I Did It For Me

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I changed the picture on my facebook account. The first one I used was too harsh looking. The second one was too exotic. The last picture i used seemed to be just about right, but I don't really have a description I wanna tag it with. I have no idea what I've made myself into for my sake. I don't know what or who my parents loved nor my ex-wives or children either. That's not to say that I don't know who or what I am is, I just don't know what it has wrought for it's own sake.

In my writing over the years I ask a lot of questions about who I truly want to impress. It's my opinion that people conduct their own affairs almost exclusively to impress a person or persons they admire and want to be like. Sometime these role models are unknown face to face, and sometimes people's role models are literally unknowable. They imitate the behavior of the people or care-actors (characters) they admire and wanna impress that they're equals. Good? Bad? Does it matter?

It matters to me. It matters to me because without someone I wanna impress there ain't interest in being exemplar for me. That pisses me off. Some of the creatures I be-co-me to impress the person I admire and want them to like me can be humiliatingly rude about dismissing my keen interest in their wonderfulness.

About the only projects I undertake that I actually accomplish something tangible are those situations where I'm showing off for a real person that will reward me with a display of pleasure that arose irresistibly because of my cleverness. If I got nobody to show off for, then life can get to be a real drag.

I'm persnickety. I won't showoff for just anybody, and if I find out in the meantime that there is no reward for showing off FOR a particular person, one of us is outta there, usually me. There has gotta be a reward, and that's what disgusts me about who-I-think-I-am-is more than any other contributing facticity.

Showing off is hard to do unless I get to the point where I just ain't all that particular. It may not matter at all to a native whose natal chart doesn't have Mercury in Aries in the Fifth House with it's only aspect to the Midheaven in Leo. Showing off is my only public outlet except for passing acquaintances and weird memories of ex-lovers.

I seem confronted by two perspectives in regard to showing off or not. Both appear to point toward an unsavory result that hardly ever gets me over the hump. Not a wild feral, uncontrollable ecstasy, but a weakly dribbled ooze. Oh, God. All that work… for this?

Adopting an imaginary entity to show off for is not a permanent solution, and doesn't work half the time on the best of days. I'd settle for my antics being noticed as a mere effort toward humor by someone who pretends from sheer pity. I'm still not all that convinced that Jesus walks and talks with me. I think it's me who walks and talks with me. Especially in consideration of the first of the Ten Commandments.

The other perspective mentioned above is to adopt an embodied spirit that I can sensorily perceive with my eyes, ears, smelling and taste, but most of all… touch. Embodied role models was a lotta fun when I was young and easily overtaken by sexual lust, but when I had to be careful for my own sake, the relationship got sterile.

I was pretty much screwed by the one chemically-induced experience that led to a much more intimate understanding of the principle of projection than was useful if I wanted to fully engage with the other. In truth, I can't go ho-me again. I can't not see the other projecting.

It's almost impossible for me to see that I am is projecting. I am what I project upon the other, but I can't simultaneously or maybe only simultaneously see myself in them. The very attribute I accuse them of is my own worst enemy.

This has been a death knell for both friends and family. I wanted individuation. I wanted to be enlightened at to my true nature. I lusted for it. I prayed for it. I preyed for it. I made it my own. Why would I not?

I never expected to see my ex-wives and children again. I probably wouldn't have then if I hadn't been summoned to pay obeisance. When the moment to co-me arrived I really, really didn't wanna do it. There are times when I regret it now. It changed everything. Right when I thought I had it all figured out, I didn't.

In one way I liked being a monster. It was an identity. It was something. Being a monster and a wife-beater. Now, I'm not even that. Merely another deluded old man who has lost his sheep, and don't care where they are enough to find them.

Old men don't make very good monsters. Too many chinks in their rusty armor. Maybe that's what Don Quixote and other stories represent as metaphor. It's about old men discovering that their own estimation of self-worth is, and always has been, an self-concocted illusion.

I encountered this most directly in the recent past. The underground PVC water pipe that runs from the county water meter to my house was cracked open by the roots of a pine tree. It went unnoticed for a good long time before the meter man said he witnessed the meter needle spinning and cut it off to investigate.

The county wanted $2400 for the water that escaped through the pipe I installed myself. I waxed indignant. I screamed (in the silent way I scream-to myself). This was a serious dent in my scant savings account. I'm the kind of servant who buries the talents my master left in my stead.

Ugh!! How utterly disgusting. This situation wasn't about the money. I worked a mojo and bargained with them until I only had to pay half that much. This incident brought out my nemesis. What the Enneagrams call one's "chief feature". In my case, that would be the deadly sin of avarice.

To look at me you might not recognize that my chief feature is greed. I make a great display of my pretended largesse. I almost always "look like" a penniless fool, and that's not always an act. I seem dismissive of collateral when my worth is accessed.

I haven't buried my talents in the ground so much as I have trod irreverently upon them. Quite simply, I don't consider what others proclaim my gifts or talents to be, exists as if they are really mine. I don't own them. They show up, but not on my terms.

Insight in particular is not a gift but the result of a decision one makes that condemns them to aloneness. The decision is to become (be-co-me) a passerby. The decider is the one who lets many things pass without being duped. Not I-am-is (Jehovah?), but me. Thou shalt have no other.

The eternal struggle between the Christos and the I-am-is has it's roots in who gets to play God. If it were up to me, and it is abstractly, I'd say it's a mojo that was originally designed to rouse the rabble. Otherwise, every newborn would come outta the oven half-baked. Nobody wants that.
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