If I had a digital camera I could post a photograph of how the ground can be seen through the cracks in the floor of my house. The floor in place presently was only intended for sub-flooring, and so the spaces between them wouldn't make any difference once a proper hardwood floor got installed. The sub-flooring's only purpose was to provide strength for the regular flooring. But, alas, I haven't installed the regular flooring nor even have the foggiest what that purported flooring might be made up of.
A house for me is just a place to get in out of the weather. Once that is accomplished, the niceties of social custom don't particularly impress me. Those artful touches seem always offered as an accomodation for the vagaries of local gossip. Who cares? I'm okay. It's cold outside right
now... and with my little $29 space heater I am comfortable here in my room. that's all I care about. For my visitors, it's 'root little pig or die'. Sure, that's not exactly a tactful attitude to display if I were running for public office, but I don't even gnow what public offices exist to run for, much less possess the acumen to pursue such trivialities.
I followed a link offered the other day to a site devoted to the late Gregory Bateson. There was a Jung quote that caught my attention... as Jung's quotes usually do... and I come away from the reading of it with a deeper understanding of why I had to deal with the eccentricities of what's called schizophrenia. As I read those descriptions I realized that my so-called "insanity" truly existed as an in_sanity, and that I had spent my life learning to accustom myself to making sense out of my inner yearnings in preference to acquiring the social advantages offered by
manipulating the external aspects of the sensory frame.
It intrigued me to read what I was typing as I wrote the last entry to my other blog. I wrote a little of how I had accepted the challenge of being shunned by society in general, to systematically explore the very aspects of life the general public appears to shun at all costs. Candidly, I didn't realize that I was challenged or that what I attempted to describe was considered taboo.
In any case, the end result of my taking on the unsupported task of allaying what frightened me personally (as opposed to what was supposed to frighten me), was that I became familiar and comfortable in the midst of what had previously freaked me out. Perseverance in the path I
felt had heart placed me outside of the class system in it's entirety. It has only been through time that I have come to understand it was okay for me to do what I did in response to life's challenges.
Many of the challenges I confronted in my opting to walk in my own shoes was the isolation it brought in it's train. This feeling of isolation peaked around the time I approached thirty years. I simply couldn't fathom how my stubbornly following my heart's impulses could lead me through the darkness my extreme feelings of isolation tormented me with. I did not gnow why was I hanging on to some isolated hope I could only pray would eventually save me from this ecstagony of isolation.
Weep and moan, weep and moan,
and cry to one's own pity.
To live this life in such a way
is just a little shitty.
It clings like putty to the soul
and pules for understanding.
But, no one hears
with glued-up ears
the pleas of silent ranting...
Now, some thirty years after I wrote this first verse of a strategic poem in my life, I choose isolation simply because I can. I've grown accustomed to it's face.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
I have remembered my father's story all of my life. I don't know how much of it is true. Either on his part or of my memory of what he told me. He talked to me about how to deal with animals a lot when I was a kid. I like to think of what he did as his way of teaching me to control my own animal nature. I don't seem all that sure his stories were all meant that way these days.
The particular story I'm contemplating was one in which he told of having an encounter with a stubborn mule. I don't remember the details of the event, but I do remember how he told me he handled that stubborn mule. He said he chained it to a tree, took a length of baling wire and twisted a large metal bolt into the end of it, and then beat the mule within an inch of it's life. He would laugh delightedly when he boasted that the mule never gave him any trouble after that. I remember as a child telling him that if I had been the mule I wouldn't have given him any trouble after such a beating either.
He told me another story I haven't forgotten. When he was attending college he worked at the State Hospital part time as an attendant in the psycho ward. This would have been in the 1920s, and there were no drugs to give the patients to calm them down. He told me several stories of his relationship with the patients and they always fascinated me because my father was the only person I actually knew that had experienced being in the presence of real crazy people. I figured that if anybody knew what crazy people looked and acted like it would be my father.
