DatingGod

Pick Ax and Ego

Mondays through Thursdays I'm in cubicleland where it's always groundhog day. The alarm goes off at 5:30am, though usually I call to Baby Wallace and he comes and hangs out on my chest and purrs his morning kitty breath on me, and sometime Jacinta slides in under my right armpit and purrs so loud I get an underarm massage. I get up, do some yoga, situps, energywork, surf the net, decide whether I'm going to wear the brown baggy pants or the black velvet baggy pants or the baggy pants with the grey pinstripes. Then I select a shirt, preferably one that clashes, and add in a cardigan or jacket, again something that clashes, such as the black pants, brown shirt, grey sweater vest, black/brown striped shoes ensemble that I had on yesterday. Then it's off to start the car, put on some Burt's Bees faux lipstick, crank the cd player up with some Stuart Davis. I'm at work by 7:45. I take an hour for lunch at 12:30, and walk down to the urban version of a park and sit on a towel, eat a half an avocado, a gluten free corn muffin, some cottage cheese, some sliced berries and melon, and watch the birds, the wind in the trees, feel the southern sun make a 55 degree day feel warm. I work until 5:05pm. Then get in my car, come home. Feed the kitties, check email, make something to eat - my latest obsession is vegetable fajitas made with sour cream and fresh guac and spelt tortillas. I watch something from my hulu.com queue. By 8:30pm, I'm in bed, kitties climbing all over me in an attempt to mash me into the perfect sleeping surface. They make passes on their rounds, up and around my head, and they stop to lick my cheek, neck, and eyelids. Sometimes I watch the sky for a while, but eventually the benedryll I took at 6:30 kicks in, and the all over body itching stops, and sleep drops on my brain like a bomb, and other than the two or three times I get up to pee or wake myself up from another weird dream, I'll sleep like I'm dead until the next 5:30am starting gun goes off.

***

Baby Wallace's fascination and manifestation of cold sores continued with a cold sore on either side of the one in the middle of his lower lip. This made him look like an english bulldog for several days which never failed to make me laugh hysterically, though I know they must have hurt him. I couldn't help it. I just kept thinking that at any moment he was going to place a monocle on his left eye and ask for a cigar. His latest illness is a hotspot on the entirety of the back of his left haunch that looks like hamburger. No amount of herbal salve helps, which he only seems to lick off with his scratchy tongue which probably only makes it worse. I'll buy some gauze and surgical tape today and see if I can wrap that rascal for a few days. Wish me luck. 

***

I wonder how long it's going to take to kill my ego. All day long in cubicleland I surgically extract slivers of it from my cosciousness. It's a slippery bastard, with the shards buried deep inside, cleverly disguised as "me". Surgical extractions look like this: One woman I work with is actually fairly calm and balanced. She occasionally chats to me about things. As one of the rules of Ego Massacre is Thou Shalt Not Tell Any Stories, I listen to her, and watch as again and again my ego wants to share something about itself, wants to put in its two cents. The woman mentions a sticky client situation, and ego wants to talk about its sticky client situation. The woman tells me what she does for fun when she's not at work, and ego wants to tell a few factoids, put a spin on my life to make it look fun. But I don't say anything. I try and arrange my face into something pleasant, although I usually fail. I'm polite to her, don't just simply walk away as I do with the other people I work with, but I watch the confusion and discomfort she suffers in trying to have a relationship with me. She is actually a lovely person, and as most of the people I work with are distinctly not lovely, I experience feelings of sadness, witness a desire to at least perform the Happy Dance a little for this decent woman. But my performing days are over. 

