WEEKLY WTF
05-20-24 Edition
Unfucking
It’s not overly complicated, you’ve got this shit!
WTF Moments
Break your mind, there’s something behind
3 Stages of Fuckery
We all get wet but we don’t have to drown.
The Hole
Me oh my,
there’s a hole in the sky.
There’s one in you too,
don’t you know why?
Surrounded by black,
the ink of night.
It surrounds you too,
we call it fright.
It’s not a riddle,
that hole in your middle.
We fill it with shit,
the cat and a fiddle.
Fill it and fill it,
then fill it some more.
It never gets full,
this open door.
We keep pouring in,
we bust and go Boom!
We never fill up,
there’s too much room.
Plenty of room,
for all of your sad.
The shit that comes out,
looking like mad.
Throw in some happy,
there’s plenty of space.
Why are you still sad?
Look at your face!
We fill and we fill,
we swallow the pill.
Why can’t we stop?
We don’t use our will!
“Why aren’t I full”
we scream, annoyed.
It’s because we’re afraid,
of an actual void.
Your thoughts are all lies,
let them crack.
Look into the void,
it will look back!
A boat made of meat,
we row and we row.
Let yourself drift,
you don’t fucking know.
Let it be empty,
let it loom large.
Quit trying to fill it,
the void is in charge.
It’s not the current,
of which you’ve fought.
It's not your stories,
it’s not your thought.
Just lean back,
give up the fight.
There’s no fucking day,
if you don’t allow night.
Maintaining your “me”ness,
takes its toll.
Relax and lean back,
into that hole.
Comfortable not knowing,
you can just “Be”.
Gaze into the void,
and toss in your “me”.
It might crack your story,
the ego gets stung.
You’ll ring even louder,
with your bell getting rung.
That’s about it,
you’re an empty bowl.
Tired of your bullshit?
Jump on in whole!
Adios!
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip… maybe the Gillian’s Island theme is not the best precursor to this. Then again…
I’ve taken 28 days off of work and today is day 6. I’m finally, just finally, almost sorta kinda starting to feel fucking human again. It’s like taking a breath after holding it for a long while without having realized you’ve been holding it at all.
Monday morning, along with wifey poo and another couple- Chris & Deneene, who we fucking adore, board a plane bound for Peru. A place I’ve never been and until recently has not really occupied much space in my wrinkly pink meat computer.
Everyone keeps asking me if I’m excited. I know that the standard answer is yes, or should be, it’s the trip of a lifetime after all, but I’m really not. At least not in the way one might think. That doesn’t mean I have any negative regard for the trip, I’m happy and grateful af about it but I prepare for certain things in a strange way lately and I’m not mad about it at all.
As a kid who grew up in a not great place with not great circumstances, I somehow noticed in my young self a sort of need to have something to look forward to at all fucking times. It didn’t matter what, it might be the possibility of hearing the familiar warbling song of the ice cream truck and standing around in miserable heat on the blistering cracked road waiting in anticipation to hopefully see its rusty chassis appeared like a mirage in the Fresno heat. Or it might be knowing I was going to my Grandparents house in a couple months and that my Grandma Dorothy would let me stir the scrambled eggs watching and nodding approvingly with her ancient and sweet walnut skinned face. It didn’t matter what it was, I just always needed to think of some future event in order to blossom a feeling of excitement to better tolerate my less than favorable circumstances of youth.
This tendency extended into adulthood. In retrospect I realize it was a way of dealing with my parents divorce and growing up in a violent place, seeing and experiencing violent things. Things that a kid shouldn’t have to ever witness or deal with so frequently. A constant need to lean out of a shitty and terrifying “now” into the perceived possibility of a better “then”.
Becoming cognizant of early psychological strategies that linger into adulthood is one thing. Overwriting them is another because fighting a thought just creates more thoughts related to that thought and all that tension does nothing to overwrite those outdated tendencies and becomes an exponentially tangled knot.
The other thing I’ve noticed by being someone who was so attached to excitement is that with excitement there must be expectation, they are bedfellows. Expectation is the balloon we longingly look up at and excitement is the tightness of the string pulling against our finger.
With expectation comes comparison and how often does our actual experience match up with our fabricated expectation of an experience? When it doesn’t then we are disappointed and instead of experiencing and appreciating something just as it is, we become off balance momentarily as we come to terms with the juxtaposition. It’s a subtle thing but it’s there.
The other thing about expectation is that it causes us to lean out of now into a fabricated then. “Then” is not a thing, it has no inherent existence. A “then” is only experienced as a “now” and if our “nows” are spent leaning into a non existent concept called “then”, then that sought after “then” will be spent doing the same fucking thing as we are doing “now” and the fullness of an experience will be diluted by the quagmire of thinking. This is true of every- single- fucking- moment. We are rarely right here, right now.
Thoughts are like spiderwebs. Touch one part of it and the whole thing quivers and we become helplessly stuck in whatever has been weaved. If the habit of “looking forward” is happening in this “now” then it will happen in every fucking “now” and will become a daisy chain of disappointment and a habitual tendency to lean into “what’s next”. Like arriving somewhere you’ve been looking forward to and immediately thinking about how quick it will go by and we’ll soon enough have to fucking leave and come back home.
Being present isn’t really a thing you do, it’s more like a thing revealed by ceasing to do other shit that’s contrary to it. I’m not trying to poopoo excitement or looking forward to things at all. Sometimes these things I write are more for me. A way of pulling out some amorphous thing and making it intelligible. Perhaps I’m weary of stumbling through some half assed and poorly articulated answer to: “are you excited”?
People sometimes assume that I have a lot going on in my head, the more extreme manifestation of this being over-thinking shit. What’s funny to me is how little I actually think. Although since I have no sounding board to make a metric for “thinking activity” who fucking knows, maybe I do. But quite frequently, through the occasional writing I do here, I realize how little I’ve thought of a thing until I bother to let it be written so it can express as one’s and zeros blasting as photons into your retina to be converted into electricity and finally your own wrinkly pink meat to do with as you will.
If excitement is a warm content feeling in my gut based only on this particular moment then yes, I’m excited. If excitement is being slightly surprised and amazed by every little thing that occurs within the actual moment in which we exist then yeah, I’m excited af. If excitement is a sort of anticipatory electric gut tingle that’s not associated with any future expectation? Then sure color me fucking excited! If excited is realizing that there is enjoyment to be had in this totally mundane moment and that you’ll be carrying that unreliant enjoyment into extraordinary and unusual moments then yep I am fucking excited as a muthufucka! If excited is being as happy as a dog with 2 dicks then Ruff Ruff!
I just meant this to be sort of a “adios fuckers I’ll be in Peru the next 15 days idk if I’ll be posting much shit or not but I’ll try”. Maybe this could serve as a reminder, to myself if no one else, of what happens without too much expectation or steering or controlling. Not too much thinking, just being empty and letting the emptiness blow a little kiss of nothingness through the thought plane where it’s motion creates a current and eddies that catch thoughts which are swirled about then splashed into a writing of some sort. Just slip into the flow of reality and go, it’ll take you places you’d not otherwise go. “Oh the places you’ll go!” Was a Dr. Suess story I liked as a kid. Perhaps it should be updated: “Oh the place you fucking are, it’s so near it’s not far!”
Alrighty well I guess I should start packing shit.. I plan on keeping up with this weekly WTF if at all possible but either way I’ll be back with many a tale to tell no doubt. A story called “now” that I will tell in our mutually assured “then” which of course is also a fucking “now”. See you when I see you, adiosaloosoo!
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
