I am a very self absorbed creature. Don't get me wrong, the Existential Journey has been going well. I have made more of an effort to reach out to others and my waitressing skills over at SOL are better than ever. By the way, speaking of SOL, The Recruit came back! She had disappeared for 3 weeks but now I know why; last week she showed up with Gout and Pediphilio in a new pair of brown leather, thigh high boots, and a brand new EE cup! It was amazing. And instead of smiling and staring off, uncomfortably, into space, she actually batted her eyes and giggled repeatedly! The Stepford Club really did a number on her. I think it's fascinating, if I didn't love my small breasts and loathe dirty, old, saggy men so much I would go under cover and write a story on the metamorphosis that takes place among Pediphilio's girls. I imagine they all go down to some cellar in a big mansion and are transformed into large breasted, integrated, multicultural robots who are than rebooted and retrained by black mama herself.
Anyways, so I am still pursuing my "pull my head out of my ass" experiment. Life has been good, but the other night I was in the bathroom cleaning and, due to the thin sheet of dry wall that stands between my neighbors and I, I heard my neighbor, Robin, talking to her husband and then, out of nowhere, she started singing to a song I did not recognize, in a rather endearing off-key manner. I smiled to myself, because I absolutely adore my neighbors. Than I started to realize how very, very strange it is that there is a whole story, a lifetime even, 2 actually, that exists on the other side of my bathroom wall, and Hunter and I are completely oblivious to it. Our life, mine and his, is all I know in my small, limited world; our apartment, our food, our music, our schedules. How can there be such a full existence sharing my plumbing?
Every few years I go through a realization that the world does not revolve, completely, around me and each time it is a fabulously refreshing slap in the face. The first time it happened I was in grade school; I realized I was one day going to die and that the rest of the world really didn't give a shit, then I proceeded to cry for the remainder of 4th grade. Another time was when I was 16 and I was sitting in detention in my math class and noticed a poster on the wall of all the stars in our solar system, with a tiny little arrow pointing to a tiny little star and it said "you are here". I loved that poster. I felt this natural high emerging from the divine sense of acceptance that the poster seemed to communicate; it was this great feeling that nothing really mattered as much as I thought it did. I assumed my math teacher put that poster up for me personally.
Unfortunately, in spite of these "realizations," I am still very self-centered. I rest in my own little world and only step outside of it long enough to feel uncomfortable, then, whap, I slam my beautiful front door shut again and ask Hunter if he is up for a game of bananagrams. I settle for the mentality that as long as I live a decent life, as a decent person, then that should be enough. But I find myself still constantly in my head.
The fact is, at this point in my life, I feel as if just being a good person just isn't sufficient. I cry for myself but barely cry for others. I'm so quick to laugh at people but lack the ability to laugh with them. I have this outrageous ego that's badgered incessantly by a protruding inferiority complex. The other day my girlfriend and I were talking about how her cousin, who was an alleged pedophile, died in his apartment and was discovered 3 weeks later, in a state of dreadful decomposition. She said, "a person's death is directly correlated with the way they lived their life." A flash of deaths ran through my head; my grandfather died quickly and painfully from asbestos poisoning, he abused his children and cheated on his very devoted wife, my grandma, who he threatened to abandon after she was hospitalized and given shock treatment for bipolar disorder; my friend's sister rotted away in her room when she was a teenager, it took her family 3 days to find her after she had overdosed on heroin; my old co-worker and ex-member of AA died of a severed artery after his intoxicated girlfriend had stabbed him in the thigh during a drunken fight in their trailer home-this man was a drunk, a drug addict and a compulsive liar. On the other hand, my dear friend Sharon died of cancer, in a beautiful room filled with flowers and people singing to her and holding her hand, she was a magnificent woman, she was colorful, animated and filled with gratitude. Not a day goes by that I don't think about her. If I die tomorrow, how will it reflect the life I'm living? Internal bleeding as a result of self-absorption? Busted brain aneurysm from interminable self-obsession? A woman from my home group had 4 strokes last month, now she is deaf in one ear and was told she would be facing persisting vertigo for the rest of her life. She got up tonight at the meeting and went on for 5 minutes about how grateful she is. That is the kind of person I want to be. At 50, this woman is more beautiful than I have ever been in all my vanity-driven youth.
I'm going to bypass the resolution for the evening and end this blog with a simple good night.
No comments:
Post a Comment