Enlightening Nonsense

I am not always forthcoming about my personal affairs. Partly because I follow politics and saw what happened when Gary Hart and Bill Clinton didn’t keep their “affairs” in order, or at least their dicks in their pants. But also because I am finding my comfort level between self-exploration and exploring with others.

In sexual analogy terms: perhaps I am worried that if I fuck with someone else it will screw up my masturbation sessions. But there is more to life than jerking-off (although there are a few people I talk to that don’t seem to think so) and, if for no other reason than ease in clean-up, sometimes it is useful to explore with others (I’ve done yoga for years and still can’t stick my tongue up my ass without needing a serious chiropractic adjustment the next day!)

As much as I bullshit others, which I try not to do too often, I never intentionally bullshit myself. If I steal something from a store, I don’t say, “But they overcharge anyway!” I say, “I’m a thief–and I can live with that.” If I lie and manipulate another in order to get them into bed I don’t say, “Well, I know what’s best for her!” I say, “Yoga is about seeking ‘union’–and I just found greater union with all the jerks who think with their dicks and not their hearts.”

I have created a certain mystique around the character of “Swami X” and a large part of that was because I saw a bigger gameplan, that this would facilitate getting the messages out that want to come through me in the forms of books, appearances, teachings, etc. I knew I wasn’t “Swami X” and I knew of the potential trappings to start thinking I was: a cheap multi-personality drama, probably starring Keanu Reeves as me if Satan was directing things. I was aware of all of this. And I felt like I had it under control.

But then there were points where working to build this character got in the way of just being me. Separating the “me” who walks my dog and meets people with the “me” who teaches yoga and meets a different group of people, or the “me” who goes to the health food store and knows and jokes with all the workers and the “me” who goes to New-Age and Raw Expos and Festivals and plays my character–it started to become a pain in the ass compartmentalizing all the “me”s!

Because our education system didn’t fully succeed (according to Reagan’s Educational Secretary, Charlotte Iserby, in “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America” and John A. Stormer in “None Dare Call It Education”) at making me completely dysfunctional and believing in Communist principles and dependent on a Master government to wipe my ass before I put on my pants in the morning, like a skilled clown, I was still able to juggle these balls of “me” without letting them drop on the floor and then having to rely on my comic facial expressions to cover the fact that I’m a shitty juggler. 

That is, until someone from one “me” category wanted to jump into another “me” category. Then it got all screwed up and even Al Gore couldn’t take a hit of American controlled Afghanistan opium and in his high believe, once again, that he invented the Internet, and help me to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Or according to the “Two Worlds Colliding” Theory of George Costanza when discussing how his wife, Susan, wanted to go out with him and his friends, “A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

So when one girl who knew me as “Swami X” wanted to get to know me more intimately–and I don’t just mean carnally, you perverts–I held out on telling her my “real” name. And then I self-reflected. And I finally saw that much of my juggling of “me”s was an avoidance of allowing myself to take my hands off my balls and take a risk that I was funny enough just being a clown.

Now I’m one who will talk to homeless crack addicts, who will walk in Central Park in dark areas at 1:30 in the morning, who will have “discussions” with police that usually end up with me in handcuffs (you know the old phrase, “Win the argument, get sodomized in a jail cell.”) But I became painfully aware that I was hiding behind “spirituality” and “self-exploration”–that I was basically jerking-off, perhaps for fear of prematurely ejaculating–and so when this girl expressed that she wanted to know more of Who I Am, I finally decided that if I blew a load in my pants before we even got to the bedroom that I was good with that. And so I shared with her not only my birth name but my willingness to risk exploring more.

And with that I received a one-paragraph email response that said:

“…I believe that you and I would create a very toxic relationship. Therefore, in efforts to skip a chapter in life in which I don’t care to be a part of nor subject anyone like yourself to, I resign from communicating with you…”

Wow! Even Abner Luima would ask for another poke up the ass with the broom handle than to receive that kind of treatment!

It confirmed what I knew to be the case: that she was enamored with the character that she met at the Rawspirit Festival and when I told her my birth name it was like going to Disney World and seeing Mickey Mouse banging Minnie in a back alley–kind of destroys the whole theme park fantasy (unless you’re into bestiality, I suppose.) What was so telling was that her email even addressed me as the character name and not the birth name, almost like she had to hold onto the fiction to keep her George’s undivided.

It was as if I just told her that the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote were not real animals but a cartoon depiction and she was like, “No, they’re real–I saw them on my television set!” There was just no point in explaining that not only doesn’t a coyote have the vocal cords to speak English, the scientific know-how to design elaborate plans to construct rockets and bombs to catch and/or kill the Road Runner, nor the finances to pay for said bombs and rockets from the Acme Company–who would probably not send rockets and bombs through the Postal Service unless one showed them an official Haliburton I.D. card or one from one of their other subsidiairies, like Al Qaeda–and even if this coyote was the one in a quadrillion that did have all this going for him, defying all odds against an education system that was designed to teach him not to think beyond, “Me hungry. Road Runner food,” he could still not take a 2000 foot plunge off a cliff–multiple times–and live.

