Author: dev7

one time i was working on a saturday. my office was way down south on southwest parkway.

I took a break for lunch, and went out to a wendy’s down the road.
I took my burger and sat at a bar by the window, facing out,

it was a fine windy day, and there was a flock of pigeons outside, sitting in a line up on the telephone wire.
as I watched, the wind blew them back and forth, their tails bobbing up and down in unison.

all except this one guy, who was facing the opposite direction.

the wind blew, they all rocked, but this guy couldn’t find his balance.

they were arranged in groups of two or three, with some spaces between, like musical notes on a staff.

but this guy kept fidgeting, going from the lower wire to the upper wire, jumping to the top of the pole, atop the transformer, back to the upper wire, down to the lower one, and back.

when he jumped to the wire, the other birds would shrug their shoulders, and inch away. indulgently but a little grumpily, I thought.

now down on the lowest wire, I noticed two pigeons off to the side a little.

one was kind of big and the other was smaller, and I imagined they were a boy and a girl.

as I watched, the boy slowly inched toward the girl, and as he got closer, she allowed him up to a point, and then began to slowly inch away.

this went on for a while, the wind blew, the line of pigeons rocked back and forth, all facing the same direction, into the wind, all tails bobbing in unison, except for one.

the boy inched closer to the girl, and she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, and suddenly fidgety pigeon appeared between them, facing the wrong direction, of course!

the boy puffed himself up and inched away, and the girl lit off to the upper wire.

as I finished my burger and left, the big boy bird was just glaring at fidgety pigeon, who, facing the wrong way, stared off into the distance obliviously.

hah. I can relate.

sometimes, someone will say something like “it’s all in the past”

what is the past, exactly?

where is it?

is it out there in some other dimension?

is everything that ever happened or ever will happen out there somewhere?

what is the future?

is there such a thing? or substance, or domain, or whatever category it belongs in?

what is memory then?

the memory of a thing is clearly not the thing itself. they say every time you recall something, it comes back just a little bit different.

maybe a memory of a thing is like the impression left by a passing footprint on dew moist grass.

Yesterday, it was a beautiful sunny day, dry, cool early September morning here in Virginia, and I took myself for a walk.
I was in the midst of pondering a big question, and as I often do, I prayed, meditating on the mysteries of the almighty.
And just like that, I had my answer, as a gentle breeze kissed my cheek.
I recalled the words of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “As a lump of salt thrown in water dissolves and cannot be taken out again, though whenever we taste the water afterward it is salty. Even so, beloved, the separated self dissolves in the sea of pure consciousness from whence it came, infinite and immortal.”
And I imagined I tasted a little bit of her in that breeze, and I heard her voice. I called Anita “my beautiful princess” and she called me her “handsome prince” in a certain way, and I recalled a time, many decades ago, when she was laying sick and downhearted in bed, and I told her stories to cheer her up, and that’s where that came from, and that’s when I secretly decided to devote my life to her, and that whole life that we lived, beginning, middle and end, was just like one of those stories. No, really. Exactly like one of those stories, our lives are the stories we tell ourselves, and some parts of the stories I told her came true, just like I told her they would, because believe it, my friend, faith can move mountains, and some parts came true, but not in the way either of us expected, but always mixed, and like any good story, it makes you think.
And I’ll love her forever, and I won’t ever forget, not ever.

In his “letters to a young poet,” rainer maria rilke wrote something like: “do not ask me, or anyone else whether your poetry is good or not. ask yourself this: if you were imprisoned, and could not write, could not create, would you die? would you not be forced to scratch your poems out on the wall of your cell with a sharp stone? because if the answer is no, then stop writing immediately. you are wasting your time, and what may be worse, you are wasting my time as well.”

