Aren’t mine
I thought I had the moment
I thought I had the time
I thought I had the words to say, but no they were lost- yes mine
I thought I had the moment
I thought I had the day
I thought I would see you take your last breath, but no time got away
I thought I had the moment
I thought I had the time
I thought that I could awake from this night mare
The one where you aren't mine
I’m Debt Free.
I have come to realize that im no longer in debt to the unsolicited gift that i've recieved. This so called "gift" of life has cost me so much, yet I know for a fact that every penny that was once owed, has been paid.
I know this because life has been, and always will be this extremely costly and emotionally taxing thing. The thing that drains my shiny pink piggy bank of things like joy and innocence.
I guess I couldn't recognize how much I owed on a gift that was given to me, and not asked for.
But at least I know that my debt is paid because there is this lingering feeling that maybe, or surely...
life could be a poor investment after all.
Struggles
It's inspiring to reflect on how far I've come in my journey. A few years ago, I found myself ensnared in a web of habits that were dragging down my well-being: pornography consumption, frequent masturbation, and smoking. These behaviors felt like towering barriers, monopolizing my thoughts, sapping my energy, and leaving me in a constant state of guilt and disconnection.
Recognizing that these habits would spoil my life I confided in a friend and joined recovery groups. Others' stories fueled my determination. Over time, healthier habits replaced the old, with mindfulness easing cravings. Breaking free seemed distant, but each small victory weakened their grip.
Challenges emerged, akin to learning math, but setbacks meant progress. Slowly, cravings faded, and healthier choices solidified into lasting habits, reshaping life.
Fast-forward to the present, and I'm confronted with a fresh challenge: making and saving money. This endeavour parallels the struggle of conquering perplexing academic subjects, necessitating strategic planning and unwavering commitment.
With the same tenacity that empowered me to overcome my former habits, I've delved into learning about budgeting, investing, and uncovering avenues for bolstering my income. Much like tackling a complex math equation, understanding the intricacies of financial stability demands patience and a hunger for knowledge.
Additionally, my daily practices underwent a transformation: incorporating fasting, meditation, physical activity, and reading. These rituals promote equilibrium and lucidity, fostering not only physical fitness and emotional health but also intellectual advancement.
Succeeding encompasses more than just giving up negative behaviors; it stands as evidence of one's internal resilience. Every victory emits optimism, extending beyond the initial challenges. Recognizing advancement and fostering personal growth portrays a lively and satisfying tomorrow.
Finally I believe that life is nothing without struggles and problems, this is what makes life amazing. cheers to the struggles of life and overcoming the challenges that life throws at us.
The Late Great Jim Brown
At the age of 87, Jim Brown passed away in his sleep in California
If you are a football fan, then Jim Brown's name is rightly known to you. He had a career starting and ending with the Cleveland Browns, and it's because of him I became a Brown's fan since 1963.
Brown impacted the professional football scene immediately, although when he became Rookie of the Year in 1957, football hadn't caught my attention then.
To put this into perspective, Jim Brown was an All-American when he played for Syracuse in 1956. Again, his rookie award in 1957. He also led the NFL in rushing 8 times. 8-time All-Pro in 1957 to 1961 and 1963 to 1965. 3-time MVP in 1958,1963 and 1965. Top that all off where he rushed for 12,312 yards and scored 126 touchdowns in just 9 seasons. That makes him a remarkable football player.
In truth, he set the bar for future running backs in the game such as Walter Payton, Emmit Smith, Frank Gore, and Barry Sanders to name a few. Currently, he is ranked eleventh all -time rusher. Not bad at all for a man who walked away from the game in 1965.
Walk away he did to have a film career spanning twenty-five films such as 'The Dirty Dozen', '100 Rifles', 'Any Given Sunday' and the original 'Running Man'.
He leaves behind his longtime wife of twenty-six years, Monique Brown, and six adult children.