***

Ego Massacre successes show up like this: the immediate bossman in cubicleland rolls his eyes and is rude, condescending, ignores questions, refuses to say hello or goodnite. He does things like refuses to acknowledge that I'm standing there waiting for him to answer a question, or he'll see me walk into his cube and then pick up the phone and make a call or he'll reprimand me loudly in front of people for telling a client to hand him a form instead of me taking the form from them and then handing it to him, even though he and I are separated at that moment by a partition and he and the client are within arm's reach of one another. For two weeks it's like rotating slowly on a spit. Then, yesterday, I stop trying to get him to stop, and simply act as if he weren't acting like an slime oozing brick wall. Instead it appears as if he's a little simple, a toddler who is cranky. I don't feel judgment, just an acceptance of This Is How He Is, this is his emotional age. I stop feeling anything other than a calm sort of cruise control taking over. Clients go the same way. By the end of the day, I'm actually laughing and relaxed instead of my usual Utterly Verklempt. And people seemed relieved when I don't fight back against the slime pit of their emotion, as if in the absence of my own brick wall of STOP their own brick wall dissolves.

In looking back, I have no idea what mechanism inside of me turned off or on or how I did it. Except maybe it's that I sort of ignore people. Every day, I lose more interest in people, their stories, the aggressions and hopes and fears and desperation they project on me. I think this means that if you ignore the world, it goes away. 

***

Ego really is nothing more than a headf*ck. I look in the mirror and think: I'm so pretty. I look in the mirror and think: I'm so ugly. And the only thing that makes me believe either one is true is ego. 

***

I've begun translating things people speak and email to me into the distillation of what they are really saying. No one likes to appear needy or greedy or mean. So they try and couch what they really want in compliments and side door requests. A family member sends me a birthday card, about two paragraphs worth of sentences. Distilled down into it's core message is one statement: I miss the things you used to do for me. 

I see this exact message all over my living. Doing things for people means they will be nice, feel happy. Not doing things for people, whether it's because I can't, or don't feel to, means that folks won't be nice, and will feel very unhappy, and will express their feelings that their unhappiness is my fault.

If it doesn't matter to you how people feel about you, it's not a big deal. And how people feel about you only matters if you think you'll get something from their happiness, or lose something from their unhappiness. But if you get that nothing anyone can give you has any worth, then you lose interest in how to add to their Happiness Savings and Loan. And you get that your own emotional bank account is as corrupted and bankrupt as any other financial institution these days. But in this case, the only stimulus plan you or I need is to stop asking for people to show us the money and instead understand that:

There Is No Quan 

***

It's 70 degrees today. The windows are open and the spring breeze brings fresh air flavors. Kitties are at the windows cackling in a bird watching frenzy. The sounds of my whirring printer are part of the activities in motion for the class I'm teaching tonight on psychic skills. The decaf coffee I'm drinking is yummy with a little vanilla extract in it. Maybe I'll treat myself to the country cooking buffet for lunch. Time to leave the apartment and run errands . . . 

Viral Joy

Baby Wallace, looking as dang cute as always, showing off his fat lip, courtesy of a new Kitty Herpes coldsore:

No, sadly, they do not make kitty anbesol, because you know I asked . . . 

Practical Miracles

More Really Good Stuff from Richard Rose:

"If he really was a son of God--in other words, if he really had transcended the illusion--then yes, anything is possible. Once you visit Reality, you know that miracles are nothing more than tinkering with the fiction we think is real life."

"Does a person have to be enlightened to do what Christ is supposed to have done?"

"Not necessarily. Some people have a way of maintaining that state of mindlessness that proves to be creative. Somehow they stumble on a condition of high indifference, and from there you dream it--you will it--then you forget it."

"But there must be limits," I said. "You never read about anything really incredible."

Rose paused a moment as if thinking how to phrase his words so that even I might understand. "Once a person has the formula," he said finally, "anything can be changed, even the future. Through determination, a man can discover how to completely change his destiny. There’s thoughts--which are not yours, but come from elsewhere--and there gaps between thoughts. When you get into that gap between thoughts, you have the opportunity to completely reshuffle you life. This may sound impossible to you now, but try not to let your ignorance get in the way of understanding. I have just told you something of priceless value."

