Last Of The Old, First Of The New: A Message From The Outer Dark

The Prodigy - Climbatize

Let me tell you a little bit about 1999.

Of all the fair years I’ve lived in memory, it was truly the best of times. Like the sweetness of early morning night, dimmed by the sun inching over the skyline, it was at once the height and the end of all things right and true in what I knew in the world. The end of a short-lasting reality we all agreed to get drunk on. The sun rises, the world is yours, welcome to garish adulthood.

But that year? It was so perfect, so incredibly surely perfect that ten years after the first Gulf War, our media had to create enemies - the long-arm of conspiracy-based programming: X-Files, Nowhere Man, Seven Days, Millennium; television proving that America never quite was at ease with the idiom of Peace. But seeing what was on television and then being able to open your blinds and be unafraid was important. That we had to construct our horrors from the daylight-burned idiot box to appreciate our creature comforts of suburbia. We had to believe things could get worse to appreciate that they hadn’t.

To think: the end of the century and the millennium and to be eighteen! That summer with the last of the parties you had to sneak beer at, with the friends that meant everything right now and won’t last much longer. Laughing until it hurt and night skies pimpled with stars and girls in sundresses that pulled and puckered the flanks of her breasts into little lines. Of the immediacy of speed: needing to drive fast all the time - thinking it was because you were stupid and young but actually because you couldn’t deal with the oncoming freight-train future and wanted to get as far away from it as possible. To find final comfort in being where you are, at that age, forever. The hope and dream and sleep of that last summer love of a girl who only lived streets away instead of minutes or in another town, another state. That particularly sad magic in that short-stretch of a summer, where eighteen year old girls finally parted their legs for you in the final gasp of adulthood you yearned to experience - all nerves and shaking limbs and words and knowing there was no going back after this.

(Consummation of sex is always the first or last car in the train ride toward adulthood. It is either the first thing towards it if you’re unlucky and too young or the last one if you’re socially inept and alone.)

And this magic? It fades. Most people don’t see it after that year. It fades from your sight like the green-purple dots after a flashbulb. The retina burned to its maximum capacity for a brief moment, the dots linger, slinks into a corner out of sight and fade away.

Like some others I’ve been lucky enough to hold onto some of it. I can make like Richard Collier and in the right moment, I’m there again. The air moves a certain way at a certain temperature and the gasp of rolling clouds and the sky… and it is all I can do to squeeze my hand so hard, to hold onto that VHS quality memory, all faded with time, dulled from playback. Faces but not names, names but not faces - events burned into brain from a hundred re-tellings but pronouns replacing people. But I’m there, and sometimes, so are you and sometimes its just the sensation - like a smell you can’t place or a few moments of a song. You may not know where what its from… but you do know from where.

I’ve lived with this yearning for fifteen years. Bid time return to a land of taller trees that weren’t torn down to make ways for better parking or ugly stucco housing and the greasy opening of familiar outdoor grills and someone’s pet dog barking from a block away. That familiarity, that base, that tremendous unspoken religion around a magic that sums up the old adage of “You had to be there to experience it”.

I’m here to tell you that isn’t always so. I’m here to tell you something nicknamed Karma, alias Supernatural is real and powerful and intelligent and put something in my lap this year.

Its been fifteen years since I’ve been out of high school. Fifteen years since I’ve experienced the things I’ve just detailed to you, so you can guess my age more or less if you don’t know me.

Her name isn’t important for this story, because she was one of those rare types who was less person, less flesh and more about that weird glow. The glow you find once in a while. Like when the sun comes up and the grass is cool and the world isn’t aware its morning and you’re by yourself. Like coffee and cool weather. Like closing your hand tight because the past revisits you briefly with an errant moment of feeling and you want to grip it so tight so it never leaves.

Except she is real. And she is everything - everything - that 1999 was to me.

This girl was almost customized, order-by-mail, we-do-it-for-you perfect. Her facets and weaknesses and vocabulary and her huge almond eyes and the sway back and the hair (adorable!) and the hunger in the center of her being for validation. I could detail you all these things about her personality and physicality and sexuality and verbiage and never get to the whole of her - or to the simple fact of her. The kind who when she curled into you like a paper doll and put her head on your shoulder - your guts would shake involuntarily. Not like it was cold but the warm vulnerability after a long hour of hot sex.

