Idioms and Idiots- A blog forming.

I do not like blogs. I don't like the word, the concept nor its usual execution and popular purposes. For instance, I have no time or money saving food recipes to entice a reader in with, I am bereft of handicraft skills or any technical knowledge, so there will be no DIY moments littered throughout. I am adverse to the very idea that I have something to say that would be of more importance than the next person with a "url". I am not popular, I influence no one and I have never held any positions of "importance" - power or privilege. Furthermore, the word "blog" is far too close to the words "blob" and "bog", objects and places to be avoided at all costs. Both denote a quality of personified inanimate voracity; as if it will unwittingly (yet sinisterly) draw one in and hold one there with an unrelenting grasp.

I will not hold anyone hostage with my verbiage. I am not deluded into thinking that my words hold power. I am not aiming for "captivating" either, as that just glorifies the same notion of manipulating someone away from their own will or desires, or what is in their best interest. Go; do your dishes. Walk your dogs. Do those taxes.  “Netflix and chill”, even.  This is simply a suggested stop-gap.  A “photo finish” win over scrubbing bathroom grouting with an old toothbrush. In short, what I aim to do is simply to make “public”/conscious that which we all must at some point in life; to face myself fully, vulnerably; and with some modicum of self-deprecation, wit and unabashed honesty. These words are not the wax for the poetic, nor slick with the lube of self-deceit and half truths to placate and probe a fragile ego. Truth be told, these words may surprise the reader. I am tired in my older age and I do not have the energy any longer to romanticize my mistakes and poor decision making.

It may horrify to hear how I address all facets of my aberrant self with both immense awe and abhorrence. I have done things few would even dream of doing, being that I am so in conflict with the "sense" common to most everyone else. I have lived with reckless abandon, little to no self preservation, and with wavering humanity. Anyone with wisdom would live the rest of their lives in atonement for karma accrued. I stagger forward with self-contempt and resignation; yet with a renewed curiosity in the road to salvation. Could my atonement as a single parent (woman and black) be to raise a good human and slip behind him through the pearly gates, as one would hack a turnstile in the subway? If I am good enough to him, would he petition on my behalf? I dare not explore the other saturnalian options, even in jest.  Could his skin stretch to keep me both warm and hidden like a “Wolf in sheep’s clothing”? 

I hastily started this blog and in re-reading it, I realized that it could be read as me being treacherously close to a ledge. I was, actually. I am still. I have always been that way; born that way. This is why I have lived a life of such reckless abandon. Like the fool card in the tarot I stepped off the precipice willy - nilly, dragging the innocent along with me. In taking a step back, I realized that the internet is an unforgiving place, and that what is written now in haste may come back to both myself and son in unimaginably unkind ways. In revision, I realized that I, myself; had been unkind and lacking gratitude to those that wanted to save this distressed damsel, before realizing that I may have actually been the mirage before the mirror demanding compliance to my being the "fairest" of them all; while in a wild wood somewhere, the real queen romps with several homunculi, waiting to one day take her rightful throne.

I dunno. I oscillate between heroine and horrid, as is evident as we move through these tentative inscriptions. I will keep what I wrote in italics below, because it is still true to "yesterday's" me. It is now just being framed by this forway into literary foreplay as the blog is mastabatory at best. A place where I finger through the index of all my life's triumphs and trauma. I will go in and out of readability no doubt, as I struggle to stay tantrically "present" and "relevant". That might not always mean in terms of a linear time leading to the "now"; but rather what is pertinent to me. So, I venture back to the ledge below and will redirect in the continuing posts hopefully finding firmer footing and going forward from there as far as intention toward an artful and accurate re/telling of my story; but God only knows where I will go in terms of destinations along this journey.  

