eerie4

On the Run to Enlightenment

I have debated over and over in my head when to start this and I suppose now is good a time as any. Writing as I sit here on a plane knowing that in just over 30 days a warrant will be issued for my arrest and hoping that the long arm of the Nevada state judicial system wont bother to reach as high at the Himalayas to bring me back before I can attain my own summit. As I start this journey I look up to the highest points on earth to find salvation. Realizing even now spirituality is not about raising your head up and looking for god in the heavens but bowing your head down in humility and truth. The person who can survive a hike to the top of a mountain is not one who looks to the peak and seeks to reach it. The one who makes it to the summit is the one who keeps his head down and only watches his next step and his proper footing.
The key to telling a good story is knowing how it ends unfortunately I know all too well the ending. Ive found the ending to the story of my life and it ended with my suicide. Yet before it does Ive decided that Id like to add a few more chapters even if I have no clue where Ill end up or where I hope to. Its seems my own eschatology will be ongoing after all. As I write this I wonder who Im writing to, as any basic writing class teaches you to know your audience yet like every thing in this life Im not sure. Do I write to those who knew me, do I write as a legacy of sorts to my daughter, do I write to my personal Beatrice or perhaps one of the individual women who have come to make up Dantas symbol of love thats just out of reach? Yet I know my words can only fall far short of sonnet 47, so why bother. Do I simply write to myself, a journal of sorts for personal refection? I suppose Im writing to you the reader, or the abstract idea of such, a stranger yet I suppose some passages are more prevalent to the aforementioned yet I will leave that to them to recognize. This is a long flight and I have considered taking the time to give a summarized autobiography as much as I want to believe this is the beginning of a journey which it is, as is every day in some aspect but this is a journey that began a long time before the plane ever left the ground. I suppose I even started writing this a few months back, it started more as a suicide note than it did as a journal, the ideas and beliefs just came into clarity and made this possible. I realized the reason I was so unhappy is because I wasnt living the life I wanted to. I have tried to go over and over in my mind looking for a defining moment in my life, a moment where it all went wrong so to speak, was it the day I got my teeth knocked out in t-ball that caused me to withdraw from sports thus ostracizing me in the future with other children my age and seeking out the other outcasts which subsequently lead me to trying drugs for the first time and a mired of other juvenile troubles or was it even earlier possibly when my father lost his leg in a car accident and me losing him to pain pills and a bottle for so many of my influential years, or was it some suppressed memory of an even earlier traumatic child abuse, was it any one thing at all, was it all theses things or was it none. I honestly believe that Ive had a pretty average life and up bringing as normal as the next person. I think weve all felt the same emotions and we all go through the same defining moments in life. The individual circumstances may very and change but the emotions are the same so theres no need for me to go over my individual trials and tribunals, no need for me to tell you things you all ready know just so you can say I relate. We all relate as much as each person differs and as hard as it is to imagine that my self and some pillar of the community have had the same experiences in life or as easy as it is to see Ted Bundys childhood in my own. I realize that none of us are all that different, an All American Manic I like to say or in my case American Psycho maybe a better fit. Some times this can be difficult to admit none of us want to identify with someone who has committed some horrendous act yet each of us does on some level or another. As the emotions and desires that drive a serial killer are the same in your life as well as his (or hers wouldnt want to leave out Aileen Wuornos.)
