Brutal Mood Shifts and Burns

Hail a frequent disposition, a curdled yoghurt dripping from an antiquated musical metaphor. Thank God a spell check follows me, an obliging carrier of stimulants. I felt sad despite euphoric quality time with my son, disappointed at my loss of control... of what? What exactly more do I want as my realm? A garden that grows as my own... what for? Kids who live somehow from my clues... how absurd! I have my wards, mounting the hill, ready to take on all my canons and artillery precautions. I have never been ready for any day. There has not been a day done very well for a very long time. I want to shuffle and redeal. To call out to a mother who has been dead since before death even was an issue. Bristling, again I am over stuffed. But what for? Certainly not satiated satisfaction! I have lost walks of dimension, meals of gratification, sex of any depth... fat beyond recognition of anything worthy of the price of admissions.

Mentalstration

Bloated... excessive lunch and attempted gardening tasks. Silence in retreat. I switch on my last listed podcast to make noise as I type. This strange insular relationship with digital space. Politics, philosophies, technological news. Building what?

When a man reaches his 50s does he have a way to fabricate a future? If he is a single dad, has an established career, owns his own home and all the middle-class assumed assets from blender to hedge cutter... how best to allow alternative paths to enter in to the mix?

How best to be, that is the question for men of my age.

Chains on Thoughts

Tad Perry has written, and provides on the internet, his "Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese." I had printed this out, some time ago, and from time to time I give it a read. He has made an honest effort of sincerely developing a sequential and somewhat logical series of instructions.

If one were to make an effort, and persevere beyond a week or two, one might begin to grasp the monumental challenge of this second language, Nihon-go. For someone like myself, steeped in this second language up to my 'life in Japan' neck, any learning would help.

The reason I have brought this up is, all tasks, like losing weight, learning a second language, creating a new dynamic lifestyle, etc. feel monumental. All are theoretically attainable, yet all are monumental.

In my daily ruminations I love to imagine ambitious projects that will have two or more goals and lead me on to a long held objective. A Manga book on Japanese grammar, a videocast of film clips of life in Japan, ESL Video podcasting, some physical challenge that will also assure weight loss, are just some of the examples that dance through my head quite regularly.

This is a pattern of 'programing my life' with a great adventure and challenge, a methodology that has worked in the past. My walking the streets of Manhattan, My Japanese pilgrimage, My many art projects, becoming a parent, are all examples in which I have succeeded in achieving several goals simultaneously.

But something has changed at this stage in my life. It feels less and less likely that I can muster the enthusiasm. I am locked in stage one, planning. This may be due in part to the complexity of parenting. Maintaining the 'normalcy' of a household lends itself to stagnation and procrastination. I tend not to want to rock the boat. And too, there seems to be a still strong after-taste of my wife's suicide, that fundamental earthquake of the soul, which says, not all change is good.

I suppose too, there have been a long series of smaller revolutions in my life, long trips and experiments in alternative communities, which did not initiate the personal transformation I had imagined. There is a certain level of 'stick-in-the-mud-ism' in my life, that is both reassuring and frustratingly anchoring.

I would not mind the anchor, if I were more confident in this angst-filled pot I stew in. I am endlessly disquieted by voices of discontent, yet stifled from affirmative action. In sociopolitical parlance, I am on the welfare ticket of a decent job and so stymied from self-initiative. I lack strong enough motivation to jump to the next level.

I am in my own way. I am fat off the system while feeling the victim of my own inaction. A victim of my own smaller successes, I feel I am missing the full glory. I do not snap to attention when a sweet narrative prescribes a pragmatic solution.

Instead I languish in lazy distractions until time to act has past. I no longer trust my inner drill Sargent, nor the cajoling mother of compassion with her platter of promising sensuous delights. I belly up and whin like a 300 pound only-clild. Why can't I have everything without the added effort, without the risk, without the investment? Don't you just hate brats like that!

And so I sit in my soiled nappies wondering why I find myself so unappealing. I would need to be conscientious, to be ambitious in my goals, to model the behavior I prefer to preach. And... inevitably... be willing to risk and invest, to sacrifice some of this security I cling to.

To qualify as a grown-up, I will need to climb over the comforting confines of my crib, and venture out beyond the kitchen, into the land of suits and ties, sweat and toil, responsibility and commitment... Gulp!

Peering through the bars of this self inflicted wallowing, I see spring through a distant window. I somehow still trust myself, as I stack my toys against the sides in order to lift my chubby leg over the polished pine boarders of my creaking crib. This nerd might be ready to abandon the solace of this Blog infested computer for the scented air of actual life.

