Reading harold_maude's journal

This morning I was continuing on a painting that has been in process for over a month and the frustration at it not going anywhere or showing me the direction that would take me to the end of the story as it were, caused me to take up a very point pen and begin to try to fix it.

It was fine until I began to realize that if I continued much longer I would end up distroying it.
It dawned on me that I needed to take a break. A big one. From several things.

In looking for a different job, my hope is that part of the intense frustration I feel will subside. If it doesn't, well then there is something else that needs to be changed.
What that is, I don't have a clue at the moment.
My suspicion is that I'm too close to so many forests all at once to see clearly at all.

At least it's not pitch black anymore. Now it's just deep shades of dark and their fuzzy so I can't tell what I'm looking at.
I think I need a vacation from me. But since there is no zipper on this body that I can just unzip and walk away for a while, then I have to figure my way out.

Looking at everything that surrounds me in my life, and looking at it for what it is, I'm very aware that what hits my senses and emotions is all problems.
Things unsolvable, and raw.

There is no gentleness about what my emotional state has been like over the past 6 months.
What I see happening in the goverment, and the lack of regard for the earth and the stewardship that we humans are suppose to be emersed in.
The corporate world and it's lack of regard for anything but money.
The people I see who are terrified of their own creativity, and need a babysitter to give them enough confidence to do anything of the simplist nature. Like using a stencil, or paint, or finishing a peice of prefab resin cast plaster.
Or even looking at raw materials and thinking about what's possible.
I don't see life. I don't see children being given safe childhoods anymore. That's been going on for years. Children are looked at and studied and bombared with immages and products that they shouldn't have to deal with.
Adults shouldn't have to deal with being bombarded with so much crap.

I call it crap because what it ends up becomming is just one more thing that will end up in landfills and polution in the water making everything that much more of a mess....

See what I mean? My head is full of all of this. More and more all the time. I see some people struggling to fight back, but because we have been so anestized when the ideas of change and simplifing hit us in the face there is no interest. Just give me another fix of t.v. or junk food or new clothes or plastic entertainment and shut up. I can't hear the latest gossip from hollywood....

I see farms that infected with so much chemical crap that it's a wonder we all don't have a meriad of disease going on in our bodies.
We eat this stuff that comes out of chemical drenched ground that's been genetically altered to the point where it's dead.
The majority of the food that is available to us in supermarkets has been irriated, changed over salted, over sugarized over done and filled with things that we don't need.

Everyday there is a new pill that you can take for something that is sympomatic that your body isn't getting what it needs, and the side effects are worse than what your suffering from.

If all this stuff we take or eat or wear or watch really did any good, it would put big business out of business.
If a person went to a doctor and actually got well there would be no need for the doctor anymore.
If a pill could truly fix what's wrong the pharmacuticle companies would go out of business.
It's to their advantage to keep us in at least a somewhat diseased state.

This is the kind of stuff that I see that frustrates me endlessly, and I can't seem to stop seeing it.
I need to somehow change the movie. But there in lays the problem, I don't know how.

I feel like I'm screaming with all my might and there is no sound comming out....maybe I'm going mad....

madness and genius are twins and just to mess with our comfort zones they change places on a regluar basis.

The last few days I've been watching comedy movies to try and lighten things up. But it's not working.

I feel like I'm standing on the sand and watching a wall of water comming at me that there is no escape from.
And the reason there is no escape is because even though there are helecopters just over head, no one will throw down a rope.

I'm expendable, and momentary, and of no use to their adgenda.
So their watching and eating while I stand below waiting for death to come.

That's how I feel. And I don't know how to escape what I feel, so that I can enjoy the day.
I can't just walk away from myself, like I did with the painting this morning.
I feel like I'm being distroyed by all I see and there is no escape.

Maybe all it will take to escape is for the weather to settle down and become spring. Maybe I have major cabin fever and just don't reconize it.
Maybe I'm so over tired and so exausted that what I really need is about 3 days sleep.

Maybe I need to just stop debating what I can't fix and stop driving myself crazy...
The people who know what their doing and how harmful it is arn't listening anyway.
Their too busy being concerned about how much money their going to make to day to listen to reason.

...after I watched Donnie Darko for the first time, I was overwhelmingly inspired to answer with a series of small drawings. One of them says:
"Wake up.
Are you so deaf
Are you so blind
that the things
that really matter
you don't take the time
to really mind?"

That's what's screaming inside my head, every day, and when I sleep it screams inside my dreams.
It screams at me when I pick up a newspaper or read a magazine.
It screams at me when I see people terrified and rushing around in circles doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
It screams at me when I see brand new, never been used products being destroyed because they haven't sold.
It screams at me when people let the whims and latest fashions dictate to them who they should be.
It screams at me when I see more and more generations wandering around aimlessly with no purpose.
It screams at me every time a farmer drenches his fields with more chemicals.
It screams at me when they herd buffalos up and kill them because their are in the way of feed lots and might just infect the over chemically infected cows that we get our beef from.
It screams at me when hospitials over charge the poor.
It screams at me when the man who sits in the most powerful office in this country shows just how little he values human life by giving companies that are responsible for the majority of land being distroyed, the land we live on and get our food from, more and more money. And by these actions tells us that he doesn't give a rip about us, we are expendable, momentary and the only things that truely matter to him are money and power.

