Depressed

In a two week span:

I go a supervisor at a job where I was literally on my own for the past year;

my car gets an annoying but expensive-to-repair problem -- I bring it to a friend's friend, who not only doesn't fix it, but makes the car basically unusable to me. I scrap my car.

After 7 months of almost daily contact, an "online relationship" (an oxymoron) vanishes, she suddenly stops talking to me and when I see her online and pop online, she goes offline. (It's more complicated than that, with a friend of hers who also PMs and emails me, but they are one and the same -- from details I won't get into here).

My angina has been coming back a little -- but getting better most recently -- when I am biking.

My therapist told me she is leaving, dropped that only at our what turned out to be our final session.


So, yeah, in what is usually my favorite time of year, I'm depressed. I am fighting real depression, aching in my bones depression.

I guess I'm grieving

Feeling so restless lately...

I know I am grieving.

The abrupt changes at work (even if they are for the better in the overall scheme of things); suddenly losing G. (and wondering if I ever had her at all); losing my car (basically losing it, giving it up now, because someone screwed up while trying to repair it).

So as I have said, everything can be new again. If I choose.

But this 4-day weekend seems to have been almost a loss. I don't even feel rested.

Hopefully I will feel more relieved after I get my first bonus paycheck, hopefully getting and getting it cashed by Thursday. Just to have enough money to hire a cab to bring my laundry to the cleaners Saturday morning, just to have enough money to "refill" my credit card, maybe make a couple online purchases without having to worry about going over my limit when the monthly charges come in. Just to have enough to get some food at the co-op deli without worrying about the few dollars.

More, that I want, and I need to take care of, but that would be the start...


Right now, I know I am still grieving. G. And my car. And my former freedom at work. Why can’t I just accept that?

The Light and The Dark

I want to say everything.

I want to do everything.

And at the same time I want to curl up into a ball a just fade away...

Collette quotes

So much going on in my life right now - at least by my standards - am strugglnig to keep everything together.

I was looking for another quote someone said on NPR, I think it was by Collette; I didn't find it but I came across these --


On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us - ah! what a dream, to live in that! - the other stifles us at the first breath.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

About how we are constantly, helplessly moving into the future, the unknown

From an email from the "What is Enlightenment" website -- basically an advertisement, but some cool thoughts --

Living Forward

In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, the renowned biologist and complexity theorist Stuart A. Kauffman repeatedly speaks to the limitations of rationality in the face of an evolving, creative cosmos:

One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.

It was just BS

It is a 100% statistical probability that G. was just bullshit.

Brilliant bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.

"Don't be afraid of hardship or suffering.... confront them head-on"

From SGI President Daisaku Ikeda

Monday, June 23rd, 2008
---- DAILY ENCOURAGEMENT ----

"The great French author Victor Hugo (1802-85) noted that faith is forged
amid the pains of hardship and suffering. Don't be afraid of hardship or
suffering, instead of running away from them, confront them head-on. Always
resolve to take full responsibility yourself."


=====

Which is GREAT... But...almost impossible to do. Certainly I haven't taught myself to do it yet.

I do not know what Victor Hugo meant by "faith". Or by the French word that he used, and its translation into Ikeda's native Japanese, and that word's translation into the English word. "Faith" as it is commonly used and understood in American culture is SO different than what Nichiren meant by the word translated as "faith". I am sure.

Sometimes it feels like my adult lifetime of my Buddhist practice has little room to spare from just the process of unlearning these words as I was raised to understand them -- "faith", "prayer", "benefit". Or maybe I am just thinking too NLP-ish....

Encouraging

Life is a series of challenges.
Let's advance boldly and courageously!
Today's self, winning over yesterday's self.
Tomorrow's self, winning over today's self.
Let's enact a wonderful drama of human revolution on life's stage!


Daisaku Ikeda, Daily Encouragement for June 18, 2008

"Everything you know is wrong"

What do you do when you realize you do not want what you always assumed you wanted?

When you realize you want something, but you never knew you wanted it before? Or even just never wanted it before?

When you are about to turn 46 years old in a month?

Do I dare?

I feel like that old Firesign Theater comedy album title -- "Everything You Know Is Wrong"

Desire and reality...

Finally got an offline from G. this morning -- from a time when I would still have been home on a normal workday. Still not sure if this is real; if she sees time differently than I; or if she even is who she says she is.

But I also am wondering: What do I want out of this? What can I realistically expect out of this relationship, even if it turns out it is on the up and up?

Reminds me of a quote from my favorite novel, Samuel R. Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand", when the narrator is told by a friend that she has found him, via synapse mapping, a "perfect" lover:

"At thirty-six years [old] you know it can't be done.
Which I guess is what desire is all about."

just a couple things

So many things, big and little ---

Still have not heard from G., or L. -- now, for the sake of my sanity, I am having to assume it was a game. Or she is gone from my life.

Or it may be that when I come home from Father's Day, she will have left me an offline apologizing and everything is fine and will be fine and I will still be visiting her in two months.

~

When I was biking yesterday -- up the Riverwalk, near the beginning of the hour and a half ride -- I was getting chest pains: like angina, but maybe just muscular, or a slight bronchial infection or allergy. And I imagined keeling over and dying.

And I thought: "That's okay - I can die now."

