Seaweed's Crystal Ball

I haven't been back to The Old City in about a year and a half.  I haven't seen my father in that time - I saw my mother a bit last winter when she visited us in Vacation City.  Holy shit, what a sea change has occurred in that time!  Holy shit!  Being very old must be like being very young - stuff changes fast.

Like a lot of people my parents don't want to leave their home.  Fair enough - they've been there 55 years.  My sister keeps an eye on them to make sure that things aren't getting too out of control and we're trying to be careful to respect their wishes.  Nobody likes to be told what to do, especially by their children.  In "The World According to Seaweed" - a very, very bad, scary world - they should have moved to a retirement home about 10 light years ago and, yes, I know that a light year is a distance and not a time, but it just sounds so impressively long.

I've spent a lot of time with them this week and they're clearly way past the time when they would have benefited from some help.  My dad is almost too physically feeble to move around and this terrifies him, and my mom is drifting mentally.  They aren't eating well; they aren't bathing regularly; the house is getting messy - it's not what I would want for them.

So . . . do I try to make them do what I think they should do,  given my track record in doing things not in the best interests of anyone?  Or do I try to be of service when asked, keeping my nose out of their business, risking a fall or a fire or something like that?  Sometimes when failing people leave their home and go into a retirement place they really thrive and sometimes it's the death of them.  Let me get out my crystal ball and see into the future. . . .

Normally my crystal ball is used to help me find my car keys or a glass of drinking water.  It's not a high end crystal ball.  I don't pull it out for big projects because I don't have a good track record of getting things right with this particular crystal ball.  It's more of a reverse crystal ball. It's good if you want to know what not to do.

I definitely don't know what to do here.

Large and In Charge

I am not in charge.

No one is interested in having me run their lives.  They're fine making their own decisions.  They believe that they're better qualified to manage their own affairs than I am.  My persuasive arguments don't sway them.  They look at the state of my affairs and they're not overly impressed with what they see.  They figure that they're better off taking their own chances.  And this is just about everyone, not only people who seem to be on the upswing in the world.  I'm talking about children, the homeless, and guys in prison.

God is not interested in my plans for his world.  God is comfortable in his position.  God has had this particular position for a long, long time.  It doesn't bother him that I'm constantly sticking suggestions in the suggestion box - which leads directly to a paper shredder, by the way - but it doesn't change his mind.

I'm not that smart is the main issue here.

Accept . . Accepta. gack . . . Acceptance

I heard this from a man who doesn't have as much going for him as some of us by which I mean me.

"Today I can accept people for who they are - not for who I want them to be."

Where do these people come from?  Where can I find these people?  And how come they're so much smarter than me?  I pray and meditate and write and still I can't duplicate the simple beauty of a statement like that.

I can only hope for that kind of wisdom.  But not content with projecting my bullshit template onto someone else I actively try to force them into said template, with predictable results.  It's bad enough that you're not who I want you to be so I try to force you to change and then I get mad at you when you don't make the change.  Arrogance at an advanced level.

Accept someone for who they are.  Can you believe that shit?

Dude Says

I was at a meeting yesterday wearing my typical garb: old suit jacket from Goodwill, pork pie hat clamped down on fly-away hair, Simpson's T-Shirt, dress slacks, clogs.  Dude shows up late, reaches over the guy sitting next to me to shake my hand enthusiastically when I return from my second cup of coffee, two more than I actually need.

Dud approaches me after the meeting: "It's great to see you!" he exclaims.

"It's great to see you, too," I say, somewhat warily.  I hate it when I've spoken with someone but can't remember a thing about the conversation.  It's not rare when this happens - I've definitely got some circuit damage up there, compounded by the fact that I don't generally listen to other people when they talk.

Willie told me the first thing he does when he reads my posts is to skim the text to see if he's mentioned.  I admire that level of shallowness in my friends.

Anyway, dude says: "Will I see you back at the house?"

Ah.  Dude thinks he knows me from a rehab or detox or some other sober living arrangement. I can't imagine he thinks I'm homeless but SuperK isn't so sure. 

Most people would be offended.  I fell in love.

Pew! Pew!!

I've come to the conclusion, after an extended, vigorous session of future-tripping, that everything will go better for me if I can keep my head down and my mouth shut during my upcoming trip.  I suspect this is what I'm supposed to be doing all of the time.

"Seaweed," my sponsor used to whisper in my ear, seductively.  "Do me a favor and try not to talk today.  Whatever comes out of your mouth is just going to make it worse."