‘“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward” -Soren Kierkegaard

Is there a governing plot to "Life"? Is there a formula for finding its ultimate meaning? Is life only to be lived forward with staggering purpose and seemingless endless edits; or backward with ponderous regard; regret and shouts for restitution for a life ill used? Is it in retrospect, described by the acts leading to death? To "be" something, "become" something, "perform" something until we die "something"...or nothing? Am I the culmination of cautionary tales, or something far more tragic? A prophecy? A harbinger of doom? Is my entire existence foreboding? Who determines if a life is worth having been lived? The age and ilk of the corpse, or the lives they influenced while sanguinated and animated. Am I the anti-hero to a story I dare not finish on my own? and why should I? If "many hands make light work" then a grave is dug far faster when everyone at the funeral has their own shovel. And my eyes, glazed and glassy, gaze heavenward as I hold court from six feet below. An amphitheater for a single performer. My final show.

No doubt parts of this will read as a love letter to all of those who have wished me ill. Who have glared an evil eye; and who have cast the darkest of spells over me. To you who did not anticipate that your mere apathy of me was a compliment to my own self-loathing, and your spite was a soothing balm to my soul. Your rancorous glances were my rose colored glasses, your incantations a mere derivative of my own divinations; thus an incomplete recipe. You see; I have tasted the blood from the self inflicted lip bite of both gratitude and grief. I have kissed the knuckle ring of the king who enslaved me; and I have complimented the shoulder breadth of the ax wielding executioner. Now is no different. I envy you your subjective hatred of me, where once again; I have not been included; otherwise, we would have made a cohesive objective whole. With myself at the center "hole" of the "Whole"; holding the organism together. Interlocked as we sing in unison around the pyre my body still smulders. Instead, your piercing and unyielding gaze gives our meta-malice away. Russian dolls of the "loathed" and "loathing;" "insiders" and "outsiders", "exterior" and "interior"; "container" and the "contained".

This is my bark which is less than the bite I offered to all of the hands that tried to feed me - a feral monster.  I was born under an auspicious moon and for my entire life, I have heard the howls of the many wolves inside me vying for my undivided attention and unconditional love.  How could those who tried to get close to help me up not see that they were in fact, not only a part of the pack, but also feeding the very beast that kept me down?  But then again, there are those that were so eager to show me how to pull myself up by my "bootstraps"  and were the same ones whose boot was crushing my neck; keeping me down and making it hard for me to breathe. The very same that then have the audacity to reel in appall at my snarl of ingratitude. And yet, even that relationship was catastrophically and comorbidly consensual.  Poverty and "internalized racism" make for contradictory and perverse bedfellows. I will address that more in regards to my romantic relationships, a microcosm of these very systems of oppression. In short, I was raised to feed the machine.  I was not a cog, a sprig nor sprocket therein.  I was the grist, not the fodder for the mill.  Crushed into something usable vs. utilitarian.  The chaff to juxtapose the wheat.  And much like the chaff, I am not easily digested and hold little nutritional value. 

And so it goes. This is my shout into the ether.  It is my signature "Tracie Wuz Here '' in scraggy etchings on a bathroom stall wall at a reststop somewhere in the midwest - on a long haul toward either coast; the road that promises not just civilization, but sophistication; metropolitan luxury and refinery. But to what part of speech do I address all aspects of self? Me, as seen through the eye of your eye, shrouded by their awakening, shuddering from our own benevolent godly touch.  I am the loathingly detached narrator with the most intimate knowledge of the personal "sacred" and "sacrilege" - used to steer the reader to a greater truth outside these words and perhaps even outside themselves.’

My "voice" has never wavered as much as it does now, but I be DAMNED if MY story is written by those who have only experienced it from the sidelines or not at all - only retold from hearsay and gossip like a childish game of telephone. This is MY journey away from hurt and into healing; from confusion to conclusion.  I do not doubt at times that the stories will have some relatability, and I am willing to share those moments with the reader. But I have lived this, bled this and am doing so again clawing for closure for myself and cautioning others with an aggressively red "Achtung" as I recount what in my healing journey was not effective. I bleed again as I write about what I did, wish I had done and what I wish I still could do, thereby honoring the ancestors before me and the ones to come - beginning at our collective one and ending with "the last man standing". Let this be a roadmap stretching in either direction radiating from my heart space with an honest intention for all of humanity. #nofilter