"I'm just going to do it!"
"I can't keep going
on and on with this boring thing! I've got to
find a way to escape being normal. You know, normal, like
all of them, like most everyone else has settled into "being." I tried it, I've
done my part, it was fine, I gave it my best but it
just isn't working for me.
Normal is so gray
and I hate it! I once knew a women by the name of Gray, and she certainly was boring, attractive and boring, I nicknamed her Ms. Beige...I quit my job when they promoted her to become my boss...she had "normal" down real well.
The whole idea of "normal" makes me feel trapped and edgy. Did somebody talk me
into this or did I do it to myself? Did I think it would be easier in some way to act like all the others and accept the everyday stuff they accept as "the way that it is?" I've been normal
for over five years now. I can't remember why I did
it but I think it was when I returned from living in Central America...there must have been a good reason. It's about time I become alert and notice why I did "normalizing" to myself with "good intentions" for "good reason" ...so I became normal?
Normal is going to kill me! I wonder why so many
people like it? I feel friendly, accepting and have goodwill for the "normies" ..it's not that I disdain them. I think they should be allowed to do whatever they want to do and keep roaming around freely experiencing their blandish form of seeking bliss...but, I'm a little angry I'm starting to become one of them. "Come on, join in it's safe." That's what they think. Of course it's not safe, they just think it is safe
because they all wander around in people packs for protection from having any real adventure and risk. They stay with thinking "safe" thoughts (mostly) and call it "being responsible"....however, they avoid thinking about stark reality, infinity and the
really big picture of life and death...they don't like being required to pay excessive attention to how life really is.
I'm happy they have all those chickens in their pots,
sleek cars in their triple/double
quadruple bi-pass garages along with all the other, expensive buffed
out sports home work-out stuff. I admire their Platinum covered
partners and all their sweet, cute 18 carat golden kiddies
and pure kittens/doggies/birds and the rest of the joys and toys
too...but, my time is running out and I don't want to
be trapped in a live museum of what should "be"... I don't want to be like them. I never wanted to be like them and I never really was like them.
I've got to think this next living my life part out very carefully.
This is no time to slow down, cower, or roll over and
play living dead. Getting old requires getting serious about whatever it is that I think I want and/or must have and/or contribute to life in the time I've got left. This is the hard part, the no going
back part, I'm getting a last "gasp" of a sprint and energy before getting ready to go...go wherever it is we all go in the end.
I turned sixty years old last Monday. I can't pretend it didn't
happen. Birthdays never bothered me before this one. The enemy is circling my wagon, this is it,
it's high noon and there are buzzards up in the
sky...the line to the cliff is forming and I'm not ready to drop off.
What do I do?
I'm going to stay focused. This is entirely about me. YES! No diversions. no distractions! My senses won't be fooled with fearfilled covers of what I should or must "do." I'm not interested in fillers. I'm only interested in locating the original me and building a fuller life in a happier direction for a great finale. I want to enjoy
me for the rest of my life! I'm going to win my struggle against boring myself to death.
I want to find out where I went wrong and where I want to go.
I'm going to take the flying leap and get on with my
life the hard way...by participating in all that I find, even if I find nothing at all...I know how to do that real well!
About Monday. I didn't notice anything that different, so I'm
older so what! However on Tuesday my good friend Sam
in the Mid-West had a massive stroke and died. I love Sam and
I never met him in person. Sam and I became
friends at our cyber group...one for recovering from the madness of the 60's..
Since Sam and I were the longterm, still living, members in our
group we sort of hung-out cyberspacewise together...we understood each other.
You know, he became my confidant my best
friend. We told each other everything. We sat
at our computers, in our various bedrooms, in our
various cities thousands of miles away from one another and we spilled
our guts to each other, every night. We didn't use the group for sharing our personal dilemmas much. It
worked real well with just the two of us on "messenger" before bed.
What a good friend I had until
Tuesday morning of this week when Sam dropped dead.
