Don't be a Dickenson...

I know it has been almost a week since I posted, and a full week since I posted a legitimate post ~

My intention in creating this blog was both to let people know the crazy way my mind works -- constantly, relentless -- and to ease myself into the habit of regularly writing.

I have as yet written only a couple references to the reality of my having a heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery, as you might expect from my subheading and my photos. In one way the heart experience in April is a solid and brilliant marker for me, a milestone in the original sense, a point I can use to demarcate my departure from something old and begin something new. There is no turning back. There never is, of course. There is just holding back.

But to talk -- or write -- like this is easy. So easy it is itself part of the deception -- our inherent Fundamental Darkness, as we Buddhists call it -- that will, like water over cracked bedrock, seep into every and any breach, any breach, no matter how small, no matter where it is or what it will affect or where it leads.

Like lonely Emily Dickenson, who wrote her fiery poems between scrubbing the kitchen floor and batting the carpets of her parents' home, who as far as we know never kissed a man, any of the men who inspired her bold words, it is easier to write about living than it is to live.

It is like I have been living a non-life. Some of you who know me may disagree fiercely, may even be offended by that. But, I am a man at 45 who has no wife or children or relationship, who does not even have a car at the moment, or a real career. Who is still living in a place whose climate he basically hates. The summers are wonderful and celebratory, and longer and longer with global warming, but the falls and winters feel devastating, each one sapping something out of me.

Why don't I just be a man -- meaning an adult -- and get up and get what I want, even from myself?

I do not know. It feels like my inaction, my waiting to see what everyone else is doing, my belief that the world belongs to other people, is so inherent it is the way I fundamentally think. Like a Deconstructionist or NLPer might say, it forms my thoughts.

But after 45 years, it is not enough. There may be some people who have gone through life like I have, and continue until the end, even if they hear the wailings of a brighter nobleman shackled in the basement dungeon, but I don't have to be them.

But (he says sardonically), that is easier said than done...