complain about being treated like that, I would be relentlessly made fun of and looked down on because I wasn’t man enough to handle it. No one should have to deal with that, on any level, and that’s what all the “toxic masculinity” talk is referring to. So much of my creative work was reduced to giggles and grunts and mindless “boobs” comments, and it was disgusting and sad. When I decided to quit that kitchen and move into the brewery, they were actually surprised, but the kids in the kitchen ditched out pretty quick when they realized the balance of heart was completely thrown off without me there. Everyone quit after that, even my boss and the dear friend who took his place after the boss left, and I watched it all happen behind the safety of the brewery glass.

This obviously got a little too personal, as I am apt to do, but it is a great example of the kind of attitude that destroys things by accident, because MAN. I am still relentlessly berated with masculinity and the proof thereof, but I have nothing to prove to anyone. I give no shits. I know who I am. I know what I can do. Maturity is having confidence in that and not feeling the need to prove it or brag about it. Why would I allow myself to be ashamed of existing in heart when most of what I do wouldn’t exist without it? My primary audience is women, and my primary goal is helping women let go of the societal bullshit that I’ve hated my whole life. Why wouldn’t I learn to communicate a little less masculine by societal standard? I can also point out the obvious here, in that nothing I do is even overtly feminine, because I am not a friggin woman, it’s just not manly enough to be left alone or accepted by some.

No one should have to pretend to be something because they feel like they’re supposed to, and everyone deserves to be loved because they were born beautiful, whether that beautiful be a girly man or a manly girl, and no one in this world gets to set that standard. It is the standards set for us, which we agree to live up to, that make us miserable. If we were to confront, define, and truly understand those standards and their value, we could destroy them, and everyone can just enjoy their life in peace and happiness, without ever trying and ever failing to be something that they aren’t, until they realize they’ve wasted their lives away trying to be something that they don’t want to be.

Truth is I love the man who told me that, and would do just about anything for him. He is in my life for a reason, and I appreciate that. Everyone and everything in my life exists for a reason, and I spend most of my time searching for what there is to learn, and how I can grow into the best possible version of myself with what the universe has given me, because the universe doesn’t make mistakes. We can better ourselves and understand on a deeper level, or we can choose to complain about everything and perpetuate all the pain and suffering of the old story that we are currently drowning in. Look around. That old story has given us an ugly reality to live in, and if you look deeper, and really feel everything around you, you will find the souls with that beaming energy who are swirling around in the new story. Right now, I’m just trying to enjoy my time in this dark void, and am waiting patiently for that energy to illuminate the path I need to walk down, ready to sprint in the right direction, then stop to rest because I can’t breathe, then sprint some more, ad absurdum, until I can just keep running.