Enlightening Nonsense

It was ten minutes after she had dropped a nuclear bomb on my heart. I had occupied the last few minutes handing out free copies of Republic Magazine, which I buy by the fifty to help wake people up, but my heart wasn’t in it for the obvious reason that what was left of my shattered pump was so irradiated that even to keep it beating seemed to require an effort. And while my inner ticker was aglow like a survivor of Hiroshima, my outer “heart” had turned pale and lifeless.

I called Tisha, a girl I dated for five years and have know for ten and knows me more intimately than just about anyone and this is not just because of time together or the fact that I’ve slept with her. I’ve know “Elks” for thirty years and remember our first intimate encounter as if it were yesterday, where he shouted out those magic three words to me: “USE MORE LUBE!” and he doesn’t know my inner workings as closely as Tisha. Although I will say that he gave better head.

I had to leave a message on her voicemail and started to think that, at least for me, her cel phone seemed to be relegated to a voicemail service. I told her, or rather her machine, that I really needed some face-to-face time and phone or email just wouldn’t cut it. The phone is like a Band-Aid and I had radiation blisters covering my body, my heart’s love capacity had vaporized and if my penis didn’t actually fall off, I no longer felt any attachment to it. Well, I suppose I still had to pee.

To her credit, she didn’t wait her customary one-week waiting period to get back to me when I would call saying, “This is time sensitive—let me know today!” making me feel like an angry spouse being told at the gun store that there would be a 3-day waiting period before he could buy a gun to blow his wife’s brains out, forcing him instead to pick one up on the black market and thus hurt our economy.

Probably because my body was numb, I didn’t feel my phone vibrate and it wasn’t until I got home, after a quick pit stop at the gun store to buy a gun and wack Tisha for not getting right back to me only to be told by the owner of the store, “Wait three days and if she doesn’t call you back by then, I’ll shoot the insensitive bitch myself,” that I saw there was a message on my machine. If it were a message from a telemarketer, I would have left Tisha to the gun storeowner and focused my “going postal” on the telemarketing company and the specific prick who felt so welcome to use up my primetime minutes. Luckily it was from Tisha and the killing spree was postponed.

She said I sounded terrible and that she would be back in town that evening, which was a Sunday, but would be busy with work until the end of the week. I decided to delay committing suicide until after I spoke with her because I figured she’d probably want to see me one more time when there was more blood inside my body than outside of it and I didn’t want to inconvenience her. Stewing in my own bilious vomit for most of the week, I called her on Thursday.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“Not really,” I replied. “Can I see you tonight?“

“I’m busy tonight,” she said. I passed the blade of the kitchen knife in my hand across the inside of my wrist. Because it was a butter knife it didn’t leave much of an impression; the only red on my wrist was a small amount of strawberry jam resulting from an unthorough cleaning.

“How about Friday?” I asked.

“I made plans on Friday—“

At this point I lost my shit. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me? Tish, I’m in need here—you even said I sounded terrible—and you have plans??”

“I can probably change my Friday plans.” I could tell in her tone that there was a silent, “…but I rather not,” and for the first time I really did think of offing myself, if for no other reason than to make her live the rest of her life in guilt. Then I thought, “Who am I kidding—she’d immerse herself in so many ‘appointments’ that not only wouldn’t she think an iota about me, but she’d probably even miss my funeral!” All of a sudden I’m Eleanor fuckin’ Rigby!

I got off the phone with Tisha, who sounded happy to be able to get back to work, and wrote the death note. It wasn’t a suicide note, mind you, but a friendly “thank you” to Father McKenzie for being the only one at my funeral, in spite of my constant ranting that all Catholic priests are perverts. A moment of panic arose when I thought what that deranged priest might do to my dead body but it passed like gas, leaving only the faint odor of necrophilia in the air.

I thought, “Who can I call?” I couldn’t call “Elks” or the other two guys who I’ve known since elementary school. Out of the boys, I only mentioned to “Asshole Abbe” that, “I met a girl,” and his response was, “That’s good,” probably less concerned for my happiness and more concerned with winning the pool where he was the only one who bet that I wasn’t gay. Maybe I’ll add a line in my note to Father McKenzie: “P.S. Tell ‘Asshole Abbe’ I’m gay”; if it had no impact on “Asshole Abbe,” it would at least give Father McKenzie a boner, that sick fuck.

But the truth is, while I have known these jackasses forever, and we have collected a vat full of stories that not even Dick Cheney’s underground survival lair could contain and had a belly full of laughs that not even Fat Albert could swallow, while I have spent the last decades pursuing consciousness, they have been pursuing “The American Dream” of having a family, 2 ½ kids and a dog and living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. I’ve dreamed of that life, too, and every time I’ve awoken from that nightmare, I’ve gotten down on my knees and was ready and willing to suck God off for not making this nightmare my reality.

