in the valley of the shadow of death

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13680868.post-1150088864976850072006-06-11T23:25:00.000-05:002006-06-12T00:12:08.206-05:00in the valley of the shadow of deathi don't know what to do. i've been drinking. just two beers, but now i'm in that sweaty haze that some people, i suppose, might call 'buzzed'. i think i used to know what that meant. it's bizarre, like in photoshop where you can have layers of varying opacity, it's like this buzzed person lives in one layer and sober me lives in another...and neither of us is whole. this one is more a shadow, the other a shell, like that's what's missing from me when i say i'm always waiting for my heart to arrive. it's horrifying, ripping off the layers of my inhibitions, because this version of me is so *angry*, and so, SO sad. i think i have, in my life, felt one or two moments of full, true joy, but it's as though the rest of me lives at the bottom of a pit where bounteous sunlight is just a point in the distance, like a star. i know it's so hard to hear this over and over again, it loses all meaning...from the inside saying it and the outside hearing it, too, it does. i have spent all my life seeking and yearning for the meaning of this sadness and this anger, and i fear the answer will never satisfy me. i fear i have already found it, and it is nothing more than a sensation, a piercing pain, and knowledge, of being alive. that is good enough to live for, but hardly enough to satiate my thirst. in buddhism, _words of my perfect teacher_, i read of pretas, hungry ghosts, so eloquently described as souls, suffering for their misdeeds, who exist in realms without water, where they can search for a thousand years to find a single drop, and when they do, they cannot swallow it. i feel as though in searching for my water, i have sacrificed the ability to swallow it--as though the fact i cannot sustain both is enough to tell me i *am* in the realm of the hungry ghosts. it's so hard to say exactly what i mean. i fear i have conveyed the emotion and not the truth, the details, the connection/translation to the real world that we live in. perhaps i should say also that i've been gambling. i've lost $500 in a week. not so much, really, in the eyes of a potentially addicted gambler. the only reason i keep playing is to win the money back. i have an idea i can. i've gotten remarkably good at texas hold'em, i've succesfully sworn off blackjack (where i lost 60% of it before wising up), and i've come close to winning a number of quickie tournaments. i have, in fact, won, oh, about $200 or so. it's just that i...well...lost it again, of course. that's the black art of gambling. that's why people keep playing. because you DO win. a lot. you just LOSE it again. but it's not just that. it's the beer. it's the drug. oh, god, does rip me in two. not down the center, or lengthwise, or mind from body. it rips me in layers, like i said before, like peeling a sticker off a piece of paper, leaving both ragged and sheared...shredded. i feel shredded inside. i can't convey such a physical sensation as the alcohol gives me if you've never felt it. it's a crawling sickness that rises from every cell of my body like the dead rising from the earth. it's like every slap or punch i've ever taken, like every insult or leer or turn of the nose, like every broken dream, every forsaken regretted deed...all of them back, rising in the back of my throat, haunting my soul from beyond their shallow graves. oh, but how to bury such things. they should not be buried at all, they cannot be, shambling about, they shall rise. nor, i fear--i know--can they be transformed into beauty. they ARE such stuff as we are made of. i fear and know at times that they are all that we are, that we are piecemeal built of them. it is true that for every cell in our bodies, another cell is dead or dying. we bring into our bodies that which is dead, how should we then call ourselves living? we are in truth made of ash. ah, entropy increases is what they always taught me, but they never teach you that knowledge and thought is ever increasing as well. that former adage has of late failed to impress me. even in misery and disease, surrounded the walls of the valley of the shadow of death, i shall seek to live on--to think and know and see, be it in hell or on earth. people always wonder how god could be so cruel as to cast them into the eternal fires of hell. but perhaps after all it is mercy, is in fact kindness, of the most empirical kind.irahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08126052534311148133noreply@blogger.com