Within My Grasp??

I should probably say something else.

(As I am so fascinated by the notion of truth.)


I'm not sure who is actually reading this...

one or two that I know of. 

I get a lot of hits- but I think the majority of those are accidental. 


Of all the billions of people on the Internet...it has to happen.

But for the one or two who do read this...

This is for you. 

& I am including myself. 


Two things hit me tonight-

I think in part prompted by my current health concerns.


Number one- the fact is...I'm not much of a human being.

I'm not going to go into the whys, the wherefores, the how's, who's whens where's and whatsits.

Take my word for it; if I turn my toes up? 

The ledger doesn't look that great.


I have been watching a lot of docos lately, and it would appear I'm not the only man who has fucked up. 

& there are those who say I have not fucked up as badly as others we could name...

Like Hitler.


OK...so I'm not as bad as Hitler.

So what.

I hold myself to a high standard...as my father did before me.

(me...not himself;

he mostly let himself off the hook for his crimes.)


I see where I have failed...& quite frankly?

I have NOT failed attempting great things.


I have failed by wallowing in a cesspool...

& never having the sense to get out.


I have not failed in audacious ways...

I have failed in mundane, sleazy, & decidedly unspectacular ways.

I have no special skills...this is as close as I get to a skill or talent. 

I had previously no ambitions or particular aspirations in my life. 


I was born into a sewer...raised by a rat...

& bless me, I failed to raise myself out of it.


But I'm not going to dwell on all this; much of it has been filmed, and is sitting gathering dust somewhere. 

If you are really curious...drop me a line.

Or after I am dead...drop my family a line. They will hook you up on most of the sorrier details...

which are all on film.

In what can only be described as a failed documentary project, I attempted to cover every square inch of my tarnished soul and foul deeds...& it sits mouldering, fermenting in it's own squalor.

With nothing of any redemptive value to anyone. 

Not even me.  

(I haven't murdered or raped anyone, certainly...

but by MY standards...which are naturally high...

I have fallen WAY short.)

Mundane is indeed a good word for the mess that has been my attempt at a life, thus far.

& the project has been abandoned- unworthy of releasing in any way shape or form or forum-

because there is no happy ending.  

No restoration. 

Nothing to be learned or gleaned from it.


It is the biggest pile of nothing since...

My father's stint in Vietnam.

Nothing.


Or is it???
 
Which leads me to realisation TWO.


I called this blog the 'Evolving Souls Club' because I wanted to set myself a goal whereby I would transcend my base nature...

My most fundamental, primal urges and inclinations,

woven deep into a DNA established LONG before I was born...

In order that I might ascend boldly into the light of my transcendence.


Sadly, I have to report...

this never happened as I envisaged.

No burning bush on the road to Damascus...

No rapture...

No bursting into a beam of light and taking my place in the heaven of everlasting enlightenment...


If anything, I find myself ensnared in the same mediocrity I have always found myself entangled.


You see...as I sit here, in yet another motel room,

on another journey in another country...

I find myself up against the same realisation.


As wonderful as the place is (& Canada is indeed wonderful)

As wonderful as the people are...

I am STILL faced with the same reality; that I...

I am still the same flawed me.

& no matter how far I might run...

I still follow.

Warts and all.

Heaven's...this is 'Life 101'.

Basic stuff.


Don't think I didn't know this would happen.

'The Razor's Edge' is my favourite book, for heaven's sake!

I KNOW that what happened to Larry Darrell would happen to me.


And as I sit here...

at 2.20 am in my room in a strange land...

Trying to figure out ways to keep travelling...

Pay bills, book flights,

trains, planes,

customs, etc...


To me...

I realise just how mundane it all is.

Yes...sadly...

as much as I am loathe to admit it

(for it makes me sound AND feel like a wilful, spoiled, ungrateful child...)

Even travel becomes mundane.


Having been blessed with the gift of being able to do this...

I have discovered nothing more than the fact that even THIS is not good enough for me.

I want to tell people who cannot travel, that it is overrated.

That what they think it holds doesn't actually exist.


Except I fear the problem actually lies with me. 

Pearls before swine.

Cast beneath the snout of the perpetually...

dissatisfied. 


I am loathe to admit it...


but I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

& it is the title of a song I really do not like.

reflecting a sentiment which frankly?

I feel is churlish and disingenuous. 

Almost as if we...

Bono & I...(three words I never expected to ever write...!)

were owed something by life.

Which I don't necessarily think is the case.


Now...if there were no upside to this treatise...

I wouldn't even bother committing it to writing.


Because believe it or not...

Even though I might not have found it...

I feel close.


So close...I can almost taste it.


And it has something to do with the mundane.

