Even this late out into the game, I find myself still hoping for a reprieve from a life devoid of tender companionship, a life destined to loneliness and continued struggle.
I mean, c’mon, even Jesus Christ asked God to see if he could somehow defer crucifixion.
Despite what all the novels and movies say, the three magic words don’t do as much as you think they do. It’s the actions behind them that count.
And while I’m starting to recognize that I’m totally falling in love with her, I am frightened.
Frightened that I won’t do the right things, and that I’ll drive her away. Either I will go too quickly, or move too slowly. I’m frightened that, in the end, she’ll flee from me, and we won’t even be friends at that point.
Let me tell you, experience is a painful teacher.
But despie the current odds, I still hope. We’ll just have to see
This song, which recaptured my imagination a few months back, popped back into my head today.
Love of mine some day you will die
but I’ll be close behind.
I’ll follow you into the dark.
No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white,
just our hands clasped so tight
waiting for the hint of a spark.
If heaven and hell decide
that they both are satisfied.
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs.
If there’s no one beside you
when your soul embarks,
then I’ll follow you into the dark.
In Catholic school, as vicious as Roman rule,
I got my knuckles brusied by a lady in black.
And I held my tongue as she told me
“Son, fear is the heart of love”
so I never went back
If heaven and hell decide
that they both are satisfied,
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs.
If there’s no one beside you
when your soul embarks,
then I’ll follow you into the dark
You and me have seen everything to see
from Bangkok to Calgary
and the soles of your shoes are all worn down.
The time for sleep is now,
It’s nothing to cry about
‘cause we’ll hold each other soon.
The blackest of rooms
If heaven and hell decide
that they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs
If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
then I’ll follow you into the dark.
Then I’ll follow you into the dark
—”I Will Follow You Into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie
The YouTube star Kina Grannis and her sisters sing a cover of this song.
At first, it makes me think of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, with Orpheus heading out for Hades in order to bring his beloved back.
But I met one of my patients again whose wife had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 8-9 years ago, and they had moved into an Independent Living facility. He has a lot of medical problems and is in fact on oxygen for his ephysema and has been somewhat saddened by the fact that he can’t really take care of her. He and his daughters have decided that it would probably best to house her in the dementia unit.
But I think of his devotion to her. She will always be his one and only, even though the disease has been stripping her of what makes her her.
And I got pretty damn teary eyed. “For better and for worse, they told me,” he said matter-of-fact. “She would do the same, maybe more, if it were the other way around.”
And, even though I know I may never find an answer to this question: how do I find a love like that?
Non certior ubi omnes illi inceperunt. Fuisset ubi ea et meus laboramus pariter, ante omnes res quid ea subire. Pro nonscitarum rationalibus, ea meum accrediderat.
Importans est quid te subdare, scio quid eam mittendam ab caelo esse.
Ea mirabilis persona est. Ea curans, lenis, cogitabunda est. In unum verbum, ea verenda est.
Et dehinc ea paene moritur, et adhoc non subdo quid posse perdida.
Et dehinc aliqua, pro quippiam rationalis, ea meum vocaverat, in incapentio ver.
Cotidie ea meum diem illuminat. Solummodo quid meum scire quid eam existat magna felicitas pro meo est.
Aliquis similis meus fortem cum alicujus similibus ea non habeo. Non scio cur somnio.
Adquo possum amare, credo qui meum amare eae. Ea meum lucem solis fiat, meum lucem guidentem. Adqui si partem eae vivae non habeo post omnibus rebus, commutatus est pro major, et scintilla eae ignis semper vivebit in mea corde.
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” — Mark 12:28-31, New Revised Standard Version
I have this belief that if God exists, she will always let stand anything that is rooted in the virtue of love. Love is the only thing that makes existence bearable, and to oppose love is to oppose God.
OK, so maybe it was a little counter-productive to only sleep for four hours last night. I felt compelled to finish my blog entry, even though the ending of it was probably too rushed, and a little forced. So it wasn’t until 2 am that I finally surrendered and went to bed. Unfortunately, I had to wake up at 6 am today. (It’s going to be even worse tomorrow.)