- From After the Absolute, the Inner Teachings of Richard Rose

by Dave Gold

available to read online for free at On Zen

In But Not Of

So much of what I've read the past couple of decades is starting to make sense. It made intellectual sense before. But now, I get it.

To be in the world but not of the world. Sounds simple. Don't be so involved in the world. Check out of worldly things. Go more internal. But it's not what it really means.

What it really means is no more interest in the things that go on outside the skin. As in no experiences that occur are absorbing. Nothing catches the attention in an emotional way.

And it isn't some sort of end product of meditation or practices or lots of counseling sessions. It's a choice. It's a moment by moment choice.

Being in hell really helps this process along. Really helps quicken and deepen it. Because when the choice is hell or not-hell, where is the choice? 

You'd be surprised at how often hell is chosen. But after weeks and weeks of conscious hell, when the body and mind are breaking down, choosing hell just becomes too arduous. And so not-hell gets chosen more often. Which is progress, or lack of fighting, or surrender, or just plain a relief. 

The ego gets more pocked with every day, less substantial, less real, less able to convince me to dance. The world gets less and less interesting. 

What gets more interesting? Curiosity at what is happening inside. 

You'd think that giving up personal relationships would make me lonely. But whatever loneliness I was experiencing was back when I was trying so hard to make my relationships work. Now there isn't any loneliness.

You'd think that letting go of having a career would be scary. But whatever fear I was experiencing around a career, meaningful work, has evaporated. Any energy around work is now simply about survival needs. 

The writing is a little tricky. I still am very drawn to writing, to keeping a log of what is going on with this stuff. Even though I don't write a tenth of what I want to, mostly from sheer exhaustion. But the writing is on my mind all the time. In my mind, I'm always writing. But I suppose that too will go at some point. But it's here for now, and it's absorbing and interesting and enjoyable.

Okay, off to peel a few more layers off the ego. I have a cracked tooth, a vicious cold for the past four days, very little sleep in days, and constant headaches. The perfect setup. It's ego flaying time!

But would he call me a stank a*ss ho if I asked him nicely?

Obama using all manner of salty language. Makes me feel so very joyful to know that my president can out curse me, okay, maybe not out curse me, but certainly give my pottymouth a run for its $$$: 

Obama is tired of your m*therf*cking sh*t. 

Patterns and Hatchet Men

I woke up this morning, opened my eyes and thought:

Schools of philosophies are just attempts to explain things. Someone(s) sees patterns and then spends time and effort fitting the patterns into a cohesive whole. Like science sees organic life grouped into animals, plants, minerals, then into mammals, birds, insects, and reptiles. Then it tries to explain things like emotion, dreams, procreation, how they fit into the patterns above and below. Or in more ancient philosophies where the patterns were believed to explain how the fickle gods laughed and played with our hearts and minds. 

But each philosophy, each collection of patterns, always leaves something out, because they can't find a place to fit it within the scheme of patterns they've concocted, like psychic ability, or the power of thought/belief to heal. A collection of patterns can only take us so far. At some point, to really see what's going on, we have to let go of what the human mind has formed in the way of patterns, and see the whole, just as it is. 

Philosophies say more about the group of people who believe in it, than they do about The Truth of what is really going on in this place called world, on this land called Earth . . . 

Then I thought:

Ego is based on the stories our minds tell us to try and explain the nature of things, and our place in them. The stories are interpretations based on what the people around us tell us are the real, true interpretations, what we see in books and tv and movies are the correct way to respond to different story lines. 

The mind acts as interpreter, and then ego acts it out. The ego is the hatchet man.

Then I closed my eyes:

 

And remembered that in front of me, on my chest, sat Wallace. And that behind me, under my head, was my pillow. But with my eyes closed, were they still there? I could feel both of them, but actually that was a lie. What I could feel was the sensation of his weight on my chest, hear the sound of his purring, smell the scent of his distinct Baby Wallace peppery fur. But that too was a lie. What was occurring was sensation on my chest, in my ear, and in my nose. The resulting "Wallace is on my chest" was simply a construct based on what I've been taught to believe is occurring based on those sensations. But what was true? And with my eyes closed, the only thing I could say was "something is occurring inside of me". I could make no true statement about outside of me that wasn't based on a cultural story, an attempt to describe the patterns . . . 