In re: the breakup, notwithstanding that is going on, and I’m pulling up memories, and observations that I hoped would help me ease out of this world between worlds I now inhabit.
I’m starting to get used to the idea of being single, but the loneliness is overwhelming. I hate it.
And I’m getting out and seeing people, and it feels great. I’ve discovered I like being in the world and around people. Maybe that’s a commonplace, but its new to me. And not just recently new, but I never felt like this before.
That said, underneath it all I’m basically emotionally unstable.
Its true, Anita was a bottomless pit of need, but she was also my lover, my best friend and my trusted counselor. She was a sweet human being and a pain in the ass. We were as happy together as two people can be and yet I was often frustrated and miserable. And now I’m happy, at least some of the time. Thus the sense of conflict.
Let me testify: there is life after death. Life for those of us who remain, at least.
Today I’m struggling with some issues and I looked at her picture, and talked to her about it. And I was overcome with a desire to call her, to hear her voice, to see what she would say.
And somewhere in the back of my mind I can hear her voice, and I know what she would say, but I’m dismissing it, because another part of me wants something entirely different. I want a new life that is as different from the old one as it can be. I want someone who is as different from her as possible. And part of that is me becoming someone other than who I was, not seeking her approval, not sacrificing everything for her, or anyone, not doing whatever it took to make her happy, without asking, without questioning, not being a goddamned slave to love. I’ve been down that road all the way to the bitter end. And beyond. I’m done with that mess.
Maybe you try to run seeking to escape your fate, but no matter what you do, you turn around and there it is right in front of you. And then you have a choice, you might say. There’s so many different ways to formulate it, “surrender to the will of God”, as we find in the Torah, the Bible, the Koran and the Gita, or as Nietzsche says, “that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” That’s pretty heavy, when you think about it.
Yah, maybe you think you have a choice, but you don’t really. Speaking for myself, if I had a choice, I’d choose to believe that there exists a universal consciousness, and it permeates all reality, including ourselves, and I’d choose to believe that love is everywhere, if we only opened our hearts to it, we’d feel it, inside us, in the space between us, everywhere, making the whole thing go. And if we did choose to believe these things, we’d find that this sort of surrender is ironically very powerful and liberating.
Love that which is.

Today is September 11, 2011
This dark anniversary makes me feel kind of blue, because I’m reminded of that ruthless and cowardly attack, and how so many lives were lost and ruined and for too many — both here and abroad — the anguish and the cascade of loss is still with us to this day. I am also reminded of how I had once despaired that we had the collective will and capacity to do anything about it.
I swore when I first realized what had happened, that I wanted Bin Laden’s head on a pike. I hated him and everything he stood for and believed in with a perfect and righteous hatred. I still do. I am not ashamed. I am proud of my hate, and I think you all should share it.
I am proud of it because it is based in a deep faith in the rightness of our cause, and the profound error of his and theirs. And a confidence that no amount of talking will solve this problem. They must be destroyed, their land salted, their names erased from the books, until the world has been cleansed of every trace of them.
I wanted vengance, yes. But I also wanted to send a warning. No one does this to us and lives. Like the decayed body of a rat caught in a trap serves as a sign and a warning to any other rats that may come skulking by, his ugly decapitated mug should stand at our borders for all to see: this is what we are! Don’t tread on me! I thought of the address Churchill gave the US Congress on December 26, 1941. Speaking of the treacherous surprise attack on Pearl Harbor he said of the Japanese: “what kind of people do they think we are? is it possible they don’t realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget! – And by God, we did, didn’t we? And I thought, that is the fate which awaits the cowardly, deceitful, loathsome Wahabiists who lurk in the shadows, as well as the palaces of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, hiding behind their women and children, and sending their pawns through the world to attack the innocent.
Eight years on, in 2009, I despaired, thinking, no, this is not what we are. Those of us capable of these emotions are apparently unable to accomplish the task, or they confused it with other, irrelevant and pointless tasks, and tangled it up in incompetence and errors of every sort, until we are all left wondering what the hell we are doing any more. Two years ago today, I wrote: “I’m ashamed of us. We suck.”
You all know what I’m talking about. I’m sick of talking about it.
Sometimes I think we’re all just a bunch of pussies and we don’t have the guts to stand up for what we believe in any more. Believe whatever you want to believe, but be prepared to defend yourself, or else there may come a day when it will be made a crime. And though like everything else, our rights and freedoms come from God, they can be taken away by men if we let them.
Then on May 1, 2011, we heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan.
And I thought: “Finally. Death is too good for him. Let his fate serve as a warning to whatever other cowardly rats lurk out there wishing to do us harm. Beware! And know what kind of people we are!”

maybe its a nascent ocd developing. or its been like this forever. because when I like a song, I’ll listen to it like 100 times before putting it down.
my latest is “next girl” from the black keys:

my next girl,
she'll be nothing like my ex-girl
I made mistakes back then
I'll never do it again
my next girl,
she'll be nothing like my ex-girl
It was a painful dance
and I got a second chance.

