The Eleventh Hour, Sixteen Minutes

Lately my friends have been telling me something that I used to take as an insult.  They're calling me "soft-hearted" and "big-hearted" and shit like that.

Them's used to be fightin' words.  I'd throw down over being called something like that.

I'm an evil, mean-spirited man, goddammit!  I want to do terrible things to you in your sleep and I drive a creepy van around quiet neighborhoods at night.  I'm not "soft-hearted" or whatever that means.

A bunch of years ago, I watched something play out at a card game that reminds me of this.  It was Chris and Ed.  Eddie was a backwoods redneck and Chris was a scruffy, dirty, smelly, lying thief. He had a thing for hookers and for him, the lower they were, the better. Seriously.  He was a piece of crap.

But anyways, these two were playing cards.  Eddie was drinking and Chris was on whatever drugs he had gotten ahold of that night.

Eddie sets the cards down, burps, looks at Chris and says, "Goathead."

Don't EVER call somebody Goathead.  Chris was highly offended.

"Asshole!"

Eddie, not to let it go, countered with, "Dick!"

"Fucktard!"

And it escalated.  The two went back and forth, trading insults.  Eddie pulled out a Buck hunting knife and slapped it on the table, and took another slug of the cheap whiskey he'd been swilling all night.

"Fuck you, you fuckin' fuck!"  And Chris stood up.

Eddie burped again, blinking, while holding up a finger.

"Wait a minute," he said.  "Let me speak good English."

Eddie pushed the cards closer to Chris and said, slowly, "Go ahead."

You never know what somebody means when they say something because words can get jumbled on their path from our brains to our tongues.  It makes communication a real bitch.

But yeah, my friends have been calling me "soft-hearted" a lot lately.  I get attached to women quickly and deeply.  I'm stupid that way.

I try not to be an emotional moth on a suicidal run into a halogen lamp.  I really do.  In recent months, I've met a lot of women who were looking for something.  A couple really got some good shots in that I just had no defense against.

In those times, I learned a few things.  I can't tell the difference between a woman teasing me, flirting with me. toying with me, taunting me, or rubbing my face in who and what I am.  Over the years, I've had women do all of those things to me.  I had one woman, years ago, who felt the need to really show me cruelty.

This woman would rub my belly and tell me how badly she needed sex.  And on the next day, she would tell me about how her boyfriend tore her up.  Then, she would pout and say, "But you don't have anyone, do you, Ted?  You're alone.  All alone.  What did you do last night, hmm?"

And then she'd laugh and walk away.

I have more stories like that than I'd care to admit to or recount.  I'm an easy target for these women. I realize that.  I'm getting better at ignoring them, too.

I met someone very recently and she and I have been chatting every day.  In our first chat, on the day we met, we chatted for about six hours.  In that time, I had a lightbulb moment about my own life and the patterns in it.  Specifically, one pattern in particular that really bothered me.

This was an incredible feeling.  I told my friends as if I'd discovered gold in my flower pots.  It was a Eureka! moment for me and I was proud and happy.

This never would have happened had I not met this woman.  It never would have happened had she and I not had hours of frank and candid conversation without filters.  Those conversations were important and productive for both of us.


Seventeen Minutes....


I was told recently not to label myself.  It's hard because I'm used to it.  I'm used to derogatory labels telling me I'm a "trainwreck" or "damaged goods."   It's easy for me to go back to those labels time and again.  The real struggle has been going forward without them.

I'll admit that it was a bad idea to have given up on everything all those years ago but I honestly couldn't think of anything else to do.  Everything had failed up to that point.  Because every path had led me to nowhere, I just figured I'd run my course, and it was getting close to Checkout Time.

But that was a long time ago and I'm still here.

One of my biggest fears is the cosmic joke I seem to be confronted with time and time again.  In this case, the joke would take the form of my purpose on this planet being fulfilled just as I begin to discover happiness and POOF I'm gone.  Just like that.

Maybe that's why I'm alone.  This way, I can't drag anybody down with me.  Nobody gets hurt.  It's a clean finish with no survivors left behind to mourn.

Sam Kinison was killed by a drunk driver just a few weeks after getting married.  John Candy died just before he was to begin a radical exercise and diet program.  Life is full of those cosmic jokes and death seems to always be the punchline.

So, I decided to pull out of this tailspin.  I don't know why.  I don't.  I have no idea why I'm doing this.  

I'm sorry I'm bouncing around so much.  I know this is hard to follow.  I've written this a dozen times and in so many ways, but it's all jumbled.  My mind is jumbled.  I'm so sorry.  These past few weeks have been so very hard on me and people have been bugging me about finding hope or whatever.
And anymore that seems to be the only thing that makes me angry.  I don't give two shits about much of anything but if you talk to me about hope, I'm ready to take the gloves off and throw down.

My brain has been a very ugly place.  And instead of dealing with it I've been filling my head with as much distraction as possible.  Cartoons, food, idle chat, games, re-run movies, old crap on television, and numbing substances I really shouldn't be doing.  Anything but dealing with reality.

Anything.

And I just can't withdrawal far enough away.  I can't.  Everything is too much and I can't get away from any of it.  I just want to unplug for a while and I haven't been able to do that.  I feel like I'm under siege by the world and it just won't leave me alone.  That's why I don't go outside much.  That's why I don't talk to anybody on the phone but for a phone call to my mother every ten days or so just to let her know I'm alive.  Those calls usually last no more than three minutes.

Is it possible to be hurling out of control towards two very different fates simultaneously?  Because that's what this feels like.  Something is going to happen and I'll be standing on the last brick before the abyss on two paths.  I don't have much time left, either.  I'm on the last last chapter of the story or the last chapter in the book.  Or the first chapter in a new series.    

What the "Long-View" Means to Me

I don't get too excited about certain things.  And often I find much of what people do to be meaningless and boring.

But I'll let you in on a secret--I've been here before.

When I was just 3 1/2 years old, I used to have a nightmare over and over again.  In this nightmare, I was bound at the hands and feet with rough, abrasive rope.  I was under water, next to the wooden hull of a ship, and I was struggling for air.  Panicked.  Desperate.

Then I'd wake up.

And I was just 3 1/2 years old.  I swear, this is the truth I'm telling you.

I didn't know what that dream meant until I was in college and somebody explained to me what keel-hauling was and how horrible it was to die that way.

There's more.  Lots more, really.  But it's too personal and I'm not going into it here.  Needless to say, however, there were other lives.  Other deaths.  And there was a soul-mate.

So yes, I take the long-view of things.  I don't need to sow my wild oats, I don't need to do a lot of things to sieze the day.  I don't feel the need to go out and "live life to the fullest" because honestly, unless there's something in it for my soul, I'm not interested.

And this is important for you to understand--I'm here for my soul.  I'm on this plane of existence because of the lessons my soul needs to learn as I journey through this world.

I'm not here for fun, I'm not here to get laid, and I'm not here to party.

I have nothing to prove to you.  Please don't take that to mean I don't care about you, it just means I don't feel the urge to show off, and I'm not interested in following the crowd.  Just because you're doing something doesn't mean I'm going along with you.  I've got my own path.

I'm here for my soul.

This is why I look for love, not some good time.  This is why I'm looking for that emotional bond before anything else.  This is why I do things with my heart firmly committed.

It's also why it's hard for me to feel passionate about things.  I'm selective and choosy.  But when I do, it's deep.  When my heart is in something, you'll know it.  You won't be able to ignore it.  And if you're close enough to me, I'll drag you with me in my wake.

I've gone through past-lives regression therapy.  I've done self-hypnosis as well.  Those helped me piece together random memories I've had with re-occuring dreams until I was able to put together a narrative that made sense.

What I can tell you is this--I have some bad karma from past lives to work through and I made some mistakes.  Plus, I did some things out of love most would never understand.  Because of that bad karma, there have been some issues in my life to work through.

One of the reasons I'm so nice to people is because I don't want to add to my bad karma that follows me around life to life like a stalker.

I cringe when people tell me I only have one life to live and to make the most of it.  I've already done that a few times.  I know why I was keel-hauled.  And I've killed plenty of people.

But there were some problems.  I made choices based on fear and rage.  The result was carnage and bloodshed.

So, I'm here to learn how to be a better person.  I'm here for a few other reasons I'm not going to get into right now.

But please don't tell me I only have one life to live.  Please don't tell me the seize the day.  I promise you--I've seized more days than you can count and I've lived lives on an edge you'd never understand. I have memories of events that are soul-crushing and heart-breaking.

I refuse to be stuck in those past lives or be held hostage by them but I need to know what I'm supposed to learn so I can stop going around and around the block.  There is somebody on the other side of the veil waiting for me to get my shit together and I'm here alone until that happens.

So that's my quest.

Before you write me off as some guy with a mental problem or a writer posting experimental fiction, I'm going to tell you a true story.  I swear, it's all true.

I used to play around with something called remote viewing.  Remote viewing is when you project your mind on a distant place and see what's going on.  That's the simple version.  I was also practicing astral projection at the time.  Those stories are for another time.

But with remote viewing, there is something called "beginner's luck" where your first serious effort gains results, and then you spend months trying to get back to that point in your list of skills.  It's weird.

At that time, in college, I had a girlfriend who broke up with me because she met somebody else.  She broke up with me, headed right for his dorm room, and started fucking him.

How do I know?

I remote viewed.  It was traumatic as hell, too.  It really messed me up to watch the woman I cared about and had just broken my heart having sex with another man.

But I was a kid with serious issues back then.  So, I did what you do when you're a kid with issues and you've had the experiences I've had--I told her all about it a few days later in an online chat.  I told her what I saw, the positions, the print on the bed sheets, details about his dorm room.

She freaked.  She thought I was just a nutcase and there were cameras in the room.  She accused that guy of making a video of the two together and he thought I'd sneaked in a spy camera of some kind.

Why?  Because I was right.  I was right about a long list of details that could only be known if I was actually there or had taken pictures with a camera.  Nobody believed it was remote viewing.

I've walked a dark path for a long time and I'm trying to not go back to that.  I've gone a great distance in my life to get to this point and I've still got a long ways to go.  But I'm doing the footwork and I keep my focus on the long-view.

Right now, I'm struggling to take the next steps.  My friends are there for me.  I'm lucky to have the best friends in the world.  After you've spent enough time in the darkness, it calls to you when you're not there, it beckons with a smile and a promise of peace.  It's a lie.  I can say that now.  It took me a long time to figure that out.