I want to write a funny allegorical story that makes you believe I am some funny, lighthearted comedian with an intense flair for word imagery but tonight I would rather write the real story of the real me that I have so far known myself to be through my observation and my actions. I am not the greatest guy that I make myself out to be. I have had a lot of heartbreak and I have also done a lot of heart breaking from being heart broken. I spent most of my life denying that it all happened the way it did but it happened the way it did.
I was born thirty-two years ago into a strange land that I didn't understand. What I understood was the beauty and simplicity of the moment. I would watch birds fly up high in the air and I would fly with them. I would watch people smile and wave as they walked by the small fence that enclosed our yard while I got lost in my imagination. I wondered why no one else ever stopped to look at the world all around them.
I still feel this way. I see the intricate. I see the unseen and I appreciate it more than the guns, the politics, the wars, the crimes, the raping and other such ugly things across the world that I have seen and witnessed. I am like a little kid that has never grown up. I don't even know what will happen if we do all grow up and lose this capacity to wonderment and imagination. It seems to me we have surely lost our way. We have so many toys that all do the same thing but we all fight over them. We have all these shiny beautiful things that the earth provides and that we weave from the earth and we store them up in big buildings and put locks and keys for no one to reach unless you have seventy-five-page documents that say you can pass through seventy-five different doors with seventy-five different people guarding them. We have the capacity to love and feed and embrace every single person on this earth as we are visitors to this place and don't own this it but we put signs for lease, rent or own everywhere and if you can't afford the price you get to go and live out on the streets and beg to live or die trying.
I sit here trying to fit myself in a box with words, I try to sell you the idea of me so you can help me pay my bills so I can make a living. I keep perfecting myself every day but as I cover up all the dirt, I get so clean that no one sees me anymore. I clean myself so well I become invisible. My beauty comes from the pain and suffering of the world. It comes from every injustice that anyone has ever endured. My beauty comes with the price of never knowing if what I am doing is the right thing or if there is even a right thing that exists at all. My life comes from traumatic abuse. Being kicked around like a prisoner of war. Thrown down the stairs. Thrown through walls. Punished for wanting to be an artist instead of some commodity sitting behind a desk with one thing to look forward to at the end of life; a gold watch that says thank you so much for sitting in that desk and never leaving outside of the confines of your own mind, or heart or being. Watching the body slowly rot and fester with the pain of being a cog, spinning the wheel.
I hate to throw this all your way and even if you read this far you either might stop now because it doesn't tell you something that makes you feel good or sell you something you can tell all your friends about or show off to everyone that you acquired because you own everything but don't own yourself. Is that the price for life? That you get to buy the whole world but still never be able to move around in it without someone else's permission or someone else's law. Hell, I am going to go right into the nitty gritty of it. I had been digging into the bottomless hell anyways so what does it matter at this point.
Damned if you do, Damned if you don't. If you want a get rich quick scheme or you want some enlightening marketing tool that you can sell to your friends, then look elsewhere because all I have to offer is the raw life experiences that I have walked through. All I have to offer are bricks that have been thrown at me. All I have to offer is misery and the opposite feelings of those things too which have brought the same pain from either side. It's either that I have loved too much. I have fucked too much. I have dawdled away all my time, energy and resources too much or that I have been too lazy, too gripped by manic episodes and depression. Sleeping on people's couches.
Accepting everything I can. Doing the best with what I know. Letting go of what doesn't work only to find this beautiful circle. No matter how many books I have read, how many religions I have studied, how many sciences I have digested, how many philosophies I have believed in, how many self-help books that have helped me to help myself lose myself even more in them. There is no answer. There's no quick fix. There's no success in three minutes. The only one's who seem to profit off of those ideas are the one's who have created them. I have learned that the truth cannot be created nor destroyed. The truth is naked and it's swinging its hips to the rhythm of life. It's not when the lips move, much like my long winded story right now that started out to be the real me but then went on a diatribe on the world outside of myself but I have realized that I am the whole world. I am every single sunrise and sunset.
I am the guy at the bar who drank himself to death from loneliness. I am the woman who hung herself in the midtown Manhattan motel because no one would love her or even be kind to her. I am the guy who won the lottery but didn't understand money and spent it all in one years time. I am the little girl still waiting for her father to wake up from the long sleep. I am every mother and father. Every widow. Every homeless one starving on the streets while billionaires sit on their balconies shouting that they should have read Oprah's new article on how to be a multi-millionaire.
I am the frank one who says all the wrong and right things. I am the politically incorrect one who you can't stand but you will be friends with if it helps your image. I am Shiva. I am Lakshmi. I am that I am. I am my father's son. I am my father who left when I was 5 because he didn't want to be my father. I am my mother who got dealt a bad hand but did the best that she could. I am my stepfather who suffers so much from the pain and suffering he kept inflicting on others because he hurt so much inside but kept numbing it with alcohol, drugs and abuse. I am the little boy who wishes he was never born into this world. I am the one who does not know how to ask for help because I have helped so many but don't know how to help myself. I am the one who got fired because he didn't love what he does. I am the old married couple who lost the fire and the zest.
What do we really do here besides create so much complexity, adversity, peace, beauty and then destroy it. I am an ancient city upon ancient city buried under so much of the earth, at the bottom of the ocean, in the middle of lands we have never explored. I am all the money wasted on superficiality, condemnation, campaigns about nothing but bullshit. I am the one who keeps putting off change because to let go of the old investment would mean that I would have to admit defeat.
I am the one who cannot seem to get up anymore. I am the one who judges myself. I am the one practicing privatized corporate punishment. I am a civilization who keeps trudging on. Who keeps seeing the poison everywhere that it is creating but won't change until the bitter end. I know there is beauty in this world too. I know there are mountains, trees, flowers, bees, honey. I know there are beautiful people too. Fragile as glass.
I love this world too. Don't get me wrong. I have had so many beautiful moments. I have seen children be born. I have seen people come out of adversity and see everything new. I have seen triumph. I have heard the most beautiful music made by angels. I have made love for hours and hours and hours into the-most-ecstatic realms I could never explain with words.
I have had homeless people walk up to me and sit down and talk and they start crying so much and hug me because all they wanted was someone to listen to their story about what happened to them before things went wrong. I have watched people die in the park and I sat there with one of them and he said don't leave until they come and take me away. I have seen the light and glow inside the eyes of fire. I have watched the flame dance for hours. I have listened intensely to all the conversations ever come my way. I have made love to so many women who have walked into my life. I have eaten so many beautiful meals with them. Smoked so many cigarettes when I thought it was cool until it started to make me feel a bit crazy. I have been pure gratitude for all moments, every single one that I write about now. Every single one because if I never had these experiences I would never know anything. I have been a friend to so many, intimidating to others, awkward to some, selfish to others, fair weather to some, unable to show up for others.
Too many experiences to know. Too many people to meet. Too many things to have. Too many beliefs to believe in and too many to break. Too many habits. Too many excuses. Too many too many's. Too much is too much. I just want to be simple again. I want to feel real again.
I want to know what it's like to have everything and share it and for the first time see the beauty on both sides.
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