[I] may be crazy but I'm the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.

05 May 2010

Final Straw

Every artist knows that a song isn’t a song until somebody sings it and a story isn’t a book until somebody reads it.

Dear sweet readers, by enjoying and responding to both my daily blogs and the first five chapters of The Movie Lovers, you have given me three and a half glorious months of heaven, a kind of virtual publication, which for me has been an experience not to be missed. Thank you, all, from the center of my writer’s heart.

I have pursued what I believed was the right path for me with purpose and ferocious desire and it led me here to you, but now it leads me away. I’ve reached a crossroads and find I must turn where I had planned to go straight. As for tonight’s blog title and song, both from Snow Patrol’s Final Straw album, that’s what I drew a week ago. I just didn’t know it. But the shaman did, and we all know what happens with the last straw.

I have reached a point where there aren’t enough indulgences or vices or fuck-ups; no matter what I do to endure or escape or decorate my life, I come back to the same unsatisfied place. When the Buddha met this realization, he renounced everything. I am no Buddha and I am not renouncing everything, just everything I have known and desired up to this point in my life. It is enough.

Here is the last of what I will be posting from The Movie Lovers, at least for the time being. It’s a paragraph from the middle of Chapter 6, One Easy Thing. I know some of you read it at my last posting, but I repeat it again with purpose.

In college I earned money as an art model, dropping my fuzzy yellow bathrobe (a favorite cast-off of my auntie’s) to pose on a dais. One artist, a quiet man in his forties who worked in pen and ink on toothy white paper, invited me to the opening of his show. “I drew you as Caesar,” he said. It wasn't the androgynous cast of my face that occasioned his portrait. It was what he saw behind my face, behind my every nude pose. “It's the purpose in your gaze,” he said, “your ferocious will.”

Being outwardly naked and inwardly ferocious is no longer sufficient for my life, not even metaphorically, not even if I wanted it to be. I signed on to learn from a shaman because I have things to do that, no matter how ferocious I am, I cannot accomplish with what I know now, with what I do now, with what I believe now. God knows if I could, I certainly would.

So I leave you with Smashing Pumpkins, because I know that everyone of you knows how this feels:

The world is a vampire, sent to drain.
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames.
And what do I get for my pain?
Betrayed desires, a piece of the game.
. . . .
Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.
. . . .
Now I’m naked
nothing but an animal.
But can you fake it
for just one more show?
And what do you want?
I want change.
And what have you got
when you feel the same?

I came to the shaman for change, and then like all seekers, I told him I wanted to be able to act the same. I didn’t actually say this - I’m no idiot - but I might as well have; my actions said it.

Bottom line? I have been told to cease and desist my online nakedness. I will still be writing but I will not be posting, not for the foreseeable future. So this is goodbye.... I sincerely hope that you, my dear sweet readers, have experienced some sense of having been seen and known as you have read my story and Jose’s, for while the words may have been about me and my departed friend, they are intended to reach out to you, all of you, who may be feeling secretly exposed and yet unknown and wishing to be heard.


You can still find me on Twitter @SinsoftheEldest
and also on BLIP.fm @4Sins.
If I start up MyZeroBDayBlog again, y’all will be the first to know.

Peace out,
Dina

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2 comments:

  1. Tell The Shaman he's full of _____. This medium
    is a healthly and self-introspective way of self-healing..it's your escape. I'm so dissapointed. You know, although wer'e strangers in essence, I truely care about you..
    Now I really feel like going for a long walk..
    gotta chill..(huffs & puffs)....

    ReplyDelete