This fat kid is heading for the front door and won't stop until he is neck deep in the baptismal waters. The image is quintessentially planted in the fertile fields of imagination, next step is over the wall to freedom... Beyond the abstract to applied resolution. Glory hallelujah! He is arisen from the dead!

Living Halfway

Today I will push through the remainder of my in room activity, a stack of magazines and books by my bedpost waiting to be read. I want to clear through this to bring on the Spring and new school term. It is cool and rainy enough to justify this remaining inhouse activity.

Springulating

Today was a miraculously beautiful day, but, much like all of this winter, I merely percolated in front of my computer... stopping periodically to clean house, cook, or interact with Kai and Grandma. This has been a rocky road, an abstracted time, occurring primarily in my head. It was the winter of head. It was a winter of romantic companionship fading... Now soon I will be slipping on a haircloth, of edgy acclimation, while I again adjust to rooms filled with adolescents.

My exploration was in the realm of atheism, culminating in Catholic nostalgia and a sad yearning for the simplicity of Spiritual naiveté. 'New Age' was so promising, while I watched my wife dissipate into depression and suicide. Now I look out onto the fresh frontier of a mental health community which is no further developed today than the compassion of Republicans under Bush. We have all been under Bush, as if under the weather, for eight horrific years. Meanwhile, how little seems to have been learned.

I so much had wanted to win the war against obsessive eating, only now to find me a comical bit actor in my own self-authored tragedy. I will let my subscriptions run out for my Vegetarian and atheist magazines, let the air clear of logical pursuits, and let the waves lap, against the side of my head.

Sea salty foam carrying sand and sediment... You read this, from your small minority of one, perhaps the only one who ever saw more. I write this for you, shipwrecked on your own sandy coast.

We are now light enough to float on wind. Years of accumilated baggage will not hold us down. The mind has open windows. We are loose, though we cling, momentarily, to those who flurry near by in this twisting Spring breeze. We'd like to bond again but, chances are, we will always be free of each other. Free of the love that once made us invincible.

When tears won't help

If only she had tried a bit more, she could have fairly easily passed so many of her courses, so easily caught the train on time, washed the odd dish, cleaned and kept clean her room. But instead she corners herself into the shadows of self doubt and impossibility. All was and still is possible, but it takes a willful act and a persistent practice of such an act.

As a father, best for me to proceed by example... make my own transition lifestyle, and succeed. It may not work to help her, but at least I will have felt I tried, and helped myself in the process.

Cold Sweat and the Club

This morning on the way out the door I discovered my wallet missing. I started to panic as I checked all the obvious and even less obvious places it may have fallen. Drenched in a cold sweat I considered how I could go to work without a drivers license, no cash, and no cards to access cash. I considered all the tremendous hassle I would need to undertake to reorder all my charge cards, ID cards, my many bank cards, etc.

The panic was real as I began to mentally plan counter steps to cancel classes, track shops where it may have fallen, as I radically expanded and repeated my search. In fact, the wallet had fallen into the roll wheels of my computer chair and would move as I moved the chair, obscuring its view. Only when I radically moved the chair did it shake itself loose and reveal itself.

Now I must collect myself and try and understand what insight this lesson had for me. Ironically the whole process was triggered by a call from a friend who told me I was welcome to his club if I did not express any opinion close to the author atheist Dawkins. Apparently it is not in the spirit of the club to question the legitimacy of religion.

To be censored from an academic club because of my appreciation of the work of any author is curious and distasteful. Smacks a bit of the inquisition and helps me better appreciate the hurdles facing atheists of conscious. I am not deeply invested in the atheistic perspective though as an American my underdog cheerleader side wants to kick in. God bless the club, all others please shut up.

As I typed this, my children's school called and my daughter is being sent home after being caught in a lie. Is there any way to process all the subtleties to these life lessons? Best just to do my best to teach, parent, and befriend while listening to what life is saying, no matter how painful the message.

Moving to the Visual

I keep reaching toward an understanding. Is there such a place or is it always a slippery slope away? The computer mount web-cam required a system upgrade but it works, albeit sluggishly being USB.2 fare. The video blog notion is both titillating yet terrifying because it requires a commitment to film, verifying both inadequacies and inspiration. Yet process is essential. Products are needed to test theories and encourage learning.

The world can bare tremendous 'tomas', the sluggish sludge that clogs the pours and slows down innovation. This week I lost three days in part due to a surprise season change cold. I will need to do make-up classes now. Yet next week will have to be a week of production. Clear out the first concept of student generated material, despite their all too common ambivalence. If the concept works I can repeat it, if not stop it early. It may be simpler to just work with better motivated classes.

It has been fun playing with technology, yet I feel I have achieved no great inroads into expression. My website continuously needs more time than I am willing to surrender and now too with video I feel reluctant to invest even more time. Yet this is essential to move to the next level... a large body of experiments, completed by Christmas.