Yeah it screams at me all the time. And I don't know how to make it shut up.

I think it screams because my heart is broken over all the unessiary loss that takes place ever day.

That's all I can see anymore.
And I realize that the in the last few posts I've been screaming,

Wake up.
Are we so deaf
are we so blind
that the things
that really matter
we are too busy
being numbed
to have the strength
to be able mind...

Harold & Maude.

All throughout the movie, Harold was obsessed with his own death, and saw no value in his own life. Partly because no one else did either; living in a sterile, manicured setting, with a perfectionist and snobbish mother. His own mother, and the only value she placed in him was in trying to model him to her ideals.

And then Maude came along, and he saw something more. For a while, he thought that this would be the answer, the fix he sought.

But it couldn't last. The worst possible thing happened. She died. All of a sudden there was nothing left for him again.

---

I may only know half the details you probably, but I still know the way you feel.

When I was young, about 8 or 9, I watched a TV movie with puppets. I forget the name now, but part of the show was a jukebox. And inside the jukebox, there was a band of puppets who played music whenever a nickel was put in. The plot of this movie involved the station being bought, and the old jukebox was hauled away to the dump to make way for a sleazy newer model.

And in one scene, they show the old jukebox being dumped onto a pile of garbage, the band members wailing in futile protest.

It scared me. Every time I thought of the movie, I thought of that scene, the way those people were just thrown away. My insanely overactive imagination began to imagine little people inside each piece of garbage. For a period of about a year and a half, I became an insatiable packrat. I would save everything from toothbrushes to used bandages. It seems wierd now, but all I could think about was what a horrible waste it all was.

Well, needless to say, I outgrew the obsession. But the hate, and even the fear of waste has stuck with me. And the way the world assures me, slowly but surely, that it owns me, it owns me, it owns me, and that I owe it somehow.

I can't claim to be balanced. I can't claim to be perfect. One day this world is going to catch up with me, and one day I may be lost.

One day there may be nothing left for me.

---

So Harold started to drive. He took that hearse, and everything it carried, and he let it fall over the cliff. He let the whole thing go, and he then danced away. Maybe it's time to let yours go too, Wendy.

People can look at you and ask, "Where is your pain?" And you can say it was too heavy to carry anymore, so you let it go.

People can look at you and say "Why don't you care about the rest of us?" And you can say "Why don't you care about yourself?"

You're here, aren't you? You're talking to me, aren't you?

Oh how I wish I could let go of it....I'm thinking you probably understand how much I want to let go of it...

It occured to me this morning that I may be experiencing some long over due dealing with all the grief I carry.
And it may as well be a part of life that I have to just go through...

For many many years the people who have showed up in my life, have stayed releativly briefly.
The reason they come is because death has danced there. Some have been in the last weeks and days of life when they come.
Some have come in the mist of deep wounded waters...yet another type of death.
And it has been the flow of my life to walk along side them.
I have seen last breaths and that door open.
In thoes times the ones who have died while I was there, stay for a short time after they are on the other side of that door.
They have touched me, and said things.

The ones who have come and death is dancing, but they go before it comes fully there, the conversations and the time that I spend with them are the most honest and real conversations I have ever experienced with another human being.

The wounded come and it is my nature to just be there, and they know they are safe. They tell me things that they never tell another living soul.
I'm just there.
A temporary safe place to stop and catch their breath.

Some of them I never see again.

Then last august happened. Everything I knew, everything that my life was, died. That's the only way I can explain that kind of dead blackness. Even the air that I was breathing out felt black.
I fought to stay here, and not follow the invation that was so strong.
The last thing I remember on the seventh of august as I went to sleep was how I felt like I was breaking apart inside.
I woke up on the eighth and there was nothing.
No feelings, no hunger, no want, no desires for anything.
Even my skin felt dead.
My eyes looked dead.
I kept wanting to go to a morturary and ask them if they would just embalm me because I was dead and I was walking around in a bag of skin.

I realized they would probably lock me up for asking that.
So I went through the motions of daily activities, and began to sense a feeling of agony inside me.
I just wanted to be free of this shell.
There is nothing so painful as being dead inside and having to keep moving and knowing you don't get to stop.

After I got way to close to going through with the process of reliving my self from my skin bag, the only answer I could think of to get relief, I forced myself to get up each morning and hang on to life.

Since all that began, I've noticed something, that everything I am aware of is what I discribed. And I wish I knew how to stop it.

I wish I knew how to drive it off some cliff, and see something different.
I wish that with all my heart.

People are still showing up and for the same reasons. What they need still comes. How and where it comes from I have no idea any more.
I see pain all around me. Some of it comes from the ancient calling to be whole, to be free and have things simple and clear.
Some of it comes from people who are being crushed under weights that only come from the love of money.
I see people in prisons that they don't have to be in.

And I don't know how to stop my eyes from seeing that....

As a result of all of this, everything I'm creating is now done in black and white.
Color is not a possiblity right now.
It's painful.

I really really wish, with all my heart that I knew how to let go of it all....