Astral Pain, Curbing Self Absorption, and Re-engagement

A gorgeous thing happens when you wake up and step outside and the world has a luster to it that isn't glass eyed.  The bricks are warm though the air is skin tight cold.  The sun is not screaming, but humming.  The clouds are waiting instead of watching and the trees are content to not say a word as you go about your day.  And it's cool.  The voices are not so loud and the stars at night are not calling you home.  All they say as you hunt in the dark is "we're happy out here as long as you're happy down there, but feel free to visit when you're ready," and it's good.  It's great.  The weapons are collecting dust and the hands are busy again at other operations and no one else has to die and it's a great feeling.  The jail yard feels bigger than it ever has and seeing your breath is so welcome a change you damn near want to cry because Summer hurt you so bad, and you've been waiting so long to see snow again and for a while there you didn't think you'd make it that long.  A strange and gorgeous thing.  The quietude.  The death of everything and the ashes blowing through the grass.  Everything slowing down to a speed your eyes can process again.  Gorgeous.  Everything returning to a temperature more fit for your fusion heart.  The astral pain subsiding.

One of the immediate difficulties plaguing the writing has been an exorbitant amount of self absorption.  Getting beyond it has been difficult.  Spitting out all of the junk on top of the processes.  Kicking out the bad and pointless information, the information occupying a lot of cycles and routines.  Brain space and resources.  Resources that can't be repurposed or freed up until the train is run through the tracks and their opened again.  A necessary thing.  There's a lot on the burners.  In fact the kitchen was pretty much on fire.  Nothing edible was made.  Did manage to make some wicked cool... I don't know.  Lost my train of thought.  Started thinking about huffing paint again, but I'm not too thrilled with the results.  At least, not thrilled enough to go out of my way.  What was I talking about?

Oh yeah, so I've been fairly disappointed with all of the sentences starting with "I" and so many of the themes being things dear to my heart, but unable to touch the rest of the world my head lives in.  It got boring.  You wait and you wait and you wait for the bulb to go off and then you look at the picture and it's another damned self portrait.  You keep calling up your imaginary friends and they answer the phone and you sit down to talk about what you and he talked about and then you hold it up when you're done and it's another god damned self portrait.  I started asking myself how the hell it kept happening.  What the hell was I doing wrong?  The arrow finally pierced my thigh.  Not really.  I just talked and talked and talked until I had nothing left to talk about and I could remember again the things they said too.

They never left.  I was so torn up and wrecked and lost all at once I ended up circling the woods for weeks before something looked familiar again.  I'm reckoning loss again.  Reckoning with.  Minor and major losses of people.  Losing people again.  Dealing with dead channels that I thought would live forever and asking myself what I did wrong and realizing at this point the answer is nothing.  Sometimes there's no explanation.  I'm pretty sure I came to that conclusion before.  Years ago.  The conclusion about a general lack of causality in the humanverse.  Sometimes there is no explanation and I was okay with it then.  I'm learning to be okay with it now all over again.  People out grow you.  You out grow people.  Sometimes friends stay and sometimes friends go, sometimes you get to stay in touch and sometimes you don't.  Sometimes you dance.  They never left.

Curbing self absorption.  Curing self absorption, was a difficult task and not entirely done.  I still have to get back inside the heads of the people and places populating my dreams.  Pierce the fog of internal war.  It's still there, but I have become so unbelievably conscious of it's necessity and it's force of presence that I can begin to work around and work through it.  Begin to retool things that have sat in draft for months.  That's important to me.  It's important to them too.  So many storylines continue on in the background and it's fantastic to be able to sit down and leave myself behind to engage them and when I can't do that the storylines continue to their conclusion and when I finally do look at them again everyone is gone and I can't remember what we were doing there in the first place or where they may have mentioned they were going next.  However, I understand now

that I was standing far too close to the bars and the picket planks to enjoy the space I've earned.  Far too close to the window and hating the feeling of my nose there pressed to see the AUs.  I have to tell you that I love you so much, these days.  I forget to do that too much.  Too often.  A return to the observational side of things and less the actor.  Returning to the maps and the center of the yard where the fences are so far I can barely see them.  It's terribly easy to fall into yourself when you can feel your hands burning inside the diamonds of that twisted wire.

I am re-engaging.  Decoupled for so long.  It's easy to believe that is all there is for you.  Because it is.  If you want more you have to wrestle it away from what has already been determined, if that makes sense.  And I'm trying, have been, and finally succeeding a little bit.  Trying not to over celebrate.  I know the next turn is right around the corner and part of living with paranoid schizophrenia is guarding against yourself.  I accept that.  I don't particularly enjoy it.  I definitely woke up the other day unable to speak because I screamed my lungs out as hard as they would go.  That was a funny one to explain when I went to my temp job and rasped like a 90 year old chain smoker who couldn't break a decibel if his life depended on it.  "I just want you to be okay."  I just wanted you to stop asking about it.  I think I'm raving a little bit so

I'll bring this thing to a close for now and shove off from here, wherever here is, later on.  The astral pain has subsided.  Self absorption has been curbed, but not cured.  I am getting back in touch with the outer planes. I am re-engaging with life, though some parts of life will be or already have disengaged with me.  Most importantly Winter is here.  It feels like a lifetime went by in the months between this time last year and now.  Twisting in the breeze.


///Lionrock - "The Guide" ... the nineties killed it for electronic music.  in a good way.