I Will Follow You Into the Dark

“No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs.”

At my job I work with dementia patients whose debilitating illness is in various stages. One particular patient, I’ll call her Margaret, specifically arrested my attention the other day. I asked her how she was doing and she replied, with her gray eye-brows perked, wide blue eyes and a smirk, “I’m going crazy of course!”

It was comical and tragic at the same time. The truth of the matter is – she’s going crazy to a certain degree. But maybe she isn’t? Maybe she’s experiencing heaven in a way. As Milan Kundera said, “The only important things are the ones that can be understood by children.” Maybe we all should have our development arrested a little bit more.

I digress.

Margaret’s husband, who seems by all means to be in good mental health, comes in every day to check on his wife. They both usually have decaf coffee and sit at one of our tables. Yesterday I watched them sit in silence. My guess is that this is a common occurrence as his wife’s mind has degenerated to the point that having casual conversation with any tangential flow is hard to come by.

I think what I saw was love.

He followed her into the dark and made it his dwelling place.

That’s love. It’s when your love doesn’t require anything from the other person. It’s unconditional.

Maybe, the memories and past love had been to such a degree that the present suffering and lack meant nothing in comparison.

All I know is that I wanted to cry.

Sometimes I am cynical about soul mates and all that stuff. And, to a certain degree I’ll believe that soul mates are just people that come into your lives for a purpose to teach you something.

But, I think there’s something to having someone that stands with you until the end, holds your hand in the dark, and squeezes tight.

That is love.

xo.

DG

Alcohol and Open Wounds

“Love till it hurts, then love some more.”

At some point in our lives all of us have scrapped a knee or an elbow and have needed alcohol to clean out any germs camping out in our festering wounds. And all of us have felt the subsequent sting that accompanies its application. And all of us have closed our eyes tightly as if we could bury the pain in darkness.

Alcohol has multiple effects. It disinfects, or heals, hurts like hell.

Maybe love operates in the same way.

It both heals – disinfecting the multitude of germs built up in our hearts –and it hurts like hell.

I’ve had this idea buried in my consciousness for a while now but my recent experiences have helped to dissolve the subtlety of its meaning.

I work as a server at a fraternal organization – no not the free masons. Though that would make for quite the blog post! And at the restaurant I often get criticized in ways that I don’t feel are loving.

Now, I am the type of person that can handle criticism as long as I know that the person cares about me as a person. But, at this job, sometimes I doubt that. Sometimes I just feel like a cog in the wheel. And therefore the criticism especially burns.

The easy thing to do is become bitter and apathetic. But, as a believer in the transcendent power of love I can’t give up that easily. .

So lately I’ve been trying to just love back.  And it’s so hard. My ego wants me to be bitter and take everything to heart. And because of this it hurts. Loving hurts. But, hopefully it will heal. Hopefully it will redeem my ego in the wake of its death.

There is a death to love – a certain  type of surrender. Maybe love is born in death.  Maybe I’m wrong? Who knows. All I know is that love hurts, but my hope is that it heals to and I hope that I can overcome my ego at work and love always. Because, my greatest hope is that

Love
Wins.

 

xo,

DG

Soul Meets Body

 

I want to live where soul meets body
And let the sun wrap its arms around me
And bathe my skin in water cool and cleansing
And feel, feel what its like to be new

Since living in Bremerton, Washington I’ve dwindled down my night shenanigans to two bars: The Mannette and The Bistro. They are as diametrically opposed as R. Kelly and Sufjan Stevens. The Mannette, like Sufjan’s music, features a portmanteau of people while The Bistro, is a lot less varied. It’s like comparing the simple R&B track “Bump and Grind” to Sufjan’s magnum opus “Impossible Soul” which blends synthesizers with orchestral instruments in a trance of a song.

Sometimes I feel like simply being a body and undergoing the scrutiny that comes with it – specifically the rejection. Living as a soul is much easier, in my opinion. It’s like people understand that there is a somewhat imperceptible x factor that lies within every soul, or within the shell of consciousness, a pearl. And that’s why people are more likely to engage in conversation with a soul than share with a body, which is known fully, for the most part, upon meeting.

Today I’m feeling like being more of a soul.

That’s all I have today.

Take care

Xoxo,

DG

This town

“This place is a prison/And these people aren’t your friends/Inhaling thrills through 20 dollar bills/And the tumblers are drained and then flooded again and again.” Ben Gibbard

Lying in bed lisning to Death Cab for Cutie in the town where its front man Ben Gibbard calls home with a swallow, everything should be in its right place. But it’s not. I’m stranded in Washington state away from all my friends all because of a wasted summer.

