The Yearn to Return

Now that my health has returned somewhat, I find myself still stuck in thinking about the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. My friend did respond to my query about the possible difference. She seemed to think both were a product of the ego.

I don't think this way. I have the opinion that the will to live pre-existed the ego, and not only that, preceded even having a body and a life on Earth.

This seems to exist as a time when I regret not studying science a little more carefully earlier. I never thought it would come to this, but I have to admit that science fiction would probably be the best genre for this fanciful flight of fancy, but since I don't possess the scientific lingo to bring it into play, I guess I'm reduced to writing my argument as a romantic dreamer forever lost in a world of my own making.

In 1971, while executing a rather simple plot devised to get some friends of a friend to get me high on their pot, I ended up in a house I had no familiarity with as the fifth wheel in a party I wasn't exactly welcome. Since I didn't have much shame in my presumptions then, and even less now, I distanced myself from the unwelcoming group by moving myself away from them to another room where I occupied myself with reading song lyrics of the Moody Blues on a poster in that other room. While staring at this poster I began noticing a completely different scenario manifesting itself on the periphery of my imagination, and upon the conscious perception of it, it rattled me to my core.

What I experienced in that peripheral fairy tale was the sight of myself as a speck of awareness sailing unhindered through the universe in a state of total exhuberation and ecstasy. It was as if there were no real plan or goal to this sojourn, zooming through the universe and experiencing this great self-exhaltation existed as the totality of my entire ex-is-tense.

Suddenly I saw what appeared as this magnificent blue and green jewel off to my right. It looked absolutely enticing, and immediately my attraction to it took me to it. This was the way I seem to move in this state of being, curiosity caused an immediate satiation of my desire.

Once I had entered this blue and green jewel's atmosphere I luxuriate in it's charm and appeal until my curiosity was sated, then, as usual, I looked beyond this place to allow myself to find curiosity in another part of the heavens to move out from this blue and green planet to zoom away. It didn't happen the usual way. Nothing happened. Again and again I performed this ritual of differentiation, and I stayed right where I was. It was like I was trapped. I couldn't get outta here. And, I'm still here.

At this point in my peripheral vision I saw what appeared to exist as the story of my lifelong visit upon this earth. This had a very powerful affect on me, because at the same time I was experiencing this fantastic vision, I was simultaneously reading the lyrics of the Moody Blues on that poster while isolating myself from the party people in the next room. Two entirely different dimensions at the same time.

The fairy tale ended it's saga of my existence as a victim of entrapment upon earth in the very spot I stood looking at that poster and was no more. I hurriedly burst into the next room frenetically screaming for someone to give me pen and paper. I had to write it all down before I forgot what I had "seen". The people in that room looked at me as if I had gone totally insane and irrational, and so I fled from the house seeking the same from any source. I ran to a restaurant near by, and a young waitress gave me a pen and told me I could use napkins to write on, and so I sat down and starting writing like a maniac. Suddenly, I realized there was no need, that there was no way I would ever forget what I had experienced in that vision, and I haven't. I have never experienced anything like it again. No need. My entire existence was shown to me as it had transpired over billions of earth years. It is not a pretty story.

You might be asking yourself what this has to do with the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. Probably nothing. It's just that this vision exists as the database of my experience for interpretation of sensory data that appears before me in my day to day life. Most people seem to have only this particular life's history to base the interpretation of their present life sensory experiences on, while I seem to have all the previous lives I have ever created myself as in my constant attempts to get the hell outta here. Through some unfortunate freak event I remember being free of this place, and that memory overrides any desire to live and let live that may have existed previous to this peripheral perversion.

If you are reading this and have come to the conclusion that this writer is obsessed beyond reason, let me assure you that I agree with you. I most certainly am obsessed with this fly-by-night fancy of the mind. It is not the only influence that causes me pause, but it does exist as the most powerful influence, because it allows me to integrate what otherwise would seem a very frustrating and futile journey on what one writer called "The Ship of Fools".

The nihilists I wrote of in a previous entry state that in order to see life on earth in it's primacy one must extinquish the will to live. They suggest that it is the will to live that entraps us here on earth. My vision certainly would encompass an "us", for it was the other entities like myself that I turned to upon realizing that I could not leave this place. They were all around me. They seem to be involved in the same activities that I would soon join them in, creating vehicles they thought might work to get back out into the universe to continue their sojourn as star trekkers. I began to imitate them, and as time went by we were joined by other specks of awareness who imitated us. We all seemed imbued with an almost unlimited ability to create, and create we did. We populated the earth with all life in this unceasing effort to the same end. That end was to get outta here. The yearn to return.

