21 Dreams).

3/24/21

I had a toothache last night, so on my way home I bought some ice cream, popped some ibuprofen, and then looked up some home remedies. I ate, and after watching two episodes of The X-Files, popped two sleeping pills and tried to get some sleep around three in the morning.

At some point after daybreak, I awoke to the sound of those air raid sirens, or whatever they call them now, and then heard loud booms that may have been thunder, though my paranoid brain immediately thought of bombs. I clearly wasn’t too worried, however, as I then fell back asleep.

In the dream, I’m in my apartment and think I hear dad in the hallway talking to Eve, the eldest of my two younger sisters, who in the dream evidently lives just down the hall from me. Opening my door, I find that it is him. He tells me about a small shelf in the hallway that someone doesn’t want and that I might find useful. I was happy to take it, maybe to put some of my books on it.

Suddenly the dream changes, or I have another dream.

I’m living in a big RV parked in some big lot, and I’m trying to declutter the place and get things organized. I feel very comfortable here. Some of the stuff seems to be mine, some I’m not sure about. Some of these possessions may have been from the previous occupant.

I’m on my bed organizing things when people start coming in, but until someone brings in their two kids I don’t realize I’m in my underwear and quickly cover myself. Very swiftly, there appears to be a lot of people inside, almost a party atmosphere, and that’s when a cop shows up and demands that everybody come outside. Everyone else rushes outside, but I take my time, putting on my pants and then my shoes.

When I finally open the door and step out into the lot, the huge crowd of people seem to be standing, patiently awaiting something, and it just doesn’t feel right to me. Something feels off. Ominous. I see some guy in a green military uniform walk in front of the crowd, and he walks like an angry man on a mission. He has a stern look on his face and looks exactly like Rob Lowe.

I’m sitting down on the steps of the jumbo RV and this slender, animate, elderly woman, maybe in her sixties, is warning me not to do something, and while I forget the specifics, she says its because the Rob Lowe guy won’t like it and will do something bad to me. I tell her, “Let him try it.”

She then says that most people here need something, and uses this one random guy nearby as an example. Again, I forget the specifics, but then she turns to me. “But you?” She says to me. “You’ll do all right.”

Or perhaps she says, “You have everything you need.” Something like that.

In any case, I’m surprised by this, as this wasn’t where I thought she was going. I thought she was going to try to coerce me into cooperation through fear, tell me how I had to get in line and be obedient, and I was ready to snap back. Instead, she seems strangely, sincerely confident in me.

My good friend Moe is suddenly beside me and he hands me a pen. I know he doesn’t mean for me to write with it, either; he means for me to use it to stab Lowe if he tries anything. Then he hands me a knife, bigger than the pen, which would clearly be more useful, but I’m confused as to why, if he had a knife, he initially handed me the pen. Then he hands me something even larger — I think it was an absurdly large gun — and I just look down at it and laugh involuntarily. When I look up at him and see the look on his face, however, he’s clearly serious.

I hide both the pen and knife in my sleeve, ready to stab the guy if I need to, but him and I sit there and the rest of the crowd stands there for what seems like forever. Then they try and move all of us to a bigger lot, after which I wake up with Chevelle’s new single, Self Destructor, playing in my head.

What’s interesting is that this dream of a cluttered RV seems to be a scale up from the dream I recalled the prior morning.

2/23/21.

I seem to be at my parents house, where the driveway branches off towards the barn. There, I put two, perhaps three people in my van, and they seem to be children. I fasten them in with seat belts and try to move my shit out of the van to make more room for them and because I’m a bit embarrassed by the clutter.

I turn to do something and when I look back the van has rolled backwards down the driveway, which turns into this long, hilly road that disappears into the distance. I immediately know that they’re too far out of reach for me to have any hope of running and catching up with them, so I scream for them to put it in park — not to step on the break, for whatever reason.

In any case, I know they’re too far away to hear me, and that even if they did that none of them knew enough about cars to be able to follow my instructions. I could do nothing but just watch the van as it cruised down the hill of the road.