I had forgotten about the band Embrace. I remember having a bunch of their tracks, but I guess they fell off my iPod playlist. This is one of my favorite tracks of theirs:
“Ashes” by Embrace
Now watch me rise up and leave all the ashes you made out of me
When you said that we were wrong, life goes on, just look how long I’ve agreed
“Nature’s Law” by Embrace
I tried to fight the feeling, the feeling took me down.
I struggled and I lost the day you knocked me out.
Now everything’s got meaning, and meanings bring me down.
I’m watching as a screening of my life plays out.
Every day I fight these feelings.
For your sake I will hide the real thing.
You can run all your life, all mine I will chase….
You should never fight your feelings
when your very bones believe them.
You should never fight your feelings.
You have to follow nature’s law.
I’ll live with never knowing, if knowing’s gonna change.
I’ll stop the feeling growing, I will stay away.
Like a broken record stuck before a song,
a million beginnings, none of them the one.
Every day I fight these feelings.
For your sake I will hide the real thing.
You can run all your life, all mine I will chase….
You should never fight your feelings
when your very bones believe them.
You should never fight your feelings.
You have to follow nature’s law.
I wrote her letters and tried to send them.
In a bottle I placed my hope.
An S.O.S. full of good intentions.
Sinking, will you give it to me? Don’t make me wait.
You build me up, knocked me down,
but I will stand my ground
and guide this light that I’ve found.
You should never fight your feelings
when your very bones believe them.
If you let them show, you’ll keep them.
I know you hurt, but soon you’ll rise again, again, again….
You should never fight your feelings
when your very bones believe them.
You should never fight your feelings.
You have to follow nature’s law.
“Target” by Embrace
Out of sight behind these eyes you’ll stay
Where everything is possible
It’s beautiful
You’re the first and the last time that I’ll ever try
so dry your eyes, I’ll say goodbye, I say goodbye….
This just goes to show that I have to re-sync my iPod to my computer more often than I do. Who knows what other cool songs I’m missing out on?
Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won’t engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
—Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I’m not sure what came over me last night. Like I said, I didn’t really do much work. The night was spectacularly quiet, and my black cloud failed to manifest itself. Either that, or my pager had decided to fail, but I woke up once or twice in the middle of the night to make sure it was really still working.
Instead, I surfed the internet, hearkening back to those long ago days when I was an intern, flailing around as night float, doing nothing but sitting in front of the puter, occasionally running in a panic to put out a fire.
And while I kept myself occupied by trying to restart my blog, nonetheless a seeping loneliness crept upon me, and I just felt forlorn.
Maybe it’s just my depression relapsing.
Times like these, it’s hard to remember the Art of Not Wanting. Interestingly, despite being anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, this sentiment nonetheless has managed to seep into the mainstream.
If you love someone, set them free
This actually echoes the Taoist sentiment that to hold onto something or someone, you must let them go. Or there’s always good ol’ JC, in Luke 9:24, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”
And there’s this verse that S. texted me once, which pretty much sums up what unconditional love is:
Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
—Hafiz
I seem to have a penchant for unrequited love. Now, Br. long ago deconstructed this flaw in my character. It’s simply a manifestation of my avoidant personality. Since I know that the situation is impossible, it’s safe. Since I know from the start that I’m going to fail, I don’t have to worry about anything.
It’s a perfect scam. It’s too bad that there’s actually a part of me that wants to be loved in return.
I didn’t run into Don Quixote de la Mancha until I was a senior in high school, primarily through the musical “Man of La Mancha”, but afterwards, through the brilliant novel by Cervantes. I never did finish it in its entirety, though.
I’ve never been called “quixotic” to my face, by I’m sure it must’ve crossed the minds of some of my friends and acquaintances.
But naturally, I grew obsessed with the song “The Impossible Dream”:
This is my quest:
To follow that star,
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far;
to fight for the right
without question or pause;
to be willing to march into Hell
for a heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true
to this glorious quest,
that my heart will lie peaceful and calm
when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this,
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star.
Looks like I’m still looking for Dulcinea, doomed to forever love pure and chaste from afar.