It was a summer filled with monotonous baseball games, pillow talk and diet coke. Not a recipe for bliss by any means, though as Modest Mouse says, “If life takes shit to make bliss, then I feel pretty blissfully.”

I believe depression is a season where demons need to be exorcised, and in that regard I had Satan’s minions on a treadmill.

I learned a lot about myself during the summer.

There was a lot of refilling and organizing that needed to be done, and I collected the strewn manilas and bent back the bunny-eared pages of books in my heart that were left agape on the floor. They were some books that needed to be read that I neglected for a while.

But that was then, this is now, and I feel like I’ve read those books, exorcised those demon and I’m left in a town filled with military pricks and chicks with puddle deep brains.

Yet, by the suggestion of my aunt I decided to go to this bar in Mannette, the sectioned off village of Bremerton where a lot of artists hang out. Mostly musicians, but, nonetheless  ARTISTS.

It was a dimly lit bar with all black walls and wood floors, reminiscent of a saloon and ironically enough it’s called the Mannette saloon.

It was an open mic the night I showed up and a couple of people courageously went up the mic and played some music for a handful of half-drunk listeners.

My first mistake of the night was to go up to an older woman and asked her if she was friends with my dad because she looked awfully familiar to me. Her friend turned to me, with “negro please face” and said “That’s an insult, unless you’re like 15 years old!”

Damn the gods.

For some reason I decided that it was wise to continue a conversation with this girl and she convinced me that I wasn’t black and Obama wasn’t either. The crazy thing was the sense of conviction she had on her face as if she was announcing that the sky was blue.

This was all directed under the presumption that Obama wasn’t raised by black parents and isn’t full black. And, since he was raised around all white people he wasn’t black either. Apparently, not only do both of your parents have to be FULL black, since we all know there’s such thing as that, but you have to also be raised in an area with a lot of blacks.

Remember, I’m in Bremerton, Washington for those of you shocked and dismayed by such comments. But, maybe you’re not dismayed by such comments, and for those, I owe a moment of silence ;).

I digress.

She went on to say that she doesn’t have age limits with dating but ideological limits, and I can see how she would have a hard time finding anyone able to keep up with her out of this world ideas.

Anyways, luckily I was able to find some quirky dudes whose house I ended up going to and playing music and doing puppet shows on emagle. The night ended well. But, overall, I have a bad taste about Mannette and the state of Bremerton in general.

I thought I’d never say it, but I really miss Phoenix. Hopefully I start m

But, I’m highly doubtful.

Love always,

DG

xo

“I overcame myself, the…

“I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.”

—

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Books and People

Today I gave up on a book. On the Road by Jack Kerouac to be specific. I got about half way through and I felt so much resistance to reading it.

 It felt like a chore.

Picking up the book made me feel heavy, and it didn’t provide the joy and enthusiasm that reading usually engenders within me.

I took several breaks from it, and spent several days without any sort of intellectual stimulation in my life. Reading literature is my primary means of intellectual stimulation, and when I don’t consume it, I just waste away my life on superficial websites not worth mentioning on this blog.

Yet, despite the resistance I had towards the book because of its sloppy nature and lack of significant expose, I couldn’t give up on it. I couldn’t let it go. I was strangely attached to it. Somehow it became lodged within somewhere deep in my heart.

For a long time people said that my writing mirrored Kerouac’s, to my disbelief, and they always suggested that I read his magnum opus, On the Road.

But I didn’t find myself in it. I found myself in a few characters, specifically Dean. But, the book didn’t rapture my heart in any way. It just weighed it down, pinned it to the ground, in a bad way.

I feel like this happens to me in relationships too. I waste a lot of effort keeping people around that weigh me down because I form attachments to the ideas of them. specifically to who they should be for me and what I should receive from them, while they decompose within the soil of my heart.

They are the books for me that I wish to hold onto despite the fact that they do nothing for me. I want to collect them. To let them collect dust in my heart just so I can say that I possessed them. But the irony is that I didn’t. They possessed me. They lied to me, and I fell for it.

Therefore, the only thing I can do is cut the umbilical cord that’s fueling this saran wrap relationship and let myself experience deeper levels of engagement. This is what’s good for me. I don’t need to collect people or books to make myself feel good.

I need the books and people that actually make me feel good, not because they are good ideas, but because they are good books and people that will add to the book that I write each day as I open my lids to welcome the eve of possibilities tempting me to bite the fruit of everlasting joy.

This is a new start; this is the end of the book. This is the genesis and the day of revelation. And I’m fine sitting within the paradox of now.

 xoxo,

DG