Full Moon at 3:45am

I am wakened by impulse... I feel concern for my loved ones... the circling band of feminine affectionate, who populate my life, call me into confusion. A big full brooding moon peers through my window. Thankfully, peace reigns on this mountain and I can collect my thoughts, in these wee hours.

I have a need to follow through on romantic opportunities, despite the whirlwind down-drafts and disturbing chills. There is a greater urge within the tenderness of concern, the folds of skin, the scented seclusions of intimacy.

Breath deeply, relax my jaw, and understand that it is a greater death done with love. Compassion calls at times for aloneness and distance. That may be what is needed now, yet the pendulum will weigh in again... bringing with it the deeper rooted truths we each bare and care so dearly to share.

I will hear their voices, their accolades of love and their brutal analysis of my vices. Their truth with melt around me, as the pains of a new spring reveal the scents hidden by winter snow, on the tundra of a billion defecations. Honesty has its price.

Yet in the end, after the methane has dissipated upward and cleared the air, there will be flower blossom from ancient fruits, consumed in exuberant passion. This truth telling will some how make sense... And we will again wear garlands around our crown and rub our lips together.

Silent Sweetness

Stepping back, allowing the wave of space and prosperity... the sweet advantage of employment, home, and health. Collecting my thoughts and neatly spacing them out on the table of reality. Today is cool, as autumn re-enlists for another cyclical adventure.

For school teachers it is back to school. That swirling hubbub of chaotic repetitiveness and speculative planning. In the back yards of love come new opportunities to understand where we stand, who we might be, and where this might relate to other passing ships.

I have a notion to implement a YouTube lesson plan. One in which we create five minute shorts, collecting the opinion of young Japanese on diverse provocative topics. Attempting to communicate individual truths, to the collective consciousness of a world audience, could be both fun and a productive language learning experience for my students.

Right now this is just a seed of an idea, but I hope to test the waters in class this week. We shall see. It may be fun and constructive, or, like so many of my 'brilliancies', fade on the way side of deflated and obsolete lesson plans. At least it is best to try...

Complete first movie in 25 years

at Http://homepage.mac.com/rlseltman/iMovieTheater18.html

A bit shaken and sore... the familiar pattern of exhilaration and focus, around the clock inspiration, and the follow through with the realities of distribution and futility. Yet, in the mix was an increase of learning, as I brought relevance into my research (all the books, magazines, and podcasts I have been studying this last year or so).

Futility is a flaw in self-perception; the swing vote of impotence verses gradual growth. That which distinguishes preservation of a process from the quelling of individual proaction as too risky, in other words, choosing a creative process that will be self-sustaining. Without an economic incentive, most hobbyist fade away.

My goal is to create a podcast business plan which is not economically motivated yet still has longevity, true sticking power... self fertilizing and personally fulfilling.

The Canon HV20 was Purchased

A good camera, and now I flounder, afraid to take the first step... patterned procrastination. Post-procrastination: when I create an edge. Yet why is this necessary when the past reveals all truths to my methodology? Hiding in creature comforts makes for a palatable self-contempt. Set up a mechanism for success.

I use a better older tripod than the free one I received on purchase of the camera. This feels more stable. I find the remote control very handy and discover the mike plugged in cuts the internal mike. Need to read the instruction book more carefully. I notice that reading the book without hands on attempts is fruitless (the book will put me to sleep) but once I have gotten into the process of actually using the camera the manual becomes readable.

I am reluctant to get into the water, but, once in, I love to swim!

Rainy Morning

The kids back in school... I am alone. In just my undershorts I trim the garden trees and bush in the cooling rain; Grandma style, the Japanese approach to pruning in my Moss garden. Chop, chop, chop, clip, clip, clip.

I struggle with the thoughts of video, reaching too deeply into my youth, confronting procrastination and a swirling quagmire of shadows. Can I cut this? Should I test the waters? So many impressions, a logical progression from years of journal keeping and a youthful false start as a filmmaker. Fear of exposure, embarrassment, commitment, responsibility... my so many technical limitations and the complex complications of worthwhile creation.

And then there is my next semester of teaching. How do all these pieces fit together?

Calculating Catastrophe

Pending pain, as reminded, from time to time, by physical and social break downs. Glorious imaginative projects, often centered around Videocasting, dance on a mind tortured by terror. What terror? you say...

Narcissistic Prima donna was an art performance I created in New York twenty odd years ago, exposed in preview, a life of self absorption. As an artist all I have ever known, or attempted to express, remains self-absorbed. And now the depth of decay lassoing my daily consciousness brings forth this same old theme. Yet guilt riddled anxiety, facing the trauma of exposing one last time, all the madness, all the tedious madness, of a man who has not changed toward artistic maturity but instead the deadening disease of regurgitated reflection.