yeh, baby. so today is the seventh of september. maybe I’ll keep counting the months forever, but for the record: today’s number is 326. we had the numbers 200 and 300 engraved on the inside of our wedding rings, marking the passage of a big anniversary most people never even noticed. we used to think how cool it would be when we got to 400. Thirty three and a third years. November 7, 2017. not going to happen, though. not ever. I wonder if I’ll still remember.
its a beautiful day. the heat finally broke and its dry to a fault. its even cool in the morning. unless you happen to be victim of one of the wildfires some poor people are dealing with around here after this long, hot, dry summer. God bless them, the poor bastards.
I’m getting my head out of my ass and starting to get out and see people again. and the funny thing is I’m seeing with new eyes. I’m feeling people in a way that I never did before. I’m sending my feelings out into the world, and there’s something coming back.
I see the old me now in a clearer light. people tell me they didn’t really know me, and I know why. because I didn’t open up, except maybe to Anita. mainly because there’s a lot of ego here, a lot of pride, and maybe also hurt and insecurity, for whatever reason, justified or not. and I was just kind of a closed book, like a lot of other people, just safer in my own world.
but after you spend some time doing what I’ve been doing, sobbing and moaning and praying for relief, there’s not much room left for ego.
so you can’t help but let people see your vulnerability, and why not let them in? and maybe its ironic, but when you need help, and you let people provide it, they get to feel better about themselves, and you. I mean there’s a good feeling in the space between you.
and all I’m saying is that I’m becoming more sensitive to those sorts of feelings. I can sense them emanating from other people in a way I never could before. you might say I learned that from Anita. but not exactly. I do feel her somehow, she’s a part of me, she’s rubbed off on me, I hear her words coming out of my mouth from time to time, but its this experience that knocks you off the tracks, and it changes you. really deep down. you fall down the well, and when you finally climb out, if you’re lucky enough to make it, you’re not the same person you were before.

