Be a Fucking Man

A few years ago, a few months after I quit my job, the drummer in my band died suddenly in a tragic hiking accident.  I went to his funeral and saw Ben laying there in the casket, all made up and posed, but stiff and lifeless.  That was certainly his body there - I could identify it as being Ben in terms of form, but that was not the same "person" or "entity" or "energy" or whatever you want to call it, that I'd seen a few weeks earlier.

In that moment, seeing Ben in the casket, I realized that I am not my body.  I can certainly identify with it, I can grow my hair long if I want, I can grow myself fat or thin, I can change its appearance any number of ways and its appearance certainly has changed as I age, but my body didn't exist before 1982 and it certainly won't exist after 2082, barring some sort of technological revolution.

So, it's clear to me that I am not my body.  Do I inhabit my body?  And if so, who is the "I" that is inhabiting "my" body.  Here's where I think language is a tricky thing.  Language, English, anyway, is subjective.  There is always a subject and an object, a related duality, and here I am both the subject and the object.  So to try to directly explain this, well, English doesn't seem to provide an easy means of describing this duality without having it sound weird or woo-woo.

I am not my body and I don't have a body and I don't inhabit my body, because my body and I are not separate.  They are a continuum, a spectrum.  Eventually, this body will dissipate and the energy that animates it will return to the larger whole of the energy that animates the larger things in this universe.  At that point, I will still not be my body nor will I inhabit it but there will also not be an "I" to talk about that.

That's the thing that kills me, sometimes, is the notion that there is something that comes after this or other than this.  And by "this" I mean exactly that, "this."  "This" that is happing right now, that is always happening right now, that will never not happen right now.  The present moment.  I conceptualize "this" in relation to "me" visually as follows:

Prior to my birth I was not alive in the physical human context.  After I die I will also not be alive in the physical human context.  In the middle I am alive and I am a human.  That, to me, feels evident and obvious and logical.

And yet, I was brought up to believe there's something after this.  That there's a linear progression towards some other place that's not this.  But this is all I've known in life.  And prior to this, there was no identity.  "I" was undifferentiated from all of this and after I die I will return to being undifferentiated "this."

So, really, to me, that's what identity is: it's differentiation in form.  I, that is the energy that animates me, in this journey from birth to death, form an identity with things, objects and concepts over time.  I can look at my body and say, "that's me."  I can look at my family and say "that's me, too."  I can have a career, I can have a partner, I can buy a house, own a car, I can believe anything I damn well please, all of which is added to the big sticky ball that is "me."

But, again, what is "me?"  "Me" is a concept.  I, me, mine didn't exist 34 and change years ago and it won't exist 100 years from now, so why do I spend so much time worrying about "me?"  Why is it that I feel so threatened when something I identify with is threatened?

Of course, that begs the larger question in my mind: what is it that "I" identify with in the first place?  What does my big sticky ball of "me" contain?

Well, I can say that I don't have a national identity.  I am American by birth and nothing else.  I, like Krishnamurti, can see the harmful affects of national pride and national identity, and I've never felt any of that and I don't plan on starting now.

I can look at my family and see that I don't have a strong identity there, either.  I mean, I like my family and they are very supportive and they love me, but I don't have loads of family stories or cute nicknames for my grandma or any of that.  To me, my family identity is my genetic identity.  I've inherited DNA and some attitudes and beliefs and all of this makes it nice to go visit once in a while.  But I don't identify with my family name and don't feel a strong desire to pass on my genes, at least at this point.

Speaking of names, I am not my first or middle names either.  For all intents and purposes, on a day-to-day, living-in-society basis, yes, I identify with my name.  That is, I will put it down on government forms and will respond if someone calls it out, but I didn't have my name before I existed, so that name is ultimately just a sound and some curves on a piece of paper, at the end of the day.

So what about sex, gender?  I can look down and see I have external reproductive organs that allow me to pee more easily standing up.  I, by this point, have a pretty good idea of how my junk functions and all that.  But beyond the physical manifestations, what does that even mean?

That is to say, what does it mean to "be a man" or "be a woman."  It's a pure fucking construct.  That is to say, when someone says "be a man," what they really mean is "be tough" or "don't show emotion" or maybe even "don't act gay."  Which is horrible, in my view.

