I reminded myself that I’m an imperfectionist. And I take pleasure from the idea of people frowning when they can’t read the text on the picture very well. Like a lot of things that are true, you have to look a little harder.
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This post isn’t for you. You know who are, favorite DNA person. 🙂
Most of us live in our private nests.
Pretty much everyone feels like they need to clean more, reduce more, and spend more time in the bureaucracy of keeping their nest aligned with an arbitrary level of cleanliness. That’s okay, too. Each minute spent to do so should not be at the expense of your moments, your friends, your family – but more so, at the cost of your mental well-being. Time spent concerned about how your nest looks is time not spent being creative or enjoying even simple pleasures. You become too focused on the “ought to and obligation” of keeping your nest perfect.
Stacks of mail in the kitchen, dust everywhere it can be. Clothes to be washed, clothes to be put away, clothes that don’t fit inside the closet, dressers, and on the floor. Books to be read, magazines you will never read. You don’t have a crazy drawer, you have an entire crazy room, garage, or storage space filled with miscellaneous everything. Most of us do. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there! People keep their nests largely unhidden, so we wrongly assume they don’t have the same problem as we do.
You can’t triage the physical space. Look around. For the most part, whatever condition your house is in right now, it’s probably the default. That might bother you to accept. It shouldn’t. You can fight an agonizing fight to spend a lot of time and energy temporarily fixing your space, or you can yield and do the best you can and let it go at that. Homes and nests are meant to be lived in, and you will always have to make choices to keep it pristine or lived in. You can’t have both without wasting a lot of your now moments.
The same is true about your job, your diet, your vices, and your mind.
Each person’s best is variable, fluid, and often contradictory. And that is okay.
If you have precious things, keep those that are tied to defining moments and memories in your life. The rest? Sell what you can to have the things that add value to your life.
Donate, discard, disown.
We hoard and clutter partly because it makes us feel like our place is a home, a nest, and our place to be. But we also do it because we don’t see the arc of time getting shorter and shorter.
For a later day, I might need it, it’s valuable; these are all valid reasons to keep things. But it is not things that matter. Not if you don’t use them regularly, not if they don’t light you up, or if they fail to make your life fuller and more satisfying.
“Treasures that aren’t treasured, admired, or used aren’t treasures at all. They are anchors, ones that keep up from enjoying the here and now and the people in our orbit.” – X
Out of sound, out of mind, trinkets, and treasures stored for no witness or participant.
Things are to be used or admired. Everything else? It not only clutters your nest, it clutters your mind.
Simplicity is the toughest goal. It requires herculean effort to overcome the urge to keep, to store, to accumulate.
As someone smart once told me, “Ain’t nothing you got that can’t be taken except for your peace of mind. This world honors nothing with permanence.”
Love, X
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There are a lot of bad men out in the world, whether they physically dominate or mentally degrade their wives and children. The smart ones are fiendishly clever in concealment; their masks in public are often adorned with a suit and tie, a quick smile, or an engaging personality. Growing up, I had to endure abuse. A lot of people knew it was happening. Few ever attempted to intervene. I understand the complicated issues at play for their failure. That kind of abuse, however, leaves most people with a shaky faith in their parents, their god, and of their ability to leave such trauma behind.
With that in mind, even though I am a liberal, I have always been drawn to the concept of southern justice. When someone does the right thing, even when the right thing is also terrible. It’s not revenge. It’s taking the light back from someone who isn’t worthy of its possession.
I’m not advocating violence.
I’m advocating action.
Sometimes action yields a terrible consequence yet remains the lesser evil.
Someone I know whose life suffered due to the presence of a human monster sent me this song.
It resonated exactly as expected.
Love, X
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Preface: I wrote what follows this morning…almost as a coda, on the way to the apartment after work, a black Camaro zoomed impatiently into its left lane approaching me from the opposite direction. The driver was going too fast and over-corrected, sending him into my lane and luckily swerving wildly into the far lane next to me. I had no time to react, not even to stomp my brakes, which would have certainly resulted in a multiple-car pileup. As I passed without time to feel my heart accelerate, squeals, honks, and braking behind me filled the air. The driver of the Camaro managed to gain control without being hit. He stopped in the right lane facing oncoming traffic. The capricious and erratic symmetry of just living reared its head and whispered to me.
