I’m such a strange critter.
Both unworldly and otherworldly and more than passing strange, I’ve always been both alien and alienated. Never really fitting in anywhere and hence forced to be a kind of world unto myself most of the time.
To the point where I worry that I can’t actually get any closer to people at all. That the fortress I build to keep the world at bay when I was raped as a toddler cannot, in fact, open its doors to the world or anyone in it and ergo I am forever doomed to be the sort of weirdo that uses the word “ergo” in casual conversation.
Which is what this is, I suppose. It certainly isn’t formal.
I am a naturally informal kind of dude.
I know that I have the potential to be different. I feel like if I had not had my world shattered by a stranger’s penis as a small child, I would have grown up to be a highly social and gregarious person with a wide group of friends and, to be honest, probably a pretty colorful love life.
I’d have made a heck of a good salesman as long as I was not expected to do the “hard sell” at all.
Where I come from, that shit does not fly, nor would it with I.
But as has always been the case with me, the potential is unquestionable. I have always had enormous reservoirs of untapped potential on so very many levels. Intellectual, creative, personal, performative, you name it.
Well, maybe not athletic.
The question is whether or not I can actually tap into all that potential, and at this point in life, it is looking like the answer is no.
Not by myself, anyhow. And yet I lack the capacity to obtain the sort of help I would need either. So the answer really is no.
For now, at least. I continue to hack away at the rock hard ice crystal, clear as glass, that encases my heart, and every day I get a little closer to being able to feel the light and love of the world on my cold and fractured soul.
But part of that liberation process is venting all the bad stuff. It’s like I have to let the bad stuff out in order to let the good stuff in, which I guess makes sense.
Metaphorically speaking, at least.
And I gave so much that needs to come out, and doing it through words like this is, quite frankly, doing it the hard way, but it’s the only way I have.
I have a thousand winters’ worth of frigid, rigid, uncompromising and unpromising solitude to overcome and I don’t even know where to start.
Once again I bemoan my lack of a capacity for transformation. All I can do is keep beavering away in hopes that some day I will reach some spiritual tipping point and things will finally slide into place.
Because if this slow, incremental progress is all I can ever hope for, I am not at all hopeful about living long enough to taste sanity.
And in all of this, I feel very very much alone. I know that is not technically true in any literal, objective sense, but it’s emotionally true for me nevertheless.
And it’s all because of that wall I put up 47 years ago to keep the evil world out when I was being violated in a way I couldn’t even understand let alone put into words.
People can’t really get close to me and I can’t get close to them either.
This fucking wall of mine gets in the way.
And it’s taking a long ol’ time to tear it down.
More after the break.
Pity the sleepwalker
Pity the sleepwalker
who cannot rest
and cannot wake
Who wanders eternally
through endless doorless halls
bumping into walls
taking enormous falls
as lost as a cloud in fog
I swear I had a lot more to add to that ten minutes ago.
Anyhow, my point is, I am feeling half-asleep and lost at sea. All alone in this world due to that stupid wall in my head that keeps me from feeling almost everything.
All that’s left of me is a very childlike consciousness that is utterly innocent of this world because he’s spent so little time in it.
I see so much but have done so little.
It’s almost obscene, really. To have someone who has developed so massively in one way – intellectually – but has nothing but a palsied and feeble soul to steer it with.
No wonder I often feel like I am not really here. Like I have said here before, it feels like either I am not real, or the world isn’t, and my unreality is far less scary.
I’d rather be a ghost in a world of men than a man in a world of ghosts.
And I know the problem is me either way. Something deep and terrible is broken inside me and it’s left me in this absurd position of being a wounded wizard with vast cosmic powers at my command but too weak a will to use them.
I feel so sick sometimes. Like I’ve been poisoned and it’s made everything in me toxic and all I can do is bide my time until the toxin passes from me naturally.
And I feel so weak. Like I have a bad case of detached id. At some level, the body and mind and soul need to be able to either generate all their own energies or be able to open up to take in the energies of the world and all that’s in it.
Somehow, there needs to be more. But I feel so feeble and helpless. Like I’m a turtle on its back, or a child trying to climb up on something but it’s just too tall.
Or like I am trying to grab on to something but I just can’t quite reach it.
Maybe it’s an emotional problem. Maybe it’s physical. Maybe it’s spiritual.
It’s probably all three, to be honest.
And I don’t know where to find the strength to rise.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.