Upon the Canvas of a Dark Bob Ross.

While I’m not the biggest fan of these earlier work shifts, there are some things I do enjoy about them — most of all the fact that, at least since we turned the clocks forward, its not nearly so dark out on my trek home from that fast food joint everyone in that damned town seems intent on spending their stimulus checks on.

After pulling out of the Circle K to head to my humble abode this early evening, I peered in my rearview to glimpse the town as it began to slowly fade into the background. What greeted my exhausted eyes was so stunning it could have been a Bob Ross painting — if only that nature-oriented, animal-loving, artistic genious with the soothing voice had flirted with his dark side a bit more on the canvas.

In a way, the entire scene, to imagine it from a third person perspective for a moment, kind of reminded me of those scenes in films where a guy calmly walks away from something like a building or car he’s rigged with explosives and is utterly unphased, doesn’t so much as blink or flich, as it explodes into an epic fireball behind him.

Granted, I was damned tired, but with the sun going down, the cloudy portion of the sky enveloping the hellscape increasingly behind me glowed a brilliant, beautiful orange, and it looked to me, as I drove down that long, tree-lined road towards home, as if the entire fucking cess pool of a town had suddenly gone up in flames.

If. Fucking. Only.

An Uncharacteristically Goofy Dream (3/16/21).

Usually my dreams don’t take on the ridiculous dream logic so many people tend to associate with dreams as a whole, like watching a monkey wheel on by on a unicycle while sucking on a slurpee through his ear as I wave to him with my foot or something. There are jump cuts and there may be odd elements here and there in the narrative, but otherwise my dreams typically mimic conventional reality fairly well.

This morning, however, my dream narrative took on some uncharacteristically strange elements I don’t often experience.

3/16/21

I was inside the restaurant I work at, staring out the doorway window. My plan was to walk outside to my truck, but I hesitated, as I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any pants on. At first my worry is that people would see me in the car-filled parking lot, but that concern evaporates when I realize that if my pants are in the truck and my keys are in my pockets, this may pose a bigger problem. At that exact moment I suddenly felt my keys in my back pocket, however — I suddenly have pants on now, and the inconsistency didn’t confuse me at all.

As I walked towards the truck, I saw a shadow cast on the ground from someone behind me, but before my eyes it transforms into the shadow of Darth Vader with a bird on his shoulder. I quickly turned around, but no one was there.

As I got up to the truck, I noticed a crack on the window of the side door, but eventually concluded that it had always been there. I then noticed something new, however: a tiny hole in the same window that looked as if someone were trying to screw into it. I interpreted this as evidence that someone was trying to break in and so resolved to park closer to the building from now on, just to keep a closer eye on it.

Maria Cox & the Statue of Baphomet (3/4/21 Dream).

I was in a building composed of different rooms, almost like big bedrooms, where different parties of people gathered, and it seemed to be connected to this department store. I was looking for something in the store — shoes, I think — and I asked Maria Cox, who evidently worked there, where I could find them. She directed me to the last isle where I didn’t find any shoes but instead came upon a tall, circular, glass display case with various statues in it, though the only one that caught my eye was this statue of Baphomet.

Later, I was trying to find my room with my people and I was unable to find the right one. I kept intruding into the wrong ones, accidentally waking someone up in one case. I think this is where I can across Maria for the second time. We were in a room, standing across from each other, just talking a bit, though what we spoke of largely escapes me. She was easygoing, playful, and actually quite nice to talk to. I brought up the statue of Baphomet and how strange and cool it was that they had one in the store. She immediately agreed and that seemed to add fuel to the conversation.