She was, without a doubt, a harbinger of that summer I had fifteen years prior. Wrapped up in pretty flesh and a bright voice and a real person, surely - but supernatural in scope. Like a Ray Bradbury morality: “This is the culmination of all of what you have sought in life, and it will damn you forever if you follow it.”

We became close and at times even intimate. And the exchanges were very warm, very regular, very powerful. She was talented with her words and her assembly of words as much as she was with her kiss. She would open her mouth and I kept hoping to drown in it.

Of course it doesn’t last. Summers never do. And I feel some deep shame in myself for almost bleeding away her youth - like a vampire - simply by bringing her into my circle for a time, even if she wanted it. No, its not a matter of moral, its a matter of - here is this creature like a forest spirit or nymph and she comes to you walking on ballet slippers of your half-remembered dreams and dressed in the silk of the forgotten hopes of youth. But to have her ends in reminding you of the fifteen years of unanswered pain that followed, all over again.

And that is where I am now.

Most people never get to live their dreams twice. They remember those playgrounds and revisit them with a sigh and then pass back into the dirty reality of kitchen fixtures and traffic jams. Others - often men - crowd in bars and trade stories about youth so vague that they’re interchangeable and universal while huddled over empty pints of beer. I, on the other hand, got what I wanted for a time and it is more than a pound of flesh I must sacrifice for that rare honor: the chance to do it all over again. Time travel without ever leaving home.

But like the past, she was not permanent. Her youth seems to have her interests casting a wider net than just me, just men, just one or two things but all of life. The narrowness of age hasn’t thinned her perspective. She is not mine to have, though I want it so badly. Like Amanda, something I can appreciate fully but somehow kept forever at arm's reach. (Perhaps the second time would heal the first?) 

I still can’t believe that it happened at all. It frightens me awake that I had the experience that all men have clamored for for as long as cognitive thought has existed. I do not know why I was singled out to receive it and I am not sure what to do with the experience now that I’ve had it. I feel like someone who has learned a whole new language - except that no one else speaks it.

The nights skies are skinned with a brighter dark now. More purple than black and I can see that may be the color of the old magic I’ve been looking for all these years. All those bygone and forgotten days and nights and drunk early mornings where no one is alive or awake unless you’re between the age of seventeen and twenty-five. And that energy, mixed with the feeling of distance, time, memory, reverence - and my own personal tastes - is why I linked to that song above. Wordless meanings memorable only to myself.
And I go out on my front stoop with that song or some other b-side from an era of music that is passe and done and best forgotten and I stare out into the inky black knowing that she was a reply from that Outer Dark. That enough wishes and hopes and prayers and whining into the Abyss eventually answered with this person - who will undoubtedly pass through me and toward her own life and its joys and miseries and I will become as much of a harbinger for a certain time in her life as she is to me.

And now I am left to wonder: who’s hopes was the Night fulfilling? Mine or its own?

The Letter To Amanda

Amanda,

How about how many times have I written this letter? I’ve finished it more than once and started it dozens more. Unfortunately, it never comes out as I want and I think it’s because it’s all so complicated in my heart. So, truthfully, I’m done trying to get it perfect and will concentrate on making it right. This is it then; this letter is an abject failure because what I feel is so much more than what you’re reading.

I miss you so very much. There’s no other words for it, so all I can do is repeat it. I miss you so *very much*. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think that to myself and mean it a bit more than the day before. Your absence is the same as if I have lost a limb or an eye: even if I am not thinking of you, my quality of life is detracted for it. Something in everything is lost to me when you aren’t in my life.

Life without you does not seem much like living to me. It has been so long, I feel like I’ve outlived you. Like you have died, and I am left behind - and yet, there is no promise of an afterlife, of ever meeting again.

So what are we going to do about this, you and I? All I know is that I will waste my life if it is not with you, that to so much as consider anyone else is a disservice. It is as if I am trapped on an empty sea facing a shoreline I can never reach. Why is it, my dream of so many years, I cannot be with you? How is it I must be apart from you, and you and I from us? Will our separation benefit the world? Will the stars be fixed to new constellations? I do not see how. I don’t see how this can be anything but a very private grief. But if that is all have of you, I’ll carry even that.