They couldn’t fully grasp the extent of what I was going through even if they wanted to. In their defense, this is not because they’re stupid (although concerning “Elks,” he is) but because at this point I have replaced so many parts of my inner machinery that they wouldn’t even know which tool to pull out of their bag—if they even had the right tool at all—to fix my blown gasket. And, not that I ever showed them that I was to the point of dragging a dull butter knife across my wrist, but I suspected that “Asshole Abbe” would tell me, “Sorry buddy, I’d love to be there for you but I gotta take my daughter to her recital tonight,” and “Elks” would say, “Leaving for the Hampton’s house tomorrow scary early but we’ll talk when I get back.” and “Nussy” would give me his typical excuse of, “Busy night of Internet porn ahead of me.” So they were out.

I’d like to have called SM, but being she was the one who had just dumped me, I doubted she would provide an impartial ear—let alone answer my call. Damn Caller I.D.! As much as this sounds like a joke, in all seriousness, I did need to see her, talk with her, look into her eyes, express a few more of the things I was feeling that my mouth was unable to speak at the time through the swelling of her sledgehammer blow.

Her email responses I received back were essentially, “We gave it a shot, our ships have sailed, and there’s no need for us to talk or write anymore.” Whether our ships were sailing off into separate sunsets or not, I did have a need: my ship was so damaged that it needed her help to patch it up so that it wouldn’t sink on its next voyage. She wouldn’t make herself available for me and it seemed that for someone who had said she would love my ship no matter what, she didn’t seem to care if it became the latest scuba dive excursion on the bottom of the ocean, divers looking for treasure when my only treasure was riding into the dark night aboard her pirate ship.

I sent Tisha a poem, which she helped inspire, about a guy who was desperately reaching out to his friend who blew him off and then he committed suicide. There was a classic line something like, “His desperation couldn’t be penciled in to her appointment book.”

She called me after receiving the poem, not out of concern but out of annoyance. She told me that my poem crossed a line and I had no right sending it to her. I told her that the poem reflected a very serious truth and crossed no line, except maybe the line she drew around herself providing a ten foot and one inch border preventing me from touching her with a ten-foot pole. I said that as busy as she was, clearly she still ate dinner or walked to the bus station after work and she could have arranged a face-to-face without messing up her precious schedule.

Then she threw the responsibility on me. “You could have suggested that then.” While she’s not entirely wrong, after acknowledging I sounded like shit, her lack of personal effort to “make it happen, Captain” showed me that she valued bullshit over me. And, folks, it is bullshit. All your little slaps on the back for a job well done and your promotions and your book club socials mean nothing compared to love and friendship. When the backslap fades from memory, it doesn’t leave the same hole that a true friend leaves in his wake.

True karma yoga involves doing something without attachment to the result and without wanting anything back in return. I fall short on this at times. When I express my love and care in actions and don’t receive the love and care when I need it, it’s hard for me to let dead deeds lie, and I often bring them up—which never seems to bolster my case as far as the other is concerned.

I know if she called me at midnight saying, “I’m really hurting and I need to see you now!” that I would drop whatever it is that I was doing and put on a nose-clip and travel to New Jersey to take care of her. My early morning client the next day wouldn’t even enter into my decision-making process—so I’d be a little tired the next day, big whoop. So, call me a karma chameleon, but it feels like a real “fuck you” when I tell one of my “friends,” “I’m dyin’ over here!” and they tell me that now is not a convenient time and to please die on their schedule.

While it may be a statement on us as individuals and questioning when push comes to shove, what we are really willing to do for our “friends,” my words are also pointing a critical finger to a society that has conditioned our hearts into numb survival-mode, trinket-seeking, pat-on-the-back cravers, instead of a love pump that—whether awake or asleep—never stops its pumping. At least my heart died from a nuclear holocaust. I would never let “society” come close enough to touch my heart, let alone steal it away.

[For the record: I will never kill myself—no matter HOW depressed I may get. If my body is suddenly found dead and there is a suicide note on the corner table, know that I was killed at the hand of the New World Order. My hand is only good for writing and caressing.]

 

REFLECTION:

Who in your life is near and dear to you? What would you be willing to drop in order to give them what they needed? Dr Peter Breggin, author of Toxic Psychology, has never prescribed psychotropic drugs to children. When one father, whose son was causing the family a lot of strife, asked Dr. Breggin in an accusatory tone, “Well what would YOU do in my situation?” Dr. Breggin responded, “I’d probably quit my job and spend time with my son.” What would you be willing to “quit” for your friends and family? Which is worth more of your time: your work and social schedule or the ones you supposedly love? We often take the ones we love for granted, “knowing” that they will always be there for us. Maybe one day they won’t. Wouldn’t that be a shame if instead of death separating us, it was our own lack of effort that killed the relationship?

MEDITATION:

Think of someone you love dearly. Reflect on what they would be willing to do for you out of their love. Now drop all thoughts except for your image of them and the fragrance of their adoring, caring eyes and their soft, loving touch. How does this feel?

 

“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came. Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved.”

—“Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles