Into the Light

Reality is motherfucking scary stuff.
Christ.

Was talking to an old friend the other day.
He observed I seem so much at peace these days it's startling.
I told him I still have a lot of turmoil inside, but I've resolved a lot of my fighting with so many different fronts in the world.
It was a relief, clichéd as it sounds, to admit my life was out of control.
The need to pretend and rationalize and justify and spin and white knuckle control a life that was dangerously careening out of control had exhausted me. I could only sleep with the help of alcohol or other "sedatives" as the big book puts it.
I collapsed inside the doors of *********** and ** days later....finally slept for the first time in over a decade.

He said he misses the crazy madman that lived the life he told other guys about not so long ago, but I had to remind him the last 6 months of it was growing reckless and not just audacious, but ignoble.
The rollercoaster was running off the tracks.

If I stop and think, I do perhaps miss some of the wild times, but whether it is desensitization to increasing stimuli and adrenaline, or maturity gleamed through hard fought experience and tribulation, the cheap thrills no longer thrill. The expensive mistakes were growing astronomically more expensive.
The reckless abandon was more like calculated risk with that creeping suspicion that one of these times, they were going to take your set of dice away permanently.
I find it difficult to not see the façade of artificial and chemically induced happiness or escape.
The vague and somehow gaunt stare of eyes not seeing another plane or another realm, but actually disappearing into the void. Moments not to be remembered, not to be reclaimed, forever wasted in time.
I spent over a decade of my life in the abyss and despite whatever boredom I now face, my time is truly my own. I don't spend time ravaging myself, endangering my life (or others), nor struggling in the hell mouth of hangover barely living until my body briefly recomposes equilibrium until I drown it in some substance again hoping to escape emotionally but only succeeding in further deepening the descent when I return to the surface.

At the end of the day, what began as making things more fun, brighter, a bit of theater or magic or whimsy as Blanche DuBois might say, ended up becoming a crutch and an escape from reality and a growing neuroses of my mind and spirit.
I woke up in a deep, dark pit, with my utter doppelganger standing over me. It took almost everything from me, wanting ultimately, just that....me. The true nature of who I was and could be, my utmost potential.

The days are not all great, but my worst days now pale in comparison to the way they used to be.
 
Good luck and happy hunting,
         - Yrs. in Christ

From over at Hawaiian Libertarian:
"“My dad is stupid.”
“My dad doesn’t like to be with us.”
“My dad doesn’t like it at home.”
“My dad is a control freak.”
"I'm not allowed to talk to Dad when he's working."
"I'm not allowed to talk to Dad when he's watching TV."
"Dad never does anything."
"I don't know my dad's first name."
"Dad never talks to Mom."
"Dad likes his car better than us."
"Dad never takes us anywhere."
"Dad doesn't like to sit with Mom."
"Dad likes his computer more than Mom.""


spotted this gem over at RooshV.

The real world contemporary examples of the below go on and on and on anon.......

"At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow."

Reminds me of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

"A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it."

And it ends with sage and profoundly prophetically damning words of warning:
"Now that women have the political power to obtain their just rights, they will begin to lose their old power to obtain special privileges by sentimental appeals. Men, facing them squarely, will consider them anew, not as romantic political and social invalids, to be coddled and caressed, but as free competitors in a harsh world. When that reconsideration gets under way there will be a general overhauling of the relations between the sexes, and some of the fair ones, I suspect, will begin to wonder why they didn’t let well enough alone."