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All of these are true
none inscribed to change your hue
An undiagnosed cough ended on the kitchen floor
her love and life abruptly no more
Expert pilot fell to the ground
his loving sister to conjure the sound
A cluster of cells aligned with malignant intent
those around her yearning more time had been spent
The unbearable yet unbeatable beckon of alcohol
those who loved him clutching and watching his fall
A 92-year-old beloved woman took her last breath
a life well lived, met with welcomed death
An aneurysm unseen and unfelt and then all rendered past tense
no warning no reason no sense
Careless driver through the sign leaving one with an unfaithful spine
her arc of life flattened to a baseline
You worry about how you sound or look
how you sing, how you dance, how you might be mistook
any given moment, the universe can close your book
You have this moment to scribble your notes
to construct and imagine needless moats
Kind heart, clear eyes, and curious mind
make sure that you leave something meaningful behind
We are all preterit
This can both energize and immobilize, this insight into truth
beauty and love are in the eye of the beholder
May you live your life just a little bit bolder
no guarantee of life or that you’ll become older
Seize the day, come what may
otherwise, it will seize you
even if you do everything to perfection
these words are no mere early morning reflection
affection, expression, introspection
of these words, there is no question
X
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Without further commentary…
I had a real belly laugh earlier.
I went outside in the afternoon to sweep the parking lot below my apartment. I do this frequently to ensure that anything that blows off my landing doesn’t become someone else’s problem. If everyone did this, it would solve a lot of the messes that accumulate in the world.
I talked to one of my newer neighbors quite a bit. He was convinced I am gay. I think he thinks his gaydar is broken now! Everything from my car color choice to my art projects, to my glasses, and the way I dress. He also took the time to complain that he hates that I took my massive fence project down. He said that it reveals a lot about the person who tried to complain, something that was coincidental, given that someone else told me the same thing today about an entirely different situation. I told him the landlord tried to take back the request a couple of hours after asking me to do so.
Just because I like to be personal, I’ve never had a gay experience or been the least bit interested in the same sex. I am so glad I came out of my violent, racist, and prejudiced childhood without those attitudes of judgment toward people who are gay. Even when the same sex hit on me, I just smiled and explained and went about my day. Anyone brave enough to express their interest, much less in this seemingly growing era of backlash prejudice, deserves grace for being who they are. Sexuality is complicated enough without the added burden of falling outside the alleged norm. Almost everyone I know is trapped in their own personal cocoon of concealment and worry about their perceived sexuality and behavior. I’ve never understood why some people are so obsessed with other people’s sexuality. Except to gossip! Gossip is the exception – one that everyone claims they don’t do.
Although it’s not directly related, if you find someone you like, tell them. It doesn’t have to be awkward. It probably will be, though, because rejection is about as welcome as a spider in one’s shoe in the morning. From experience, I learned the hard way that you should NOT use a bullhorn to tell them. Or shout it out in church.
While talking to my neighbor, I was reminded of how small the world is and how interconnected we are. Because he knows a few people I know. And some of them have secrets, secrets that belong to them to keep private or to live openly. But I wish the world were filled with grace. Not acceptance… because that belies that people different from us must be accepted. They don’t need to be accepted. They need to be who they are without our individual judgments or perceptions affecting how they live their lives. Unless we’re having a laugh about the absurdity of individuals and their choices. I love it when people snark about me, as long as they are creative.
So if you see me driving around in my little blue cotton candy car, I’m not going to give you my number. I won’t go to Applebee’s with you either for a cocktail and hot wings. Unless you’re buying, of course.
Love, X
PS That’s a crescent wrench above my thumb. I keep one magnetized on each side of my metal door. It looks like a floating key. The “Sadboy” t-shirt I’m wearing, the one I splotched deliberately with paint, it’s the most comfortable shirt I’ve ever owned.
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This is a piece of motivation. Nadine, if you’re reading this, imagine that I’m an expert and not the goofball you know.
Stress will never disappear from your life. Neither will the obstacles that frequently jump up and surprise you. You’ll always be tired at times and not want to prepare delicious food that feeds your body. You’ll always be tempted to stop at some place quick and delicious on the way home. Given the certainty of those variables, you’ll have to come up with incremental changes. They won’t feel natural at the beginning. Nothing does. Continuity and comfort work for us. But they also work against us when we’re motivated to do something different.
If you want to eat less or eat more healthy so that you’ll look better, embrace it. Anyone who tries to discount the vanity and self-esteem aspect of looking better is fighting human nature. If you think you look better, you will almost always feel better. It will translate to energy and optimism. If you want to eat differently just to be more healthy, that can be amazing too. We all know that the food we eat is the fuel that helps our body protect itself. It’s equally important to know that you can do everything perfectly and still have illnesses and unexpected calamity. As we get older, all of us are forced to confront that.