As I’ve written of before, Maria was a girl I went to high school with and who I am currently friends with on social media. I never spoke too much with her, but she was friends with Gerty, a girl I was rather close with for a time. For the most part I recall the school dances I attended, when I’d always find her in a dark corner or against a wall, in tears over whatever jackass she came with. I denied my attraction toward her for some time, specifically to Gerty, but eventually it became unmistakable. As I’ve written previously:

“It took some time for her to become a point of focus — and there are levels to it. For one thing, she has transformed into a rather alluring goth over the years, a feel and look that has always inspired my passion with respect to women, at least when it’s authentic, and in her case, it most certainly is — hence Gerty’s insight so long ago that she was right up my alley.

Physically, to state the obvious, she’s hot as fuck. I have cast her in the starring role of countless kinky fantasies of mine over the years. She is also someone who, as seems clear to me from her Facebook posts, actually thinks for herself — a depressing rarity among the human population, it seems to me — and she is a rather rebellious soul in general, which only increases her attractiveness as far as I’m concerned.”

She is also a superb artist and has a certain fondness for Lady Luna and her sea of stars, which makes me want to get high with her some warm evening, sit back with her beneath a cloudless sky, and just talk about weird shit. This isn’t likely to happen, but its crossed my mind more than once.

Aside from that, I always felt Maria was kinky, exploratory in that sense, and was the type to go to fetish parties. I also failed to shake the suspicion that she was involved in Paganism, maybe even Satanism, or at least dabbled in it. And this isn’t Satanism in the sense that your average, Christian-minded person would consider it to be, either — just to be clear.

So why was Maria in my dream? What did she represent? Well, for one thing, it likely relates to goth culture.

A fair question to ask is in regards to my personal relation to goth culture. As far as I’m concerned, I’m on the outskirts, as with so many things. A detached spectator. A distant observer and appreciator. According to one man, however, that’s not nearly all.

A long time ago my good friend, Channing, moved out of his parents’ house and into a condo with a few friends of his. One of these friends was a skinny, black-haired boy striving to be a writer. He identified as a goth. He had a hard-on for the culture, and he seemed to resonate with it quite strongly. He had bouts of depression that reached the extremes of suicidal impulses and there were countless dramatic, emotional moments throughout the time he lived there. Though I can’t say that I got to know him too well, I was around the guy often enough — and heard of incidents involving him through Channing often enough — to know that I sincerely liked the guy. And, I should add, that I shared the worry his roommates had for his well-being.

Once he got to know me a bit, and before he flipped out in a major and characteristically dramatic way that sent him launching away from Ohio and landed him back with his parents in Connecticut, he said something to me that has, I confess, kind of lingered in my mind ever since.

When I denied being goth, he passionately disagreed. He said that when it came to the goth culture, I was a natural. That I was what they wished they were, what they could only hope to become. That I was what the average, run-of-the-mill goth aspired to be.

He could be dramatic, as I memtioned, but in a way — and yes, perhaps one hell of a sick, fucked up way — I took that as a compliment. Even so, I’m allergic to pledging my allegiance to groups. I am what I am: nothing more, nothing less.

My first real introduction to the goth culture was through my friend, Terra, who, especially in the early days, I often jokingly referred to as the Evil One, the Queen of Darkness, and perhaps more recently, simply, and accurately, My Dark Friend. She was never one of those hokey, I-Wanna-Be-a-Vampire goths, either. She wore dark cloths and often had on a spiked choker, but it never seemed like she was wearing a costume — this was simply a reflection of who she was within. She just needed to wear it on her sleeve, perhaps as part of the creative, artistic impulse we both share.

Though there was undoubtedly some conflict between us early on in our friendship due to my deeper desires for her and her seemingly contradictory feelings toward me, the friendship always held strong, and it became clear to me that I valued that more than anything — and I still do.

We’re both introverts, we’re both rather moody, anxious, depressive, and dark. We both seem to enjoy writing and engaging in artwork. We share what I consider a deep yet unconventional kind of friendship, a special bond that I’ve always cherished. She is one of those people that always makes me feel better when I’m around her. Her energy is soothing. I don’t have to hide my darkness as I do when interacting and communicating with most other people, or feel embarassed, dramatic, or ashamed about it. I can let it flow without fearing judgement, and it makes me feel unspeakably wonderful that she seems to feel the same way towards me.