I view the yearn to return as the will to live. In my experience as an exerciser/creator of this yearn to return, I seem perfectly willing to accede that it doesn't work, and that it may indeed be the very reason we can't get outta here.

Due to the appearance of this vision I do seem aware of the problem and this awareness may serve as the inspiration to actually cease and desist from making such efforts to create a vehicle that allows escape velocity, but until this vision occurred, I only saw the will to live as my fear of death. This fear of death seems associated with the notion that all my previous attempts to create a more perfect vehicle of escape have failed, and that this present effort will fail also, just as the others have. I don't gnow how to extinguish the year to return, and as long as I remember how it was to fly free amongst the stars in total ecstasy, I somehow doubt I ever will.

I've had the flu or some other kind of bug for the last week or so, and I don't know whether the illness or the stuff I've been taking to alleviate the discomfort has screwed with my body the worst. I do know that I have not been able to write anything because much of the time I didn't care whether I lived or died, much less whether I was clickety clacking on my keyboard or not.

I just asked a friend of mine to offer me her opinion of the difference between the will to live and the fear of death. In our discussion group there are a group of nihilists that proselyse the notion that gaining the true vision of life requires one to relinquish the will to live. They say the will to live is responsible for all the ills of the earth and that it must get extinguished to go to heaven or something. So far, I haven't been able to interpret what they intend by their statements because I'm not sure what extinguishing the will to live actually amounts to in their theories.

I have supposed they meant a human's desire to survive any threat of death, and the extremes a person will go to not to die. Recently, an example of this showed up on TV with a hiker who got his hand caught under a huge boulder, and ended up cutting his hand off with a dull knife after three days being trapped alone in the wilderness. Did his actions spring from a will to live or a fear of death? I would love to get into a e-mail discussion with him so I could ask him directly, but it seems his typing ability has been seriously limited by the incident itself, and it might be a long time waiting for a reply. I wonder if dying of boredom might exist as an example of extinguishing the will to live.;-)

I've never heard of a person who died from boredom, I don't seem all that sure it's possible, and if they actually did die of boredom, what signs would the coroner look for as the cause of death? When I first came up with the saying "Bored people are boring.", I was very pleased with the cleverness of it. Whether I actually created that saying or not still lies begging in the back of my mind. I do know that since then when people have told me they were bored and I offered this quip in response, it sure seemed to change their attitude. This quip has not had the desired result with the nihilists though, equating extinguishing the will to live with boredom doesn't seem to have penetrated their will to bore others to death with their sorrowful wailings.

Fear of death appears not to live in the same camp as the will to live does. I haven't figured out if this seems true to me or not. The stories about heroic behavior many times cite a loss of the fear of death as the direct result of their acting in disregard for their own lives in favor of allowing others to live as a result of their behavior. Even more difficult for me to grasp is whether a person who does not survive their attempt to rescue the perishing is a hero, or a person who has extinguished the will to live and decided to take action in some vainglorious effort to commit suicide to gain their fifteen minutes of fame.

Perhaps my friend will answer my question about the difference between the will to live and the fear of death in a way that clarifies this dilemma for me. Hopefully, she will do it in an amusing way that dispels my boredom.

I just like waitresses. I always look for that quality of hardscabble tenderness that tells me I'm gone walk out on the other side one day. Some of them had faith in me when I was on the dark side of the moon. Many of them didn't even gnow they had ithat much compassion in them my my sorry state of affairs gave them the chance to reach out. It surprises me when I drag myself out of the gutters to walk inside some brightly lit diner and watch this harsh, seemingly mean-spirited harridan growl at the rest of the world, and then turn to me with her heart light shining. It helped me make it through the night.

My good friend Eddy and I went on the bum drifting from place to place just so he would have something to tell his grandchildren. He had heard my stories and wanted to go out with me to see if I was lying.

There was four of us who rode down to Brownsville, Texas to find a job on the shrimp boats. The weather was bad, the shrimp won't running, and nobody had a job for us. Luckily, we found out about a government program that paid a stipend for shrimper wannabees to go to a vocational school and learn how to work on shrimpboats. They had a domitory to sleep in, free food, and state-owned shrimp boats to learn the ropes on. We all signed on to do the school thing until the job market opened up.

