Good Fortune

Midnight.

I once heard an anecdote from a peer in recovery about some friends he knew. Apparently, their car had run out of gas and they were stuck someplace with no gas can or service station nearby. So, like good Christians, they resorted to faith to help their situation. They gathered around the car and prayed over the empty fuel tank to make the car run. I guess God would either put gasoline in the tank or make the car go without fuel… It’s just an example of an extreme that Americans went through twenty years ago and I had the good fortune to hear about. During the time I had a job with the agency, life was quite an intellectual desert, though I met a precious few rational people who were a pleasure to know. These occasions were rare, but I appreciated them while the rest of the world had gone off the deep end. The Rush CD that came out in May 2007 was like a love letter to me, expressing my own sentiments exactly. Otherwise my existence was very lonely and damned, as if I was a pariah for a reason I couldn’t fathom.

It pays to persist and persevere. I really had no choice.

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Look and See

Eight twenty five.

I keep making the same mistake of trying to read people and situations, only to be proven way wrong as the evidence is available. As a tool for knowledge, imagination doesn’t work. If you want to know something, just look and see. To learn what a person is thinking, ask them to their face. Intuition and imagination are useless for gathering information.

It’s a cloudy morning. I’m committed to going to church today. Things are rather wobbly for me in a few ways, but I’ll persevere and come out stronger. It seems that my worst enemy is myself. When it’s sink or swim, I choose to keep swimming.

Keep Rolling On

Nine twenty.

This just hasn’t been my week, but now it’s almost over. Before I got out of bed, I thought of a few songs by The Police that put me in a better mood. It could be that the philosophy reading depresses me. My poor Stratocaster sits in the same spot disused for many months, so maybe I’ll try playing it soon again. It’s hard to stand by and watch the death of rock and roll in our world. Any attempt to revive music is a good thing for our souls. Music also bridges chasms between people who disagree on everything else. And maybe reviving it is the key to our own revival.

Ten o five. This morning’s weather is cloudy and dismal. Everyone seems pretty wrapped up in themselves lately. It’s difficult to make a connection when people are so self absorbed and every person for herself, but I keep trying anyway. Am I just hypersensitive? A long time ago I was a narcissist and believed the world orbited around me, but today I feel insignificant and unworthy. I could either keep trying to make friends or withdraw into isolation. I could be a flower pressed into a book, shelved and forgotten about for the rest of my life. But that’s not what I want for myself. Somewhere there must be a niche for this ugly duckling to be understood, a place yet undiscovered… 

Love’s Evolution

Ten ten.

The title theme to Untamed World, a tv show from the late Sixties, returns to my mind like it was yesterday night. This is what reading Jung can do to me, though it doesn’t feel bad to bring back the archaic, both in macrocosm and microcosm, like the tadpole to the frog. I suppose the psyche does contain all of evolution in itself, as the embryo of a chicken looks no different from a human embryo. My dog just lapped his water down to the bottom of the dish and poked about in his dry food: animal logic is not far removed from that of people… And yet progress of the individual is good, and the idea we call freedom of the will. I guess the question may be, Towards what does the individual person progress? You leave your mark on history and politics, hopefully to push the envelope of freedom and justice a little further. This is the spirit; then when everything is done, the materials of your body are recycled in the circle of life. It is the whim of fate whether your words are remembered, to say nothing of your deeds. So what is the point of it all? “Rejoice, rejoice / We have no choice / But to carry on.” And not to forget that love is coming.