Which is the first time I had that thought since my heart attack and surgery, instead of the exact opposite -- "I can't die yet, I'm not supposed to die yet; there is something I MUST do before I die - I still have a mission to accomplish, one that I don't even know yet!"

But today, I feel again it is not my time yet - there is still something for me to do.

Maybe this has to do with my accomplishment of sustaining he Coalition on my own for the past 11 months. Maybe this has t do with feeling it is best for me emotionally to give up on G. Maybe I'm just tired, and can actually relax a bit now that we have a new Executive Director.

~

Maybe G. will pop up again tomorrow morning, and all will be well with the world again. Maybe I should not be so emotionally dependent on an "online relationship". But then again, maybe it is all real. Probably my not knowing is the worst part of this at the moment.

"nothing's gonna change my world..."

I still haven't felt like doing anything today.

Even after an hour-and-a-half bike ride, and an hour's daimoku. Even after reading a trivia game with Box of Rox/Mark. Even when there are people online whom I usually would talk with.

Just...flat.

Can't figure it out. It's almost bedtime anyway. Maybe if I had more money, I would have gone to Jim's Steak-Out for a taco and fries combo ~ but still the idea of that does next to nothing for me.

Is the only thing I want is to talk with G.? I thought my life was bigger - and by now more realistic - than that.

Will I be a fool, or will I be a lion?

(Saturday) Feeling down today -- although I know I need rest I still don't want to rest.

For one thing, on a normal Saturday the past couple months I would go spend a couple hours or more at the Community Center through the 10:00 am - 8:00 pm Soka Spirit toso -- but this weekend our new Community Center is closed, per the lease, so the landlord can make money off the big gated parking lot for the Allentown Art Festival. I am still down to chant from 5:00 - 6:00 though.

And I am so fucking broke -- have about $40 I think, including credit card, to last through when I get my paycheck in he mail on Friday -- TOTAL.

And --

G. has not as much as sent me an offline since we talked briefly early Tuesday saying she was off work but would be stay in from the 100 degree heat there, and be online waiting for me -- but by the time I got to work, and slipped online she wasn't on. (and she didn't even drop me an offline that she had made plans and decided to go out.) And I haven't heard from her since.

I even dropped L. an offline today asking if G. had stopped in the shop to see her or if she had heard from her.

From all I know - they are one and the same...

And despite G.'s swearing of her love and attention toward me, in the end it is all just words, in a online universe that is just words. Hell, even at this point she hasn't even given me a phone number, or bothered spending $15 on a computer mic when I know she makes a special trip and spends almost as much a week on her "food". Even after we have started making plans for me to visit her and stay with her for a week in late August. And even though she has been talking about borrowing a cam from a friend and sending me "special" pics of her, she says she still has not been able to connect with her...

Is she real?
Is she playing "chicken" with me?

In this week's Artvoice "Free Will Astrology" - Bob Brezsny is a Cancerian himself, and I look at it more as cool advise he is giving, than any guidance - he references the 80's Matthew Broderick movie "War Games", and advises: "The game your playing is nowhere near as dangerous,...of course, but why not play to win?"

So, if this is a "game" G. has been playing on me the last 7 months, I will somehow come out winning. Even if it not winning against her, I will still bring it to Gohonzon, I will still win over me.

And if it is that G. and all this is real -- and if she has just let time fly by without realizing it (as she has expressed before after being offline to me for 4 or 5 days; she is after all a lot younger than me and therefore sees time and the future/lifetime differently than I do), then, if it is real -- I am the fucking luckiest man in the world!

A girl on the street

While walking back to work from dropping off mail at the corner mailbox yesterday afternoon, I passed a young couple.

The girl was thin, in a black dress loose even on her frail frame, pretty, pale skin and blue eyes; dour.

She was wearing an odd, slightly baggy, white knit or thick mesh cap -- odd in this weather as it was, but also not sure if I saw any strand of blonde hair from under it.

And from under the collar of her dress, up along the left side of her throat, was a semi-rigid yellow straw, a plastic tube, coming up from the hint of a mechanism at her shoulder, that after a hard joint went up into her left nostril.

She looked like someone out of Star Trek: The Next Generation --seriously, literally.


I just wanted to talk with her. I just wanted to know what she was goning through, what her story is.

"What do * I * want?"

I was chanting, for half an our this afternoon, back home after world Peace Gongyo, about my situation at work tomorrow -- i will be getting a new boss, and Jim Coder will bring him over and we will talk tomorrow. And started chanted about his happiness, that I am a good employee, even picturing that I shakubuku him (introduce him to Buddhism) and picturing him getting Gohonzon ---

And then something washed over me, that never had before...

"What do I want?!"

That just came out of my life, like it never has before. The thought being the big picture. Am I really cut out for working at a desk in an office? Do I want to work on my own, even be self-employed?

Just the question itself was a bolt out of the blue. A deep thought and paradigm shifting I had never had before.

Wow!


I just this morning read Thom Rutledge in Embracing Fear talking about "living by default", just accepting and taking what happens to come your way, even the big things, like jobs and careers, marriages. He was fortunate enough to realize this, and that he was himself doing this, while he was still in his 20's and in still in college.

But I am still fortunate enough, hopefully, to realize it and come to grip with it now.

I keep surprising myself!!