I feel like I’m entering a new phase of grief. And this one’s not in the books. I call it “the breakup”.
Really, its like breaking up with your lover. I’m pulling back a little bit to protect myself, and my own feelings, and I’m starting to think, “she kind of used me.” There’s so many dimensions to it, but today, I was cleaning out some stuff from the office, and there’s like piles and piles of shit from her stuff. Of course all her clothes, and stuff like that. We’re working through it a little bit at a time. But other stuff, not important, not sentimental, just piles of it. Tons of textbooks and notes from college classes she took years or in some cases decades ago, and there’s a whole saga to that, but never mind. All kinds of crap: scribbles on paper, her work stuff, get well cards, ancient bills, printouts that went wrong somehow, but never got thrown out. Just massive piles of stuff of all kinds.
And now she’s gone, and here I am, still cleaning up her mess. And from time to time, I’m overcome with anguish, and if you want to know the truth, I’ll tell you, there I was rolling on the floor, clutching my gut, just bawling and emitting sounds that were kind of primal in nature, if you know what I mean.
I made this decision early on, that I was not going to avoid the pain, I was going to look right at it, I was going to drink deep of the cup of grief, in the hopes that taking my medicine would be the best way to get over it.
It’s worked in a way, but this path ain’t for everyone, let me tell you. It’s rough. It’s passionate. It’s real. And you know, it turns out those words describe Anita and me — our relationship, our love, our life, our sex life, those three words sum it up pretty well. From the beginning right up to the very end. And beyond, into this nether world I now inhabit.
But there’s some liberation involved in all this too. I don’t have to bother with the eternal arguments of what to keep and what to toss. That’s one reason why we have so much of it — argument avoidance. And now, I’m kind of in a mood to toss most everything. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure I’m still sane, and I won’t do anything rash, but the end result is a much more open, lighter feeling. I feel unburdened by tossing all this crap, mine too, and giving away all the salvageable or recyclable stuff to the goodwill, and wind up with a cleaner, more spacious, more comfortable space for me. The new me. The single, solitary me.
And so the first thing is the breakup. The way I feel now is like she left me. She flew the coop. Like the old cliche, “it’s not you, it’s me. it’s just time for me to move on.” And she left me here crying, with two kids and a big pile of bills. No, really. Just like when we started out, Anita was nothing but a bottomless pit of need. Oh, I could cite you chapter and verse, and I would do if there was the slightest point. But never mind any of that, because now she’s gone, and all that is in the past. Or almost. We’re getting there.
Digging out of the debt we got into when we had more pressing business at hand than to worry about everyday finances, and fighting the collection agencies, the hospitals and doctors who can’t figure out their own billing systems, the greedy bastards can’t even grasp their own marginal competence, or their own contractual relationships with our insurance company. I am so right, they can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, they did such a great job she wound up dead, and after that, they send me bills that are egregiously in error. Wow.
Oh, it’s not their fault she wound up dead? Yeah, its not mine either. But I’m the one who get’s stuck with the bill. I was just standing here, when a star fell from the sky and knocked me pie for a loop, and I fell in love. So shoot me. Who knew there was a bill attached to that shooting star? Heads up, lovers.
And that’s the other part of all this, that now I feel like old Rip Van Winkle, just waking up after a thirty years’ dream. Oh, I had moments of lucidness in there. But now, well it’s a different feeling.
And I’ve talked to a couple of friends about this, and you know I’ve been kind of surprised at what I learned.
It’s sort of hard to know where to start. Let me start here: I hate all couples. Old couples especially, but young couples too. Even couples in trouble. Why do I hate them? Because God has so ordained it: “there went in two and two … the male and the female, as God had commanded.” Because we are all just leaves on a great tree, we beings come in complementary forms: physical, emotional, spiritual. Some of you know what I mean and some of you don’t. For the latter I have nothing but compassion and love. Brothers and sisters, I feel moved to preach. But let me restrain myself for now. Let me say that you can try to reason it out, you can try to explain it away, but the power of love as it was meant to be is overwhelming like an ocean wave. There is no discussion, nature is manifest. Simply observe the power of creation as it silences all argument.
But that’s not at all what I want to talk about. There’s this discovery I’ve made. Being single sucks. At one level its like middle school lunch room. What table do you sit at? All our friends, practically everyone we know is paired up into couples. Even when they mean well, and invite me over for dinner or whatever, its like one or two couples, … usually all mournful and pitiful, … and me.
What kind of social setting is that? The pressure is unbearable.
And then I’ve got a few single friends, and they’ve all figured out or are somehow managing to cope. I ask them, and they say things like, “I’ve learned to do lots of stuff by myself.” And of course I didn’t say it, but I’m like, “yeah, but what about sex?”
Or a friend of mine was finally able to admit, “I felt kind of funny hanging around with you all after the divorce.” You see back in the day, he and his ex-wife, and Anita and I had a lot of fun together. And we endeavored to maintain our separate friendships with each of them throughout the difficult process and over the years. But he said that afterward he felt uncomfortable when he was with us. Like a third wheel. But now that he and I are both single, well, it’s just a little more symmetrical. I totally know what he means.
And I could go on, but the point is that none of this other shit has anything to do with grief. It’s just the bullshit of being middle aged and single in a world that wants couples. And what are we going to do about it?
Sometimes we all speak in codes, but I’m coming from a different place just now, so I’m going to put it on the table. Sometimes you hear people say things like “society expects you to come in a couple.” But that’s not what I feel at all. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I could give a crap about what society thinks. No, it’s not society, it’s fundamental nature that drives me to seek human companionship.
And here’s the discovery. I have found that apparently society does have something to say at this juncture, and several people have told me explicitly that it’s too soon for me to get involved, or that I could get involved with someone as long as they met certain parameters, was suitable and of a certain age, and didn’t know anyone we already knew because that might be complicated, and of course don’t even consider trying to meet someone online, that’s for losers. “Do it the old fashioned way”.
Ha. It’s kind of funny when you really see it. There’s a lot of angles to it, but the bottom line is that despite what people say, and how they all claim to wish there was something they could do or say to help, if there ever does comes a chance where you might actually be able to do anything about it, maybe get a little joy and happiness back in your life, even if you can overcome your own guilt and conflicting emotions, people pull back, or start judging you even for just thinking about it.
The other day, someone said to me, “guys who get involved with girls younger than them, the girls have always been neglected, and they have daddy issues.” And here I am sitting there thinking, “what the hell? how can you have the slightest notion of what potential psychological issues a purely hypothetical individual might have, based on the imaginary possibility that she might get involved with someone not within the approved age bracket?”
Oh, there’s more, but it doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, as the grieving begins to dissolve into just plain loneliness, and we try to separate out these different strands of emotion, and I look around for people who aren’t just wringing their hands, wishing they could do something to help, what I actually see is quite the opposite.