i'm a damn genius

[click image — note the V — today IS symbol literacy day, after all....]

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You will recall my whining about having sliced myself, given myself the Mark of Zorro with one cruel swipe, all in one dreaded instance of absence of mind. Oh, sure you do. I was griping about the slasher movie going on here, the gallons of blood lost and the mind all raisined up with the intensity of desire to undo that dastardly moment. Well, no shit, I cut the living snot out my left index finger and I goddam managed it all by my quaking right hand and hopping innards, alone here in the great northwesternmost outpost of Californiatude. I severed nerves as well as skin and blood vessels, but imagine I just missed the bone.

Well, goddammit, I never got even the beginnings of infection! I rock! I did NOT have to present myself to the impersonators at the Emergency Room. I did it! Despite truly convulsive aversion to facing it, I so totally handled it.

Yes, yes, I'm yer man in ANY emergency, including a bloody one, but, despite nearly desperate pleas by my boss when I was sixteen, I did not become a nurse... because... all insults to the integrity of skin—anyone's and equally my own—make all my organs trade places and my veins knot up with alarm that does not ebb, but rather starts crashing on my shores with near the reliability of the tides. They say you get over this. You get used to it. I do NOT believe them. I didn't then and I don't now.

HERE. Try just this one snippet of the ten-hour whole.... Do you know, while listening to this whole long thing, and googling for an image of someone he mentions as a part of all this Masonic symbolism of Hollywood and advertising, I landed immediately on THIS. Whoa. Synchronicity, or whut?

Do you know that, once, a long time ago, upon learning that my lover had fallen ass over tea kettle for an anorexic teenager, when he made so polite as to call and announce it, I barfed. I kept barfing for a couple hours. I wonder, these decades later, if he'd had the nerve to face me with it, if I might not have broken a chair over his head.

99, how does this follow from your pathetic bragging about your perfection of first aid?

It follows by considering, as I am at this moment, the notion of willingness to experience negative emotions, which also is why I am wanting you to listen to this Tsarion maniac with me. He talks about this stuff, about the evil of ignorance and denial, the karma of it, and the dharma of real knowledge... of which this willingness to experience suffering is a part. People think that enlightenment, or Zen realization, or whatever, is the END of suffering and the start of unmitigatable bliss. No. That's a phase. The rest of the time you actually feel things more acutely than ever before. You just don't break chairs over idiots' heads.

86, one time, some years ago, decided to go ape shit psychotic awful on me, as I was standing at the stove, cooking him dinner. He was right up at me, trying to get in my face, screaming filthy lunatic things. I did a half turn, lovingly took his chin between my thumb and forefinger, and began pressing him back as though, say, gently pushing open a door to keep from awakening a sleeping person, just the slightest but steady pressure. He flew backward across the kitchen and landed on his ass... just like that mad Iranian trying to grab my boobs when I was nineteen had when I applied similar pressure on him. It isn't something you learn. It's there only when it must be.

Shouldn't that be what one does with one's life? Becoming fully the one who is there when it must be? Isn't there someone who should be here right now? A bunch of someones? Millions of them? Are you out tagging your neighborhoods with V's? Are you in considering facing yourself? What are you doing?

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love, 99
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