I can see the glow of the Vegas neon fade but still like staring at the sun I wonder if I havent scared my retina. As Ive spent the last 20 years, my entire adult life staring at those lights and now Im not sure they will ever go away or simply leave some blacked spot on my soul. Sometimes I feel like my third eye must have some form of spiritual cataracts, I have scared my self with experiences that I cant seem to see through. Im temped to talk of my adolescence growing up in Vegas the many years spent 4 up and 3 down, the drug filled times with a punk rock soundtrack playing against the back drop of subterranean casino corridors and vacant facades, the desert bonfires down old pipe line road, the endless weekends drinking 40tys in the parking lot of the Huntridge, that is before the roof caved in on it all. Having projectile vomiting contest, we used to say every toilet needs a good flushing. We would drink till we puked and not the oh Im so sick, the rooms spinning, make it stop kind of sick but pounding beers for the point of puking if not the only reason to use the curb like a long jumper does his mark and simply see who could get the most mass the furthest and believe it or not there really is some technique to it. One must arch the back, tilt the head up and lunge forward just as the vomit swells in your throat. You could be in mid-sentence of some drunken discussion of sex, violence, philosophy or any other of the few things that preoccupied the juvenile mind but had to make it to the jump marker, get into position and be able to lunge forward with out coming off the curb. I tell you it was all about timing every thing had to be just right and you might just make it the two or three car lengths out of the parking lot into on coming traffic which was the punk rock equivalent of hitting a fast ball in to the stands at Yankee stadium. Even years later at times I felt I had pulled my self out of the middle class hood of Pitmen and learned the ropes of Vegas or better put how to get around the velvet ropes and the money people with more money than ego will give you for showing them around. I tried to live a normal life, a young beautiful model girl friend, going to premiers, casino and restaurants openings with the stars, VIP treatment at all the hottest clubs and for a while I thought I was happy yet the same way a happy drunk doesnt usually mean a happy person just a distracted one. I see now I wasnt happy at all. I just kept myself distracted as I have been most of my life. Growing up in Las Vegas its easy to loose your self in the distractions of life, they are the same distractions youll find in any city anywhere I assume but dont know as Ive never really spent more than a few days any where else. Yet once youve found (usually by falling in) the pit falls of each vice and different addiction when the drugs are gone, the bottle is empty, the 3rd car smashed, the umpteenth girl friend has left to become a striper as every remotely attractive women Ive loved in this town does, Im left alone and realized I wanted out. I want to unplug from the pulsating, life sucking neon breast of this city that Ive been attached to. Yet I cant, unplugged the cat45 cable and disable the wireless, cancel the cable and turn off the radio yet the streets of this town are paved in pornography quite literally with handouts and advertisements for escorts, the freeways are lined with billboards for strip clubs and theres an adult superstore (the wal-mart of porn) on every other off ramp. Even the true unofficial motto from advertisements the city visitors authority paid thousands to pound in to American culture what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas Ha what a lie what happen in Vegas can scar you, make you jaded but god I hope its true because Im finally getting as far away a place I can think of. I want to reconnect with myself and humanity as a whole yet the more I want, the more I become emotionally distant from my self; the intellect not only separates the body from the mind but the soul from the spirit. Ive lived my life thinking Im gonna do this, Im gonna do that. If I could just get this and I could just finish that. Whether its getting my degree or finishing off my parole with out incident, or getting a good job or making more money. I will, I just have to do this one more thing and that other then I can do this and that.. Im tired of waiting for this and that. Im tried of having to do this before I do what I wantfuck it Im just going to do it and hope for the best. I just have to figure out what it is. People always say just follow your dreams you can do any thing but really you cant there always some obligation or some safety net you need to get up first. You see or read about stories or watch a movie of people who have lived these extraordinary adventures, done these amazing things in their life. Ive always just found some detail different than my own life usually its the fact that they had more money or they must have had a family to fall back on if it didnt work, so thats why they could do it and I cant. And then there are those people who didnt have either, money or a family and still threw caution in to the wind and followed their dream but more times than not they really didnt have much to loose anyways but for most of us though, we live life somewhere in-between the two. We dont