Then I scratched Wallace's fur, and did that thing he loves so much where I let my heartbeat expand so that it mixes with his and we lie there together, our hearts beating together as a giant heart that envelopes us both and feels warm and sweet and Yes . . . 

Fuzzy Lovin

A great article in salon.com posted today:

The love that dare not bark its name . . .

What do you think is going on culturally now that pets are so popular in the United States?

My theory is that we're suffering from oxytocin deprivation.

We walked off the farm in the past hundred years and broke a link to nature and animals that was 10,000 years old. If you follow my premise that the ever-increasing contact with animals was able through touch and sight and smell to really boost this chemical bond between humans and animals, then what happens when you, in just 50 years, go from 33 percent of Americans living on farms to the Census Bureau just stopping even counting because there are so few people left percentage-wise in America living on farms? That's a huge and sudden divorce from the animals and from the chemical milieus that they created.And what would happen if this same chemistry of bonding was also the chemistry of anti-stress? You would find that people would be flipping out, and they are. Children are more depressed, they're more anxious than ever before. A huge study showed that children born after 1955 are three times more likely to suffer depression than their grandparents were, grandparents who had lived through world wars.

What you see is that the Industrial Revolution causes this great flight from farms, and we are stripped bare of the land, the whole tactile nature thing, not just the animals. My feeling is that people are grasping intuitively at their animals, desperately trying to create this homeostatic correction.

Read the whole article in salon.com Here.

Rise Within

To pursue The Happy means a rejection of something very basic: the only place The Unhappy is is inside of a personality.

I want to quit the cubicleland job so badly that my heart aches. But Life has me tethered to it by that most fascinating of energies we humans need to survive: money.

I make it through another horrendous day, another day that threatens to turn me into a crying-raging hybrid. Before I leave for the day, I almost marched into the manager's office to say: I F*cking Quit. But I know it's the stink of ego, and I refrain. 

It takes two hours from the time I leave after work to even get to the place where I've processed through the raw emotion and drilled down to what is really going on. It's something I've seen dozens of times over the past three months that I've worked there, and it only really shows its true face after a day filled with awfulness.

While it's occurring, it is so personal, and so real. It's blows coming at me. Managers who run around telling us all how horribly we're doing, how we aren't fast enough, perky enough, don't smile enough. Clients doing their usual raging and wailing. Bad air quality making everyone feel sick. The sound of constantly ringing phones and blaring television sets on talk shows and mainstream "news" channels. An onslaught.

And only moments here, and there, can the truth be seen, felt. That it doesn't matter. None of it matters. It's all drama and intrigue, dreamt up by the personalities present, only kept alive and in motion by group consensus. At any moment, we could all just drop the act, and start laughing, enjoy ourselves. But we don't. Though in those moments when I'm awake, aware of what's truly Not Real, I start laughing, and I make a joke to whoever is with me, and sometimes they laugh too, but mostly they don't. But sometimes they stop, and look at me, and for a second they aren't sure what is going on, this off script moment, and for a moment, we aren't in hell, it's just an ugly building with beige walls and boxy furniture, but it's all okay, everything is okay, and we smile.

And it isn't until now, five hours after I left work today, that I'm able to see the real truth of it: the only thing that makes cubicleland hell is the fact that I believe in its hellishness. I buy into the meanness the managers radiate, the fear and rage the clients radiate. I choose to believe that it's real, by internalizing it, giving it validity in my heart and mind.

But it isn't. And tomorrow is another day to prove that. To prove to myself that I can opt out of it. That I can witness the fumes of their hell, and turn away, and yawn.