Everyone who tries something new eventually hits the wall of the reluctance curve. You won’t see as much progress as you would like. Or you will have days where you fail. It will feel like those days of failure far outweigh any progress you’ve made. It’s not true. You have to exercise that muscle of habit. If you do things incrementally, over time, even with days of failure, you’re improving yourself and your habits. There will be days when you will drink an entire bottle of wine and probably eat half a cheesecake too. But over time, you will see that there are simple ways to eat a whole lot of food and be happy with them. It does require you think and plan ahead so that you’re not creating obstacles. Chances are if you’re smart enough and motivated enough to make such a change, you will be able to do it. It will be easy to point the finger at the people around you, because Lord knows they’re going to be eating entire pepperoni pizzas and ice cream while you are choosing better options. At the same time, there are times when you should go crazy and a pizza with them. Because life is short and food is delicious.
Try not to start habits that you cannot do for the rest of your life. Because once you start them and have some success, if those habits fall to the wayside, you’ll start eating unhealthy and put the weight back on. Diet and nutrition is pure mathematics. You have to eat fewer calories than you burn long term. It’s not so much about the individual days as it is the arc of your progress. It’s one of the reasons I advise people to not weigh themselves more than once a week or once a month.
For most of us, if you don’t have underlying medical conditions, no matter how bitter the truth is, most of us can hit an ideal weight simply by changing what we eat. Our bodies have developed over thousands of years to survive. Exercise has its own benefits, ones that overlap into other areas of your life. But you do not have to do any exercise changes to achieve your goal weight. You have to swallow the truth that your weight is nothing more than putting more calories in your body then you are burning. No matter how many calories you burn through exercise, the physical truth is that the overwhelming majority of your weight is diet and daily activity. I can’t stress enough that I am not saying don’t exercise or go to the gym if that benefits you. I am saying that we only have a certain number of hours in a day. If you can achieve your goal without using those precious hours in ways you don’t enjoy, then try to wrap your head around the fact that you can do it without activity that doesn’t bring you joy.
If you don’t have any medical conditions, you can be the way you want to be.
Read the last sentence as many times as it takes to believe it.
Will it be hard for you to eat differently? That depends on how you use your intelligence to learn new ways of eating and stick with them.
Choose your hard.
When we don’t choose, we are pushing the consequences to our future. We still have to deal with them.
You can do it. But everything hinges on you making the decision to invest in yourself.
If you’re happy with the way you look and especially so if you’re mostly healthy, embrace it. Don’t try to lose what you see as extra pounds. You can be happy with that if you have a happy outlook. If it is about your appearance, find someone who loves you. That kind of adoration is transformative for your self-esteem. It becomes easier to see yourself as they do, even if you are plagued by self-doubt.
Whatever your goal is, do not attempt to go from 0 to 60. Incremental changes are best. You can experiment as you go and find the things that work for you and skip the ones you don’t. That is what we’re supposed to do in life. We often skip the second half and forget to remove the things from our life that detracts from it.
Don’t bother with spending money on supplements or anything you have to pay for. It can all be done with delicious food that you like. In this modern age, we have more variety than we ever have. Take advantage of it and use your intelligence.
People ask me what the secret is. The secret is… There is no secret. Simplicity in your life and simplicity in your diet. Eat fewer calories than you burn and live a good life.
It doesn’t matter how old you are or where you’re starting. No one changes until they do. No matter how you got to where you are or the way you are, it took a lot of years of habits to get there. If we thought things could not be changed, it would be a horrible cynical world.
Love, X
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Because I’d been boiling myself off and on on the landing and baking in the sun, I turned the AC to 70. Because my AC and heat had to be completely replaced, given that it was from 1976, the new unit is incredibly powerful; its loud sound is relaxing. Güino decided to slumber in my office chair. He’s wandered the landing and the lower floor today several times. Instead of bothering him, I rolled him a foot away and pulled my red rocking chair up to the desk. It felt like I needed to write a couple of hundred words. A few thousand words later, all of it expunged from me in a single burst, I sat looking at the prism hanging outside through the slats of the window blinds. My metal front door is over 170 degrees again. I thought of all the energy reaching us from our nearest star, the sun. We only receive a sliver of its output. It provides enough energy in the form of light to power the entire world – if we’d let it. I think the same is true for each of us. Most of us have the gift of massive kinetic and potential energy inside us. It’s in our nature. Somehow, we allow our lesser forces to override our natural tendency toward power and movement. In my case, I’ve been busy. Being busy or productive isn’t always the best use of my time. It negates introspection and examining the things I’ve said and done with sufficient scrutiny. Life flicks by on lightning skates. It’s easy to live superficially, and sometimes this ease lulls us into thinking it is the preferable way. It’s not. A moment of thought, especially one of gratitude or appreciation, becomes twice as memorable when considered after the fact. Those thousands of words that poured effortlessly from my fingers as I sat here in the zone? They are some of the best words I’ve ever written. I feel it in my bones, the ones that now creak a little as they realize how long I’ve abused them.