I can’t explain it better than that; there it is in all its roughness. My love for you stumbles as words but not in feeling. Everything is between the lines of this pale letter and my seeing you again.

Please remember these small things: I will always love you and carry you with me. You will always have a place with me. That something inside of me belongs only to you and that it weeps inconsolably for you in the dark of every night we don’t speak. That the old feelings of my hands in your hair at the train station or your breath in my ear or the gentle sounds you made when we intertwined on my couch - they are all sacred to me and that I ask to experience them again. That the sum of me is not worth a fraction of you, or that a man can be a man by himself but he will know nothing of Manhood without the love of the right woman.

I hope to hear from you one day, in this life. And if not then, I take sure comfort that because so much of what I am is because of you, that I will find you across that wide river we must all cross, many years from now. Perhaps then I can know a time with you, as I have spent so much of it without already.

Je t’aime, ma petite voix.

From the Just So I'm Better Understood File #001

For those of you who don’t know, on a Meyers-Briggs scale, I’m a textbook case for an INFJ. Down to my blood and gristle. The introversion, the intense level of feelings, the intuition, the constant need for solitude and the taffy pull of desperately needing a few particular people in my life and shunning the rest of humanity. I’m not that guy you invite to the bar for a bender, because I’m that guy you stay up talking with until 2 am.

(I am also a textbook Pisces - but I don’t put any stock in horoscopes. Still, the details of that sign are very much me. Don’t ask me why or how.)

But what adds to it is the fact that I also suffer from Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is a relatively new thing to me, in that I was only diagnosed with it in the last year and that I finally have a “term” for what goes on in my head and my heart. My current doctor doesn’t like giving “firm prognosis”, (which is something I agree with since they can be limiting) but this is what I’m being treated for, so for the sake of brevity, this is what I have.

The thing is that one brings out the other in spades. INFJs tend to have that old adage of “still waters run deep” while C-PTSD also has an added detail of my staring off into space to think or simply “blanking out” very often. I tend to retreat from life at every opportunity and it becomes more pronounced both with age and with (particular kinds of) stress. So one feeds the other - my personality and my disorder - so its hard to see where one begins and one ends.

If you’ve known me at all for any length of time, the following list from the Wikipedia entry of the “Adult symptom cluster" should make some sense to you. Edits are based on my own history, emphasis meaning habitual occurrences and strike-outs meaning not applicable.

• Difficulties regulating emotions, including symptoms such as persistent dysphoria, chronic suicidal preoccupation, self injury, explosive or extremely inhibited anger (may alternate), or compulsive or extremely inhibited sexuality (may alternate).

• Variations in consciousness, including forgetting traumatic events (i.e., psychogenic amnesia), reliving experiences (either in the form of intrusive PTSD symptoms or in ruminative preoccupation), or having episodes of dissociation.

• Changes in self-perception, such as a chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, shame, guilt, self-blame, a sense of defilement or stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings

• Varied changes in the perception of the perpetrator, such as attributing total power to the perpetrator, becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, including a preoccupation with revenge, idealization or paradoxical gratitude, a sense of a special relationship with the perpetrator or acceptance of the perpetrator’s belief system or rationalizations.

• Alterations in relations with others, including isolation and withdrawal, persistent distrust, a repeated search for a rescuer, disruption in intimate relationships and repeated failures of self-protection.

• Loss of, or changes in, one’s system of meanings, which may include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

Largely, aside from an occasional meltdown (once every three months, tops - more often twice a year), I hold everything together and keep on truckin’. I’m not medicated nor does my doctor think I need any but its a struggle to see where one thing ends and the other begins because there is so much “natural” overlap.
However, with this new (sorta) diagnosis, I’m finding that I need to do something about my triggers. Most of them are based around work and, though they’re for solid reasons (or so I’ve been told), my … emotional reaction (or lack) is not. So, basically, its time to find something else - and the trick hat is the anxiety and frustration centered around doing *just that*. As was eloquently pointed out to me, I was never allowed to fail growing up - that is to say, everything had to be done right the first time and if it didn’t work, you’re fucked forever - so trying something without being utterly sure of its success is unnerving, to say the least of it.