After work, though, I grabbed a large cup of coffee and sat in my car by the beach, watching the crashing waves and the surfers who braved them. For some reason—possibly entirely pharmacologically-mediated by the caffeine—my mood lifted up as I drove home. The morning always looks better after some coffee.
Later today, I found myself thinking: there’s got to be an orthogonal solution to this. There’s got to be a way for me to beat my fear of rejection and be able to tell people how I feel about them, without hoping for anything in return.
And I recognize very acutely that if I can’t take care of myself, if I can’t love myself, there’s no way in hell that I can actually love another person. It’s just logistically impossible. If I don’t have all my shit together, how can I possibly be any good for anyone?
And at last, it comes full circle. If I learn to love the world and the people and things in it for who/what they are, and not for what I wish them to be, no matter how fucked up everything is, no matter how evil people can be, unconditionally, whole-heartedly, without expecting anything in return, then maybe I can learn to love myself for what I am, even knowing that I am badly broken and horrendously imperfect. To put it in terms of Darwinism, the only options are to grow, change, or die, and despite how I feel some days, I really don’t want to die. At least not quite yet.
I finally recognize, perhaps years and maybe decades too late, that life is impossible without love. And even if no one in the world loves me, I’ve got to at least love myself. I’ve got to believe that there’s a seed of something great inside of me, it just needs to germinate and take root.
Seeing the world in this light, sure it’s fucked up, beyond belief, and possibly beyond repair, but, to use a contemporary, hackishly trite phrase, it is what it is.
R has often quoted “Buckaroo Banzai” to me: No matter where you go, there you are.
This is not about resting on my laurels. This is, ultimately, about believing that, even though there are a lot of things wrong with me now, I can get better. Slowly, maybe imperceptibly so, but if I make the effort, given enough time, there will be a change. There’s no reason why every day has to be like every other day, fraught with total insanity, mind-crushing depression, and abject desperation. Change will be excruciatingly painful in the beginning, but what have I got to lose if I’m already hurting this bad?
Change for the better is possible. And I can make it happen. If I just keep believing this—and I see no good reason why I shouldn’t—then one day I might actually make something of myself. Not just a guy with a title, with a few pieces of paper that all say I’m over-educated. More than that. It’s possible that some day, I can be a person that’s worth falling in love with.
P.S. anytime I start feeling sorry for myself again, please remind me that I wrote this.
In that moment, as I leaned on the railing and watched them all dancing, the unasked questions buoyed my heart, lifted it up with the tide, and I smiled, knowing for that one moment the answer.
The sense of certainty, of inevitability was profound.
But I said it before: it doesn’t mean it’s going to be some fairy tale ending. I only know what my answer was in that brief moment, knowing that I would give that answer no matter what happens next, even if I only get to creep in the shadows, flitting through the bright, electron-infested interstices of the Internet, hoping for some hint, some passing mention of her.
Just to know that she exists in this world is enough. And where I go from there is clear.
To love, pure and chaste from afar if that’s the way it’s got to be. Although I wish that wasn’t all there was to be, what is, is, and that will always be enough.
Twitter is an exercise in simulating Brownian motion in a network. It’s kind of like the example of the drunkard trying to find his way from the bar by choosing a random direction at each intersection he crosses. Or, technically, I guess, it’s a random walk on a graph, where instead of merely choosing cardinal directions, you could just as easily choose walking through a tunnel, down a diagonal, or up a freeway on-ramp.
There is no path to truth. Truth must be discovered, but there is no formula for its discovery. What is formulated is not true. You must set out on the uncharted sea, and the uncharted sea is yourself. You must set out to discover yourself, but not according to any plan or pattern, for then there is no discovery. — J. Krishnamurti
Now I see why most people are apt to think of art and science as completely dichotomous. But I think most people don’t really understand science. While most people probably don’t understand art either, that never stops them from their conjectures.
One might imagine that the whole purpose of science is to predict that which has not yet happened. We’ve taken Newton’s Laws of Motion and calculated launch trajectories to the moon, and figured out how to steal some gravitational energy from the Sun and from Jupiter in order to visit Uranus and Neptune with great success. We’ve taken Einstein’s beautifully simple equation of E=mc2 and created both horrific havoc (in the form of nuclear explosions) and closely guarded hope (despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, I still think the only way we can gain independence from hydrocarbon fuel is to pursue more research in the safety of fission-based nuclear power plants, and to finally figure out how to build a working fusion-based reactor, which would be orders of magnitude safer.)
