Magic Wand

Seven thirty.

It’s a blue-sky morning with no plans and no pressure on me. My dreams last night were about freedom, so I wonder what this means in my own mind and why is it important now. In the morning yesterday I paused on my street to watch two jet planes fly overhead, glittering in the blue with several vapor trails. They remind me of the skywriter at the start of Native Son and the fantasy of aviation and freedom. Why is this emotional for me? I had a flying dream one time, and only once. Otherwise it’s always grounded reality. How noble would it be to be free and liberate everyone else from tyranny and lies? To expose oppression and point the way to happiness? One might start by trashing his television set. There is truth beyond internet. Unity is a good thing, depending on what it’s based upon. I remember a time before I had a connection. Life seemed to flow okay offline, and the community felt smaller and more together without digital everything. And we had touring bands come through. Things were human and real. If I could, I would regress to better times. This is achieved only in imagination, by a feat of mental gymnastics. Maybe I’m just crazy. 

Cue Cards

Four o’clock.

I think of a guy with schizophrenia at LHC years ago. One day I was walking by the bank when he suddenly spouted stuff about “right and wrong” and other people around him tried to talk him down. Often he asked to use our fax machines to send off important messages somewhere. They were delusional of course. He comes to mind because my own preoccupation with religion is excessive, and it was probably a mistake for me to join a church. Most people shrug and get on with their lives. Maybe they’re right after all.

Also I remember drinking Jubelale with my brother in his motel room at Christmastime 2010. While there was nothing wrong with this necessarily, I felt uncomfortable with it. We were a pair of rebels drinking beer for no particular reason except to get drunk. Christmas provided the excuse. I feel bad for my brother. How free is he to choose his actions; what does liberty look like? In rare cases, honesty is stronger than vice.

Culture is a curse. When you hear something repeated enough times, you begin to believe it. Abuse tends to perpetuate itself. Where can we end the cycle and enjoy life? Instead, we enjoy what we’re told to enjoy. It’s like the cue cards telling you to laugh for a tv sitcom. And the sitcom is very bad. 

Little Debbie

Quarter till ten.

Maybe I’d like to be like Emerson, but truth is I’m not very independent in most areas, so that socialism suits me better. Yesterday I learned some news about my brother, though I’m not really at liberty to talk about it. I can only say something about license and self entitlement, like letting the panther out of his cage. This tyranny of the soul reminds me that I ought to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. But the whale in Moby Dick is enough of a teacher on immoderation and extremity, and the black panther in Pound’s Cantos… It’s cloudy but dry so far today. I have nothing new to add to the usual stuff. It may be good to take a walk around to the store even if nothing interesting comes to my attention. Also I told my sister I might call her again today. I guess no drama is better than too much of it, like the roller coaster of addiction. I could buy some mini donuts at the market: the value of my freedom. What is all the clamor about regarding freedom, or is it just me? If you knew you had freedom, what would you do with it? Like what Ralph Ellison writes. Perhaps with all the freedom in the world, a person would go buy donuts? 

Liberal Arts

Four thirty AM.

In weak moments, my mind wanders to planetary influences on my life events, particularly the influence of Jupiter when Saturn gets out of the way. Is it all a bunch of hogwash? Shakespeare and Milton believed in astrology but that was four hundred years ago. The only account of the creation Milton knew was biblical: Darwin came two centuries later. It’s quite a sad thing that some people still stake their lives on Shakespeare, as if Ibsen had never written a play and the modern world didn’t exist for them; as if they embraced their cage rather than gone out the front door to freedom with Nora… People don’t realize they have options; but the cost of an education is astronomical, and nowadays education isn’t like it was decades ago, where liberal arts was still alive and well. I asked a youngster, a student at the community college, what he was taking for electives: he told me that the military had waived them. His major is Computer Science and he will get a job after his AB degree. But he’ll have no background in academics, nothing to humanize his life, to give it seasoning and meaning. I guess that for the big questions we have the church nowadays, but the church discourages you from using your brain; it doesn’t invite questions or challenges. The result of all this will be universal silence. The quality of our lives will be nil when none of us can think. 

Freedom

Quarter of five.

Sometimes “freedom” rings a bell with me. Often the sound is muffled or lost in all the competing din. I know it has personal meaning for me. It goes back to age 19 at least when I felt strongly about what I wanted to be: and I wanted to be a creative writer. 

Rhetoric in the Wind

Wee hours.