To identify with gender really means to act and dress in certain ways.  This makes sense to me in some regards because to fulfill a gender role means to know your role in society.  You know the rules and everyone else knows the rules, so you know how to act and other people expect you to act in that way and as long as the rules are followed, everything is fine and we're all comfortable.

But that's horrible because it's stifling.  It stifles the true self and it causes suffering.  I have a dick but, like my name, I don't particularly identify with being "male."  That is to say, I will check off the "M" box on government forms if I have to, but I don't identify with what it traditionally means to be a "man" in this culture.  I believe it's this toxic masculine attitude of being tough that is one of the things that kinda fucked me up emotionally and that hurts a lot of other people, males and females alike.

All of this is in recognition of the fact that I am at this moment both this body and the energy that animates it.  That energy has polarities, a yin and yang, a soft and hard, a masculine and feminine.  Some days I feel more of one than the other.  After I run, it feels good to growl at the top of my lungs and see if anyone looks.  Recently, it's felt good to paint my nails.  I can look down and see that these hands are mine, that I have a choice with what I do with them.  Most days I don't feel tough.  I cry a lot.  I like soft energy.

And, of course, when I'm talking about identity here, I'm talking about the deeper side of things, the deepest side of things.  I've looked very deeply into myself the last three years, mostly because I didn't have a choice, and I've had many moments of "I am."  Moments of pure self, untainted by concepts and expectations and all that.  Ecstasy.  I exist and I am aware of the energy in my body and of my body itself.  I am aware of the dual nature of the energy and that the masculine and the feminine are intertwined and not separate from each other.

There are higher-level concepts of privilege and things that could be brought into play here as well (i.e. sure, maybe it's easy as an outwardly seeming white cis male to say some of this stuff because of the privilege society affords and the knowledge that that privilege is always there to hide in), but that's a different discussion for a different time.

At the end of the day, I think my strongest identity is a traumatic one.  I identify with trauma to the extent that when that identity is threatened, I will defend it with my life.  Love and trauma can't co-exist, so when I'm offered love or compassion, my automatic response is to reject it.  If I am not living in trauma-land then where am I living?  How do I identify myself if not for pain and suffering and deep feelings of unworthiness?

I've realized recently, through writing about and sharing my experiences, and with other life changes, that the trauma identity doesn't serve me any longer.  But what else is there?  If I lose my identity, how do I know myself?

But who am I kidding?  I've lost my identity before.  I've experienced ego death so many times, what's one more?  Except this time must be slow, deliberate, and conscious.  And it must include other people in its deconstruction.

It's just that I find it incredibly hard to relate to people sometimes.  It's partially, I think, because this American society identifies and values so many things that I do not.  It's hard to exist in a culture that feels sick and superficial to me.

But what I have noticed is that when I've opened myself up to being vulnerable with others, with sharing myself, the response has been mostly positive.  Nothing terrible happened.  I felt warm fuzzy feelings.  I felt love.  Love is something that's been historically hard for me to allow in.  But fuck it, just because I've historically been closed off to love doesn't mean I need to continue to be.  And, really, I don't see any other option if I want to continue to be alive.

On the Previous (Brief Psychotic) Episode...

One of the reasons I wanted to start this blog and one of the reasons I like a semi-public forum for my thoughts is that I find it so hard to share myself - the personal side of myself - with others in face-to-face or even direct online communication.  It turns out that this is necessary to establish deeper connections with others, which would explain why I don't feel like I have many deep connections in my life, or at least why I don't actively foster those connections with those I do have in my life.

I liken it to a bed of nails.  Talking with someone one-on-one feels like I'm laying on a single nail: piercing, vulnerable, painful.  But to talk or share with a group of people is like laying on a bed of nails - the more nails there are, the more the piercing vulnerability is distributed; I'm less likely to be hurt.  This could explain why I've always felt more comfortable on stage playing music or performing theater or improv than I have talking to people before or after a show.

