|
| Back on track with a whack attack. Come join the fun at:
www.xanga.com/mckrlshrk2_0
Good to be back,
A. Rust
| | |
| I can't believe how far I've traveled since I started you almost two years ago. I took my name for you from my Yahoo mail account that I started in high school, and in retrospect that was a highly symbolic choice, because the journey I've charted out on you has been a journey from the me of my childhood. I started this blog as a boy I leave as the vague outline of a man, or at least the beginings of one.
When I graduated from high school a friend of mine wrote a note in everybody's year book, "Don't become somebody new, become the more of the you you always were." There was a great deal of wisdom in that statement which I am only now learning. I'm now less of what I always thought I had to be and beginning to become the me I always was. I'm discovering that to completely believe what's wonderful about yourself you have to go through the muck of what's awful about yourself. To understand how beautiful the smell of rose is, you have to walk through shit.
I plan on keeping you going, if just to remind myself, to steal from Nizar Qibanni, "of your beauty and my madness." Because you are beautiful mckrlshrk, exceptionally beautiful but I was quite mad for beginning you. I had so many monsters lurking in my closet when I started. And for the first time I know regret, but they are not "socially acceptable" corrects to be sure, at least where I come from they're not. Just between you and me, you should know them:
1) I regret not connecting with people more.
2) I regret listening to my parents too much.
3) I regret not having sex sooner.
4) I regret being too Christian instead of taking the long way around and being human.
And finally the most important...
5) I regret believing the lie that you should have no regrets.
And that is probably my best, and last, bit of Xanga wisdom. Never, ever, EVER, believe the lie that says have no regrets. Regrets show you were invested in something of value and they are clear markers that show the points in your life where growth occured (i.e.- The things that make a life lived as opposed to passively accepted).
And that, dear Xanga, is about it, I'll be sure to come back and look at you from time to time, look at friends sites, but I don't think I'll be writing on you anymore, except maybe to leave a post to a blog that I start up elsewhere. This phase of my life is officially over and I am greatful that you were a part of it. Take care mckrlshrk. God speed, and God bless.
Introspectively yours,
A. Rust
| | |
| If there is a God it's a very Buddhist kind of God.
*** Fun fact: when I talk with non-Christians I can use all the Christian language I want, when I talk with Christians I can use only Christian langauge. Intellectual emaciation and linguistic incest is fun. *** In the final analysis if the world is only material or has an element of the transmaterial is immaterial. What are you doing to make the world a better place? *** Why is it the further and further I get away from the religion of my childhood the more Joshua of Nazareth (to use his Jewish name) becomes a man I can respect and want to emulate? *** There are two kinds of people: those who think in binary opposites and those who don't. *** If you're having goyim problems I feel bad for you son, I've got 99 mashugnas but a shiksa ain't one. *** Two men I feel bad for: Paul of Tarsus and Friedrich Nietzsche. They share more things in common than we would expect: colossal arrogance, a biting sense of irony, and a long line of interpreters who put their words to ends that would make them roll over in their graves. This probably explains the latter's unmitigated loathing for the former, we generally prefer a self reflection as opposed to an honest one.
| | |
| Whose life this is I wish I knew
I'm told it's mine. But passing through,
(Or by) might be more exact when
Comparing my sense of am to my act of do.
What little I've found is bad or worse
And though the facade is well-rehearsed
Beneath it I've hidden grinding cracks
Of painful discontinuity
I can't go back down the road
To tell the I I was the I I'll be
And let me know the painful truth:
The you you don't admit you are
Is the you that you become
The life ahead is dark and deep
With miles to go before I sleep
With miles to go before I sleep
Yeah... it's kind of like that,
A. Rust
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
-Robert Frost
"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
-Paul Laurence Dunbar
"We Wear the Mask"
| | |
| So somewhere from the deepest nether regions of my psyche is arising something wholely unexpected:
Self-confidence.
But a different sort of self-confidence than I used to have.
The old self-confidence was in knowing what I knew and knowing it better than the people around me so as to keep them distant.
Old habits die hard, I still find myself doing that.... a whole honking lot.
But this old form of limited self-confidence is transforming into something altogether new: a more complete, more vibrant self-confidence that can allow people closer.
It's weak, it's feeble, but as it toddles forward into the light of full realization I'm realizing that in the long-run it's more healthy, more complete, more human.
More of what I always was to begin with.
It's a start, it's a living.
Introspectively yours,
A. Rust
"Don't forget who's taking you home
And in whose arms you're gonna be
So darling, save the last dance for me."
-Michael Buble
"Save the Last Dance for Me"
| | |
|
