Jump And Run

I just opened the outside doors because it's warmer out there than in here. It's 42 degrees Fahrenheit in here. My little space heater just won't keep up. I'm all bundled up. It's been this way forever. After at least twenty-five years of pretending to build myself a house to grow old in I should have been able to put together a more physically comfortable place than this, but I haven't. I've had to bundle up to stay warm when it gets cold from the bejinning.

I don't think I really like to be protected from the elements that much. I dream about it. I write poems about it, but despite my plaintive wailing, in the end game, I sort of make sure my projects to finish the job off never come to fruition. I find it remarkable to be me sometime. I know that's immodest and arrogant, but sometimes I can't stop myself because I am the only witness to some remarkable shit. That's why I write about it to my imaginary audience, because it's remarkable. I like to write remarks about the events that DO come to fruition in my life more so than the flip side of the coin.

When I got to be a big boy and found out there were tropical places that didn't get cold in the winter, but only perhaps nippy if the temperature get down to seventy five degrees at night. Brrrrr..., I started making excuses to go there no matter the impediments I might encounter. Like being a respectable marriage partner and/or obedient to the so-called Christian work ethic.

One of my proudest memories is when I abandoned all my responsibilities and hitch-hiked to Key West in my tailor-made three-piece suit and no luggage for the winter, and nobody but me knew where I was. When I returned, my wife and my old boss accepted me back into the fold, and "life went on, even when the thrill of living was gone."

I just related that one event to seeing my father take off all his clothes, rip all the IVs out of his dilapidated eighty-five year old arms, and go dancing like a child through the hospital halls, happy as a lark that he was doing something he shouldn't oughta be doing on purpose for fun.

I seem to have entered and exited my second-childhood at will. Maybe the bejinning is the end. Maybe my second-childhood is also my first. Is childhood merely a place to go? I know my father was bored out of his mind lying in that hospital bed day after day with the unwatched TV blaring propaganda for the living at him day after day. It's no wonder to me that he "jumped and run". Was I doing anything different when I abandoned all hope and "jumped and run" to Florida when living the way I was living was turning me into a lounge lizard and a drunk to deal with my boredom and ennui?

There was a gleefulness and a feeling of great joy I felt by walking away and doing something I ought notta. Ecstasy beyond description. To do for-myself has always been one of my greatest challenges. I resent being forced by circumstance to do for-the-other. I seem condemned by my absolute refusal to "be there" for another human being if I'd just as soon "be" anywhere I fell for.

That is how it's done in my world. I "fall-for" thangs. I read the sign above the entrance to the oracle cave, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." Falling-for things is how I enter the rabbit hole. YMMV.

I abandon the ground of being necessary to possess individuation. I be-co-me. "Be with me..." It's a matter of letting go of one's own need for their own ground of being to remember who I am is before the funny lights began to attract "me".

It took forever to let myself be absorbed into the light with less resistance in order to be-co-me. I wouldn't have know what to do if I hadn't read about what needed to happen in the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Evans-Wentz while I was in the Navy. Far out at sea. For weeks. Nothing to do but stand watch, work, eat, sleep, and read, perchance to dream. Have you ever spent week after week sequestered on a huge metal machine from which escape only invited death by asphyxiation or sea monsters, and God help you if you somehow survive.

I don't think the process for abandoning hope can be learned from external sources. I believe one can become aware that such a thing is possible, and maybe even ken the need of it before they actually attempt to let it happen. For me, it was a little like having to feel good about falling out of my bed while I was dreaming at night.

I'm sure I actually fell out of bed and was rudely awakened by a hard floor a few times, but in the latter stages of my matriculation into learning to control my dreaming, I would wake up at the last moment and realize that I was merely dreaming, and not physically falling off my bed on to a hard, cold floor at all.

I didn't set out to learn how to adjust to and restrain my unreal fears from eviscerating my mental state, it happened over time so I could get some sleep. I had to get up by myself before everybody else in the family and go down to the barn and milk the cows for a long time.

Learning to boss around and exploit huge dairy animals mano y mano by myself before I weighed a hundred pounds was a powerful incentive to figure out I wasn't really falling out of bed and ruining my sleep, and let myself fall into the cosmic soup with aplomb. I got real good at it. I thought it was to die for. Nobody knows. I haver never been able to convince a single person alive that I was right but for-me.