The Season of the Ouroboros

I come to this weekly practice every week doubt-stricken, fumbling to render visible the incredible bevy of feelings that I experience. Each week, I begin by questioning my own ability to keep going. I continue by doubting that I will bring the feelings into some discernible state to share. I vex over that for a few days, giving into whatever whim of nostalgia or feeling that is permeating my general environment. I tend to pour gasoline on the flames of whatever I am going through by going back, back, back to the feelings, giving them all the fuel they need to grow. Then, as if struck by lightning, something happens on Thursday around hours of 5:30 pm and 11:30 PM. And when I say it happens, IT all starts happening, word after word of the most impassioned utterances I can conjure come flowing out of me. It’s like I am continually coming home to myself growing old alongside this ever dusty Queen City on the plains.

Having been consistently writing for a year every week, you grow tired of your own mythologizing of yourself. I have trouble telling the story now about finding death work by finishing my mom’s unfinished business. It’s not that the story is not pertinent to who I am or where I have been.  I just have uttered it so many times now that it has lost its charge. The story tries to turn me into this chiseled bit of stone, capturing me in some narrative that fits some older version of me that has already died away. It’s also the sort of trite, triumphant story that our death phobic culture craves so deeply. They want to know that the person who has lost everything can triumph over death and grief and come out the other side full again. Well, I’m not full. It doesn’t matter how much I weave, spin, or dye. My mom’s still dead. My dad is still a living ghost. And I’m holding onto my chosen family for dear life while “shadow boxing the apocalypse and wandering the land.”

If I have a quest in this life, it’s to remain true to that dynamism at the heart of all things. I have no interest in playing the hits when there are new or different stories to tell. It just means too much to me to push the stories I tell about my own life into weirder directions, exploring what complicates the trite stories we are handed to make sense of our own time here in this experience. I suppose that’s why I am not an influencer. I am not pretending to have it figured out and am not trying to sell you on the fact that I got it figured out. No, if anything, I am just writing from the hyper-alienated, individualized culture that we were handed by our parents and trying to find some flickers of companionship among the “pierced queer (millennials) in cyberspace.” (See song below)

Who among you has numbed yourself with alcohol or drugs? I remember my ability to drink two 40s in under an hour. Some folks needed to duct tape those malt liquor bottles to their hands. I didn’t. I guzzled down those bottles easily in under 40 minutes with no trouble in college. The sting of the alcohol was nothing compared to the personal hellscape I created with my undiagnosed obsessive compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, low self esteem, and fear of blowing my one shot out of Toledo. I remember being at a house party in high school where I ate a weed brownie, smoked out of a gravity bong, and then watched waves of static consume Hong Kong Phooey on a TV screen as I started to pass out. That numbing was much preferable to the depression that marked those lost years growing up in a broken home in post 9/11 America. Ooof. 

These are distant memories and yet it still feels important to part with that numbing for ever. I decided two months ago to go sober in an effort to delve even more deeply into the feelings. I just want to open even more space to explore those more mundane difficulties that we all experience as humans. It’s the sort of difficulties that my mom used to tell me to just, “have a beer,” over rather than suffering through it. Well, I drank and smoke myself into oblivion and all those feelings were still waiting for me on the other side, mom. So, I am ripping off the bandaid. I will dispense even with my artisanal beer and whiskey sipping. I just want to directly approach these feelings that I confront all the time, rather than dodge them. 

“Pain is gasoline. Channel it. Use it as fuel or it will burn up inside you. Trust me. No matter how fast you run, you’ll never escape it.”

Geoff Rickly’s “Someone Who Isn’t me”

I want to hold these words as a clarion call or a gospel. I want to burn hot like a supernova, using my pain as rocket fuel. Fuck numbing with the alcohol, the drugs. Fuck running. I want to be barren, unprotected, standing amidst the inferno of my own conflagration of pain. Let it engulf me and burn away the useless bits of me that need to die. Channel the pain from grief, from being wronged, and from being alive in collapse and put it into the art, the pedal strokes, the will to continue this discipline despite there being no guarantee of recognition or success. It’s always been this way for me. I have always alchemized my pain so that it is felt or seen by others. This change only hastens the immediacy with which I prostrate myself before the ouroboros, the great destruction and remaking of our world and myself. That always has made more sense to me as an ideal than the good news spread by charismatic religious organizations. 

And so, l turned to the cards in this season of the ouroboros. The card revealed itself quickly with only two or three shuffles of Tonja Reichley and Dana McGarry’s Way of the Wild oracle deck. It basically called for me to pull it out of the deck with a flourish, as if set aflame. It was the Holly card. The card spoke deeply to my moment: “stay committed to the path forward, even through the unknown dark.” It reassured me, ”you are committing to the journey ahead.” So, I continue the work of setting up the infrastructure of this project for the long haul. I have had difficulty really getting inspired to uhh set up a business bank account, fill out licenses, and what not. Weird, right? I mean who doesn’t wake up excited to set up COMMERCE?!?!?! hahaha To stave off the doldrums of that, I just do it a little bit at a time each day and get help from experts. The whole thing has a sort of cosmic tipping point weight to it where I feel like I am truly committing in this project in a way that is scary. Yet, I figure that if I am willing to stand in the conflagration of my own pain then some paper work isn’t to bad, right? RIGHT?!?!?!?!

Until next time, dear reader,

James

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