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The wind started howling early this morning and woke me up. I finally went back to sleep, but the wind was still blowing strong when I got up, and has blown hard all day long without a break. It's pretty cool too, but none of that compares to what's happening up in the mountains and in Virginia and the Northeast beyond Washington, D.C., I feel their pain.
Year after year I seem more sure that if there is a hell, that hell is cold, not hot. Living in a hell where it would be equivalent to the 95 degree/95% humidity summers we have here on the coastal plains might be just about as punishing. I came close to dying from getting caught in a freak snow storm once, and it made a distinct impression on me.
The deepest impression might have been the ecstagony of getting warm again. That episode surely contributed to the rheumatoid arthritis that plagues me now. It's the only pain I've experienced that approaches the agony I experienced in that bath house shower.
I had turned blue from the cold up on top of what was supposed to be a scenic view of Yosemite Valley. When I got to the bath house that was open and was warm inside and had hot water in the showers I couldn't stand the touch of warm water.
I kept turning the adjustment knob on the shower to a cooler setting and sticking my hand or my blue feet under the stream of water to see if I could get under it and warm my body up, but before I could get under it I had cut all the hot water off.
The bath house was at about the same elevation as the Park Lodge I found out the next morning, but that elevation was at least 8-9000 feet high, and the cold water in the shower was very cold, yet I could barely stand putting a foot, then a calf, and then my knee under the shower until I could stand under the shower stream.
I don't know why I didn't scream at the pain I was experiencing. Sometime I've thought that it might have been because there was no one around to hear me. That seems sort of stupid now, but I was so totally focused on surviving the pain I didn't need to scream. It might have been the straw on the camel's back that would cause me to collapse in shock.
It took me all night to gradually turn the hot water valve on. I think I wept, but I don't know how I would have any tears left to cry. Just before I jumped off the mountain to what I fully expected to be my death I sat in the snow and wept profoundly at the the irrefutable approach of death.
My life didn't pass before me in those dark moments. I felt a deep and abiding sense of failure. Not the failure I felt in Reno, Nevada after I'd left my first wife and our child. The failure I wept for there beside the Truckee River was the failure of my parent's child's endeavors.
I was inside the closing year of my first Saturn Return, and I was sad to death that I had failed them. They never got over it nor forgave me. No blame. That's what happens when some homo sapiens turn thirty. I didn't last long living in Reno. About four months altogether. Another woman ran me outta town when I didn't measure up.
It was on my return trip back toward North Carolina from Reno that I was convinced by my friend Jerry who now lived in Montgomery, Alabama convinced me that I oughta at least commit myself to an asylum and see if they could help me outta my complete funk. I guess I hit the bottom in Reno. I was convinced I had become someone not worth loving.
Reno - 1969
Weep and moan, weep and moan,
and cry to one's own pity.
To live this life in such a way
is just a little shitty.
It clings like putty to the soul,
and pules for understanding,
but no one hears with glued-up ears
the pleas of silent ranting.
Laugh and cry, laugh and cry,
sometimes I'm in the middle.
The crux of feeling lie in between,
and I end up second fiddle.
The sounds of being second
sounded resoundly in my mind,
and the flaw of my competing
was not common in me or kind.
Sing and shout, sing and shout,
in the rhyme of speculation
I see myself a crazy man,
and swoon in adulation.
Playing tunes of yesteryear,
reciting psalms of tribulation
I sing the songs of childhood
and prey for restoration.
fmp
Edited today.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
