Day 35: The Spiritual Cunts

Day 27: I'm sorry, I'm not interested

Morrissey says this to his elementary school teacher on page 60 of his autobiography when asked about a book that is being read aloud in class.  The context is that he has been staring out of the window while the book is being read.  He is watching black rain fall outside of the windows, as one would imagine a young Morrissey doing.

We should all be this honest at such a young age.  We are taught as children that we need to respond appropriately when we are addressed by teachers and other adults, but that appropriate response rarely includes expressing ourselves authentically.  Instead, we are groomed to feign interest in appropriate things at appropriate times.  We are repeatedly encouraged to suppress our true interests for the sake of those things that someone else who has never met us or come to know our person has decided are in our benefit.

Conform and suppress.  Conform and suppress.  I say no.

Regret...

It is one of my least favorite words.  I hate having regrets.  I always promise myself that I will do my best not to have any, but in this human experience, sometimes it just can't be helped.  We are emotional and sometimes irrational animals, fumbling through this world one precarious step at a time.  Sometimes we fall off the edge.  Sometimes we throw ourselves off.

I think what I am most afraid of is not having enough moments.  Or that because of moments past, that if this chain of moments were to suddenly come to an end, that others wouldn't understand the gravity of the moments past and they would say things that they needed to say so that they could rationalize things to themselves, but those things wouldn't be true.  And like so many other things, a certain story would be told about those moments that were a fiction.  And the truth about the moments would be lost forever.

The truth is that I loved with a stumbling, raging passion that was nonsense and madness.  The way love is sometimes.  And even though the chain of moments were imperfect, nothing was perfect, and they just were what they were.  I wouldn't have traded any one of them for any other experience.

Unraveling.

The thing about addiction...

People don't know how to respond to it.  They don't know what to do.  They tip toe around the addict like they have an undiscovered cancer that everyone can see, except the sick person themselves.  They pretend that watching them kill themselves isn't so bad and they don't do anything to help because they are afraid.  They are more afraid of alienating someone, than they are of attending their funeral.  And all of this makes the others, the honest, the most evil people that were for telling the truth.  Because if only one person is telling the truth, then they must be telling a lie.