I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t hurt. But my hurt was not just the typical “feeling rejected” sort of hurt. It  was more due to my immediate association of the word “toxic” with the classic horror movie “The Toxic Avenger,” in which a nerdy high school kid who was constantly being bullied is finally thrown into an open container of toxic waste, that only Homer Simpson and his crew could have been so irresponsible as to leave open and outside a high school. And while I used to enjoy the thought of this deformed creature taking revenge on his tormentors with his new-found strength and psychosis, now I could only think of him as a boy who had so much to offer the world but because of pre-judgements and the inability to shed his “toxic” image, he would forever be seen as a monster–and unable to get a girl until the sequel, “Toxic Avenger 2.”

I knew she had fallen for a fiction and yet I believed that she would find an authentic “me” much more attractive than any storybook character I could create. I had broken down a barrier to let her into my sanctuary and I found myself coming home to a temple where all the light statues were stolen and the heavier ones were pissed upon. My House of Worship had turned into a House of Urine, to bastardize a Jesus line from “Jesus Christ Superstar.”

I wanted to be mad at her, for betraying a trust, for throwing salt on the slug that was in the center of my chest where a heart should have been. But as much as I tried, I could see the bigger picture and, as always, I was left saying to the Universe, “Well played, Universe. You won this round. But I’ll be back, I tell you. I’ll be back! Hoo-hoo-ha-ha!” The Universe had held a mirror up to my face and said, “Put on your yoga poser pancake as thick as you want–that’s still a zit over there.” (Great, now you all know I wear pancake!)

The real lesson was about me staying in the safety of my self-created cocoon and calling my hibernation “spirituality” when my wings had already fully formed and it was time to flap my butterfly ass out of there. The typical person would clip his wings and blame the other for now being a kind of weird wingless butterfly who can’t fly like he should be able to and can’t crawl like the caterpillar he once was and will probably be eaten by a bird within a day or two, that is, if the bird is not too confused as to what the heck he is and decides to shit on him instead. I’m not your typical butterfly and won’t choose to cripple myself in self-pity. I am going to acknowledge that these wings were made for flyin’ and if I have to fly solo for a bit, it will be with a more expansive view of the world than I had locked inside a cocoon in safety…but also in darkness.

I shared the saying of Hericlitus with this girl several times before she gave me the hemlock, “You can’t step into the same river twice,” not just because I thought it was often relevant and would make me appear smart but because she couldn’t seem to grasp the meaning, instead thinking that it meant that while Calgon was the “ancient Chinese secret” (according to the commercial), stepping in a river twice was the ancient Chinese curse.

What it means is that the water is always changing and that if you step into the river once, and then step in the exact same spot ten seconds later, the water where you first stepped will be replaced by a whole new set of water molecules; that the river is constantly changing. Likewise in our lives, with the myriad of different life experiences and relationships and learnings we’ve undergone and undergo each day, you can’t really have the same experience twice. Going back to sexual analogy: you can only be a virgin once and once you get laid–even if it is by the blacksmith from the bad family down the way and so you lie and tell everyone you were impregnated by God–you can no longer be a virgin, no matter how many believers in fairy tales read about your immaculate conception forever after. 

So a girl who was married and divorced twice, once to a person she didn’t love but figured, “What the hay, it’s only marriage!” and another time to a guy who would disappear for days at a time on “Vision Quests,” which is fake Native-speak for “I’m freaking out and need to run away for a few days without telling you where I’m going or when I’ll be back”–labels me “toxic” for saying, “Hey, I’m willing to risk seeing where this goes.”

That’s like someone who had Hitler as her first husband and Stalin as her second telling Dudley Do-Right kneeling before her in proposal position, “I think you’re a monster and want to avoid getting involved.” You would think my self-reflectory ways and willingness to share even difficult feelings would take me out of the “Killed Twenty Million People Between Them” category. I’m not saying I’m not a prick but I would probably tell my significant other where I was disappearing to if I went on a “Vision Quest,” and most probably it would only be to the health food store to buy bananas for one of my shakes.

So I snuck back and pee’d in her river. Unfortunately for me, by the time she stepped in the river again it was already clean. Damn that Hericlitus!

REFLECTION & MEDITATION:

Think to a time when you were enamored by someone else; maybe it is even presently. What was it that interested you? Were you in love with the idea of “being in love”? Or was there some quality about that person that was the interest of your attention: “He is honest”; “She is loyal”; “He is good-looking”; “She has a nice ass”? Were you emphatuated with the quality or the being beyond the quality? Is the perceived quality Who They Are? Is it real heart-felt love or a cerebral construction fueled by your desire? Has any of your past “loves” really been more than emphatuation and a desire to step into a fairy tale? Think back to when you ever pushed away from someone. Was it because of love and self-respect for what you needed…or was it because of fear?

I responded to her “toxic” email that I didn’t think we would be a match made in Heaven either, that her energy was a bit too frantic for me at the moment, but that I was willing to risk exploring further to see, if not how close we could grow in a relationship, then how close I could grow in comfort with expressing my Authentic Self.

Imagine yourself face to face with someone you love and unsure of how they feel about you. Imagine telling them that you are willing to give your heart and soul to them and they respond, “Uh, thanks but no thanks.” How do you feel? Now imagine their response is instead, “You had me at ‘hello’!” How do you feel (besides ripped-off that they stole that line from “Jerry Maguire”)? If your goal is living and loving fully–no matter what the risk–then either response would bring you closer to joy; if your goal is a fairy tale love then only the second response would bring you joy.

Nothing wrong with reading a fiction book (like one involving an “immaculate conception.”) It’s when you place it back in the Non-Fiction section that you are living in denial–and you’ll piss the librarian off as well!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under Self-Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.