have enough to just live life care free and follow our dreams but we also dont want to loose what we do have either, whether thats a house, wife, kids or merely a decent job and good friends. Ive heard it said that the man in the tightest of restraints is the freest of all and I never really understood that, being a guy who has spent his fair share of nights locked in a cell it really didnt make cents but I think I get it now when your locked inside your self, when the options seem to be removed, when your forced to go where you dont want to, be who you dont want to be, you realize that you have nothing left and the world becomes wide open. When I started this a few months ago as I think I said it started as a suicide note and a summation of what I had learned and what brought me to this point. I realized as I was bringing it to a close if I was really going to do this (kill myself) was there anything left for me to do or say? Yes, hell if Im going to die today then thats a huge weight off my shoulder, I dont have to worry about finishing my masters degree, working to pay off the $100k in student loans, all the other life crap I had piled on my self. It sounds so cheesy and full of shit when Ive heard people say stuff like live life as if each day is your last as if, you could. If you lived your whole life like you where going to die tomorrow youd never accomplish shit. I mean if you think of any thing that seems worth doing, any thing that has any lasting pay off, eating right, working out, saving money or working at all for that matter no one wants too but anything that Ive ever had any lasting benefits from, anything I was truly proud of it was because it was fucking hard to accomplish, if you choose the easy choice its probably easy because it was the wrong one and it will come back around on you like credit card interest. Hard work pays off in the future, slacking pays off now. Well. I dont know why a person cant just live for today though, I was going to say people dont live their life for today, to be comfortable, you know work so you have food, eat right to be healthy but usually its to be more comfortable tomorrow rather than to be so today and this has been my existence living for tomorrow. The guy living on the streets wants a card board box, guy with a box wants a room, guy with a room wants his own apartment, got an apartment then a house then a bigger one. Im just tired of wanting. To be honest though, Im scared as Ive live a pretty comfortable life never had to do anything so terribly hard even if it seemed like it was at the time. I remember thinking high school was the worst now look back at the good old days. Ive live in middle class comforts, one summer I spent it homeless living on the roof of caf Coupeeo bumming change for food and miller 32 ounces (wed call them the super big gulp of beers as they cost around the same as a big gulp and same size) but that wasnt so hard as the cafe was right across the street from the collage and you could earn enough for the day in 3 or 4 hours panhandling. Being the crust punks my group of friends and I were it was pretty easy to get up $10 -$15 in no time. I think as I look at my own time spent in collage, years latter cramming for test with midnight runs to the 7/11 getting red bulls for the study group passing a new group of kids standing there I found my self envying my own wasted youth. I was happy to givem my spare change. Plus when I was living on the streets there before the cafe was fire bombed all the cute gothic girls hung at the cafe so it was the life living on that roof top. Yet when it got cold I knew I could always go back to my room at mom and dads house. Now Im on a plane to a country Ive never been to and only a few dollars soon to be yen (or some other currency not sure what it is) in my pocket and I cant just call mommy to come pick me up. Im scared, have I made the right choice? One thing I will say that Ive found though is no matter how bad a situation gets, no matter how much you think theres no way I could do that its really is amazing what you can do when youre forced to. I learned that after a few months in prison. Think about the people who have lived through some insane ordeal whether its living 2 weeks at sea alone in a rubber boat, or on a iceberg in the artic and hiking hundreds of mile to civilization, you think if you asked any of those people a year before it happened if they could live through something like that of course no one would be so cocky as to say oh yeah I could do that and if there is some one who would say that hed probably be the first one to drop but my point is that no matter how bad a situation gets when the only way out of it is death most of us would live through it and sometimes death isnt even an option thats when it really gets hard, when you have no choice there is truly no escape and theres no turning back now. Im tired of waiting, Im jumping in, and Im going off the cliff with no shoot. Ive tried to over come these scares, they say the Buddha didnt achieve enlightenment till 35, Christ transcended his body and was crucified at 34 well I cant wait, It seems I can not break free of the reality I have put my self in. So I can only hope that going to the far end of the earth or at least the furthest place I can think of from the decadence of the city thats razed me will be my escape.