The photo is a trading card I had for a number of years. In 2000, I went to my first Hall of Fame game in Canton, Oho. The tickets were cheap, but they also had three tents outside of the stadium where Hall of Famers would do autograph signings. You could only sign up for one session back then.
I'm here to tell you I had cards signed by Terry Bradshaw, Jerome Bettis, Dick Butkus, Don Shula and of course, Jim Brown.
It was a stellar two-day event to not just see the game but also the new inductees to the Hall of Fame. Joe Montana, defensive back Ronnie Lott and linebacker Dave Wilcox. Joining them in the class of 2000 were former Raider's lineman Howie Long and Pittsburgh owner Dan Rooney.
Yet for as grand as those times were, the standout is Jim Brown. There will never be another like him.
You Probably Shouldn’t Read This
But I need to get it out.
2023-05-15 A Letter I Will Never Send My Children
Dear Abacus and Samurai:
Ab, you will be 20 this year. Sami, you are 18. I am so sad and disappointed in how Mother’s Day culminated. I hear you saying that it’s all my fault, and I’ve lost your trust and desire to engage in meaningful discourse. And that for the sake of what values your father has taught you, you only continue to engage me out of obligation but no desire for a relationship past the surface. You don’t value my counsel or presence beyond this farce of filial duty. You will show up as required and allow my presence only if I refrain from trying to peel that delicate top layer and stop trying to heal what has been damaged.
Abacus your rage is a scary combination of your father’s and mine. I hope you age out of it like we did. Verbal discourse was never my forte. I’m sure that’s the biggest reason I am still alone after all these years. Well, maybe not, I have plenty of flaws from which to choose.
It’s an impossible feat though, to move forward when everyone is so unwilling to hear me. If you had any idea what it’s been like to be a single mom these past 15 years, with little to no support except my friends. The things I have gone through and done to protect you, I hope you never know.
I try to explain things, to offer you my perspective, and you tell me I am being defensive. You see a tear or hear the shake of my voice because of the depth of the love I have for you, and the sadness I feel about the way things have turned out, and it’s another brick in the fortress you feel you need to build to shield yourself from my emotions. I cry and I’m being manipulative.
I get angry because you tell your father about what happened and he calls me and tells me not to speak, just to listen to him, that I have nothing of value to say and just have to hear him play “knight in shining armor” to you - to rescue you from my emotions - my hurt, pain, and sadness. And I am playing “the victim card”.
After struggling for 13 years as a single mom, you bring another child into my home. Well, a young adult. Unquestioningly, I take her in. So now, I have four children, except one isn’t actually mine, so I honestly don’t know what to do when there is a conflict there. I’m not her mother. She doesn’t pay rent so I’m not her roommate. And these are exactly the kinds of situations I find so difficult.
Yet I am judged and blamed for not treating her as one of my own. Although based on what you’re telling me, she’s lucky, huh?
I suffer from chronic overextension of my finances, aka poverty, except I never tell you how often I didn’t eat so you could. I never tell you how dire things get trying to keep all the bills paid, because there is enough stress in your lives, and you are my children and I want to protect you. I suffer from seasonal depression, but I don’t want to weigh you down with another worry, so never mention how hard it is for me to get to the other side of each winter alive.
But I’m afraid the thing I protected you from was understanding. From learning empathy. If you had any idea how many times I have almost died, but kept going one more second at a time by thinking of you. And how much it hurts to then be rejected and berated and pummeled over the head with my very human missteps and mistakes. But if I try to say, “My life was hard” I’m guilt-tripping you.
I have given you EVERYTHING I could. I have sacrificed pieces of my soul for you. But I never want you to truly understand. I just want you to love me 1/10th of how much I love you. That’s it.
Love always,
Mom
2023-05-15 The Letters I Will Send My Children
Dear Abacus and Samurai:
I am sorry. I did not realize Abacus was so upset about that exchange.
I hope we can still do our little camping trip with the family this summer, including Kim.
I will not speak of anything which may upset anyone.
Love always,
Mom
Dear Kim:
I am sorry you felt unwelcome in our home. I am a pretty awkward human, and I clearly have not entirely figured out how to adult.
