Morning Pages Day 8 -- Jan 14, 2022

Good morning, god-awful Pages. I am only indulging in this exercise today because the alternative (getting off the couch and actually starting my day) is even less appealing. It’s cold in here because I left the heater off most of the day yesterday. It’s 59 degrees inside and 39 outside the house. I am officially a wimp. But I’m OK with that. I am a warm, cozy wimp lying on the couch with a blanket, pretending that writing this down is something important enough to keep doing.

I had a good group last night. Emery was still sick, so she asked me to fill in again. I was hoping someone else would step up, since I facilitated last week, and I don’t want to feel like I’m oversaturating the market with my shtick. Once again, however, the group was warm and receptive, and I felt nothing but good vibes coming from all the members. I admit, for the ego, it is a bit intoxicating.

As nice as that is, I can’t say they really like me for me. They like who I present myself to be. I haven’t opened up to them about areas in my life that might alter their perception of me as a saintly older gent. I may allude to a dark side or uncomfortable secrets, but that’s as close as I’ll get. Within myself, I am a conscienceless sociopath, and as such, I am OK with me. If something can lie buried beneath the surface, then no one can stumble over it, and no one gets hurt.

Such unnecessary disclosures would not be productive, since I don’t really want to set up divisions. I’m not trying to recruit anyone to my way of thinking, to my amoral lifestyle. If everyone were a dirty rotten scoundrel like myself, would the world be a better place? No. So duplicity it is. When you go out into the world, you look in the mirror and do what you can to make the face you see into something presentable. Combing messy hair, shaving, wearing clothes that hide visible faults—these are things that normal people do. No one purposely goes out of their way to show off a pimple or an infection.

“Dude,” I say, “no one wants to hear about your deviance, except perhaps other deviants. And do you really want to out yourself to the world, rally around the deviant flag and normalize your socially unacceptable behaviors? No. I didn’t think so.”

So why can’t I just let it go? What about this stupid area of my life is so important that I have to play 20 questions with myself and wind my narrative around a twisty rope-lined queue? Why can’t I just cut to the head of the line and say, “Here I am, deal with it” and move on?

It’s a social conditioning thing, I guess. I don’t have any reason to rock the boat. I’m not making a stand because that would be unpleasant. It’s easier to compartmentalize. I am this one person 99% of the time, but then, randomly, out of some compulsion or inner mechanism that I am not altogether aware of, I become this other person. I turn, like a zombie or a werewolf, into some other creature, who is compelled to eat human flesh. No, cannibalism is not my thing, silly. That’s just a metaphor.

Although I am fine with my actions, and find no reason to prohibit myself from acting in accord with my random whims, at the same time, I find myself blocked creatively, since I A) won’t write about it directly and B) can’t ignore it, since it is like a speck of dirt on my glasses. So hard not to talk about the elephant in the room.

“What elephant?” I ask innocently.

“Haha. Not so fast,” I say. “You aren’t going to get it out of me that easily. This shit has been a dark secret for years, and you expect me to fall for that little maneuver? Not a chance.”

But having less than a clean slate to write upon makes one have to acknowledge the stuff that is written on the slate, even as one does their best to erase the chalkboard. But let’s use that metaphor and attempt to do just that, shall we? What’s done is done. Yesterday’s sins, if you believe in that sort of thing, belong to yesterday. Who am I right now? What am I currently engaged in?

I’ll tell you what. I’m a lazy couch lump, too cold to get out of bed, too uninspired to even write in my blog. My dreams have been very thin and unmemorable. I can’t weave a narrative out of a single image, which is all I’m left with these days, if I dream at all. If I were disciplined, I could use the time to write something more interesting than this internal monologue crap. I’d sit down with my headful of memories, choose one and write about it. Whether that would make interesting reading or not, I don’t know. But it would sure beat this ring around the rosy business of trying to journal without complete transparency.

Fuck it. I am who I am, I do what I do. If I don’t want to talk about it, I’m not going to. Discussion closed. For now. Who knows whether I’ll get some urge to spill about my proclivities in some future timeframe? Right now, I am am uncomfortably comfortable holding my cards close to the vest, though even mentioning that I am holding some cards means that I am in the game.

La dee da. I’ve rambled incoherently about nothing for a page and a half. Can I be done now? Writing three pages seems excessive. I would go for one page of quality over three pages of fodder. Maybe the idea is to get enough stuff out there that I can go through it later and glean the salient bits, I don’t know.

I need to re-listen to the audio book. It was just another distraction for me, not like something I was taking notes on, just background audio for my walks and quiet moments in between TV shows and music. I perked up when she mentioned the Morning Pages because it sounded like something that I might be able to pull off. I was already in the practice of writing in the morning because I was doing my dream journaling.

The book smacked of too much new age spiritualism. Too much deference to a Creator. Too many references to God and spirit and the universe. I can’t stomach that. What I believe, or more precisely, refuse to believe, as a sentient unit, singular and disconnected in many ways from the quote unquote universe, may be wrong, may be inconsequential, may be keeping me from graduating or realizing my potential or whatever, but it is my operating system. I can’t do warm fuzzy universe crap. Not after the shit the universe has pulled.

Haha. I can be mad at something and still not believe in it. I am cool like that. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. Yes, I can hold two contradictory views and function just fine. I can engage in sinfully immoral behavior and flog myself over it, while at the same time not subscribing to a moral code. I can eat meat and still love animals. I can say “thank God” and mean it, without believing in the motherfucker.

So, no, I won’t be kneeling and asking for guidance, forgiveness or anything. I don’t have assurance that the other shoe won’t drop anyway. I can live my life like there’s no tomorrow because that is the reality. For all practical purposes, I live like there is going to be an infinite number of tomorrows. I do that because it’s all I can do. I have to assume the continuation of my being. Waking up each morning, I must act like there is a day stretched out ahead of me that I will take part in.

I like drugs because they make more things seem possible. Time can tend to slow down, and things can be more fully paid attention to, when one is on just the right amount of the right substance. I use weed to achieve this effect. But I fall into the trap of letting the weed become an end in itself. The feel good sensation becomes a pleasure to be indulged in, rather than a medicinal tool.

I’d like to create a few magic rituals. The problem is that I don’t really have the heart for it. I don’t believe in magic. I’d like to believe, but I’m one of those people who likes to have the horse in front of the cart and not the other way around. “Believe, and thou wilt be shown!”  No, that’s not for me. Show me the money, and then I’ll believe. I guess that would obviate the whole need for faith. It wouldn’t be a belief; it would be knowledge.

And while we’re on the subject of semi-colons, like, what the actual fuck are they good for? Kurt Vonnegut called them “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” I would argue for the use of a comma following the word hermaphrodites, but that’s just me.

I used to use commas like a pre-diabetic uses sugar. They would go anywhere I could fit one in, just because it makes things go down easier. I tended to agree with Kurt on the semi-colon, though. Who needs a fake-ass period with a comma underneath it? If you want to make two short, choppy sentences, do it. And if you want to use a comma splice, do that as well. It represents a poetic choice, giving the reader a gritty, real-time look at the internal narrative. No one takes the time to think in complete, grammatically correct sentences. Those people are pompous asses. Or royalty or something.

Yeah. And fragments. I used to employ them like day workers. No need to long term commit to forming a complete sentence. Just shoot the thoughts out there, machine gun-like. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tat. I’m gonna revisit the use of fragments in my next incarnation as a writer. Or not. We’ll see.