I say there were four of us. The two other guys were were travel buddies we had met and had a good time with in New Orleans. They had been offshore sandblasting and painting oil rigs, wasn't gonna get paid until the next day, and needed a place to spend the night. Eddy and I agreed to let them sleep on the floor of our rented room. The next morning they got there checks and bought us all a big Italian meal that hit the spot. We decided to truck around together for a while to see what kinda jobs we could get on the waterfront around the Gulf coast.

Soon after we started the shrimping school our two friends found a job on a steel-hulled boat that worked the shoals off the Yucatan. The Mexican authorities didn't particular like this idea and chased them with gunboats, but the money was good if they didn't get killed. Oddly, without a clue, our friends turned out to be three steps beyond skin popping in a very serious way. It turned out that everybody on that steel-hull was of the same persuation. They would go out for a month to six weeks and catch as many shrimp as their holds would take, and then come back into Brownsville, sell the catch to get the money to cross the border to Matamoras, Mexico and hang out in shooting galleries, until it was time to go out in the steel-hull, then smuggle enough dope back across border to last them until they came back from the next trip out on the Gulf.

I never saw them again. During the next few years I heard that one of them committed suicide, and the other drowned when a crab boat he was working out of Key West got run over by an ocean liner out on the Gulf nearby. I was hanging around in Key West without realizing he was there until I read about it in the newspaper. They even had a picture of him. He had taken the money the ocean gave him to keep up his habit, and then it swallowed him. I figured he was a lucky man.

Eddy and I got split up after we finished the shrimping school. We couldn't find a job on the same boat. We didn't see each other for several weeks even though we were fishing outta the same harbor and all the boats came in during bad weather.

One day we ran into each other in a bar in Brownsville. We both seemed delighted to run into each other, and decided to celebrate, but neither of us had any money. I had an old Texaco Credit Card that the Holiday Inn honored. I warned him that it might be expired because I hadn't used it in a long time, and didn't remember when I had made my last payment. We decided to give it a shot and went into the Holiday Inn Restaurant to have a little blowout. I showed the cashier my credit card and asked her if they honored the Texaco card, and she said they did, but they needed to check it out. So, I handed her my old card, she made a phone call, and then smiled and told us to walk right in. This was looking pretty good. Life had not been too kind to either of us for at least a month. Now we found ourselves in a restaurant with a bar with a kind of carte blanc from the cashier.

I told Eddy to eat anything he wanted while we were there. I gnew this little fling was not going to help my credit rating, but I never kept much good credit anyway since I had decided to follow Doctor Leary's advice.

The waitress that came over was warm and cheerful. She had a pretty face and smiled a lot. I got lucky and guessed her astrology sign and then started working that mojo to see if I could catch her interest. She brought back drinks. Eddy was a Pisces, so he felt right at home here, and when the drinks come he brightened up considerably. Then, we were both flirting with the waitress and it appeared as though she was enjoying our attention. There wasn't many customers, so she stayed around the table a lot.

Eddy had a puppy dog quality about him that he worked with an easy style. He had a degree in Psychology and two trips to Nam to give him a little edge that emerged from him laughingly with an extremely dry turn to it. He liked my way of working my mojo and I liked the parts of it that he noticed. Not many could. Eddy had both couth and never mind. He was an expert at hiding it behind a big grin, big wide-open, bespectacled laughing eyes, and you could never keep up with him. Sometime, when he got drunk or drugged enough, he'd get brazen enough to start telling you what you were gonna say before you could
say it, and even imitate the way you were going to say so
that you thought you were talking to yourself. He thought
this was funny. I did too. We got along real good. He put up with my overbearing flair for the dramatic, and I tolerated his frenetic sense of insecurity. I guess we needed each other for a while

I had been around Eddy off and on for about three or four years. We lived in the same house together with about eight or nine other people several times. It was the only clique I ever belonged to, and being with these people was like fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Eddy knew I was attracted to the waitress, so he told her I was a palm reader, and that she oughta let me read her palm. She looked at him a little strangely, and walked off. In a few minutes she came back and asked me what Eddy had told her was a joke. I told her I could really read palms, and if she didn't believe I could when I was done I would buy her a drink. But, if when I finished telling her fortune she was pleased, then she had to buy Eddy and I a drink. She was hooked. Without saying a word she stuck out her hand.