We have often exchanged letters and emails over the years, and in her letters she tends to ask me for advice or a fresh perspective, particularly when it comes to her issues in relationships and feelings towards the male gender in general. This may be relevant because the day before I had the dream I had finally responded to her mist recent email, and it was on that very topic.

Unlike Terra, and even myself, Maria seems more confident, more personally empowered in general, and I think that’s one of the things I most admire about her. It could be an illsion, as I certainly don’t know her personally, but she seems to have found the kind of balance I seek in myself, and which Terra seems to seek as well — the reconciliation of the opposites: the dark and the light, the often false dichotomy of what is considered good and evil, the cultural notion of masculine and feminine qualities of the personality. She may not be the ubermench with a pussy that my ex-girlfriend Anne constitutes, but she’s certainly a strong individual. She’s certainly got a swath of admirable, undeniably alluring qualities that, like Anne, seems to get major aspects of my overall being aroused, including but by no means limited to the shroom-tipped, ever-spitting trouser-snake.

And to get back to the dream, this may be where that glass-encased Statue of Baphomet comes in.

Rather recently I finally read the Satanic Bible, which confirmed my sense that it was essentially an atheistic religion that embraced personal freedom and the development and expression of the individual. I was surprised to find that they also embrace magick ritual, however, which increased my fascination, though the portion of it that teaches curses doesn’t settle right with me. In any case, I could see Maria dabbling in this religion, as well as Pagan practices, which in turn increases my fascination with her. Again, I don’t know her personally, though, so this could be a ridiculous assumption.

Until my research today, spawned by the dream, I failed to catch on to the fact that I was confusing The Church of Satan with The Satanic Temple.

So far as I’ve been able to discern given my little research, The Satanic Temple embraces atheism, science, body atonomy, empathy, and peaceful protest — all of which resonates with me — but they seem to be monists in the philosophy of the mind and wouldn’t so much as entertain notions of out of body experiences, reincarnation, or psi phenomena, inside or outside notions of magick, which sets me apart from them. The Satanic Church, however, seems to incorporate all of the above for the most part but also embraces magick and, with respect to the inclusion of curses in magickal practices, is more than a little light on the notion of empathy.

The image of Baphomet I had in the dream — the statue — seems to derive from the Satanic Temple, not the Church of Satan, not the Satanic Bible. Even so, it seems that what the Levi-inspired statue resonates rather well with the values embraced by both — though I will certainly have to do further research into both and what distinguishes the two to be confident in this perhaps premature impression.

In any case, the image of Baphomet in the context of the Satanic Temple was evidently inspired by the “Sabbatic Goat” drawing of occultist Eliphas Levi in 1856. Here, Baphomet is depicted as an angel-winged, hermaphroditic humanoid with a goat’s head — both human and animal, both male and female, both good and evil. Between its horns sprouts a torch, symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge, and upon its forehead, a pentagram. Upon its arms are the Latin words Solve (separate) and Coagula (reform), familiar to anyone who has read up on alchemy in the context of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology or otherwuse. The right hand points two fingers upward, the left bears two fingers pointing down, meant to suggest the alchemical notion “as above, so below.” Baphomet also has titties — or, alternately, two children, one a boy, the other a girl, to either side of the human-beast, staring up at her/him — to suggest both masculine and feminine qualities. The tummy bears the symbol of the caduceus: two serpents winding around a staff, symbolizing the reconciliation of dualities, which anyone interested in Jung and his notion of a psychological Transcendent Function should appreciate.

In essence, the statue signifies the reconciliation of the opposing forces within and between us in our quest towards totality and the pathway of greater understanding through questioning and experimentation. Perhaps its presence in the dream suggested that I see Maria Cox, in some way, as just another manifestation of that ideal, and that this accounts for my fascination with an attraction towards her.

Cell Phone Guy & a Gifted Lighter (3/1/21 Dream).

Circa 7:30 AM.

