Sugarplum

Tonight as the world sleeps, my steamer and my crock pot are sitting on the kitchen counter rather than on the space-saver unit’s bottom shelf, where they’d been living for the past year. In the frenzy of cleaning, I finally asked them why they were living on that bottom shelf, and they told me, “because she likes to have a big, empty counter on which to prepare food.” It was the same type of answer I used to get out of the dresser when I would ask it why I could only use three of the six drawers, “Because your half is the left-side half, just like your half of the closet.”

For a year, I’ve used the vegetable steamer and then put it away where it belongs, leaving the counter space clear. The pots went on the pot shelf, and the dishes on the dish shelf and the big pots on the big pot shelf, because that’s the way it always had been. Today, when the steamer sassed off at me and revealed its reasoning, I started taking stock. I pretended like I’d just arrived and had no idea where anything went. I moved everything around in the kitchen. I rearranged shelves and I cluttered up both countertops. And immediately things made more sense, because they were placed the way my brain thinks of them now, not her brain and not our collective brain.

The empty halves of dresser drawers and closets have all had their virginity taken long ago. There isn’t anything in the apartment that holds any energy on it but mine and the cats’, and there hasn’t been for many, many months. That’s not really the point. The point is that habit scurrying under the refrigerator grate a few minutes too late to escape me. In light of it, how many other things are hanging around trying to curl close to corners?

We all have those little habits running around the baseboards and chittering in the crawlspaces, those things we pack up in suitcases and drag with us from relationship to relationship, or job to job, or state to state. In some cases, they make some sense of the mundanity of our lives and give a convenient set of functions and algorithms that let us go about living without thinking more than we need to, or at least deflecting thoughts to more important matters.

And so they are helpful, right?

I don’t know. Sure, a long self-discourse on the relative virtues of parking in row five or row six, or what the most efficient set of steps are to make tea, probably don’t amount to too much in the category of worth. And I’ll admit that nobody reading this cares where I put my vegetable steamer (and maybe there are some blunt suggestions that I don’t want to hear). But what if there is a better way to make tea, one that I’d like more? And what if one day I drove around the whole parking lot just to see what it was like? And what if, down the road, a left instead of a right on the way home, there is something I’ve been waiting my whole life to find?

I guess what I’m feeling tonight is that all of my frustrations and depressions about my life are just ways of thinking, most of them outdated, some of them continuing to play on because that’s the way it’s always been done. And I guess that Ana’s favorite saying keeps coming back to me too, that the surest way to get what you’ve always gotten is to do what you’ve always done.

I’ve started to make a list of the things I do that make me very happy and relaxed, and it’s not a list that I’d ever have guessed at. I can’t figure out why some of these things made it to the list and what they have to do with other things on the list. And it’s caused me to want to question all the voices, the habits, the things I take for granted as my foundation. I’m feeling like I want to de-evolve in a sense, to mutate, because it’s possible that none of what I know about myself now is valid. I’m feeling like I want to go nuts, to wear my slippers in the rain and call everyone “sugarplum”.

I think I may have changed too quickly in the last year, to the point where I cannot think in such a way that fits the person I am. I am suspecting that all the blockages in my life are not due to the need to change, but by a change that has already happened I haven’t fully realized externally. I think that the person I was is long gone in many ways, and I don’t have a set of habits that surround the person I am, or ways of thinking that feed into the person I am, and no clue as to what any of that should be. Do I put jam on my toast or don't I put jam on my toast, and if not why not and since when?

Today, I’ve been stopping myself as I step forward or pull back, and asking “Why” or “Why Not”. In some cases, with no answer, my foot turns to the left or the right, or I do something else instead. I’ve lived this day observing another person, one that I don’t know too well, going about his life. And it’s scary, fascinating, and encouraging at the same time. When I ask myself “Why aren’t you…” or “Why are you…”, sometimes my answer is “I don’t know”, and not the kind of “I don’t know” that smacks of denial or fear, but the kind of “I don’t know” that means… “Who am I and how did I get here and why are you asking me that question and won’t you please leave me alone until I figure out where my socks are and why they aren’t where I left them?”

I’m not exactly sure where any of this will lead, but it is putting me in a dream-like state where only certain things take on a reality I recognize. And it is allowing me, albeit briefly, to stop cold some deeply ingrained patterns, not through actively questioning them and solving them, but by the matter of a simple yes and no gently applied. Yes, that belongs with me now. No, that was part of me then and can just go.

There’s no great expenditure of energy or struggle or sweat in it, just a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, or a calm transformation, or an exploration of alternatives that stems from being an outside observer or chronicler – one that doesn’t care about the outcome of the answer, only that the answer is a real one.

Rudderless Seal

My bathroom is arranged in such a way that everything is a constant state of teetering. Soap dishes, shower shelves, ledges, sink edges, are all either too narrow or slope inward or outward too much, so that nothing is safe from the potential to fall. Razors, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, combs all have de-edged themselves and toppled into either the sink water, the bath water, or worse, the toilet. All it takes is a movement of any kind on my part to send one of those things into one of the three pits of germs and soap scum.

Any movement.

It’s like the bathroom was designed specifically for this feat. It’s a backwards Rube Goldberg machine whose function is not to bring a simple result out of the chaos of cause and effect, but to take a simple thing like a bottle of aftershave and through a tangle of angles, slopes, and the carefully measured placement of a number of basins, to bring out a particularly vile brand of chaos. And what it does to me, even on my better days, is to reduce me to a simpering slobbering mess of frustration. I mean, it’s not like my elbow brushes across the sink top and connects with a bunch of toiletries that I have carelessly left bunched up and dripping onto the floor. It can be a single comb which seems safe one instant, and through just the wind of my hand over it, loses it’s balance on the devil’s porcelain and splashes into a conveniently unflushed toilet.