So in that spirit, I've decided to share something of myself with the lovely bed of nails that is the Internet - something that, it turns out, is a huge part of my development, my identity, and a huge part of my psyche.  It is not something I talk about because, well, these things are difficult to share with others.  These things are not something that just come up in conversation.  I've been in group therapy for a year or more now and I still haven't really talked about this there, in that safe space, beyond mentioning surface level details.

About seven years ago I found myself out to lunch with a work colleague and close friend at the time.  For the weeks leading up to that point I had been consuming massive amounts of coffee.  My reasoning at the time was that I wanted to understand why caffeine suddenly, a few years earlier, started giving me big anxiety and panic attacks.  I'd been able to drink coffee successfully until one day I couldn't.

When I started drinking it again, it was intentionally, with the attitude that I will learn to get over the anxiety, that I deserve to drink coffee as much as anyone else, that by delving into the anxiety full-force, I could conquer it.  After all, I'd managed to quit smoking cigarettes around that time and had just started dating someone I'd pined after for years.  I felt empowered.

So I took the extreme route and drank up to ten cups a day for a period, no joke.  Then I would come home from work all wound up and panicky, maybe smoke some MJ, and explore full blown panic-land alone in my apartment, terrified at my palpitating heart but stoic and determined to resolve the dread and anxiety I was feeling.  I'd recline for hours on my Lay-Z-Boy while my heart spun in my chest.

I did this for several weeks and after a while I stopped sleeping.  Then came the day I went to lunch with the colleague and something made me snap.  We were at Chilli's and I think the Red Hot Chilli Peppers came on the radio and maybe it was the subtle coincidence of that or maybe it was something she said, but I snapped.  When she got up to use the restroom, I ran out of the place, through a local supermarket where I left my phone in the cereal isle, out through the store room and made my way up a hill behind the complex.

As I made my way up the hill, I systematically removed all my clothes.  I then took my wallet and systematically emptied all its contents.  When I reached the top, I was having full blown delusions about heaven and hell, God and the Devil.  I believed the government hatched a plan to nuke it's own citizens but that I had foiled their plot by running out of the restaurant.  So I had to rid myself of everything the system gave me in order to remain invisible.  The answer, it seemed, was nature.

To protect myself from the impending blasts, I rubbed leaves all over myself, plugged all my openings with them (yup, all of them).  I found out later, the hard way, that those leaves were poison ivy / oak / sumac.

On the other side of the hill was a large quarry where active work was being done - I could hear the rhythmic pounding of the machines.  Somehow I managed to make my way down the rock face to the bottom of the quarry where a large excavator rolled by and the driver saw my nakedness with a terrified look on his face.  An ambulance eventually came and I ended up in a psych ward.

I've written a much more vivid, first hand account of these events and maybe I'll share that one day, but for now, for this sharing, I find myself in a psych ward, out of my mind.

The thing is, I can answer all questions correctly: who is the president, what's the date, logical type questions.  I know how my reactions and responses will elicit responses in you, so I know exactly what to say and how to say it to get myself out of this bind.  But nothing else makes sense.  I see patterns everywhere.  I see that everything is essentially the same, complex transformations of some more basic element.

When I first get to the ward, a guy comes up to me, real close, and shows me the bandages around his wrists.  He tells me excitedly that he tried to kill himself.  I'm a newcomer, I'm a star, there's a whole group of people surrounding me.

There were a lot of things I experienced in the psych ward that a lot of people, if I told them, might be apt to dismiss as hallucinations on account of my eventually diagnosed "brief psychotic episode."  I saw doctors one day turn into janitors the next.  I saw complex formulas appear on packs of gum.  Even the fucking doctor assigned to me was wearing the same fucking shirt design as the one I'd discarded on the hill.

All of these things would be classically dismissed as hallucinations of a crazy person or maybe meaningless coincidences.  Fine, easy enough on paper.  But this was my experience, and these things had and have meaning to me.  What I saw and what I experienced were not mere hallucinations, distortions of some more true, objective reality.  What I saw and experienced was more real than this day-to-day bullshit most of us live.  I was tapped into another realm of existence, one better described by quantum physics and probability than by psychology and mechanistic certainty.

I was in the ward for a week or so, eventually being transferred to a higher functioning unit filled with alcoholics and people who recounted their traumatic stories all day on loop.