I told her the story she already knew. I told her how many children she had and how many times she had been married, and why she was so desperately sad behind her smiling ways. Just like a woman she started welling up tears and crying. With a pompous sounding British accent I demanded she bring us our drinks, and then she was both laughing and crying as she walked away. She was a lot of fun.

During the time she was bringing us food and more drinks we chatted it up, and then she asked me to write down a poem I had told her. Instead, I thought it might impress her a little more in the right way if I were to write her a poem of her own instead of making her a copy about another subject all together.

In the next fifteen minutes or so I wrote her about the things I had read in her palm, and added a hidden enchantment for good luck at the end. I gave it to her, and she was gone for a good while. When she returned her eyes were full of love. She told me to wait for her until she could get off from work. It would only be an hour or so. I agreed.

Eddy told me he had to go back to his ship. They were leaving out early the next morning, and he had to leave. He had told me earlier, but I felt he was trying to get out of my way, and so we went to cashier to pay the bill.

There was a different cashier at the cash register. He took my card and filled out the credit slip. He told me that my bill was above fifty dollars and he would have to call it in. I was a little nervous, but I'd had a few drinks, and the night looked promising, so I wasn't all that concerned. That is until the clerk turned to me and told me that I had exceeded my limit on the card and that I would have to pay cash. The bill come out to sixty-six dollars, and between Eddy and I we had less than two dollars.

I told Eddy to go ahead and leave, that I would take care of it. He looked at me closely and asked me if I was sure. I told him to leave now. He spun on his heel and walked straight out the double-front doors.

I watched him look at me quizzically and wave as he left, I waved back, and sorrowfully turned back to the clerk, and told him I was completely broke. He insisted that I pay, but soon realized I was telling the truth and called the police.

There was no where to run, and so I didn't. I waited for the police to come and haul me off.

The word must have gotten around the restaurant that I had stiffed the check, and the waitress too, because I was going to add her tip to the credit card. My whole well-intended scheme was falling apart, and I had set myself up not only to go to jail, but hurt the waitress I really liked.

The police finally arrived. The clerk told them the situation. They did asked me if I wanted one more chance to pay the bill, and if I didn't they were going to cuff me and put me in jail for fraud and credit card abuse. This wasn't going well. Regretfully, I told them I had no money. They put my hands behind me and started to lead me outside to the patrol car.

Suddenly the waitress ran into the room and asked how much the bill was. She seemed hysterical, and appeared loud and pushy as she demanded the cops take the cuffs off me. She made such an entrance it startled everybody there. Her eyes were spitting fire, and she stared at the desk clerk with utter contempt. He shriveled from his clerkly arrogance to a surprising meekness and told her the price of the bill,

She turned to the cops and almost yelled at them that she would pay the bill, and to take the cuffs off me, that I was too good for that. The cop behind me took off the handcuffs. Then, she looked at me pleadingly and told me that sixty-six dollars was a lot of money for a single mother with five kids. She needed her money back when I could get it. I promised I would.

She wrote the desk clerk a personal check. She and the cops all nodded at each other, and the cops told me to get outta town. I agreed with them and left. I never saw her or Eddy again.

I laid on my bed thinking I would surely die last night. I have been ill with some sort of bug. It infected my sinuses and my lungs. I had a pretty high fever and ached all over. I had so much phlegm in my lungs and sinuses I could hardly breath. I thought of my father finally dying of pneumonia after losing control of all of his bodily functions. And now it was my turn. I said goodby in my mind to all the idiots who supposedly love me and would feel a loss no matter how much they hate me for what I represent to them. My breathing got faster and faster as my lungs filled with fluid. Mostly, though, I heard the wind howling.

I'm not fond of the wind. It always seems to howl in my most desperate moments. Even worse, I gnow it's not personal, but care-less. To be fair, I love the wind when I have been hot and sweaty and it cools me down. But, when I am not well or when I'm in danger it howls it's curses at me. Last night was one of those times.

I live in an area that is famous for it's attraction for hurricanes. Not many tornadoes like they get in the midwest come this way. Hurricanes do. The first hurricane I remember was called Hazel, and it ripped the roof off our family home and tore down the barn we were building. It destroyed my father's hen house and scattered ten thousand chickens across the landscape. I was a young teenager and the hurricane's coming was exciting. I had read all about it in the pirate's stories I loved to read.

