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The impression I had about cleanliness being next to godliness was not what I've acted like was true in the past. I've had to ignore both cleanliness and godliness merely to survive beyond right now. As in staying alive for supper that night behind the closed doors of some inside place to be.
I have lain my body down in some filthy, heathen places that nobody in his right mind would consider doing unless at the point of a gun. In some cases I have done what I did because I didn't wanna get shot dead as a concession to honor among thieves. I bear shame, but I ain't dead yet.
Nobody who visits me here seems to conclude that I deem cleanliness to be next to godliness. I never intended to keep house when I started building the barn I live in. I just needed some place to collect the stuff I had left from two failed marriages in one place, and call it home.
I wanted to get inside, and out of the inept vagaries of weather and sleep behind a locked door for a change. As a homeless bum I was subject to whatever stumbled over my body where I lay sleeping. Shit happens. Things change.
To me, this rat hole of a house I constructed is merely a better hootch than sleeping on the ground in some hobo haven or worse, in the house of some do-gooder who insists on helping the poor like Jesus did. If I hadn't have been a bum I would have never known that there are an awful lot of people who secretly, and not-so-secretly, believe in their heart of hearts that they are in word and deed the returned Christ. Huzzah!
There are a lot of people out there who haven't the slightest intention of helping you or offering you hope, but seem hell-bent on destroying you for the good of the world. Both types of people are world saviors in their own perspective. The mean ones wanna save the world by saving it from people like you. Some weep and beg you to forgive them for being the instrument of some tribal god from the mideast.
In this place I have a bathroom with a shower that has hot and cold running water. That's better than in most of the places my family lived when I was a kid. A series of rental houses where one outdoor toilet served two adults and five children. I took my turn emptying the slop jars for the whole family in the outhouse.
I use the way I've lived as the criteria for what I'm willing to settle for as a place to live today. Many people say they couldn't live in the house I now live, because they've never lived like I've lived before now. I'm literally ignorant about how to earn their respect. I don't try to keep up with the Jones' because I've never had nothing anybody else prized.
I never had anything to lose in order to be sorry I don't have it now. Such a lack of ambition has possibly cost me a somethingness my slothful nothingness has never coveted. I know how to not want things with the best of 'em. My pride in my cultivated lack of desire is not to die for. I guess I started seeking nothingness because of my desire to be something. Unfortunately, an undefinable nothingness that gainsaid no true goal toward a pious end.
The entire time I considered myself to be on some ill-defined spiritual quest I was clumsily learning how to be a miser. I was not and am not a natural miser. I am possessed by only a smidgen of avarice, and it's biased toward a sometime ignoble end, if indeed, I have one. I can do without most comforts of life, not because I'm an enlightened holy man, but because I am more ignobly like Scrooge. "Bah... Humbug!"
It is only within the last decade or so that I've realized my chief feature to overcome to be-co-me with some popular world savior is avarice or greed. Maybe that's why it took so long for me to accept my miserliness as a millstone around my neck. As a bum I constantly gave any abundance away if it was too heavy to tote. How could somebody with nothing have a greed problem?
Self-deception is not an unlikely careactor trait for me to unknowingly exhibit. I constantly chastise myself for being the last to know stuff. Stuff that everyone else seems grimly aware of. It's a very tenuous position to try to turn into lemonade.
My ignorance of my chief feature being avarice was a big stumbling block for me. I use the term "ignorance" to indicate a severe ignoring. The kind of blatant ignoring that defiantly makes me the last to know what everybody else already seems to.
Even after I somehow figured out that my real stopper for being an awakened human being was caused by my unrecognized greed, I couldn't remember in real time to act like that was so. I knew it was so. I learned the hard way. I'm trying to ring the bell with the big hammer of having a body as intensely as I can. But, as yet, the prizes I'm winning only stink up the place. Cheap thrills. I got no class...
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