I was in some gas station, with someone out in the car waiting for me with engine running, so I felt kind of pressed for time. I passed by a girl with shirt on that looked like it had a gray alien on it, and it looked pretty cool. I then saw a card table nearby with a few piles of folded shirts on it, and I found that while the one the girl was wearing was there, it wasn’t an alien one — but there was indeed cool-looking alien shirts in one of the piles that I considered purchasing. As is often the case, I decided I should be careful with money and so elected not to buy it, but thought that I may come back at some later date and get one.

I think I was primarily in there to buy a carton of cigarettes, but I also desperately needed a lighter, but couldn’t decide on one. Some were laying out, some were in bowls on shelves, and I kept picking one out, holding it, deciding against it, picking out another and putting it back again, frustrated by my own indecision, as I felt I really needed to hurry up.

I finally settle on one when this old guy, an old regular at the fast food joint I work at, comes up from behind me and slipped a lighter of his into the breast pocket of my shirt. When I turned around to see who it was, he was already looking dead at me with a warm, friendly smile and curious eyes. He seemed genuinely happy, perhaps happier and more at peace than I had ever seen him. I thank him, and he says something to me, but for the life of me I can’t remember what. I think it had something to do with the fact that he used to smoke but had to quit.

The dream ended there, but this was a guy that, in real life, I had nicknamed the Cell Phone Guy. He would come in frequently at night, always speaking to his wife on the phone because she didn’t trust him, always paranoid he was cheating on her. He was an elderly guy, very lively and personable, and he certainly did flirt with the girls a lot, so there may have been some justification for her paranoia. We always had kind exchanges, though our conversations never got too in depth. A regret of mine, to be honest. He always seemed like an interesting guy.

I didn’t see him for awhile until at some random point during this pandemic, when I had snuck out to the front of the building after dark to have a smoke one night. He came by in that same white van he always drove, but the van had seen better days.

So had he.

His age had certainly caught up with him. He had slowed considerably, had lost a lot of his characteristic spark and spunk. He spoke to me a bit. It seemed like he just really wanted to connect with someone. Evidently his wife had died and him and his new girlfriend, maybe his new wife — I can’t recall, exactly — who was on the seat beside him, they were leaving the state to start a new life together. He was leaving within a day or two and wanted to say goodbye to Marjie, one of the assistant managers he had taken a liking to, but she wasn’t there that night, so he asked me to bid her farewell for him, which I had forgotten to do.

I congratulated him and wished him good luck before my cigarette was gone and I had to get back inside. I was happy for him, but seeing what age had done to him — and seemed to do to him rather abruptly, it seemed to me — also depressed me. In the dream, however, he seemed back to being the lively, smiling, spunky, good-natured fellow I had come to know and looked forward to seeing for so long. It was nice to see him like that for one last time, even if it was in the context of a dream.

And it was a nice gesture he made, too, as I really do need to get a new lighter.

A Paranormal Dream & Altered States of Consciousness.

In the dream I had yesterday (2/22/21), I seemed to be traveling around, exploring paranormal mysteries, and I think I may have had a partner as well. In the twilight between sleeping and waking, I was reflecting on the dream and began thinking about the show Supernatural, though the cases in the dream certainly involved paranormal occurences, not the religious fiction depicted in the show.

After I opened my eyes and made some java, the likely inspirations for the dream became clear to me. As of late, I’ve been re-watching episodes of The X-Files from the first episide, and now, at the beginning of season five, it’s brought back to mind all that I loved and hated about the show. I also recently watched the Netflix documentary about Elisa Lam’s death at the Cecil Hotel, which did a good job of demystifying and satisfactorily explaining the case in my opinion.

More importantly, perhaps, I’ve been obsessively watching the videos on the YouTube channel of MrBallen. Origionally I became intrigued not only because he’s a good storyteller, but because he covered a lot of the mysterious missing person cases investigated by David Paulides, which he collected in his Missing 411 series of books. But he has a plethora of strange and interesting stories to convey.