I knew it beforehand! I knew it before I tried to
find him on-line. It's one of those things that
happens between friends. I felt it. I felt it the
whole day like something was wrong with my good friend
Sam. I call that feeling of apprehension "pending doom" other people
call it intuition. It's
gloomy. It feels like you know something is
about to happen. Pending doom is like some prehistoric
instinct coming alive and edging up to me through the
tar pit of lifetimes ago. I bet other people notice it too. It isn't
the kind of thing that people talk about. People
probably don't like to talk about it. People don't
like to look at real feelings of dread...feelings that are weird or mystical,
sometimes they think it's a anti-religious or superstitious. It scares them. Not me, I want to get understand the really deep
and under-the-surface/current stuff. I want to know
what everything means. I'm not interested in
how things "appear" to be. I'm on a mission of
knowing the absolute truth about me and everybody else
around me. I'm going to find a good shrink. I'll talk to
the shrink about all of these things. The shrink will
know for sure exactly what I mean and what I need to do to find
my way to live enthusiastically in reality...enthusiastically, right up to, and including, the end." Chapter One, Dr. Swoozie Nights, by Leonardo Ricardo
_-_James_Tissot_-_overall.jpg)
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7 comments:
Me too. For what it's worth, I offer you my full support. Live it and don't give a shit about what anyone expects of you. Search it out and find it. That's what I'm starting to do, too. I am so grateful that I have encountered you, LR. Even if this moment is all that there is.
Mine dropped dead in 1996, and I hadn't seen him since, oh, I don't know for sure, about 1985. It's all the same.
Blessings...
Leonardo, in so many ways you remind me of th Man from la Mancha. Your quest is honorable and your means admirable. May your searches be filled with nooks and crannies of life and may they never be ordinary!
My dear Len,
I hope this "Comment" gets through to your Blog. I don't read Spanish and I am not sure how this works.
Your Chapter 1 Story is all about ME, isn't it?? My Lord, it IS ME. I never, never ever wanted to be "normal". And I worked hard NOT to be and to be different. Sometimes I couldn't be different enough because I was held in by the constraints of having to work in conservative capitalist companies in the U.S. of A. I should have been a dancer, an artist, a painter...anything but a salesman! Yikes! You really touched me my friend and I sorry about your dear friend Sam (that is true?) Keep on writing and enlightening us!
Much love and many hugs,
Ricardo of the North
Thank Richard, Fred and Scott...all the messages got through just fine...I'm enjoying the prospect of telling my little "thin" novel...I've started with this first chapter after having posted chapter 10 (scroll down)...I decided this would be a good place to expose it as I wrote it years ago when living in Puerto Rico full-time...I had just returned from Central America and the loss of Jose and I was at a loss as I tried to simply "be" in Puerto Rico...my friend Suzanne Woods suggested I write a little book, a "thin book"...so, "Dr. Swoozie Nights" came into being as a poured my freeflowing thoughts out day after day into the "draft" portion of my program...as my friend Suzanne said after she read the first part, "you paint better than you write,"...nothing like a true friend to tell one the truth...no worry of get carried away with big plans as a great WRITER..my favorite kind of friend is one who encourages me to take positive/adventurous steps even if I might be PERFECT at the steps that I take...being human, a REAL human being is a fantastic thing and I like exploring the potential in just "being." I hope I don't bore all you silly with my estoria de fantasia...I'll post a chapter from time to time and identify it, as "Dr.Swoozie Nights" so you'll not think it's just another one of my political, social or religious rants!
Thank you for visiting me at http://www.leonardoricardosanto.blogspot.com this is really fun.
Love to you, all of you,
Leonardo Ricardo on Monday in Central America
Sorry, might NOT be perfect (but you knew that already...verdad?)
I think some do okay in "normal", but I have never looked good in that shade:)
I didn't have to try to be different, I was just made that way. I did try, in my early life, to be normal, but it didn't work:)
My interests and passions were elsewhere. It was my mom who once called me her black sheep... lol, and she is right. I am like no one in my family who are or were all, basically, somewhere under the bell... I'm more out on the end somewhere:)
I figured out long ago that being happy was being who I am. I'm hardly the one at the party with a lampshade on... actually more like the one off in a corner in some seemingly deep conversation, and while most think of me as an extrovert, I really enjoy my very alone time. Well, alone as one can be with cats and dogs here.
I think you are just FINE! And, BTW, I envy your view of that gorgeous mountain... I look out from the tops of trees at a gorgeous red sandstone near-vertical cliff which is wonderful, but your mountain is somthin' else!
I'm glad you wrote this, Leonardo. I've felt it too, throughout my life but especially in the younger years. People seemed so willing to live with borrowed thoughts, canned responses, filtered perceptions, scripted lives. When I was too young to say a decisive "NO" to it all, I thought I'd die gasping for air in that pale, tepid, half-feeling world offered to me.
e.e. cummings wrote,
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things--
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
Somehow it got easier when I discovered I could slip through the cracks, so to speak, find the REAL behind the facade, punch a hole in the celluloid (shades of Sherlock, Jr.) and gaze into the pure joy of sunlight, water, the music of the breeze, the immediacy of animals, the intensity of poetry and art.
Thank you for saying all this, amigo. Some of us kept it bottled up too long.
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