And the coffee helped and talking to someone more wobbly than myself helped, and having a small dog puke up a semi-digested spider on my foot helped. Whatever takes us out of a certain loop of thinking, whatever erodes selfishness, whatever pushes self-pity or brooding aside.
Whenever I find myself on a certain switchback between old relentless memories and dread of the future, it is always key to ground myself in the here and now, and look at what I can change and not at what I can’t. Octavio Paz:
“Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down,
we don’t move, today is today, always today.”
Someone in some cosy nook of cyberspace is trying to sell copper ashtrays to me at a discount (I don’t smoke, I don’t need ashtrays, I think of copper ashtrays as ugly and irrelevant to my corporeal existence) and I spam him or her or it each day and they just pop up again. When I first began posting on the Internet, I believed that if I was cautious and reticent and guarded enough, I could protect myself from the obsessed and inappropriate and transgressive. Now I know better. If someone wants to seek me out or pester me, there is nothing I can do to pre-empt them or discourage them. What I can do is track down their Internet provider and complain, or call in the police if I know the identity. Bar mails through my spam filter. Or just keep zapping the mails into spam.
When I listen to anyone who has a life given over to craving and schemeing and uselessly fighting cravings and pointlessly hoping the cravings will give up and go away, I take in a deep breath and feel so grateful I could weep and shout with joy and dance. For me the war is over. I must have spent hours of each waking day in debate with myself about where the next drnk would come from, whether I should drink before noon, whether I dared have another and another after that, hoping I would stop before I died, knowing I did and didn’t want to stop. Alcoholism was my inner civil war and nothing changed until I gave up.
GIFT
Some ask the world
and are diminished
in the receiving
of it. You gave me
only this small pool
that the more I drink
from, the more overflows
me with sourceless light.
- R. S. Thomas
I don’t really get why you are picked on in cyberspace. The only times that it’s happened to me have been so minor that ‘delete’ and it was gone. It’s good to be boring (me) I guess.
you are one of my saviours. i just wanted you to know. i read you every day and i gain in my struggle from what you say, what you experience and how you grow. thank you from the bottom of my heart, for being here and being you and sharing as you do.
linda
Linda, comments like yours give me a reason to blog.
Thanks so much.
I get the spam comments on the blog–Japanese porn sites it appears–but I delete those because of comment moderation.