I don't know if my father's responses to his stories were due to him being a nervous type person who might either laugh or cry when emotionally startled or whether he really enjoyed remembering the reactions of his victims, but when he told of how he and the other attendants would deal with difficult patients, he usually had to stop the story to allow himself full laughter. They would put soft soap into socks to avoid leaving bruises, and then gang up on the miscreant and beat them unmercifully into submission.
I think my father may have told me those stories simply to intimidate me by planting the seed that if I acted like what he thought was animal behavior, I might end up like that mule. Often, in my youth, my father would get angry with me and tell me that I was as stubborn as a mule and beat me. Other times he would accuse me of acting crazy and would beat me. I don't gnow if I consciously connected his stories with the beatings back then.
I guess I learned his lessons well. Do whatcha gotta do when dealing with animals and crazy people. Don't let them get the upper hand. Just stop them. Stop them dead if you have to. My father's interpretation of "have to" could be a little nebulous and leave me shaking with fear that one day he would go over the line and literally kill me. I reckon I learned to create that same type of impression with uncertainty myself when I am is my father. I'm scared I might go over the line with it myself. The existence of these precedents do not provide comfort or company in my agedness.
My father, however, does not exist as the most terrifying image I can be possessed by. The experiences I have endured since I was a child have negated the lengthy contemplations I devoted to my father's antics. Even more terrifying is being stripped of my entire ideated construct of sensory reality, only to fully realize it only IS as a construct, and that my construct of sensory reality had been constructed by, of all the incompetent bumblers in the world, me. That's the scariest thing I gnow.
The particular story I'm contemplating was one in which he told of having an encounter with a stubborn mule. I don't remember the details of the event, but I do remember how he told me he handled that stubborn mule. He said he chained it to a tree, took a length of baling wire and twisted a large metal bolt into the end of it, and then beat the mule within an inch of it's life. He would laugh delightedly when he boasted that the mule never gave him any trouble after that. I remember as a child telling him that if I had been the mule I wouldn't have given him any trouble after such a beating either.
He told me another story I haven't forgotten. When he was attending college he worked at the State Hospital part time as an attendant in the psycho ward. This would have been in the 1920s, and there were no drugs to give the patients to calm them down. He told me several stories of his relationship with the patients and they always fascinated me because my father was the only person I actually knew that had experienced being in the presence of real crazy people. I figured that if anybody knew what crazy people looked and acted like it would be my father.
I don't know if my father's responses to his stories were due to him being a nervous type person who might either laugh or cry when emotionally startled or whether he really enjoyed remembering the reactions of his victims, but when he told of how he and the other attendants would deal with difficult patients, he usually had to stop the story to allow himself full laughter. They would put soft soap into socks to avoid leaving bruises, and then gang up on the miscreant and beat them unmercifully into submission.
I think my father may have told me those stories simply to intimidate me by planting the seed that if I acted like what he thought was animal behavior, I might end up like that mule. Often, in my youth, my father would get angry with me and tell me that I was as stubborn as a mule and beat me. Other times he would accuse me of acting crazy and would beat me. I don't gnow if I consciously connected his stories with the beatings back then.
I guess I learned his lessons well. Do whatcha gotta do when dealing with animals and crazy people. Don't let them get the upper hand. Just stop them. Stop them dead if you have to. My father's interpretation of "have to" could be a little nebulous and leave me shaking with fear that one day he would go over the line and literally kill me. I reckon I learned to create that same type of impression with uncertainty myself when I am is my father. I'm scared I might go over the line with it myself. The existence of these precedents do not provide comfort or company in my agedness.
My father, however, does not exist as the most terrifying image I can be possessed by. The experiences I have endured since I was a child have negated the lengthy contemplations I devoted to my father's antics. Even more terrifying is being stripped of my entire ideated construct of sensory reality, only to fully realize it only IS as a construct, and that my construct of sensory reality had been constructed by, of all the incompetent bumblers in the world, me. That's the scariest thing I gnow.
