I'm already gone.

I think that this has been the year of self-preservation.

I look back on the pagan calendar and I am thinking about my journey from the last Samhain.  It's been a long, dark road before me, wrought with perils.  I am sure that there is a lot about me fundamentally that hasn't changed, but I would have to say that there is a lot about me that's changed too.  I've made a lot of hard decisions in the past year, about the people I will keep in my life and the friendships I will let go.  It sucks, because people I call 'friends' have great aspects about them.  But I've come to the point where I'm realizing that even though I see the potential of a person, that doesn't really mean they will live up to that full potential, nor that they even care to.  I'm weeding out those people who do not enrich my life in any way, or people that seem to take from me and never give back.  One-sided, unhealthy relationships.  I am brushing away those that would speak kindly to my face, but bitch about me behind my back.  I am turning my back on those who offer nothing but their outstretched hand.  Those that never seem to care about me, because the world revolves around them.

Maybe that sounds a little selfish.  Maybe I deserve to be a little selfish.

Since the focus moved from my community (those I hang with) to my family (those I live with, save for a scant few tried and true friends), my family prospers.  My husband and I are doing really well and able to do more and more for our family.  I'm not driving in the middle of the night on rescue missions, I'm not trying to cut it close to life expenses versus bailing someone out of jail.  I'm not over-exerting myself outside of my household.  And things have never been better.

Some days I think about what I have lost, and I mourn the loss of people.  Of their potential.  But the greatest of that potential lies with me and my family.  Had I seen that sooner, well...

...would of, should of, could of.  It doesn't really matter.  This past week has been a bit of hell at work, but in the end, it's worth it.  Even if it's just me and the cat in the middle of the night.  We get past that short spell, and on with the living.  I got at least one of the two things I wanted most for my birthday this year.  The reasonable one was spending a nice, quiet evening at home with the family, celebrating my birthday.

The second one was the impossible, but it doesn't mean I couldn't wish it.  The second was I just wish my sister could have called me to wish me happy birthday.  I hope that she would be proud of me.

Liar, liar.

I remember taking the humanities at the community college, like sociology and psychology.  One of the things that Dr. Simones used to say is that people lie to themselves, even just a little.

And we get this.  Sometimes it's what our weight or size really is, just little white lies to the brain.  Others, they're a bit more severe, like we really didn't want something bad to happen after just wishing for it.  Or we didn't wish for it, it just happened.  Whatever we can tell ourselves in a whisper to keep ourselves in a comfort zone.  Looking in the mirror, we tend to be critical, but we also tend to talk ourselves up, saying things like we haven't gained that much weight, the creases at our eyes aren't so deep, we haven't really changed all that much from high school.  Right.

I realize that intermittently, I can affect people subtlety.  I don't necessarily get the credit for it, but I do influence people, and the funny part is that I don't intend it.  Like picking up the partiality to sterling silver flatware, or the desire for the garb and dress of the renfests.  From teaching to writing to my personal thoughts on hallucinogens to tending fish tanks.  I know there are places I had a hand in thoughts.  Deny it all you want, but someone in your life that you've loved, even if that love didn't last, has affected you in some way.  The seeds of conversation plant ideas which would flourish into something not entirely unlike a thought process that loved one had, or maybe it was set adrift to form a completely different viewpoint.  Either way, a few choice words were a catalyst for something.

I have an aversion to designer drugs, flowery patterns, and turquoise plaids.  But I have picked up an affinity for house music, antiques and small, random adventures.  I love pottery, textured fabrics and enjoy designer coffees and breads.  All of my tastes, styles and thoughts have been my own, yes, but also shaped by the world, no, the people around me.

To not give them credence is laughable.  Just because I don't like someone, I'm not honorless enough not to give credit where credit is due.  Perhaps I did not really care much for my mother-in-law, but she did make sure that I got my diploma and that I walked the year I almost didn't graduate.  Doesn't mean that I have to be  bosom buddies, but it would dishonor me not to admit where I came from, so to speak.

So surround yourself with people, but don't get lost amongst them.  The ones that you invest your precious time in will shape the kind of person you are.  You are your own person, honed by the love of your company. Pick with care who you spend your time with.  You can either be like crabs in a bucket, people clinging to you to drag you down, or you can fly with your flock, the winds uplifting you all.

Occupy Wall Street.... Occupy Your Life. Get in there and LIVE it.

I've been watching this in the news, touch and go, and getting ideas of what exactly it is.

No one seems to have any definitive claims as to entirely what 'Occupy Wallstreet' is.  Some have said it was a protest against capitalism in the form of corporate greed.  I've seen others say that it was a demand for a truer democracy.

