Crazy Sorrow

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

I once started a novel titled Crazy Pussy, but abandoned it later as an exercise in bad judgment.  It was based on a woman I once knew.  Unspeakable things had been done to her.  She was a strange mix of beauty and darkness, tenderness and rage, passion and loathing.  She captured me without my having fired a shot in my own defense.  Our’s was a raging roller coaster of earthly delights and bone deep horror.

Dylan – Tambourine Man

One of the most seductive things about her was how easy she was to please.  She would just beam at every thoughtful gesture and every minor kindness.  It made me want to shower her with same.  If I stopped on the way to her place and bought her a rose, you’d have thought I had built her her very own Taj Mahal.  This woman could make me feel pure joy.

Lucind Williams JOY

I began blogging two years ago come the thirtieth of this month.  I have poured virtually all of my spare time since then into that effort, my activism and the making of art.  I’ve done little else.  I’ve not indulged much in entertainment, just enough to stay sane.  I’ve not read fiction, which I deeply love, and I haven’t dated.

At 56 my opus magnus is not done and I guess I’m feeling the pressure.  How odd that that stage in my artistic life coincides with the neocon assault on America.  I have never in my life worked so hard for anything as I have to defeat these bastards.  Who knows, my major work might turn out to be to drive the final nail into their coffin.  I would love nothing more.  I never thought of myself as a political artist but circumstances have forced me into one.  That’s just fine with me.  I’ve always admired art that serves a higher cause – and the rescue of our country could not be a more noble one (IMHO).

I guess I’m just feeling sentimental at the approach of the 2 year anniversary of my first blog post at dailykos.  But I have other reasons for being turned inward, and they have to do with that girl I was telling you about and another one I met more recently.

Having lived like a monk for a couple of years, and having found myself lusting after inappropriate partners of late, I decided I needed to get out more.  And not having the time for that, I turned to the net and signed up at a dating site…figured I might better go meet someone appropriate before things got weird.  Well…sigh…

I tried to filter by making certain things clear:  activist, hippie, committed protester, rabid blogger, no time for the Braves kind of guy.  And that has proved largely ineffective.  I did meet one interesting woman though.  Her name was Joy.

Joy was a special needs teacher, from New York, a counter culture type – my type in other words.  We hit it off right away.  The things we had in common were crazy, and the chemistry was good.  We chatted for quite a while before meeting, neither of us wanting to jump into anything – especially since we were both sort of rare finds for our area – chances of it going bad wrong were too great.  We developed a nice little online relationship and came to look forward to our chat sessions, and one night she said let’s just meet now.  So we did.  We clicked and spent that first evening in each other’s arms on a park bench groovin’ on oxytocin – felt like heaven.

We met for a second time at a restaurant half way between her place and mine, had a nice dinner, clicked some more.  She was artistic and quirky, smart and funny, and we got along like we’d always known each other.  But later that night there was both a coming closer and a pushing away.  In one evening I went from this simpatico guy with whom she’d made an authentic connection to possibly just another crazy guy she’d met on the Internet.  I sensed a sudden and very definite pulling back.  I wondered if it was something I said.

The following evening she im’ed me and we chatted.  She said she needed to slow things down because she had issues.  I said I’d be as patient as she needed me to be.  She said she didn’t think we wanted the same things, and I replied that yeah she probably was right, we probably didn’t – though I hadn’t thought of it up to that point.

At some point she explained she was a victim of abuse and that’s what she’d been getting at in previous references to issues.  It broke my heart to hear that.  It reminded me of that woman from long ago who had been sexually molested by her father from the age of nine.  How heartbreaking is it that people can do such things to little girls?

I made a hard headed and hard hearted decision, the first of its kind I have made in a long time – and I don’t know if it’s good or it’s bad.  I just know I saw no other way out of the dilemma.

I told her of my previous experience.  I explained that it wasn’t that I was judgmental or unfeeling, but that it was just the opposite.  I am all accepting and deeply empathetic.  I told her of how I had gotten to experience all of my former friend’s pain, rage and darkness.  It totally disrupted my life and when I tried to pull away from her she stalked me.  She showed up at two different places of work creating scenes, she followed me bumping my car from behind on one occasion at speed, she broke into my apartment twice, she left hours of crazy phone messages, she called my elderly parents and told them I had gotten her pregnant and dumped her (not true).  I actually went to court to get an order of protection against her.  It was a nightmare.

I then had to tell Joy that I am a man on a mission and I cannot let anything divert my trajectory.  Between my son, my work and my activism I have a full life.  I cannot afford for anything to consume my life – it is already consumed.  I have no delusions about my ability to save America, the world or humanity, but I feel a powerful, overwhelming impulse to try – in the crazy hope that my efforts may add in some small way to those of millions of others.  I simply have no room in my life for anything that detracts from this effort.  And so as powerfully as I feel the urge to somehow come to the rescue of this dear woman, I cannot.  And it makes me very sad.

This Joy

Just then the sun went behind a cloud

And I was enveloped in darkness

OPOL