Jesus f-ing Christ I leave this platform for a couple of weeks, return and find it’s got some new, very instagram-esque features.
I’m not really sure I need to write about this or I should be writing about this, because I’m seething at the moment. And writing when you’re seething is a lot like going grocery shopping when you’re hungry.
But part of the seething is not caring anymore, so
Also, I feel like I owe my subscribers something. So many of you have supported my creative process, it’s not fair of me to stay silent for too long.
But I’ve been busy absorbing and integrating a lot of new stuff and I’m rounding the bend into another year of sobriety and another year of this life, which is a big deal.
Let me see if I can get this right.
Last night I had a dream in which I was with someone, a woman, and we were enjoying each other’s company until the part where I told her I don’t drink. Then she got angry and defensive, probably because she was scared by my choice to not drink. When you’re confronted by someone who doesn’t drink it calls into question your own life choices which often times aren’t terrific and mostly we want to be mad at someone else or blame someone, anyone, rather than make changes.
The dream ended with her screaming and shouting and me leaving quietly.
Thank you for indulging me in sharing my dreamscape.
I think it mostly had to do with how it’s felt to be a sober person all these years, feeling like I need to apologize to other people because I don’t want them to feel bad about themselves.
And then I realized it’s pretty much how I’ve felt most of my life, feeling like I have to apologize for everything.
Sobriety: Twelve years of an intensely personal and challenging choice, day after day, teaches a person a thing about life. Because when you don’t drink you see more clearly just how much the world is full of drinkers, most of whom are drinking to shrink from some pain or truth they don’t want to think about.
And when you start there and expand, you see all the other clever methods the world is using to try to disconnect from pain.
Anything, anything, anything at all to get out of dealing with life. Because god, life hurts so fucking much.
Sobriety teaches you, if you let it, how to handle pain. How to rearrange your thoughts around what life is and how to deal with it.
And if you stay clear long enough and live long enough, you can look back and see all the ways the world was working to get you to do its bidding. Your parents, then school, coaches, teachers, peers, everyone had an agenda for you. It is so baked-in to our society and how we’re raised that the mid-life crisis became a cliché. Of course you will melt down at mid-life (whatever that is); you have no idea who you are or how to be alive.
For some reason this year, creeping up to 58, I’m mad.
Maybe I’m mad today because I’m heading to the town where I went to college. Not to visit the school or any crap like that, but for a good reason, to take a friend back to her hometown and give her the chance to visit her old places before she dies. It just happens that she lived (before the nursing home she’s in) close to where I went to college.
Looking back over my life I see all the times and all the ways I was molded like a lump of clay (college being one of those major events the world tells you you have to do when in fact you don’t; most of the most interesting people who did the most interesting things with their life didn’t go to college. Christ, Doug Tompkins, one of the most interesting people ever, dropped out of high school). All the lies I ingested, all the yeses I said when I wanted to say no. All the dumb ideas other people had for my existence, all the ways the world made me think I couldn’t do something I was pretty sure I could.
AI is creeping into our lives now, our world, and in a futuristic sense I would imagine it’s going to be able to get people to do anything it wants, one day. There is so much scamming, dishonesty, lying, smoke and mirrors that it will only get harder and harder to know what’s real and true. Which is why I feel a growing burning in my chest to remind people what it means to own your own power in this life. To give the finger to anyone and anything that keeps you small and quiet, anyone and anything that tells you you probably can’t, anyone and anything that makes you feel that what you want is impossible.
Because it’s not. And that’s the thing no one ever tells you, or at least not soon enough. That your power is so immense, so beautiful, so clear, so unique that anything you focus on in your time on earth is possible, any reality, any dream, any plan.
I’m jumping through all these dumb hoops again, this is raising my hackles, too, getting re-licensed to be a pastor. It’s a pile of crap and another one of those things we do because this is what we do! Woo hoo! Waste my time and other peoples’, too, telling me I can keep being what I’ve been for the last ten years. Just another way life keeps us small. We, the important overseers, the authority, deem you worthy and hand you this piece of paper so you can keep doing your job!
Over it, done with it. Please, whoever you are and wherever you are, don’t ever wait for someone else to tell you you can do the thing you were born to do. And don’t let anyone or anything talk you out of your crazy, audacious dream. Don’t wear the uniform, don’t play the game, don’t listen to the worn-out lines of bs that want to keep you small and manageable. You did not come here to play it safe, to fade into the crowd, to disappear.
I just ordered myself a new microphone. I have a lot to say. The books are almost done, I know I keep saying that, they’re coming soon. Maybe a birthday launch. Please put down your phone, put down your drink, pack away every lie anyone ever told you about who you are. Stop wasting your precious hours scrolling socials, it’s all meaningless garbage. Reel your power back in and use it. Take it back from every jerk who ever made you feel insignificant or less than or not smart enough. The power you possess and the creative power around you is infinite. Infinite!!
And if anyone ever tells you differently or makes you feel differently, send them my way.
And if you’re nearby, Sunday mornings @Peru Church, cute little town in VT, worth the trip. We’re telling a new story.
Wonderful timing!
Roar!
Sorry your feeling the disruption, but I like the fire you are stoking. I too had a recent
‘Screaming at the top of my lungs but barely being heard’ dream interlude… everything unnecessarily huge (like cavernous city center sized room) with zero connectivity and communication. Infuriating disaster, please hold. As with all of those settings, someone was insistently putting up those
‘Pipe and Drape’ screens to keep the unexpected from view… and I lost it.
‘WHY BOTHER?!’ I yelled at the top of my lungs- it was all doomed to be pre-packaged BS anyway…
My takeaway: at our age the surgical removal of drama and time-wasting BS is the
new goal. You’re not defining me by your small box notions. I’m defining me from my viewpoint and I’ve got big expansive vistas out here…