As the plane starts its decent I can feel my heart rate climb as we come in to the landing I find my self wishing for some catastrophe, wanting to be released from this ball and chain of flesh imprisonment hoping that some how just the act of getting on the plane was enough. I dont fear death, now dont get me wrong I do fear drowning, choking, bullets or some mangled runway tragedy and any other method of dieing. I just dont fear being dead actually look forward to it. I saw my father commit suicide as a lonely, sick old man alone in the desert. I wonder to what end his life achieved; I evaluate my own existence and see no point in waiting. The search for answers to the point has come full circle, "the man who knows he knows nothing knows the most of all" To understand the absurdist was an idea put forth in the beginning of the philosophic quest. I have reached this end not from any Nihilistic point of view or because miseries vastly outnumber pleasures, happiness is impossible and thus subsequently advocating suicide, but from understanding that there is more and trapped here I can not reach it. I reach this end not because I believe in any one philosophy, religion or understanding but because I have lost the path or understand that the path is lost and with out finding a path or simply picking one Im destine to jump from path to path never getting anywhere only going over in circles. Compassion eludes me, creating eludes me, I have been sucked in to an Existential vacuum in my search for meaning and unlike the teacher of Ecclesiastes search or the great Zen masters such as Dogen Im not able to find contentment in the truth of the reality of my day to day life and the beauty in a tangerine, even understanding there is nothing more.
I can feel my heart pounding in my chest like some alien creature clawing at my breast plate trying to be free; I take slow deep breaths as I sit waiting for the other passengers to exit the plane so care free and me attempting to hold it together. I think this is how a drug mule must feel, sphincter clenched tight with balloons of what not up his ass. Maybe hoping a small leak will happen to give the ever so needed fix, just a little to calm the nerves yet I know Im not smuggling any contraband and Ive learned no fix other than possible ODing can subside my hunger, Life in the physical world trapped in this flesh is a struggle Ive come to find pointless theres always a front to back, a left to right, theres always one or the other there is no middle path to happiness the world is a power and control issue, theres always a give for every take and to live is to suffer in this struggle. Not to suffer one must simply stop trying not to suffer you must accept life is suffering. There will always be something more, you will always get hungry no matter how long youve spent well feed. For a hungry soul Ive not found a fix that can satisfies yet, Ive tried all I can think of, Ive done mass amounts of hallucinogens to try and jolt me into a state of understanding to force open the DOOR'S to perception, like a rope trying to pull me across the stream but only to give out before I could make it to the other side. Like Bill Hicks said a lot of the greatest musician, and artist, creators were real high and to create is happiness
If all we truly know of god is the word god Then what is the word as there is nothing if you dont have a word for it to translate the word god in all languages means the creator or simply creation so if all we know of god is creation then to get closer to god or understand god one must create! (Which Ill bet has something to do with our innate desire to procreate as well) We must then look at what is created us, the world, everything and what is everything, how is it made, what is it made of, atoms and what holds atoms together, how are they created well its a neurons and electrons bouncing off each other around a nucleus held together by electromagnetism, an infinite amount of power or electricity and what am I but just a mass of flesh and tissue with a small eclectic pulse firing in my brian the releases different chemicals to make me think and feel thus acting a certain way. So I guess god is in all of us in everything. If you look at Nero-electrical activity in the brain Ill bet the highest amount is generated when a person is in the midst of creating, painting, music, design, even sports. So to know gods thoughts, to be closer to god, to be happy one must create! Even understanding the key to happiness and knowing where to find it doesnt mean you can ever reach it and if you do find it as we all do in moments, there lies the problem. Its all just moments and the suffering of loosing it, the suffering of wanting to find it. In my own search at times Ive given up and spent years not even trying, wasting time, trying to only find comfort, most of it just spent in excess addicted to one thing or another. Ive over come addictions, tried to live a healthy life, work out, eat right all that but found I had just become this American psycho with no cense of self just an empty facade of what I was told was the thing to do, this image that wasnt dependent on a self image but what I thought you wanted, what I thought she wanted. How did Palahniuk put it self improvement is masturbation but self destruction is the answer but Ive found no answer, no key in either. I once spent a summer attending different religious organization each week from Buddhist temple to Baptist church, from Orthodox Greek to Thelemic lodge, all centers of town Kabala to Zen, so much over lap, so many things the same. I guess it was a spiritual walk about if you will, but finding no answers. So here I am attempting to smuggle my soul to the eternal or at least smuggling my mind to the roof top of the world in hopes that from here Ill have a better view.