I still write a journal after 30 years and my thoughts have never caught the wisp of a muse. Do it, you say. Manifest your freaking vision and let it die in the air of actualized feces, fertilizing the creative with negative example. No man or woman of mindfulness can justify a contemplative angst of non-action. Better to pour my proactive shlock and serve it to the digital mainstream, to be dissipated into the stratosphere of crystallized dribble of modern social media.

Do it? You say. And I wonder who the hell you are to ask. Haven't you been reading my posts for the last thirty years, and hasn't 'how I am' as a fumbling procrastinating blob, stuck yet? Do you really believe there is something to do that is both possible and worthwhile? And you answer, in a cynical but supportive tone... "why not do all you can, no one will be effected much, and there is always the outside chance something will come of all of this.

Shaken but not stirred

Is it the weather or the transition from work to recess... a headache slips up the side of my head. Keeping focused, one wonders if I have always been, what is called, ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). Just keep getting back to the tasks at hand and hope all will settle into place. Make life wonderful.

No Way if my way is the only way

Argumentative, combatant even, inconsistent energy level, fragile health due to lazy use of the body and abandonment to oral gratification... Opinionated, psychotic at times (rationalized or actual ramification to trauma), all in all transformational. Or is it all just talk? Begging the question, "What would be success?"

Rose, thorn and fragrance

The taste of life is so subtle, delightfully complex, bitter sweet... aromatic. Here in Nihon, we have the moist wave of clouds encircling my home, in the magical haze of the rainy season. Temperatures fluctuate from tropical forest to chilly damp mountaineering. My life is riddled with hard core emotional delicacies, a gourmet buffet of buffering challenges. I will not articulate these here, these petty chores, trails and tributaries, that crown all domestic and professional integrity. We all have sweaty brows in this climb up and out.

I tried unsuccessfully to retire the God concept, interwoven as it is into my pea brain personalized didactic. How can I teach in a head created by others, even when that head is my own? Yet I enjoy the skeptic's freshness, the raw dance of persistent ruthless critique. It is a cruel world, demanding an intellectual purity, always slightly over my own horizon.

I wish I could justify my primate tendencies... my swinging pendulum of man and beast. But the internal holocaust and its hedonistic healing are two sides of the same thick skull. Pain and pleasure is how we monkeys learn. I wish I could ask for forgiveness, yet so clear, I error in my very nature... my very core convoluted, to what is expected. I relentlessly remain responsible, within my own philosophical dictum.

In other words: Tragically, majestically, you get what you see... I stand here before you, naked, apple still in hand. Guilty as charged in my wild man innocence. Welcome to the real world, post-Paradise lost; Eternally Adamized.

Ants in My Pants

I have quietly spent my Saturday absorbed in podcasts, and now will begin my day of expanding my garden and visiting a gallery opening. My pursuit of science, or at least the initial trappings of such, has revitalized my academic pursuits, from other visceral perspectives gone asunder. I haven’t time now to describe in detail this transformation, as there are too many variable. Instead I will simple acknowledge Hitchens, the podcast 'Point of Inquiry', and the comical biographical work "Letting Go of God" by Julia Sweeney.

Trying to Evolve

Perhaps I have found the adjustment to eliminate the trouble I was having with this software. In life there is so much personal work going on, yet the angst that 'time is too short for actual understanding' pursues... true transformation being more elusive than mere bug fixes.

Point of Inquiry, a secular humanist podcast, has me buying books again like crazy. Previous to this topic, on-line purchased books have been coming on my resurrected interest in film-making. Also, gardening and gardening books have flooded into my life, with trees following roses following diverse flower collections springing from feminine companionship, in and on every available space in yard, terrace, and house.

The transition I sense is grounded in my geography, an inner relationship with my house here in the hills of Japan. The anniversary of my wife's death looms on the horizon of summer bringing with it further reflection and the remaining deep pangs of sadness. My decision to pull in, and stay here in Japan this summer, is a shadowy choice. There are as many subconscious reasons as conscious, as I try to map out progressive actions, within a soft-focused vision of the future, laden by such dense fog.

There could be so much to say here, but I dissipate much of my reflective writing into a handwritten diary I use throughout the work day. Over 40 years of diary writings, spread across book shelves or stuffed into boxes stored in attics on two continents... so much fire wood for my funeral pyre.

Living Frustration

There is a bug in this software. Our social upbringing creates similar bugs in our psyche. Daily we are tasked to rewrite our own programming or learn to live with our flaws... Thus frustration.