Or rather...the recognition of the state of the mundane.


Frankly?

Everything I have seen in my life to date has been mundane.

Right from my abuse as a child, to my lost middle years, to now.

Mun-dane.

To be sure and for certain.

I am a mundane, mediocre man.

I even wrote this in my diary the other day, so as not to forget.

I am a mundane man,

Living a mundane life,

Doing mundane things.

& I must tell you...

Even those things I have discovered in life potentially spectacular and transcendent...

in and of themselves...


I have sullied with my mundane affliction.

As beautiful as things may seem...

or as beautiful as they may indeed be if I allow them to be...


I render them somewhat plain and ordinary with my insatiable hunger for something other-worldly.

Right about now...as I edit this piece, each time I feel I should insert Aldous Huxley.

Far be it from me to validate my chagrin by associating myself with such a brilliant man...

But I think his hunger for kicking down the doors of perception is actually close to my own than I might want to admit.

For the man was mad as a loon.

& at the same time...

a genius. 


I might be one or t'other...

neither, or both...

But I think I understand his yen for...

Something other than this.

What he might even (in fact I think he did) describe as the mundane and functional fact of ordinary life.

Rather than settle for 'the miracle of regular life'...

He sought out...something higher.

Greater.

Admittedly through hallucinogenic drugs...

But so what?  They occur naturally in our brains; we just don't know how to gits at 'em.

Yet.

The closest I have come to what I am looking for was jumping out of a plane.  


Which is a slap in the face for those who have loved me.

I even sully that.  

But like Aldous' wife- who understood his insatiable lust for the 'divine' other...(for I think she shared it...)

Maybe my loved ones will understand. 

Perhaps they will see that those times when I was cruel, or unjust...were merely the times when the inalienable fact of my separation from the transcendant proved too much for me to bear.

And I lashed out.  

At the nearest and dearest to me.

So far away- beyond the reach of my backhand- 

lay my quest. 

When my face was rubbed into the shit of the realisation that I was still no closer to...

the answer...  
 
I became a rotten shit.  

If I don't pull SOME kind of iron of enlightenment or self awareness out of the fire...

Then a stain on the underpants of reality I shall ever be.


I fear...inevitably...

In my feverish desire to hone in on a solution to the existential dilemma with which I find myself mud wrestling with...

I may be drifting into territory I have always considered fraught with mines and depth charges. 
  
Speaking of Huxley...

I feel embarrassingly close to a kind of Jim Morrison-like state. 
 
& not in a good way.

A self-destructive character who was maddened by the limitations of this mortal coil...

& sought to set himself free...


to break on through to the other side. 

I am ashamed to admit...

I feel very close to feeling what we assume to be the kinds of things HE was feeling.  


Because I also fear...

the fact that the love of his woman...

his friends and family...

was not enough for him...

So much so that he felt he had to pursue enlightenment...

& it turned out to be oblivion at the bottom of a bottle?


That kind of self indulgence even I...in my malaise...would find abhorrent.  


And yet...

I too feel as though I want to break on through....

Or rise above...

Or even jump out of and fall down into...

WHATEVER direction...


I want to leap squarely into...

Contentment. 

Gratitude.  

Fulfilment. 

Rest...


Ok.


So many times...

I fantasise about being an Astronaut. 

(this is NOT something I particularly cared to be as a child. 

this is some new shit.)

So many times...

I wished I could be an astronaut, drifting back toward earth...

from space...

and reach that moment when the earth's gravitational pull would drag me in. 

& burn me up.


(I stress...

it's not a suicidal impulse.

although argue it any way you like...

that would be the outcome.)



It's a desire to...

step into the transcendent.

To find a way somehow to...

not die...

but be subjected to such extreme physical conditions...

that I be slung like a shot into another...

paradigm. 

dare I say dimension.  


something neither dark, nor light. 

neither death, nor life. 

not up, nor down. 

me...

and not me. 

something else.  

entirely.


I feel ashamed even to be writing this.

how often have I spoken in the past of the shame of being...

ungrateful?

Right here in this forum??


& here I am...the most despicable of all God's creatures...

sounding just that.

I could bash myself all night over it...


Except I don't wish to.

Why?


Because I don't necessarily think it is wrong. 

what if this...

nagging dissatisfaction with the status quo...

this...urge...

this inclination to...

this burning desire to leap into another dimension...

Is a necessary part of my evolution as a human being?

As a soul??


What if...

this thing I feel to be merely a source of more shame...


I need not indeed be so ashamed of at all?


& not only might it be part and parcel of my redemption...

my soul's transcendence...

but something inside is telling me that it is perfectly achievable, and within my grasp???