Perhaps somewhat related, for at least the last two days, my state of mind has been peculiar. Today in particular I feel rather spacey and out of it, kind of depressed, maybe, just kind of staring off into nothing, very stuck inside myself, even for me.

My mind has kind of been slipping into altered states of conscious again. While I try not to write about the weirdness of my life in this blog, yesterday I slipped into mental imagery and a mood that felt associated with one of my apparent past life memories. The other states have been less potentially paranormal-related, but still weird.

This morning, I saw imagery in my minds eye that reminded me of a brief period in which a friend drove me to Pittsburg years ago. I think it was Pittsburg. It was more of the associated mood more than anything, but it was all-consuming.

Yesterday I sensed the difference between someone who had their shit together and myself, though its hard to explain what I mean by “sensed.” It felt as if there was this stable level of consciousness above where I’m at, a state in which I could actually be active and stable and reliable in the external world, but I can’t seem to ascend to achieve it.

As it has been since forever, everything seems so fluid and unstable in my life right now. At the core of it is this deeply-rooted fear of commitment and inability to follow through with much of anything. Is it just a desire to keep options forever open, or is more about being reluctant to take chances or risks for fear of being trapped in a decision I can’t back out of?

I’m thinking its more likely the latter.

Late for Break (2/23/21 Dream).

On break from work, I walk through a bad area in town in order to try to find a gas station. I thought I knew where it was, but its nowhere to be found, and the looks I’m getting from people in the area are making me feel nervous.

I walk out of that area as quickly as I can and roam around for too long, hoping to come upon some gas station, eventually making my way inside of a large building and onto a high floor. Inside, I end up talking to a girl, I think a red-headed girl, on the top of a long stairway or escalator. We strike up a conversation, but then manager Steve from work and someone else casually walk up to me, as if they’d tracked me down, and both the way they talk and their body language conveys that they’re not-so-subtley suggesting their power over me. They imply that I’m late for clocking in and it makes me feel guilty, which I feel is something they were aiming for, but I can’t help but suspect that for whatever reason they also just didn’t want me talking to the girl.

So I go back to work, having never found the gas station, only to find, upon clocking in, that I’m only five minutes late for my half-hour break. It seemed as though it had taken a lot longer, and Steve and whoever had been with him had acted that way, too.

Angsty Rant of an All-Party Pooper.

You know what I think the solution is to the ever-gaping political divide? Lifting a throbbing, rock-hard, erect middle finger to herd mentality, to tribalism as a whole, all as you go against the grain and blasphemously explore the issues, thinking for yourself, embracing open-mindedness and aiming for subtlety and nuance in constructing your own views, in coming to your own damned conclusions or, better yet, working hypotheses.

Being honest with yourself. Being as reasonable as you can manage.

And if you think you’ve done this already and yet find yourself standing entirely on one side of the divide or the other, having planted your flag in a single camp, ask yourself how likely it is that the truth would be found entirely in the context of one party and all the lies so safely secured in the other.

I’ve never met any single individual I’ve agreed with entirely, and even a broken clock is right twice a day, so how could I agree or disagree with a group entirely, or even mostly?

Especially considering that the positions those parties have on particular issues change over time, how likely is it that right now, of all periods in history, that one party is entirely right as the other is entirely wrong — and you just happen to be a member of Team Truth?

If you’re honest with yourself, you should have a foot, or maybe a toe or two, in both camps and appendages that stretch above and beyond them. Anything less should indicate quite strongly to you that you’re a victim of groupthink and embracing a false dichotomy.

And no, I’m not talking about fleeing to a third party, I’m talking about being a fucking free-thinking individual.

I think people fear expressing views not held by the party they seem to be affiliated with, or the party the majority of their friends are affiliated with, because they fear friends of theirs will assume that they’re now a member of the other side, and even that the other side may feel at the same time that they’ve won them over. So they’ll avoid that topic entirely or disingenuously parrot their affiliated party’s views just to avoid that ripe potentiality. They feel its too dangerous now with this “you’re either with me or you’re against me” attitude (which the Left found reprehensible back when Derpy Dubya echoed that sentiment) and the “you’re either the solution or part of the problem” attitude.

