We were almost home…. as in, we were already in the parking structure… when I realized I had the wrong popcorn.
I had meant to grab a bag of the oh so delicious Orville Redenbacher’s Movie Theater Popcorn that I love and crave and very slightly worship. but instead, I had the Salty Kettle Corn variety, which is no doubt delicious but I can’t eat it as it has sugar.
Julian said “We could go back… ”
And I said, “yeah, okay. ”
And that was huge for me. All my usual self-minimizing thoughts and emotions were right there and ready to go. Oh no, don’t bother,. I’ll make do, it’s more trouble than it is worth, fuck it, I just want to be home safe already.
But I chose differently. I chose to get the right popcorn, the one I love. I chose the option that was not the path of least resistance. The path that meant I was claiming resources and taking up space and being a real person and all that jazz.
By choosing to go back, I was asserting my right to exist.
And that felt good. Scary, and hard…. but good.
I have no reason to hide from the world.
I have nothing to be ashamed of.
I am a good thing. I am a good person. I have worth. I have value. I am not a liability. I am not a burden. People are not worse off for knowing me.
And having to tell myself these things over and over does not make me broken, weak, pathetic, or worthless.
Neither does having to tell myself THAT.
There are lots of people who are better off for knowing me. I bring sunshine into people’s lives just by being my funny, witty, deep, interesting self. There are many peole in this world who are happy to have met me and love having my around.
The world needs me.
And I need it.
Now it’s just a matter of tunneling through my scar tissue so I can make the connection I need to the white hot center from which all life flows.
I am alive, under all that snow. My heart beats and my blood flows. Being numb is not the same as being dead. The sun doesn’t stop shining when it’s cloudy.
All the warmth and life-sustaining love and acceptance that I need is inside me right now, waiting to break through and turn my eternal winter into spring in rowdy bloom.
I will rise from my grave.
I will live again. I will be alive and present and happy to be here just like I was before I was raped at the age of 4.
I will escape my internal labyrinth. I’ve always known the way out.
Just stop needing it. To hide in. To keep my mind occupied. To be the hamster wheel with an odometer to give me the sensation of going places and doing things without me having to go anywhere or do anything.
Some day I won’t need it any more and it will disappear.
Until then, I have a lot of scar tissue to digest.
More after the break.
A better conservative
Fuck it, let’s do politics.
It really bothers me that a monster like Trump has unlimited access to the hearts and minds of the millions of Americans and can, in effect, make them believe whatever he wants them to believe because he is their chosen leader.
To say he abuses this responsibility is an understatement on the scale of referring to the heart of the Sun as “hot to the touch”.
He is, in fact, the worse kind of person to be given this kind of carte blanche access to the souls of millions. He’s erratic, inconsistent, heedless, incoherent, and unstable.
So even apart from politics, I would love to free these people from his thrall.
But being, above all, a pragmatist, I know that it is virtually impossible to convince a conservative to become a liberal, or vice versa.
I mean, there’s pretty compelling brain science on this point now.
And you know how I loves me some brain science. \
Luckily, Trump is so terrible a human being that it is entirely unnecessary to convince his followers to be good liberals.
You only have to convince them to be better conservatives.
Because no matter what you imagine conservatism to mean, Donald Trump is as horrible a conservative as he is a human being.
I mean, he’s not even Christian.
To me, this means there is an enormous market opportunity for a superior conservative. Someone who is just as loud and aggressive and who has impeccable conservative bone fides but who can attack Trump on the many, many, many ways in which he has betrayed everyone who has ever supported him, made their lives miserable, forced them to betray everything they ever thought they believed, and has led them to a very dark place from which there seems to be no hope of escape.
I would almost be willing to volunteer for that role but it would not quite fit me.
If I have any kind of bona fides, I’ve yet to see them.
But I can imagine maybe going for it as long as I was promoting my own version of conservatism. The kind I all too briefly believed in when I was a teenager in the 80’s, before Mulroney cured me of that forever.
That conservatism is about being the grownups in the room. It is about being the sane, sober, practical people who see the world for what it is and don’t balk at getting their hands dirty with the nitty gritty numerical realities of life.
It is a conservatism that is realistic without being pessimistic. It believes there is such a thing as right and wrong and that if something is wrong, it;s wrong no matter who does it. It has very high standards and expects them to be met. It is not afraid to judge people as being just plain wrong if their actions warrant it.
It’s a conservatism that faces the facts, then rolls up its sleeve and gets things done.
Yeah. That’s the kind of conservatism that I could see myself selling.
But who the heck would buy it from me?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.