Because hell, it is so very, very boring, don't you think?

If Brother Jed Had A Cafe Press Site, This Is What The T-Shirts Would Say

• Heresy is truth-talk in the dreamstate

• Beliefs are the charms we use to hold infinity at bay    

• Everybody is full of shit   

• If religion is the opiate of the masses, spiritual stuff is just a higher dosage  

• Everything is futile 

• There is no over-estimating our ability to avoid making eye contact with the obvious   

• You're just a character in my soap opera   

• Further    

• There is no meaning of life. Really. No shit.  

• I went to the JedZone and all I got was this lousy t-shirt 

• You Have No Idea Who You Are  

• Boredom makes me do stupid things     

• Bam! 

• Figure out what you want   

• I'm not a nice guy, I just play one    

• The body is just a rental car and the planet is just a motel  

• Do you know where you are? 

Not Unhappy

There isn't much that makes me happy to be alive these days. 

It isn't that there aren't things that I could choose to feel or do or see that wouldn't bring on The Happy. But I know better than to choose them. And so I watch the landscape as it passes beneath my feet. Sometimes feeling the sun on my face. Othertimes drenched to the bone from the latest freezing rainstorm. Sometimes it's pleasant. Mostly it's a slog. 

If I'm in cubicleland, it's the ramshackle massacre of my ego, hour by hour, minute by minute. Being alternately screamed at and lauded by clients. Watching as one by one, my coworkers release into the fact that they really, really don't like me. I see that it would be easy to turn it all around, to do and say the things one says in order to be liked and admired by coworkers, to be feared/respected by clients. And when it gets really bad and I just can't take it anymore, I make a reflexive move to soften things with my words, my facial expressions, to appear more authoritative to clients, more part of a team with coworkers, more pliably slavelike for my bosses. But the nausea rushes in and stops me short. I can't wear those clothes anymore. I outgrew them. And trying to make myself wear jeans two sizes too small lasts for about a minute. Then I tear them off, and find myself, yet again, inappropriately nekkid, and the robots gnash their teeth in violent disapproval . . .

If I'm home, it's sitting in the rubble of ego that is the product left over from this week's round of detonations. Exhausted. Depressed. I sleep 10 hours. Surf the net looking for truth's footprints. For signs of life beyond the robot. I read and reread and read again the Jed books, the latest stack of recommendations from David over at Just Perception - Bernadette Roberts, Richard Rose, Jim Marion, Franklin Merrell-Wolf, rereading the huge pdf he sent me of his own writings. I read and reread and read again because they keep me out of the headspace that says 'yo, you know you're wingnuts, right?' by showing me the very exact things that I'm doing, going through, experiencing, are the same as these other folks. And they've made it through. To that placeless place called Awake. Or perhaps we're all nuts in the very same specific way, in which case I don't feel so alone in the nuthouse with all the good company I'm in.

Part of me gets that perhaps it's not too late to turn around. Run back to the safety of the hive. This time, a carefully crafted coif will indeed be the thing that will bring The Soulmate. I'll finally unlock the secret pattern of behaviors that will finally make A Career materialize. My attention to detail and willingness to surrender to Love will repair all the broken relationships and Everyone will love me, and I'll finally feel okay. My Magical Powers will have not only brought Baby Wallace back from the brink of death, but will also bring immortality to Jacinta as well. But then I get how ludicrous it all is, even when I remove the ludicrous languaging.

But I can't go back. I've spent 25 years of my living this go around trying to fix the broken construct that is Katherine. And even when I finally got her all patched up, when she was all buffed and shiny and folks went: ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!, I still knew, could still feel her Falseness, the fact that she would never be more than Bullshitty, no matter how much organic emotional aromatherapy I bathed her in.  

Daily, I remove another barrier, another bulwark against destruction. My destruction. The destruction of "I". All the little things a personality wraps around itself to keep the truth from leaking out. Or in. 