Each person, whatever color, gender, sexual orientation, religion or creed....no person can seem to give a straight answer on exactly why they are there.

But they're mad as hell.

I can get that.  There is so much bullshit wrong in the world, I won't even start my own list.  I've listen to people bitch about unfair laws, unfair corporations, unfair, unfair, unfair.  But there are a few things that I have to say to this.

Firstly, standing around gets a bit of attention, but never really the kind of attention you want. "Yeah, I've been  standing on Wall Street for days now..." Okay, you look like a good guy to give a job to, don't you?  But I have to give them props.  They're trying to figure out what to do with whatever it is they're upset about.

Therapy might help.

But beyond the selfish outer shell of the movement, the rallying words of "we want", perhaps something more revolutionary would be "we act".  Let's fucking take this to the street then, shall we?  You know that there is registered sex offender lives on the corner, never coming out of his house.  Let's all get together instead of standing in a street with a volatile concoction of emotions and anger, and bust in on this bitch for some vigilante justice.  We will just hang him in his own tree in the front yard.  We will do what we believe is right to make this world a better place, be it through burning down the buildings of the corporations, or stringing up a guilty man in a indecency with a child charges.

Oh, wait.  Once that's done, you find out the guy was 18 at the time the crime was processed, sleeping with his 16 year old girlfriend.  And rumors and speculation led this mass mob to hang him.  When really, even though he was tried and found guilty by the letter of the law, that this perhaps wasn't quite the case it sounded like on paper.

Does the vigilante justice redeem itself just by saying they're sorry, they didn't know?  Hell no.  And when the masses are to blame, well, everyone misses the blame.

Instead, go to the source.

I have said this several times before, I'll say it again.  I am not the best when it comes to interpretation of the law.  I am no lawyer, I have never been to law school.  I'm taught the bare fundamentals in school, like everyone else, and set out into the sea of adulthood to find my own way.  I get that.  But no matter how long my ship gets to sail, the waters will always be grey.

If you don't like what's going on, change it.  But you can't change it from the roles of victim and exploited.  Get out.  Get up.  DO something.  Join the congress.  Join the PTA.  Join a community shelter.  Do service at the local church.  Help at the pet shelters.

Pay it Forward.

Nothing will change overnight, and all though self-understand and self-reflection is important, it cannot be all-consuming.  When you get your tentative grasp, hold on tightly and move forward as if it is the last thing you do on this earth.  Because any cause can be shunted to the side.  What you do about the things that trouble you is what will make the entire difference.

For those at the Occupy sites, I wish them happiness, peace, joy, and resolution.

BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

Life is a dancefloor....

"Might as well let go, you can't take back what you've done..."

That's part of my problem.  For some reason, I'm literally hard-wired to obsess.  At least, that's what the shrink said by looking over the waves of my brain.  I suppose he got bored with me, or he's just kind of letting me do my own thing during October, because I'd told him it would be crazy-busy.

I've got to work on my birthday, which is a first in a while, but being the type of retail, I don't mind it.  At least that day I get to work early, so off early, which means dinner, possibly.  I don't really think too much about it.  Frankly, the only thing I want for my birthday, I can't have.  And that would be just to hear my sister call and wish me a happy birthday, as we were apt to do on our birthdays.  Just call and chat.

Last month I found myself calling her phone number, just to see if the voice mail was still there.  Nope.  I couldn't have checked it, so I wonder about the calls she never got to return sometimes.  It worries me, fascinates me, and humbles me, the realization of how completely her life just stopped.  Bill collectors and catalogs still frequent the mail.  I had to donate a lot of her clothes (when I got here, we were the same size....a few months past and I'm much smaller now....plus, well, we just aren' t into the same kind of style of dress....go figure), and she has art supplies here I have yet to go through.  So much stuff, so little time.  And well, there's other things.

She's got photographs of being out with people I've never seen before, to places I never knew she traveled to.  I am sure she loved her friends very much, but it was just another indicator about how very different our lives were.  Sometimes it makes me feel really alienated, like I never really knew her at all.  And in other moments, we we spoke and the exact same thoughts crossed our minds, I felt deeply we were cut from the same cloth.

And now....now all I have to analyze is what went on before, and soon enough, those memories will erode in their sharpness, and it scares me to forget them.

And then I think about my stepbrother, about how long he had to suffer with schizophrenia, and it makes me truly sad.  I mean, it emphasizes the fact that in all acutality, I lost both my sister and stepbrother a long time ago.  Estranged.  And the thing that makes it the most pointed is the fact that I have a hard time recounting the last time I saw them before their deaths.  In my stepbrother's instance, I think years have passed.  In the instance of my sister....I'd seen her a few weeks before, but before that particular visit?  I can't remember.

