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Henrik is talking to some guy about a confederation of white nations. I think maybe he has a brain tumor... or I'm just old and can't get there from here.
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I am not trying to brag about the weather here, but I am hoping this stuff will knock out the fires to the east.
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5:45 a.m. — and it's raining hard. All my windows are open and it's the coldest time of the day... 67º. I'm wearing a t-shirt. Only. I finally got to sleep last night. I tried the pot, and it works, but it makes me feel like I have to consciously breathe or I will suffocate first and then I sleep. A chill pill works but it's crap sleep and not restful and it's usually the second night after I take one when it I get some decent sleep. I really, really needed it.
I don't know if it was the frequency noises that woke me or just that I'd had enough sleep. I fell out before ten. [Outrageous.]
But it is raining for real. Not kidding around. We knew it was coming... and when... back with the precision forecasts... and we're hoping the paint went on early enough yesterday that it won't run. There's a good chance because a really warm breeze whipped up before early afternoon, and that's when the handyman quit painting and switched to fixing the tool shed door.
I know, I know. This is taking forever. I'm done emoting about it. He's got a day job and has to sneak over here between his life and his work, and he's doing a fantastic job. I've had a big long list of things that need done around here to make it livable since the day I moved in. They're getting done.
Way more slowly than I can stand. I tell people always about dropping into states of mind or emotion and punching through the other side. This is maybe the most amazing thing in my life... that everything you think and feel has an outmost boundary... that the most vicious pain and hate and frustration and gratitude and joy and love so intense you can feel your particles trying to fly apart, anger you think will cause another tsunami in Japan, all that stuff you spend every waking moment trying to make flow in an acceptable way, a manageable way, all of it, all of it, all of it, when you let go trying to keep it in line, hits a boundary, an absolute limit of itself right before it punches you through to its opposite.
You're in your little being spacesuit and you've shot yourself out your desire cannon, past even the point where you make a total jackass of yourself in your crazed groping for enough of that, but you're still going, there's not enough gravity to pull you back down when you're that far out, and, suddenly, your whole planet and ocean and atmosphere of desire gives way to endless innergalactic gratitude, a whole cosmos of transcendent gratitude is punctuated by little microspherules of panting pointless irrelevant desire. Desire is minuscule and gratitude is galactic.
When it first hit me that my whole life had been filled with Olympic class love that had gotten to such a pass as I was trying my hardest not to drown in it, turgidly floundering around in my pathetic imitation of treading water, splishing and spluttering and exhausting myself to get purchase on some well-anchored float, because I can't breathe water and I only float by myself about two feet below the surface, I finally lost it. I couldn't hold on another second. I could not "try" anymore, and if Japan had to be smacked by it, I'm so sorry, but I'm only fallible flesh. I have to drown now. There's no more I can do. When I got there, I found myself flying through innergalactic space and punching through a boundary, an event horizon. I got out of the entire drowning situation in the seas of desire and into a beginningless and endless expanse of gratitude.
How many decades have I striven to keep a lid on that, to not explode of it, and all the while my problem was I didn't love and desire to keep it together enough! I needed most not to do that! I needed to stop trying to fit my feelings into this world. I needed to just let them be what they are, without even one of those asshole headtrips trying to sculpt them into acceptable forms. Quit fashioning abstractions. Quit the unceasing air sculpting that creates this world.
That's when the trouble really starts.
People sense you are not participating in this fervent project of producing a world full of airstrikes and class struggles and homeless people and barely-clad porn monsters with microphones waving their butts at you on TV. They immediately grok somehow that you aren't buying their "art", and they feel threatened to the nth power. They can't even put their finger on it. Every micron of their own fiction is suddenly exposed. They feel naked and unacceptable around you. You are not doing or saying anything to cause this. You are relating with them as always, but they are naked with a klieg lamp on them and can't even come up with a sensible complaint, but they get to the point where they are full time dissing on you, and wanting nothing so much as you out of their lives.
You are a monster.
You love them as much as ever, more, but that is not what they get out of you. They don't even see that they are getting from you a vastly purer attention than ever before, that your wishes for their happy lifetimes are expanded to a hugeness such as no one ever got in history, but they just will not have it. Mostly. Mostly you lose all your friends. One or two might be more reasonable, not flip out like that, but they become increasingly suspicious of you and slowly stop wanting as much contact.
This ends up being the mechanism by which great enlightening beings attract good candidates for passing it on. There are lots of people who call themselves seekers, but they don't mean that most of the time. They mean they want to think of themselves as spiritual seekers, sometimes to the extent of going somewhere people shave their heads and bow to grasshoppers. Not them. It gets to the point where it takes a ridiculously short time to know who's worth your time and who isn't. Idries Shah, The Sufi, could tell the moment you walked into the room. That's when everyone can tell, but can't tell that they can tell until they stop sculpting air.
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7:05 a.m. — It went down to 66º – I put on some leggings – and the rain's let up a bit. Still it's, as you can see, supposed to keep going all through today... and beyond. The handyman is supposed to use the wet time, this not painting time, to start doing some of the inside projects.
We're ripping out the carpet in here, stripping everything down to the base floorboards, covering it with sheets of "underlayment" and painting that with many layers of ultra doubleplusgood floor paint. And a quick whitewash of the walls before putting up the shelves. Still a shit ton more work inside and out, but the things that have already gotten done or are in progress are so pleasing I have punched through my disaster-edged impatience into a cosmos of elegance-laced serenity.
The mudroom door that has been broken since I got here is fixed. I can come in and go out it now without irk. The horrific color of the place is now an ultra-pleasing color I made up. Dark gray blue that tends to lavender. The whole neighborhood is on fire with appreciation of this gorgeous color. Only three sides are painted and the trim isn't even started, but it looks so radically better, "updated", that no one is even bucking about the slowness anymore.
The garden flower barrels are too rotten to keep tacking back together. I'm getting flower boxes too. The abandoned pot garden from the last owner that I have just been throwing things into to find what the gophers won't eat is getting narrowed and raised to make gardening doable for me again.
At the rate we're going there's a remote chance it will be done by the time I'm 62... optimistically speaking.
always and any time....