I follow the fear like breadcrumbs. I fear being dooced. So I blog about work. I fear the horrible cubicleland job will kill me. So I don't look for another, not really. I fear my clients will see that I'm just another struggling robot. So along with the monthly calendar updates to classes I'm offering, I not only link to my holistic work website, but send out the link to this blog. I fear my lack of buffing and shining and making nice with the nice peoples will leave me homeless and broke and afflicted with a pox that only high quality medical care will antidote. And so I stop cleaning and baking batches of nice to serve to the nice peoples and instead just feel the space, relax my face. I fear staring into the nihilistic, depressive suckhole that is the abyss. And so I adjust the lens to the sharpest focus.

I get that I'm fumbling and bumbling around in here. But there will be no more teachers to show the way, only post it notes left by God/Life/Yes that say things like "maybe you want to lay off the wine for a while" or "for two extra points, spend three hours reclining in your barcalounger while you alternately watch the bluewhite sky and the play of sun on Baby Wallace's fur". There will be no more friends as I once knew, only a laugh, or if I'm lucky two, shared with David, or Sean, or Chuck, or Lynx. There will be no more How-to Manuals, only a road sign or trail marker left by The Others who passed this way and were kind enough, felt moved to craft a little message for us flailing around in the forest, because they could sense that more were coming, and that we'd really, really appreciate a little path action through the thicket with the nastiest thorns.

So, yeah, I f*cking feel terrible. And I'm really, really tired. But what else can I do except keep hacking at my head, trying to saw the f*cker off? Because there is no Katherine. I know it's true. Even though those last two sentences put together make no sense and by their very virtue of being put together shows why I am in so much pain. And everyday I hack off another piece of her and feed her to the wolves. And there is just enough light so that I can still see the way ahead, even if only a couple of feet, and all I can think is: can I make it to that machete before the f*cking wind blows the candle out?

Do I trust what's going on? Not when I'm in this much pain. Do I think that I will win? I know that the question doesn't make sense anymore. Do I have any f*cking idea what's really going on? Not the foggiest. Do I have any choice? No. Because I know she has to go, and she doesn't want to go, and she's a fighter, she's a hell of a fighter, which is how she got this far. How horrible is it that the very warriorress that took me this far, with her bravery and bullheadedness and streetsmarts and smart-alecky mouth, is now the very person I have to kill?

It looks so nice, doesn't it, so clean when you read about it in those self-help books: you must drop the ego, you must hold onto nothing, to be reborn you must die. But to actually do it is so messy, so horrendous and painful, so violent and ugly. And I post this sh*t on the net. Invite the madding crowd to pitch a stone.

But I'm not unhappy. Because in spite of all the hollering, I sniff something on the wind, and I'm tracking it's scent, back to its source. I don't care about anything anymore except for following this trail. I don't care that I'm nekkid and cold and alone and ill. I have to make a living, work, pay rent, chip away at the school loan debt, because that is the reality I know right now. I do what I have to do to stay in forward motion as I know it: pay bills, take care of kitties, get up at 5:30am and go to work, do sessions with holistic clients and rent them the fruits of my struggle for a half hour or so, try to eat halfway healthy food, get some sun on my skin. What else can I do? Go get a scrip for an SSRI and plug back into the matrix?

I have been happy many times in my living. Felt so incredibly happy and blessed and full of radiant good health. And I wouldn't trade where I'm at right now for a million hours of those happy times. Because none of it was true. It was all simply changing states of emotion, of consciousness. It was all gazebos built on fault lines, pretty structures simply waiting for the slightest movement, the inevitability of tectonic shifts that are living on this planet. 

Maybe what I'm going through is ugly and scary and distinctly unfun. But what I was doing, the energy it took to keep it all together in order to keep producing The Happy, was like flushing my lifeforce down the drain, like waking up one day to realize I'd spent my entire life studying phrenology or serving Zeus or working in corporate PR.