Do I make the picture clear enough?

I’ve been on edge lately. As Anastasia says, a “rudderless seal”. All this great and overwhelming lack of structure is pointing out to me how convenient it was to hide behind the mantle of “someday”, to keep working at a job I kept planning to leave, and yet by not leaving, to keep myself in a constant state of knowing that something else was right around the corner. It was the potential I was living in, the fact that I might be unhappy with what I was doing but that I was only doing it to pay off debt, to move to another city, to help put my wife through school, to bide my time while things changed around me in such a way that they would magically reveal the perfect next step and I would be free.

Now, suddenly, I am in that next step and it wasn’t the next step I thought I was waiting for. I know that the choice I have to make with what to do with my life cannot be the safe “this will do until” bet, because I’ve just done that. And it did do until. Now is that until, in fact. And what’s more, choosing another “do until” won’t work either. Because I know that Until never, ever comes. It’s only a self-delusion.

Oh, there are of course exceptions, but they all depend on having something concrete with which to fill in the “this will do until….” blank. Otherwise, if you spend all your time waiting for the world to change to accept you into some mythical future flow, it will do just that – change around you or in other words, despite you. It’s never the right time, and nothing will ever come together to make it the right time. It’s always the right time, because the number of right times is diminishing away from your life quickly. Just take one. They are all the same.

So I am here on the other side, wondering what I was waiting for, because that’s the thing I should be doing next. And I have this sense of teetering, of uneasy formlessness, of certain impermanence. I’m frequently miserable. I’m lost and confused and easily muddied. At times, it feels like I am on the edge of toilets and sinks and bathwater while some invisible hand is moving above me. And yet I know that this is only a changeable perception.

The thing about releasing yourself from struggle, about giving yourself lovingkindness, about removing attachments, about surrendering is that conceptually it is very easy to understand. What you have to do in order to move to that place can be held in the brain with the same amount of effort it would take you to remember how to boil eggs. The actual getting from point to point, however, involves using muscles that you have to invent along the way. And what’s more, while doing it, you know that you are only using those muscles because you think you should use them, and even further, that those muscles probably don’t exist… and neither does the struggle. But, if you could see through the illusion of your own struggle to struggle, you’d already have done it and wouldn’t need to do it.

Now do I make the picture clear enough?

The only person who will ever keep me away from being everything I could be is myself, through a perception that I can be nothing at all or through a belief that I will never be good enough, ready enough, or brave enough… or that the time will never come, or has already gone. In truth, it’s starting where you are, not limiting, and picking a perception that says “not only can I do this, but I will do this because that’s what I want to do.”

I’ll keep repeating it until I read it myself and think “Oh, what a grand idea!”

I spent several hours today singing for a second Blonde Swedes cover album project. We figure one every 15 years is good enough. At any rate, it was heaven because of several factors. It was something I did that I didn’t care how good or bad I was with it, that I had no idea why I was doing it, that I really didn’t know when I was done with it, and that no matter what I did, it would be met with glee all around. Sounds like formlessness to me, and I was very content within it.

What’s the difference between that and anything else, then? I cannot seem to achieve this state in other areas of my life, or in other manner of art or writing or performance. The big brain sweeps in and wants to know good, why, goal, better, feedback, growth, process, plan, discipline, why again, meaning, purpose, life path, outline, technique, method, wasting time, tomorrow, next year, validity. And all this just gums up the works and leaves me searching and reaching and running in little circles. And the big, wide world, bigger and wider and worldier than it has ever seemed to be before, sits outside my door in all it’s bigness, wideness and worldliness. Life is changing around me.

So, I guess since I can’t fix the sink and the shower and the toilet, and I can’t stop using the bathroom or my toiletries, the only thing I can do is not care so much if something topples. It’s bound to eventually, and probably will often.

That’s how the whole thing was made, after all. The worst that can happen is you get wet.

Quick Burst Skyward

At the last minute, I decided to stay in. Over a decade ago, Jocelyn had taught me how to recount the old and count down to the new, her soft fingers in mine by the bank of candles and her voice a whisper below her sparrow eyes. My intention was to partake in ceremony, something large and deep and certain. My plan was to bid farewell to the worst and most eventful year of my life, and welcome in something that I hoped would be full of birth and purpose.

But as the moment neared, like some chaotic version of the Whos in Whoville, Seattle began to explode and cheer. From absolute peace and quiet, a silence made partially of newly fallen snow, came a rising tide of revelry.

I've never heard or seen anything quite like it. Home fireworks burst from several directions, set against the colored-sky-puffs and the whistling spiders launched from the head of the Needle. Ecstatic shouting spread from Lake Union to Greenlake, primal whoops and shrill laughter, the pops of corks and the plastic quacks of party favors. Radios blared and hands were brought together. And then from the water, like a flock of approaching geese, came the boat horns, low and powerful, wildebeast and waterfowl. They picked up automotive counterparts as they passed, until everything was light, sound, and happy energy. I sat on my porch chair with my feet propped up on the railing, and I thought this is all the ceremony anyone needs for anything.

It's an hour later and all is quiet, almost as if nothing had happened. I have Kava brewing in the kitchen and the cats are asleep again. What a start to 2004 this is for me, and I hope that all of you had a similar new beginning. May the New Year give you magick, love, and adventure. Happy New Year, all.