It's Me, Oh Lord, Standing...

It's not that I'm cold-blooded. That would require too much focus. There are just times when I'm not emotionally invested in activities other people appear to be frightened by, and I don't understand why they're not just as detached as I am is. I know the end game. I never asked to, but I just do. I take things for granted. This is the way things are... so, this must be the way things are supposed to be. Selah

Being this way is not something that happened over time. It's not something I worked at to learn to do. I never had no mentors to show me how to be this way. It's the way I was born. I remember backing off as little boy and watching the other kids go nuts about things that I wasn't even interested in. I had other fish to fry. Sometime i think it's funny to catch people by surprise and cause them to react predictably to situations I bring into being. I don't even know it's not nice when I do that... until later.

That's why when I bought those audio tapes about what the Enneagrams are to have something to listen to while I was driving a semi truck up and down and across America, I never expected to actually learn anything new, but I did. I found the keystone to what holds my world together.

66 Jesus said, "Show me the stone that the builders rejected: that is the keystone."

http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm

There were six audio tapes in the package I bought at Barnes & Nobles in some weird town up in Connecticut. I wasn't familiar with the Enneagrams, but I was familiar with the guy they were associated with, and I couldn't find any other tapes that seemed interesting, so I bought 'em. I'm saying that the event was serendipitous and not intentional. Not as far as I was consciously concerned.

The tapes were promoted as a Workshop in Enneagrams. The woman who recorded them explained the whole deal, and damned pleasantly too. That was important for me being out on the road in a big truck driving to nowhere by instruction from the computerized truck. I was just along for the ride as far as decision making was concerned, and that's why I needed the audio tapes to focus on.

I listened to books-on-tape when I could get them. I didn't find many audio books that appealed to me at the truck stops. I was a bookworm as a boy, and that whittled down the topics I find myself interested in as an adult.

The audio books were the only human-like interaction I could relate to. I hated listening to the chatter on the CB. I couldn't talk that way and maintain a sense of integrity and self-respect. I was afraid I might get stuck there and never be able to have a conversation with myself ever again.

The woman's voice on the Enneagram tapes was part of my fascination with them. I grew to love her sight unseen. I listened to the tapes as if a man possessed, and I deliberately sought the obsessive way I listened zealously. I've been alone with myself for most of my life. I know exactly how to give myself permission to cop whatever attitude or posture that suits my fancy. Why would I not? Nobody knows.

The anonymous occupants of the other vehicles on the road with me certainly didn't know what I was doing or who I became or pretended to be in order to listen to whatever for any reason that crossed my mind as extemporaneously intriguing. I must have listened to those six audio tapes 50+ times apiece. Over and over. Repetitively. Redundantly.

That's why I put the Gospel of Thomas saying at the top of this ridiculous rap. The term "keystone" is one of the words and expressions I've made myself familiar with by participating in an e-mail discussion group that sends out each of the 114 sayings once or twice a month... again and again... for discussion and comment. When they reach the 114th saying, they start again with the first. Maybe when I become so familiar with the sayings that I become contemptuous of them, then, and only then, will enough be enow.

The keystone I found by listening to the Enneagram tapes repetitively for a long time was that a person like me is most likely not to experience what happens in real time until later on, when they get off by themselves. Contrarily (and most significantly to me), if they don't get off by themselves to experience what happened in real time to milk it for it's true worth... then they kind of go batty... and their frenetic behavior equates to the seemingly erratic flight of a bat changing direction constantly to catch as many bugs as they can eat.

Realizing there may be a purpose in displaying such weird, freakish behavior takes being alone a lot and not listening to nobody else's projections about what they would be doing if they were you. They're not, but it's not them that's gotta realize they're projecting the kind of person they "think" they'd be if they acted like you for their reasons. It's you that's 'standing in the need of prayer.

"It's me...
It's me, oh Lord.
Standing in the need of prayer.
It's not my momma nor my poppa,
but it's me, oh Lord!
I'm standing in the need of prayer."

~ Traditional Hymn

Up until I got obsessed with getting what there was to be gotten from the Enneagram tapes I didn't realize how central a role my need to get off by myself and review what I had deliberately not taken for real when it was real in the specious present.

What I'm trying to describe is that I didn't know I was doing that... in the first place..., and subsequently... I didn't know I needed to rectify that deliberate ignorance via contemplation of my life. Later, I realized that it I began experiencing what happens in real time when it actually happened, I wouldn't have to get off by myself to rectify a lousy strategy.

That's why I self-diagnose myself as autistic. All kinds of intriguing events can be transpiring around me that the other people around me are acting like their pants are on fire, and I'm thinking about a difficult clue in a crossword puzzle I carry around in my mind's eye to amuse myself with while Rome burns.

Most of the social and/or cultural faux pas' I commit by mishap in this way are overlooked by many people because they're too busy making their own mistakes. Either that or felicitously covering them up. Other times my uninvested detachment, and the inevitable sorry end that accompanies it, is not so forgivable nor passed over but called out.

Worse, when the wounded party's unreciprocated raw feelings come openly to fore, and when I finally get the picture in my solitude when it's obviously too late for recompense, only then, in that sad moment, do I realize that I had really hurt someone's feelings (and more) by not registering or openly recognizing the pain I'd thoughtlessly inflicted without feeling. I can't be trusted. Not even by myself. I live in a limbo of the other's fear and loathing, and their gratitude for being dealt with forthrightly. What a drag, man.