I've been told that army men used to practice for the fear and terror of actually being shot at by actually being shot at during basic training.  The exercise was to crawl across a field while machine gun bullets whistled over your head.  I guess the bullets were aimed well above the ground so that the exercise was being shot at and not being actually shot.  Keep your head down, keep crawling, keep moving forward.  If you get up you might be able to get across the field more quickly but you also might get plugged.  

Doesnt this sound like bullshit?  Maybe I saw it in a cartoon or as part of a hallucination in an LSD fugue state.  I can see Foghorn Leghorn losing tail feathers to an errant round more readily than I can see actual kids getting strafed.  Anyway, it's a great visual for me.  SuperK and I were discussing how I should handle a potential series of conversations with one of my relatives.  She kept making solid, reasonable suggestions that made a lot of sense, all of which I had tried at least 30 times in the past with the result being a round right in the middle of my forehead every single time.  I'm not smart but I'm old - I've tried everything more than once.  I have a bullet-riddle helmet to prove it.

I'm also not in the mainstream in my attitudes about political, religious, moral, and social attitudes in The Old City.  Like most places these polarized days no one is interested in hearing anything but their own opinions aped back to them and when the aping doesn't go down the default position is yelling out those non-reciprocated opinions more loudly.

"I'm not deaf," I say.  "I just don't agree with you."

The final insult is to be repeatedly insulted for having the non-aped opinion.  I don't think The Old City is particularly unique in this regard but that distinction doesn't make the insulting any funner to endure.

Whenever SuperK made another very reasonable suggestion I would pretend to be crawling on the ground.

"Pew!  Pew!  Rat-a-tattattat," I'd say, making my best gun sounds.

There's a great scene in the Simpson's where Homer has to connect a wire to a live electrical circuit.  He has two choices: blue and red.  He tries red and gets the shit shocked out of him.  He tries blue then with the same result.  "Hmmm," he says.  "Maybe I'll try red."

That's me.  That's what I do.

F.F.A.

Free Floating Anxiety:  Prone to anxiety over nothing at all.

I told SuperK today what I had been in free float about the last few days.

"You need to find some other things to worry about," she said.

I told Willie what was going on.

"You're going home?" he said incredulously.  "I visited home last weekend and my mom was on vacation and I still got about half-freaked out."

I told California Tom what was going on.

"Yeah," he said.  "I'm not the guy my family wanted me to be, either."

I mentioned it in passing to Jimi Hendrix.

"Rainy Day, Float Away.
Lay back and groove on a rainy day."

Into The Void

Vacuum:  A region of space that contains no matter.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

I've been learning a lot of good stuff about prayer in Vacation City.  I've not been a big fan of prayer historically for a variety of reasons, mostly because I suck at it.  I spend way too much time praying for help in getting the things that I want or in avoiding the things that I find objectionable.  I'm also big on praying that other people, places, and things help me get the things that I want or avoid objectionable things.

This is crappy praying.  I've found that god has a technique for people like me.  God provides the things that I ask for; however, god is quite literal and pretty creative in answering my self-serving prayers.  If I pray for a better relationship with my boss I get fired, that kind of stuff.  It's funny as long as it's happening to someone else.

People here are not as overtly religious as some of the other places I've lived.  This, in a general sense, is not good or bad but it does fit well into my world view.  I was told exactly how to pray when I was growing up - the exact words that I should use - and I don't do anything anybody tells me, often to my detriment.  Here the praying is more along the lines of the loose garment theory.  One old-timer tells me that the nature of prayer is not to change the world but the person doing the praying.

Meditation is a little trickier.  When I try to sit quietly I find that my mind fills up with a lot of noise post-haste.  It sucks in more voices and general cacophony than one person has the ability to endure.  It has gotten better over the years but it's still a low-grade riot in there most sessions.

I feel better when I do it.  I don't understand why, exactly, but I end up calmer.  I feel better even when I have a session where the voices have stormed the ramparts and sacked the castle.  It seems that the effort is the thing.  I'd love to hear god talk directly to me in a lovely baritone with a hint of an Irish lilt but I'm good when the Mongol horde is in control, too.

Void:  An empty space; a vacuum.

My favorite Black Sabbath song is "Into The Void."

Rocket engines burning fuel so fast,
Up into the night sky they blast,
Through the universe the engines whine,
Could it be the end of man and time?

This is probably symptomatic of my trouble with meditation.  I'm just sayin'.