I hope you can forgive my missteps and we can move forward in love.
I never meant to make you feel excluded. Please understand it’s a relic of relationships of my era. It’s clearly a dated practice, but there was an understanding that addressing one half of the couple included both halves automatically. That is the only reason I didn’t think to include you specifically on invites and such.
You are always welcome in my home.
Love,
Mee
Defense of the Revolution
We are being saved,
we are being wakeful against the drag of sleep,
we are lying on a made bed and outside there is a
thunderstorm and we are
looking out the window at the rain
and in the on/off of the floodlights flicking through
the palm fronds
we decide it is the hand of god
moving the particles of our existence
finally
making known what was always ignored.
There are afternoons and evenings where I give in and let the encroaching twilight wraps its warm arms around and around me, creeping in from the edge of my vision and filling up my throat and pores and wringing my guts into stillness, this blessing of calm this treasure of nothingness and think I hope you die I hope we both die.
Where is the comfort in this world,
in this modern world?
Where is the embrace of centuries, the chain going backward and outward?
Sometimes they find men buried in the glaciers
of Switzerland or the Tyrol,
ancient and preserved, withstanding alone the sun coming up
going down
the stars wheeling overhead, the river of milk
moving so imperceptibly it feels permanently in place,
as though the world we know and the skies we search
were the same as his,
even if it is hard to imagine now a shallow, warm sea
covering Nebraska.
After all, even the Grand Canyon started as a raindrop-
-even the cruel English barons of Ireland dream of their grey home when they sleep-
[last night I dreamt of an apple, red and the size of a breast, and when I cut it open the flesh inside was black and sweet, this is the apple of discord, I thought and ate the whole thing, core and seeds and stem, and in the morning I woke up and vomited black bile into a marble sink.]
this panoply of color
the Ishihara test of the human spirit,
the bitter apple ash on the tongue of the race.
We stay up late, all mankind, ekeing out one more moment, one more instance of meaning
before we surrender to sleep, to wash it all away,
the morning finds us all newborn and helpless, motherless, fumbling with heavy lids
for the breast, for the song-filled voice, the blood that is our blood, the last time we were anything but our lonesome selves: someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's everything.
Our culture tells us, shows us in multiple ways, that the weak are left behind,
that a millstone will pull upon all our necks and together into the tar we will sink
singing glory glory glory.
What a miserable world we have made for ourselves, the snapping of human bonds sound like gunshots (otters hold hands in their sleep so they do not drift away from each other)
or a broken femur, which 15,000 years ago was set by unknown caring hands and its owner tended to and healed and so was able to get up and walk out into the mountains of the old world and fall into a glacier and die and see the sun again in this new world unimaginable even to our parents,
and if not for those hands there would be no modern world.
For good and all-
sometimes I laugh for no reason I can recall
sometimes I cry
or sleep and dream of glaciers in my guts, of Catholic peasants cutting turf
and falling into peat bogs
lungs filling, all the colors detonating across the shut eyelids, the pounding of the earth's heart in the ears so loud it cracks the skull and the brain shines out like a diamond in the wastes of Kimberley, gripped by dirty, unpaid hands and wrenched from the claws of continents to settle fine and unjust in the coronet of a far master.
But it is beautiful to live, to live in beauty itself,
to lie on a made bed and think about the grass
drenched and drinking
the soil beneath becoming slurry, the worms writhing in mud,
the roots of palm trees and jacarandas swelling and gorged,
to think of the world without my place in it, because we shall all be forgotten in time
until the day when our glaciers recede
and unrecognizable beings crowd around our fleshed mummies and poke and prod and wonder
why no one set the bone.
Truth
you’re not real
my version of you is simply
a perception created to please myself
or is this the best design?
I wonder how you see me
does it matter
what if you see me as perfect?
does that make it real?
what if I like your model better?
could I accept it as my own?
after all you don’t have to see something
with your own two eyes
to believe that it’s truth