After I got out, I spent some time at my parent's house and eventually went back to work part-time, then full time.  And the most painful part of this whole experience?  It's not the psych ward itself or being crazy, it's that all of this had zero consequence, save a few thousand in medical bills.  It's like nothing ever happened.

I returned to work and no one talked about it (at least to me).  Like nothing ever happened.  My phone was returned to me, found by the owner of a local burrito joint I frequented.

That's the basic theme: no one talked about it and nothing ever happened.  Who really wants to go "there" right?  And I can't blame anyone for not wanting to broach those subjects.  Or maybe I'm enacting a confirmation bias and people did inquire and I was the one who didn't want to talk about it.  But, then, how could I talk about it?  Who has the language to accurately describe this stuff, the actual experience of it, when you're in it?

This is not to say I didn't feel supported, because I did and I was.  But that's how it felt to me, like it never happened.  Even my freaking girlfriend at the time, whom I had dated for only a few months before that episode, stayed with me.

And so that's why I'm sharing this with you now, you beautiful bed of nails.  Because if you're reading this and you feel like you're crazy or you've been in a psych ward, know that you are not crazy.  It's the world around us that is crazy.  It is our culture's inability to properly manage mental illness that's crazy.  It's all the fucking pills we take to calm ourselves down, the socially-accepted massive amounts of alcohol we consume to socialize and connect with others, and most especially the things we don't say for shame and fear of reproach that makes us crazy.  If there was less stigma about mental illness, then I believe mental illness would start dissipating on its own.  I believe it is what we are hiding out of fear and shame that drives us nuts.

So fuck this fear and shame based culture; I refuse to live that way any longer.  I will be my true self.  I will learn to speak my truth despite the perceived consequences.   I will learn to share myself and connect with others.  I will learn to receive and give love.  I will learn to live a compassionate life if it kills me.

Of Hierarchies and Holarchies

I was talking last night with a good friend and towards the end of the conversation the topic shifted towards college and employment.

He related a story of a woman he knows who, without a college degree, started working at KFC as a server and eventually worked her way up to the corporate office.  She started at the bottom and worked her way up to the top.

I can relate to this.  I left college halfway though and started working at a temp agency, which had me calling dentists as part of a product recall for a dental company.  That turned into a full-time job with the company, which turned into a job at the corporate office, which turned into the full-time consulting gig I eventually left, more or less, to pursue music.

The idea of working your way "up" - that you start at the bottom somewhere and work your way higher in an organization and / or in life and status, that's the basis of "The American Dream" isn't it?  To make something of yourself from nothing.

It wasn't long before the conversation turned to politics and the thought, "well, the system is fucked up" popped into my head, right before my friend verbalized it.  But what about the (specifically US) system is fucked up?  That's a complicated question that has 320 million answers.

This whole idea of there even being a bottom and a top is the basis of a hierarchy.  A hierarchy as defined by a quick google search is  "a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority."

Reading that definition makes me cringe.  The idea that people or groups are ranked feels unethical and seems to me to be at least partially responsible for some of the toxic attitudes and behaviors that exist in this country.  All I need to do is open up my Facebook feed and I can read any number of articles or posts that make it clear that there are those who are in authority, those with power, and those who are not in authority and who suffer because of it.  It was only recently that I realized my place in the hierarchy as a white cis male...and subsequently realized how that's a contributing factor to why I'm so emotionally messed up sometimes.  But that's a different discussion.

In a ranked system, as above, so below, in order for certain individuals to have power or authority over others, there must exist others who have less or no authority.  In other words, the authority of some is defined be the lack of authority of others.  Both must exist simultaneously in order for the dichotomy to exist, as each defines the other.

This works great for capitalism, right?  My product is better than yours, it's differentiated in the market and so it has value.  Kraft mac & cheese is better than the generic brand by virtue of the generic brand even being called "generic."