My father was excited too, but so angry that he cried. He was just getting started on the first property he had ever owned and the financial loss was terrible for him. The sugar plums that had been dancing in his head were gone with the wind.

The eye of the hurricane passed right over our house. It was the first winds that did the real damage, and then the calm of the eye arrived and everything was real still and silent. My mother ran inside the house to see how much damage the rain had done to her precious furniture before my father realized what she was doing. He rose up from his tears to scream at her to get out of the house because the wind and rain would return. She didn't come out and so he went in after her, hysterical from his fear for her and with the immense pain and anger he felt from watching all he had worked for get blown away as he sat with us in the family car he had parked in the middle of the front lawn.

When they emerged from the roofless house again the wind and the rain struck from the opposite direction. My mother and father sat in the front seat of the car and held each and cried. I was astounded. I was a young boy. I had no idea why they were so crushed. I didn't know what it meant. I never have understood money.

As the winds rose and the rain was driven against the windows and metal of the car I just got more and more excited. My older sister and my younger brothers were crying too, more because of my parent's sorrow than the sense of loss. Not me. I watched the wind take the galvanized metal roof that came off in one piece get lifted from the ground where it lay crumpled near the fruit trees and get wrapped around the telephone pole out in the front field. I opened a crack in the back window of the car so I could smell it better. I could smell the salt air from the ocean fifty miles away. My father screamed at me to close the window.

It was hot and stuffy with six people in the car with the windows closed tight. My mother began praying. My small brothers huddled up against my sister. My father sat with his head lowered as tears ran down his cheeks. I knew I should at least act like I was sorry too, but I was so fascinated by all this uncontrolled power that even my father, who was the most powerful force I had ever known, couldn't stop from happening, that I stared out of the window in a state akin to pure ecstasy.

Later, when I joined the Navy to get away so I could find out who I was other than my parent's child, the power of the wind was always around. It controlled the seas, it controlled the oceans. It decided when and where our ship could come and go. Once, when we were escorting an aircraft carrier near the Phillipines, we got caught in a typhoon and couldn't get away from it. They battened down the ship and lashed everything down to rided it out. They called it a typhoon, but I knew it was a hurricane. The waves became so big that even the aircraft carrier disappeared from sight when it went into a trough between the big waves. Only five men out of a crew of 240 men were able to stand because of their sea sickness. There was only two of us on the bridge of the ship where there were normally 6-8 people.

The executive officer, who was renown as an old drunk on his way out of the Navy, commanded the ship while I fought the wheel to keep our bow into the wind. We would rise on the crest of one wave only to dive into the next one, and the entire ship except for the tip of the stacks would go under green water to emerge triumphant on the other side. There were only three men down below in the engine department to keep the boilers going and the ship going forward. The ship to ship radios were blaring away, but the exec ignored them and stood out on the bridge staring straight ahead, occasionally screaming course corrections at me and words of encouragement. I knew him in those moments as if we were of one mind.

When it was over and we had come through the storm, the deck of the aircraft carrier was curled back like an opened sardine can. Our sister ship's front gun mount was smashed back into it's bridge. Our ship had been stripped of one of it's anchors, and all the life lines and the Captain's boat was gone. After I finally got relieved of the helm where I had stood alone for half a day I went below to get some rest and green vomit from all the seasick sailors sloshed around in the aisles between the bunks, and the air was filled with puke and of moaning sick sailors. Not a good place to be.

In Key West, Florida where I got stationed in my second hitch to attend a nuclear school, there were two hurricanes down there. Later, when I got out of the Navy I returned time after time because of my affection for the place and went through two more hurricanes. Hurricanes were not as exciting to me as I got older.

It was the hurricanes that come here where I built my house on a 3 acre plot my father gave me that I began to understand my father's anger during Hazel. I built what there is of it myself board by board. I built it strong to survive hurricanes, and it has endured three direct hits and several that have come close enough for the winds to build to over a hundred miles an hour for a coupla days at the time. But, I wasn't here. When I saw the weather reports that they were coming I would get in my car and drive to some place out of harm's way. I could not bear to hear the winds howling for days at the time.

As I lay in my bed last night thinking my death was at hand I thought the howling winds had caught up with me, and were telling me this was my time, but not yet. I ain't dead yet. Damn.