But the path to these truths do* have a lot in common with art. The *discovery of the theories of gravity and of relativity were certainly not predictable, and their stories are very human stories, guided by intuition, instinct, and the desire to find beauty and grace in the universe.
Interestingly, one of the landmark theories (or set of theories) of mathematics, and particularly of information theory, formulated by Gödel and reapplied by Turing, proves that you cannot intentionally predict nor calculate that which has not yet been discovered. If your current system of knowledge and mathematics does not contain the axiom you’re looking for, you can’t just plug in parameters to an existing equation to try to derive such an axiom. The only way to obtain new knowledge is to venture out in the unverifiable wilderness, and see if what you find is actually self-consistent with what you already know. And as the history of the scientific endeavor has shown us, sometimes what you find out in the wilderness forces you to recognize that what you thought you knew is actually much stranger, much more subtle, much more intricate than you first thought.
So the path to truth cannot be calculated, but it can be found, by rough approximations, skilled and shrewd guesses, courage, patience, and, most of all, unquenchable curiosity about this universe of ours.
And thus, Krishnamurti poetically restates Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.
If you are in a relationship, and it is “doing absolutly[sic] nothing” for you, makes you feel bad about yourself or situations, just causing unessesary[sic] drama, and ruining things that you may actually care about…why would you want that in your life?? you need to surround yourself with the people that make you feel good, and that will help you get to that next step in your life. that is what a relationship is all about…growing and moving forward. Surround yourself around people that are making moves, and doing what “they want and love” with their lives, positive energy…thats what life is all about…living. Because if you dont, misery loves company, they will only try to bring you down with them…but the question is, are you strong enough, to not let that happen? Its hard to see if you let it get to that point… …and then from all those answers you have to decide if that person is worthy of being a part of “your” life….because it is your life, your show…you decide who you want the characters to be…not the other way around. Every person is different, every person has their voice…can you recognize your voice, listen to it, and stick up for it??
(discovered on Tumbldown: a metaphysical mashup, from the Myspace blog of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, of whom much ink has been consumed in describing her illicit client-provider relationship with erstwhile-but-no-longer Governor Spitz.)
I suppose this just goes to show, that to be good at anything, even relationships, you’ve got to experience as many as you possibly can. Practice, practice, practice. Preferably with strong financial backing.
On the other hand, when you’ve only got one X chromosome (and I’m not talking about women with Turner’s Syndrome), I think it becomes a lot harder to pick and choose just exactly who you want to be with (especially if you expect them to pay you $5,000 an hour!) I’m not a big fan of binary thinking, but sometimes, the choice is often her way, or the highway. And let me tell you, I’ve got plenty of experience driving the lonely interstate highways of this great nation of ours.
The real reason I grew confused and insane is that I realized that I still like someone else a lot, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. (And this is probably unwise and stupid to post here, but I really don’t care anymore. I’m like a tagger with a spraypaint can, leaving “Kilroy was here” all over the place, like a dog pissing on trees. If you can figure out who I am, and who I’m talking about, well, good for you, it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.)
Amidst the waves and the cake and the gin, I once again realized how royally screwed I was, and this sent my mind reeling.
Is there any hope? If there isn’t, what the hell do I do now?
This is when depression sets in. Big-time.
It didn’t help at all that one of my cousins, a guy I grew up with, just got married to his on-again, off-again girlfriend for the last eight years, and they are so disgustingly happy that I wanted to commit suicide that very night, and pretty much tried to drink myself to death.
The thing that really wreaked havoc on my soul is that I’ve known this woman who is everything I could ever want and far more than I deserve for about that long, and really, I’ve had a crush on her before that (non-withstanding my disastrous obsession with you-know-who who is now married and has two kids)
And beside the fact that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Satan’s asshole in the first place, I couldn’t’ve done more to be as far away as possible from her.
Good one, dude. That’s how you let people know you like them. Run away as far as possible.
