Best of 2011, year in review

I guess I wasn't really setting out to become better, or really much of anything at all. Mostly I just wanted to get out with my head still attached to my shoulders.

I don't recall what I did last year, I think I was at my friends' house and we played video games and I probably drank too much. My just-yesterday-finalized-ex-wife was there.

There are a little over a dozen deadlines I did not meet at all at work, another dozen that were partially met, and a few dozen that were in the clear.

Time to clear out some dust bunnies. Grab the popcorn, mfg is about to have an old-fashioned itty bitty pity committee.

God, my throat is backed up with frowns and my brain is pregnant with a panic baby. I can't reach out and I can't feel anything right now.

To really get cliche and self-indulgent and to amplify/exaggerate how I'm feeling and bring it up by one order of hyperbole magnitude: (1) I need distance from myself and the faster I run the quicker I catch up to me, (2) My emotions need a break, they have been working overtime telling me what I need; yesterday, they were taken hostage and strapped into the front seats of a car and rammed into a wall at eighty-and-five miles per hour.

Everything swells and feels like a threat.  Every last thing. My job, my house, my friends, my life. Everything contracts and shrinks from view and becomes rigid and fixed and obscured. Everything has been checking in for eight months straight with those emotions and it seems like they just aren't getting any easier.

I am in a mind to run around and tear all the posters off my walls. I don't have any posters on my walls, and am afraid of breaking shit, so instead my mind turns inward on itself and attacks healthy nodes because it doesn't want to go anywhere near the panicky nodes.

I stand by the vapid designation of 2011 being the best year of my life so far. And insofar as that can be a state of affairs, rather than some fixed notation pertaining to a range of dates, the state of affairs still obtains. Vapid, as in 'best' doesn't really specify much, yet designates much. When I say 'best' I mean that I have become more present in more moments. I have been able to integrate disparate elements of myself and suffer less acute attacks of person-fragments.

Still I am left feeling old. Old like ripped off, time wasted. If I ask myself generally or specifically have I made any choices or decisions that were a waste of time or that I regret my guts always return an emphatic no. I don't know if it's that they're committed to some sense of pride or if they truly mean that they just don't regret anything. All the same, paperwork in hand there was a sadness that I was overtaken by yesterday as we had the last bits of our marriage dissolved and I officially (with certifications, judges, and notaries involved) became 'divorced.' 

Many things that I had taken for granted at 7:59 am became irrevocably rattled by 10:59 as I had just finished buying some coffee beans and was waiting for a bus to take me home; both things that were new about me and the post-April life I'd led, and things that were old and from before April.

I found myself talking to Beth last night from a very far away place. It was around 8:30pm, she had taken me to dinner and we were back at her new place. I haven't "needed" a drink in the 8 months of sobriety but fuck me a joint would have been nice. In the clothes I had been wearing all day I was buried under a small burial mound of blankets trying to sort out where was my mind. I was in a room covered in white. Every surface. Every molecule of air was carrying around some dusting milky house paint, each surface covered in a white canvas. 

Here I am not.

Or: "Nothing means nothing / Everything is fleeting / Don't get used to it / I say, look upon the ruins" ("Ancient Questions", Mount Eerie)

So now I begin today and moving forward to survey the ruins. I had time to survive. I had time to deconstruct and rebuild and test and try. I began again and feel good and now it's time to bring me back to where I am and take the time to look upon the ruins. This is necessarily an isolated trip. I must question all things but only be concerned with me.

Looking upon the ruins, what is that? As far as I can tell, it happens after you figure out how to get out alive. Which takes place before you figure out how to escape with some of your shit. Which precedes how to escape with a shred of dignity. Which is a necessary condition to ever begin to figure out where you're going with any of this. And like a poorly planned move, it's only once you get a decent enough distance away that you even figure out what you even should have brought of yourself, your shit, and your dignity.

Looking upon the ruins is a solitary thing to do. Like Macchu-Picchu overrun with tourists, no one wants to feel crowded in the ruins of their life. Down in the sealed catacombs that create the foundation for the obelisk that is self, we don't want people breathing up the limited ambient air supply. Sometimes the catacombs are haunted and you need to ask for back up, but ultimately there will eventually be ghosts only you can see, much less exorcise.

I already know many of the ghosts down there. It isn't overrun with assholes trespassing in the private parts of my life. The ruins are a place of memoriam and respite. The ruins are where we survey who we are, how we cultivate who we become; they serve as a memorial in a way that the morticians table cannot. Here the dust has settled. Yesterday morning I added my final relic to the chapter titled Amanda. A large, granite tablet fell from the sky and flattened a portion of the earth kicking up a last substantial clod of dirt into the sky. These last particles will take some time to settle, and when they do I suppose I will in some way move a little further down the road with a little less of me left back there.

How do I feel twenty-five hours later, or 10.5 days through the new year? I have ruins. I have sadnesses associated with my ruins. Sometimes, when a fragment of myself is acutely crying out I am prone to feel remorse for something that was undone. I have learned to expect more, rather than less. I have done without and found it wanting. I have a pervasive covetousness for security that would insist upon only the surest assurances.

Yet I feel constructive on the whole. No grand realization, no consolation and I can't be consoled as there's nothing to be sorry about. My boots are dragging a bit leaving the ruins, and I choke up turning my back on them, still after a certain hour a graveyard is no place for the living.

"forgot about the state of the world / so I'll just fall in love with girl / I've got too many years left to spend / she's all I think about in the end" ("five and dime" Port O'Brien)

My hair is long this morning, my nails clipped. I am stained with ink and pushing into new territories. I am excited and enlivened and afraid and overrun with fearlessness. Fears are pushing in saying that I am toxic, and I push back and say we were toxic. Fears are pushing in saying that all is doubt, and I push back and say I am sure.