If people would stop either avoiding or blindly battling and actually have honest, open, empathic conversations about the issues, perhaps we could heal the yawning wound and make it through this catastrophic mess we’ve made together…

Slave to the End.

One of the few benefits of working this bullshit fast food job is that you get to meet a wide diversity of people — that and you learn, out of necessity, how to let people go.

In the too-many years I’ve been here, the perpetually revolving door and rather high turnover has made me realize that few relationships last forever and as sad as it is, that’s okay. You have to adapt. You have to learn to let go. People say they’ll keep in contact, that they’ll visit, and sometimes they do for awhile, but they inevitably move on.

So I guess what’s apparently on its way isn’t that much different.

Donny, the maintenance man for the morning shift, is eighty years old, I learned the other day. Granted, I’m bad at judging age, but I never would have guessed he was that high up there. For the years that I’ve worked with him, he’s always been an active guy. He’s never said it outright, but it seems clear to me he wouldn’t still be working if his wife wasn’t so restless and determined to keep a job herself. He enjoys being at home, in his garage, engaged in woodworking, pursuing his creative talents. And he is indeed talented — he’s shown me several things he’s done, and they all look fantastic.

It was a few months back that he told us at work that he had gotten diagnosed with colon cancer. Rather than going the radioactive route, he elected surgery, and initially it seemed to be going well. He’s been back in the hospital now three times. They fucked up the surgery and now he’s lost a tremendous amount of weight and is in a good degree of pain. No one wants to state it outright, but the looks on everyone’s faces conveys the same, dire expectation.

It feels unjustified, cruel that he never really got to enjoy retirement. Granted, I’m talking as if the guy is already gone, and he’s not, and as much as I’d miss him working here, I hope to fuck that if he makes it through this he finally quits this shit hole and can truly enjoy the time he has left.

No one deserves to be a slave to the end.

Nobody’s Fault but Mine.

It is utterly irrational to blame your parents for who you are.

If you do blame your parents for all your suffering, all your trials and tribulations, all you have to do is extend your logic to its ultimate conclusion to see its inherent absurdity. After all, if they are to blame for who you are, then they were just as predestined to be who they are because of your grandparents, and your great-grandparents are to blame for who your grandparents became — and so on and so forth, all the way back to the first form of life, or even the circumstances that brought life to be, or all the way back to the Big Bang, or the quantum fluctuations that made nothing belch up something to begin with.

Alternately, we’re all ultimately responsible for who we are. We may not be able to control what happens to us, we may always have influences of varying intensities, but we always have a choice in how we respond and what we make of ourselves — and please understand that this is coming from someone who has made a cascade of shitty choices.

Even so, I believe in free choice. In free will and personal responsibility.

As far as I can see, for each and every one of us every moment presents a vast spectrum of potential choices ranging from the path of greatest resistance to the path of least resistence, and I think most of us lean toward the path of least resistance on default, chronically overestimating the amount of free will we put forth.

Not everyone starts out from the same point of departure, however, which is precisely why those who echo that whole “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps” bullshit instantly inspire me to punch them in the dick.

Or give them a cunt-punt. I mean, I’m not trying to be sexist here.

We may not be able to manifest the perfect external circumstances, but in the end, its up to us to manage our damage and pursue our passions, refine our talents, find or plow our own paths, or at the very least fashion our perceptions and alter our attitudes.

I still have that child in me that angrily points the finger here or there — anywhere but the self. He arises during intense emotional states, rears his angry little head in dreams. He is a poison in my veins.

He needs to learn. The inner child deserves a better outer adult.

Intellectually, I know the truth, and I need to start taking advantage of it. I need to take responsibility for who I am and invest more of my will in my external life.

Ultimately, I am free. In the end, I am responsible.