Ranking systems help us sort out the big mess that is life, how we make sense of things.  But when we're ranking people, that's a funny thing because, at the end of the day, at the fundamental human level, what makes you so different than me?  Take two random people, a fortune 500 CEO and a homeless person, and put them on a desert island.  What's the difference between them?  Both are living, breathing human beings that eat and shit and have the same capacity for love and the same capacity for suffering and in the end have the same basic needs.  Outside of the system they are the same.  Within the system, they have a rank, which reinforces the system itself.  And where does the system exist?  On paper in the form of laws and regulations, certainly, but I would say it exists even more so in the minds of the people itself, in their attitudes and beliefs about themselves and where they fit into the model.  Racism doesn't necessarily exist on paper but it is certainly alive and well in this country.  So to me, the collective human mind is an operating system whose programming instructions are distributed amongst everyone in the form of attitudes and beliefs, which drive behavior.

I said to my friend, "You know, I read an article someone posted on Facebook the other day about how things are changing, how millennials are fed up with the old model and how the internet is connecting and changing things."  That resonated with me.  I can feel it and I believe a lot of other people can feel it too: things are changing.  They must change or our species will eradicate itself.  But what must change?  The change must be in how we organize the world, how we think about it and our place in it, and especially how we view time.

The way I see it, the most fundamental thing we must deal with is ourselves, which is to say human beings.  On a day-to-day basis, all you ever really deal with are humans - whether that be other humans or yourself.  So why don't we have a more human-centric model, if all there really is, practically speaking, are other humans?  Why does so much hatred exist in the world?  Why do we hate ourselves?  Why can't we see that the other is not separate from self, that they are one complete, connected whole?  And when I say we, I mean I struggle with this as well.

I've spent a lot of time getting deep into the study of music over the past three years.  One thing that became immediately clear to me early on is that music is circular, it is periodic.  That is to say, if I play the note "C" on a piano and play all of the other keys sequentially going in either direction, eventually I'll play another "C" that sounds essentially the same as the original "C."  And yet, the language of music, excepting the circle of fifths, obfuscates the true periodic, circular nature of music.  Instead, it's presented linearly.  The lines on a page of music are, well, lines.  The piano is linear and hierarchically organized, with the white keys given preference, and the key of "C" (and related modes) having preference.  Notes start at "A" and end at "G."

Linear thinking and hierarchies go hand-in-hand.  But why all this linear thinking?  It might sound sound strange to bring religion into this now, but I view the Christian cross, the one that is intended to symbolize Jesus' death and resurrection and all that, as almost more a symbol of linear thinking than anything else.

Whether you believe in Christianity or not, the fact is that the cross is a pair of lines that, well, cross each other.  Lines bread hierarchies.  And where does one of the largest and most historically entrenched hierarchies exist?  The Catholic church.  I don't intend this as a criticism of Christianity or Catholicism, but more to point out the hierarchy of it.  I am criticizing hierarchies and linear thinking.

We think of time as linear.  There's a past and a future and they never connect.  But what in this universe is not circular?  Galaxies swirl.  Even the straightest of roads exist on the curved surface of the earth.  The fucking earth is a sphere that goes around the sun in a circular (OK, elliptical) orbit.  We come back to the same point in space in relation to the sun once a year.  It is the same, but it is different.  It is another "C" that is distinct from the first and yet it's the same "C," to use the music metaphor from above.

So what is the alternative?  Anarchy is one thing that comes to mind, but anarchy is still an "archy" that defines itself by the absence of organization or authority.  In that regard, in my mind, it's just the other side of the hierarchy coin.

Is there a way of organizing that takes into account both the part and the whole, that doesn't have linear ranking but recognizes each part as both a piece of and reflection of the whole and a whole in and of itself?  After all, I can think of myself as having many different levels that have existence in and of themselves but are dependent and interrelated to all other levels without preference.  There's this mind with these ideas, this body sitting here typing them out, the organs and various systems that keep my body operating, the cells that make up those organs, molecules, atoms, etc.  Not to mention the environment in which this body exists, the earth, the air, the sun, other humans.  It's all one connected whole.  All of it is necessary for me to function and exist.

It turns out there is such a method of organization, called a "holarchy."  Where a hierarchy is a linear ranking system with clearly defined tops and bottoms, a holarchy is more like a fractal.  Zoom into any level in a holarchy and you're looking at a whole complete part that reflects both the larger and smaller related wholes.