Gods help me, it's really been long enough I can't remember.

It still doesn't make me feel less of either of them, I love them all the more for having watched.  Having been blessed enough to be there.  Not entirely under the circumstances any of us would choose, but I got one gift I can't be ungrateful for.  I got to say goodbye, which is a lot more than some people ever get.

Just sometimes I feel really alone.

Of the moment

I can't say that every word I ever wrote was kind, but nor can I say that I meant every harshness I dealt.  And that can become the deadly beauty of writing.  A double-edged sword which can help you cut to the quick of things, but damaging and swift to others.

I remember that a friend of mine once left a diary behind in a move.  He was beside himself with horror that anyone might pick it up and read it, because he wrote freely in it, not withholding his emotion or timbre.  It caused him great anxiety for two days, whereas we safeguarded his words, never opening, and returned the books to him.  In passing, he mentioned writing things in a not-so-nice-way about people in them, and actually said he had done the same to me, 'writing in anger'.  He was easily enough able to retrieve the books and continue our friendship, although he admittedly wrote very ugly things in it about me.  I was able to nod to this, because I believed my friend had a right to his feelings in the heat of the moment.

I look at my words to him in recent times badly.  I know they were unkind.  I was angry and dealing with other things, but....he is firmly of the belief that people, depressed or having issues should be responsible for their actions and words......Oddly, even in anger, I had the strength to speak directly to him (or indirectly, writing to him) and I shamed for my behavior.  But what he writes, as long as I wasn't privy to it, does it make it justifiable?

I look at the double-standard as interesting.  I am not saying either of us is right or wrong, but in my observation, it looks like a duality exists.  Just as assuredly, if I know that something is illegal and willingly engage in the act, then I am chancing the probability of being caught.  Having to be responsible for engaging in the illegal act.  I will not cry about how unfair I think it is, or how the system is wrong.  I will not evangelize about my rights, the deterioration of 'the system', or make any other excuse about why I should not be arrested, tried and convicted.  When I speed in traffic, although I have faith in my driving capabilities, although I have never been in a car accident, if I accelerate above the speed limit, I know that there is a possibility that I can be stopped by law enforcement, ticketed, and possibly jailed.  So when I speed, I willingly break the posted law, the law I know about, so when I have to face the consequences, I will accept them as an adult.  I might bitch about the fact that I hate the process.  But I know the law, no matter how unfair it is to me, and anything else is just looking for an excuse.  At least, that's how I feel.

And yes, I speed sometimes.  Just not often.  Because frankly, I can't think of anything so important that I couldn't have left twenty minutes earlier for instead of trying to break the sound barrier. Granted,in  emergency instances...well, if you'd have known it was an emergency twenty minutes earlier, you'd already be long gone, wouldn't you?

the dream of a memory...

A man walked into my store today which struck a chord with me.  For all the things that I had to do, all the work that had to be done, I paused to look curiously at this man.

He closely resembled a man who crossed my path over thirteen years ago.  The anesthesiologist that took care of me when my first child was born.  I remember his thin and supple fingers, his calm, quiet tenor words speaking lowly.  The content, I can't remember.  It's the reassuring tone you use when you're dealing with someone you are afraid will spook at any sudden movements...kind of like a horse trainer, I suppose.  He was pale, thin, very tall, and had eyes the color of brilliant aquamarines.  They reflected the cold, crystalline blue and picked up grey from the matte steel materials which surrounded us in the procedures.

It's interesting to me how one face, one smell, one pattern or touch can bring to me a hundred flashbulb memories.  Some with complete clarity, some a little hazy from the faded photographs time leaves behind in the mind.

Don't know why it was so strongly remembering it, but it was a brilliant moment.

scotch and strings

Last night was a beautiful night.  Even though I had to work yesterday, I came home to a content husband.  We talked in the breezy, cool weather of the evening.and spoke of the String Theory and its relation to music and magic.

There are the things that we talk about when left to our own devices....

So....can you imagine that.....?  The universe made of subatomic particles which are all,, for all intents and purposes...just music....

Every moment we ahve, every place in time, through out time, back and forth in the multiverse.....the ForeverSong.

Which....does make happy about the name I gave it when I was so little.

But regardless, we spent hours last night, holding each other outside, singing to music and talking in the cool twilight.  Which is what love is, right? Spending that quality time.

Geez, I'm tired.