I slept until I grew annoyed with my unconscious mind and decided to get up for a while. The day yesterday was cloudy but dry; I spent part of it lying in bed feeling dysphoric, probably psychosomatic or just chemistry (you are what you eat). By around five I felt better and I wrote an email to my Texas friend. Above all, the idea in my head is, why isn’t it possible for the human spirit to have a rebirth? When the future looks like a dead end, we need to muster up some ingenuity: can we do this by a revival of antiquity?— because we won’t be saved by Jesus or a visitation by extraterrestrials. There has to be a realistic way, a human way, to save ourselves and our evolution. We can at least do something to feel better and make life better rather than worse, with these poisonous dictators and power mad people who don’t hear the cries of citizens everywhere. Maybe the movement “closer to the heart” won’t begin with the ones in high places, but with average people like you and me. Maybe that’s where the heart always resides anyway. I guess I’m just restating the ideal of democracy: rule by the people. To lose this loses everything. Do we realize what’s at stake if we make a mistake? We may never be free again.

It’s a mighty long way

Out of the darkness

To where the sun is free to shine

—Steppenwolf 

Delayed and Deferred

Quarter of seven.

The last two days were quite confused for me. After I’ve put my letter in the mail at the post office I hope I can relax. My mind is too careworn and bullied by the world around me, which are effects of being sober. If I could just hang a sign saying “out to lunch” and go on holiday for a while, I might come back refreshed. Better if I didn’t have to come back at all. It seems like once a month I get a bomb in my mailbox from Big Brother in some form. I guess it’s living in the fishbowl that I object to: if I have more free time, I also have no power over my life as it is. I don’t have the luxury of a beer buzz or anything like that. I think of a verse by Kipling titled “Mandalay,” where the speaker says, “A man can have a thirst!” It’s a toss up. Live longer with a lousy quality of life, or live and die by the sword, as my brother says. But if I really believed that, I wouldn’t be alive to write this paragraph now… I feel sometimes that I should put my foot down and assert myself with everyone. My dog even has his way with me. I’m a pushover and getting sick of it. At some juncture the crap will hit the fan; or the pressure cooker with my slow temper is going to blow its lid. Everyone knows the poem by Langston Hughes about a dream deferred. I’m not sure: what is a schizophrenic person supposed to do, and was honesty the best policy? 

The Fishbowl

Quarter of nine.

I made a special trip to the store this afternoon to buy Aesop’s Dog Chow; but when I got home and gave it to him, he refused to eat it. It hasn’t been my day. At best, it was mixed blessings. The mail carrier brought me two packages today, which I found in my box before I started walking to the market. One of them was a set of bass strings, but I lacked the energy to restring my bass today. The other was my Vraylar from Genoa pharmacy. Those people are really great. I guess I ought to count my blessings rather than bitch and moan that I’m not free. Maybe nobody is really free in the world today. I promised Gloria that I’d do the dishes before Tuesday. Now I have to do it. It’s this situation of being in the fishbowl that makes me kind of mad and crazy. Supposedly I’m getting help, but are they really doing me any favors? Perhaps my feelings are rebellious and a little childish, though compliance can be costly down the road. The worst part of it is the use of force to make you do what they want you to do. It’s even hard to identify who are “they.” Who is the authority at the top that can tell you what to do? 

State of Mind or Money?

Quarter after seven.

I seriously consider not going to church tomorrow. Even if I do, it’ll be the last time I ever go. At the university years ago I learned the importance of freedom for individuals. It could be as simple as a person’s right to tie dye his shirt. Today, the church is nothing like that. In a profound way, people are expected to think alike. Your identity comes not from within but from what is dictated to you. I can’t stand that anymore. If it means being alone, then my freedom is worth it. Instead of getting better, things have gotten much worse for me, and I sense the rudiments of tyranny in the air. I may be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so I can only assert myself by negation, saying no. Regardless of which political party is in control, there’s this phenomenon of drowning mice in liquid oxygen, an image for oppression. I feel the effects of this in more detail than I can describe the powers that be. In many ways we’re all laboratory mice running mazes to get to the cheese. And somehow it all smacks of $$$.

Is the pen mightier than the dollar? Do you have to buy freedom? 

The Unconscious

Wee hours.

The last comments I made in my journal were about psychology versus philosophy, generally speaking. I said that the ego believes it is free, whether or not it really is. But if it believed it was bound to fate, then the whole psyche would be a slave to determinism. It’s enough to believe you are free, and the rest of your experience follows from this attitude. Perhaps the whole argument over free will is a lot of hot air. Another fact is that I can imagine Jung to be just a book on the shelf: at will, I can put it back and take down another one with a different worldview… Whatever we think of freedom, it is not to our advantage to be fatalistic or defeatist, to rely upon nature or instinct for our guide. This is where I disagree the most with Twelve Step doctrine regarding addiction. The same instinct you trust for recovery is the one that wanted to use alcohol or drugs. Instead, the focus ought to be on the ego and conscious experience: the rational part of the mind… I heard it argued that mental health depends on wholeness and conformity with nature; your life will have a flow to it this way. But Plato says that lunatic impulses must be held in check by reason. Better yet, why not write off the unconscious altogether? Deny it being by denying it consideration. The unconscious is only a theory after all, so it makes little sense to dichotomize the mind, or split it into different compartments. 

Make it one thing united in an essence of liberty.