Here:
though the sky is blue, you look to the ground out of caution
caution saves, but it also reduces
though the world is a palette of individuals, you seek understanding by viewing them through your own filter
though the world shall never spin according to your whim, you waste your
allotted moments by wishing it not to be so
the pond will fill if you hurl enough stones into it, though it will take years
your life will fill if you stop looking toward what lies behind you and spend your hours subtracting and adding according to your desires
the sky is blue, just for you
and for me
if we but let it be
X
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I’ve learned that people who isolate invariably have an addiction or a trauma. Quite often, it’s one they bury; like the ghosts of a cemetery, they emerge and travel capriciously in that person’s mind. Loop after endless loop. No one else bears witness. And because angst or depth wildly varies between different people, no one really understands the profundity of what afflicts them. Some people relentlessly look ahead, leaving behind the most heinous offenses. Others get trapped in the vortex over things we judge as minor. Though the loop may be nascent and small in circumference, each cycle takes the person closer and closer to calamity. We all see it coming and are mostly powerless to stall its progress.
Cognition seldom helps. You’re not rationalizing with the individual. You’re attempting to overpower something that is both tenuous and tentacled inside someone’s kidnapped mind.
You can try to get close out of love or concern. They often rebuff you. Isolation becomes its own self-fulfilling reward. The phantom loop constantly whispers to the person trapped in a behavior; its voice is not only proximal but deafening.
Don’t fault yourself if you’ve tried to pierce that bubble and can’t. It does not mean you shouldn’t try, even if it’s futile. Because the uncaring alternative is much worse. Even if the story ends badly. Most of us will return to that wall and vainly attempt to chisel away at it, even though we fluctuate between helplessness, anger, or realization.
This is the thesis of my Bystander’s Prayer.
And despite our varying cynicism, our hope for a dramatic change sometimes happens. The alchemy of why or how is beyond calculation. If this were never the case, our behavior would automatically adjust to just accept the unacceptable before we even tried. When it does come, the change, it brings joy. Everyone loves an underdog or someone who has overcome.
If it does end badly, we promise to try something different the next time. Likely, we won’t. There will always be a next time, as this world is full of trauma and unseen damage. Most of us believe that love or some fruitful variation will be enough to convince someone that it’s time to pull up into the high clouds instead of plummeting.
When one person plummets, we all do because that person carries a piece of us with them, even if they are blind to it. It’s how friends, family, and tribe work.
If you can, keep your hammer in hand, your chisel sharp, and your optimism high. If life gets you down, you might be in the hotseat. You’ll need us to pull up, just as we need you when we’re in the loop. The horseshoe finds its way onto every hoof, no matter who you are.
X
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I’ve written that the worst feeling in the world is knowing you are the villain. Or at least the one who has hurt someone, regardless of one’s intentions. In one’s head, you don’t think or plan in a straight line. The water starts out warm and then begins to boil. It’s easy to get into that mindset wherein you begin to believe that there is no resolution; hopelessness is often the result. Emotion, doubt, and undesired consequences merge into a mass of something that seems infinite.
“On a long enough timeline, everyone is going to be an asshole.” – X
I’ve learned again and again that my intentions are meaningless when compared to the consequences, much in the way that love is diluted when you observe behavior versus intentions. If love is indeed a verb, then it follows that consequences are the fruit of intentions.
I tapered off Lexapro by going through three reduced cycles and finally just tossing the remainder. This website might sanction me again for discussing it. (Which I still shake my head about, though it was a year ago.) It was a huge help for months; now, it lies on me to practice what I supposedly learned. For run-of-the-mill idiots like me, such medications don’t add value after an indeterminate time. My doctor’s office helped my decision along by being profit-oriented rather than patient-focused. I’m used to it. And maybe, in this case, it is for the best. Everything seems inevitable after the fact precisely because it happened that way. But as adults, we know that isn’t true, even if we cling to the comfortable idea of inevitability.
Real villains and narcissists don’t worry about whether they are villains or narcissists. But just because I’m not bona fide does not mean that I am not quite often an asshole.
I yield to the truth when I’m able to recognize it.
Discomfort. Doubt.
Ignoring it doesn’t erase it.
I yield.
PS I’m okay! I just like to write and share what’s in my head. Attempting to control how it’s interpreted is a fool’s errand.
Love, X
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P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 