Thanksgiving - an essay ·
I am in bardo,
(ˈbɑːdəʊ ) noun (often capital) (in Tibetan Buddhism) the state of the soul between its death and its rebirth;
actually Bakersfield, CA - same difference ·
July 4th of this year i returned from 8 years abroad with a very hazy agenda - one objective was to visit 94 year old ma. The date was due to a requirement by the nation i was living in to have an exit ticket when i had arrived 6 months earlier, existence by fiat is not something i can recommend to you. My choices had not always been so desultory; in fact i have lived most of my life driven by a singular purpose to create. To that end i looked out over the horizon after the death of my father, a precipitous career end, and an unfortunate house purchase, each of which was affected by the conceit or myself as artist on a mission, but suspended in a vacuum. For the longest time i could endure the crushing loneliness that is the ‘creative life, for to create anything of merit requires intense application and vast periods of solitude - characteristics i’d thought defined me well. So well, i deflect compliments about work believing that proves my ego has been tamed and my ambitions pristine - talk about ‘your delusions.’
Then i got old, not in the Rip Van Winkle manner - waking up sans hangover to find my torments gone, clutched in the loving embrace of wee-ones hanging off my ankles; however, my real realization was a ruptured disk hefting bottled water in confined quarters. My fate appears to have had much better ideas. A harbinger of things to come had been debilitating sciatica, or so i imagined. Turns out to be serious degeneration of my hip socket exacerbated by a decade of manic ‘denial’ running with pronounced LLD (leg length difference); coupled with a lifetime shifting the weights of carved stone statuary intended as a bulwark against the relentless march of death that stalks each or us, instead of a bizarre metaphor for Moby Dick careening with me and my arrogance deep into the vast ocean depths of an unknown future - the pièce de résistance, of course would be degenerative osteoarthritis, or has been said better elsewhere “i ache in the places i used to play.”
The paradox - there’s always a paradox, i am as thankful as i have ever been, however galling it is to consider any future that includes picking feathers off a floor from a caged flock of birds whose closest equivalence to my enlightenment would be the obnoxious personality Baba Ram Dass reputedly invited into his ashrams to push the acolytes off center - an oddly effective method for breaking down the ego. This holiday i have the poignant responsibility to be present during the continued fracture of a mother/daughter, time-honored tradition for the questionable reason that a child has not attended the first half of her first year of schooling; i watched the same child spiral out of control within 1/2 hour of waking because she was using a lollypop to scoop sugar powder from a candy dispenser shaped like a toilet - sad huh ? Sadder still when you consider this Sucrose Delivery Platform was designed to ‘train’ the most vulnerable amongst us - children. How would you explain to the ‘adults’ present they were sealing an hysterical semi-fate for the next 45 minutes, until the sugar ‘boost’ falls out - ah ! tradition !!
But this isn’t about you - it’s about me digging myself out of the existential rut from which i am seeking traction and another unique solution while i abase myself vacuuming feathers from a flock of manically squalling captive birds which i would gladly throttle one by one had i a killing bone in my body. I douse my murderous fury like most other murderous inclinations that visit the dungeons of my of my emerging heart by accommodating and sublimating uncomfortable feelings until i’m sure my instincts won’t damage another; not because i am afraid of retaliation, but from the very real experience of having been hurt; i have been damaged and have caused others damage. So it is not difficult to sense the same pain in others. The 7 year old ‘wannabe’ sugar addict this afternoon was being given extensions, and loudly objecting to someone else imposing a style on her captive head - not much different than the ‘judgement’ with which i plague myself. What i vow to do as i veer from my self-imposed bardo rut is to pay myself first and foremost the respect i accord others, whether understood and acknowledged or not. I cannot be thankful to anyone until i have nurtured within myself the same ‘unconditional self worth’ i pray for the world.
There is much hurt in my heart from things not of my making, and more from my own doing; nor am i yoked to the myriad bizarre notions others entertain themselves with about my reality - either former ‘others’ or recent ‘others'; everyone seems to want a say about everyone but themselves · i understand that, for having struggled to distinguish my feelings about this holiday, it has meant owning the cruelty of my birth family members without embracing whatever perceptions they use to justify quarantining themselves from me - like that would keep them from experiencing whatever illness or unexamined feelings they would apparently project on to me. We are the same four infants suckled and nurtured within the same cauldron of multi-generational pathology. My mother’s, and by extension, my sibling’s effete assertion that they alone parse the correct interpretations of gratitude, family, and decency is fascinating, if it weren’t for the contortions i go through to disentangle the illogic of such stupidity without causing them, or others pain from my own unacknowledged suffering. I will continue to express my thanks, such as it is, to a world that often feels to me as though i am supposed to be elsewhere and say nothing about that.
- (talk about your unexamined feelings and unconscious projection, why don’t ya’)
now i’ll work on how to present proper gifts to that same confusing world, because t’is the season to be . .. ···
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moments after completing this essay i went out to ride the safe zone circuit in the adjacent subdivision, but before i reached that haven within the most dangerous roads in ‘merica - Bakersfield, CA; i was knocked by a holiday-hurrying Mazda accelerating into my right of way out of a too-short lefthand turn light in a crosswalk and rendered unconscious. Though out longer than 10 minutes, the perspicacious paramedic deemed my ‘mentis compos’, sufficiently such to release me; i walked myself and too-damaged-to-roll bicycle home, evading the maelstrom modern 'merican care has become.
That was the 25 of November, by the 28th it had became an issue for the fiduciaries and i was ordered to submit to a CT scan at the ER. The results declared a contusion and hemorrhage to my right temporal lobe (approx 6 mm) which a 2nd CT scan could not find; a compression fracture to my left fibula and a laceration to my right distal phalange that was too far along in healing to accept sutures. My panicked ’primary care’ physician ordered a 2nd CT scan 4 days later, that exposed a ‘false positive’ for hemorrhaging or contusion: i'm repeating myself - welcome to the world of 'TBI'·
I am still thankful, but with additional reasons; the osteo-technician that replaced the temporary ‘ice-tong’ splint expertly fashioned by the LVN Ms. Rung during the 1st CT abomination created a sculptural masterpiece that has immobilized my fibula, yet allows me the dexterity necessary to type at will. Grateful i had the ‘presence of mind’ to examine the contraindications of taking the analgesic ‘Mobic’ prescribed because of a opiate fear that i was self-medicating with 50mg of Tramadol for my continuing discomfort and peculiar inattention by the ‘Doctors’ for degenerative osteo-arthritis of the lumbar and hip socket that was made manifest by x-rays that have now turned up missing.
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Giving thanks - the sonnet ·
Hating where you are creates a hard share
which may explain the fantasy season -
give objects to others, in place of care.
ergo, it may be kinder to have fun.
Playing in this world creates more to give
because fun is finer found with others,
yet here i sit alone, happy to live
without family, sister or brothers -
instead creating ash Leonard called poems.
Is that finer fun and a better gift,
than our hijacked Xmas and twisted Oms?
or delusions from a heart shrunk and bereft?
Doesn’t matter - what does, is i’m happy
though my shrunken heart feels my gift - sappy.
jts 11/24/2022
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