But really, it's not all bad. Really, it's so much better than The Happy. I'm grateful that I can finally see my death coming for me, relieved that I can put down the Pretending to Be Shiny. And that I can keep writing. I'm so dang grateful to be able to keep writing. 

And so I'm not happy to be alive. But I'm grateful. . . so dang grateful to be alive . . . 

Enough. Not two feet from me there is a patch of sun, a cushy recliner, and a snuggly kitty. Who am I to say anything other than yes to the Yes?

The Tribe of Yes: Live and In Print

A couple of days before Christmas, I received an email from an editor of a local magazine, asking if I'd write an article for them on blogging and social networking. The deadline for submission was in less than a week, the pay was $75, was I interested?

I thought about it for a bit. It sounds like a no brainer for an unpublished writer. But I really did need to think it through.

A few months ago, I suspected that this pulling away from the world thing I was setting off on would be a real buzzkill for opportunity. But since making the decision to Go Solo, drift into the background, keep a low profile, I've been interviewed for another local magazine, been interviewed for a national radio program, and been asked to co-write a book on holistics with a physician. The former I did because she was cool, the second I did because I was at my cubicleland job and my boss said I had to and the reported jammed a microphone in my face before I had a chance to think it through, and the latter I turned down because I simply got a very, very bad feeling about it. 

But this article, writing an article, did I want to do it? I asked myself, if you say 'no' what does it mean? Is it fear? Is it arrogance? And if you say 'yes' is that arrogance? Greed? Hope?

And as I sat there thinking about writing an article for someone else, I got that sick, pushed feeling, the one that rehydrates up from my past, those pockets of unprocessed trauma from when I've been forced to do things I don't want, when I've felt I've had no power, before I understood that I had a choice. In some cases, it was the sort of every day things that most all humans face - going to a job you've no passion for, or smiling and agreeing with a boss you've finally accepted is an asshat and a doofus, or feng-shuing your face to remove all traces of irritation as your neighbor yet again performs assault and battery on your ears with the blunt instrument that is the minutae of her life. In others it's the darker experiences, the more personalized things I've been through - the rape I experienced when I was seventeen, or the guru/sexual predator I fought off at twenty-three, or the family member who continues to put forth effort to sabotage the things I build in my heart and world. 

The last few years have been a hell of a ride for me. And in the wake of Life As A Human Torch, I've discovered that Yes is the most beautiful word in the English language. But to get to Yes, a lot of No has to be wielded for the sword of integrity, courage, and thou-shalt-not-f*ck-with-the-truth that it is. I say no so often and in so many ways, that most folks don't like me or like being around me anymore. And I can't blame them. No one likes a Negative Nellie. But to honor the Magnificent Yes I've discovered, I have to keep digging through the usual normalized crap that is so much of our modern world. And until I get the hang of it, I'm going to do most of it very badly, my colors will clash, I'll say *f*ck* at the most inopportune moments, and I won't be very much fun at all at dinner parties.

And so I sat, rereading the article writing invite, letting it all wash over me. And I got that some time back I crossed over a threshold in my writing, where I stopped writing what I thought would please people, and begin writing only what pleased me. I finally accepted that writing is something sacred to me, my main form of communion with whatever gods and goddesses I still pray to. And I got that I still may be a slave in some areas of my living, but that my writing, baby, she is free and unfettered, and I cling to her for the coat of arms she is for me. 

So I got that the only way I would do this article was if I could do it in the way that felt true to me. And the only way of writing that feels true to me is what I do here on this here blog thing, the sort of splayed, rambling, weirdly punctuated, bizarrely grammered baked alaska that is DatingGod. And so that is what I replied to the editor: I'll do it if you don't mess with my funky, if you don't edit my weirdness to make it Nice. And he promised. He said that they loved My Voice, and that was why they were asking. And so I said Yes. And the editor was gentle in his editing, and true to his word.

And the result is the first time I've ever been published in professional print: This.

(which is the online version of local newspaper The Wilmington Star's Wilmington Magazine)