So how does this apply to humans?  Well, this is where I falter, because I don't know.  Humanity is large and messy and historically violent.  And I can't claim to have any of the answers.  All I know is it seems clear to me that the current way of thinking about ourselves is not working - because the operating system I've been given doesn't work for me - and we need to expand our understanding of what the fuck this spinning ball of life is, beyond traditional concepts and ways of seeing things.  I feel like we're close to some sort of shift, maybe.  But who knows.

I've driven myself crazy thinking about all this stuff and have realized that I need to apply this obsession of deep thinking to something more practical and manageable, lest I wither in a big ball of anxiety and dread.  So I've been looking at music and looking at it very deeply and looking at it without existing language as much as possible.  That it to say, the challenge I've given myself is this: can I produce a theory of western music that doesn't use existing terminology or language as its basis, that doesn't use ratios to describe intervals, that doesn't rely on complex math, and especially doesn't organize things hierarchically?  I believe I've found a way, and that way is to fundamentally never lose sight of the fact that music is circular and that each note, each chord is always played in relation to other notes and other chords.  I believe I can describe music holarchically.  And, I don't know, maybe I think that if we replace notes and chords with humans and societies, maybe a theory like this can have some wider applications.

Until then, you'll find me drawing simple geometric shapes and playing guitar, trying to figure out what all this is for.

The Why

This is my fourth attempt at a blog.  The first I programmed myself in high school before the word "blog" even existed.  It was mostly teenage ranting.  I started my second after I decided to quit my job and pursue music.  That quickly fizzled out when I realized I had no idea what I was doing with my life.  I started my third after six months of sobriety, after a series of life events blew my world apart.  I traded in that blog for more dependency.  And here's the fourth one, 3+ years into the path I chose for myself, the only real decision I feel I've made for myself, a path that's still mostly and dark and murky and fraught with daily struggles.

I thought it was my full-time job that was holding me back creatively, that quitting would free me up to do what I really wanted: create music.  While I have managed to do some of that, the past three years have been mostly a direct confrontation with myself and all the swirling patterns that exist within me and my culture.  

One thing that has been lacking in my life is a sense of purpose.  If I only knew where I was going, why I am existing now, then maybe the obstacles wouldn't seem so huge and impossible to overcome.  Without clear purpose, intention, the core "why" of what I'm doing, everything becomes an obstacle and I'm left overwhelmed by seemingly simple life-things, frozen and unable to connect with others.  

If there's one thing I identify with it's feeling powerless, that I don't have a voice.  So the purpose of this blog is to give myself a voice, a semi-public outlet for what I'm feeling and what I'm struggling with. Because sharing my true feelings directly with most people is too painful.  Because I don't trust people with emotions.  I don't trust my emotions.  

It's when I need to share myself the most that I hide away and lose myself in the murk, able to see other humans but unable to connect.  And I know that there are others out there who feel the same way, as much as I don't want to admit that I'm not unique in what I'm going through.  So if my voice in its many forms can give a little hope or a little bit more vocal power to others, then that right there is some life purpose.

This morning I wrote a little poem type jawn to start off with.  This is where I am at the moment and this is how I feel.  I hope to answer some of these questions as I continue to figure out how to deal with this life thing.  Because to not answer them for me is the loneliest and darkest of slow self destruction processes and I can't live life that way anymore, in silent suffering.

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How will I know myself without pain and suffering?

How will I accept love and compassion when these are the most threatening things of all?

How will I love myself when my culture loves violence and hatred?

How will I exist without these walls of protection?  Will I erode, picked clean by scavengers?

How will I feel good with mostly endogenous chemicals leading the way?

How will I talk to you if I don't have a voice?

How do I choose without the power of choice?

How can I be helped if I feel completely helpless?

How can I desire if it eats me alive, unexpressed and inexpressible?

How can I see you if I can't see past myself?

How can I exist if I don't trust existence?

How do I reconcile I am-ness with ego?

Why is my culture so fucked up about sex when it is the most fundamental thing there is?

Why does sexual abuse exist?

Why can't you see me?

Why can't you hear what I am saying?

How can I help?