But then, again, I’m an INFJ. So where do I even begin?

I Am Athiest And I Am For Religion

As an atheist, one would assume I worship at the altar of Neil deGrasse Tyson (I don't, can't stand the guy) or Carl Sagan (now we're talking!), but the fact of the matter is - my atheism doesn't stem from Internet group-think or a simple "rage against the machine" youth-logic that a lot of it seems to come from these days. Nor does it come from having a super-science brain. I am not particularly smart (I would consider myself more "clever" than anything else) and cannot explain away God like so many other people smarter than I.

Yet I would not rid the world of religion if given the choice.

Putting aside the absurdity that one person's or group's belief system can trump others (a common point in theological and political ideals - read Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" to understand it better), the fact is that much of the history of art in all its forms is based on religion. The Louvre would be largely empty were it not for early masters and idiot children today would not have crappy pop music if those artists weren't influenced by the Beatles. And the Beatles by Bernard Herrmann... and Bernard Herrmann by Percy Grainger and Percy Grainger by Edvard Grieg and so on. All the waters - both shallow and deep in the streams and rivers of music - eventually flow out into the sea of classical influence. And classical music has a strong grip on all religious views.

Think of all the music that came from faith. To rid the world of Mozart is a much, much greater crime than to rid it of any supposed God. To rid the world of God would bring some peace but to rid the world of music would bring complete silence. There is no uglier fate than that.

And I am not talking about pop song religious fluff either. I am not talking about "Jesus take the wheel" schlock, which sells Christ like Reebok sold sneakers with basketball stars. I'm talking about *music* - that art above other art that expresses the incommunicable and changes and grows with every performance. Music music, not dance pop numbers or trivial rock music - but music that speaks to something greater than every day angst and doesn't consist of little more than minor chords or synthesizer beats. Music that, by its nature, informs you of a part of yourself that had previously not existed. 

Music is, in many ways its self, God.

So, I will live with the presumed silliness of (what I believe is) someone else's outmoded belief systems if it means the world has George Frideric Handel's "Messiah" and Morten Lauridsen's (totally fucking sublime beyond all expression, that I have to use the word "fucking" between "totally" and "sublime" just to get the point across) "Lux Aeterna" and the "Missa Solemnis" by Ludwig van Beethoven. It would not be a world worth living to remove the greatest musical artists of all time from history - nor should we invest in a future where religiousness or faith is undermined or removed simply because there is no proof in the existence of God or the obviousness of science and an arbitrary existence.

I will suffer, gladly, your notions of a bearded or multi-armed deity if it means you leave me alone with music. 

Beliefs (9/21/2010)

Be excellent to each other. Don’t eat the yellow snow. Don’t screw anyone over, even if you think they deserve it. Stop hating so hard. Stop caring so much about your job - when you’re on your death bed, you’re not going to think “boy, wish I put in more time at the office”.

Be so passionate about things it may scare other people. If you see an attractive woman, you can look all you want until she meets your eyes - then you have to smile. Approach all situations with joy. Live every day like you’re going to die to the extent that you have a slight death fixation (this makes more sense and sounds less creepy when you get through it all). Eat really good food when you can manage it. Stop buying material possessions. Don’t fuck unless you absolutely mean it.

Talk to yourself - its the only way you’ll get an intelligent conversation. Get angry about things that piss you off but don’t nurse it unless its forced on you. No one is better than you, and you’re better than no one. Don’t use politically correct language. God is a limiting detail on greater spirituality; he’s an atheistic conception used to control guilt-minded people.

Support first and second amendment rights - if only because not having the option is scarier than never needing to use it. Give to charity but mindful of what charity it is since a lot of them are just sharks out looking for blood. Thank every war vet you meet and shake their hand for it. Forgive your enemies but don’t forget them - they may try it again. When you walk into any room, think of the James Bond theme and then notice how your posture and stride changes. Drink heavily, smoke a lot, have some abhorrently kinky sex - but be careful about it all. Appreciate your parents but also realize they don’t trump your own self-respect no matter what. Take pride in your work but also take humor in yourself. Stop using motivational posters and self-help books to grow - just be, and the growing happens of its own accord.