Delight of a Conquistador

I'm concerned. She's increasingly obsessing with psychic predictions and I know less and less how to engage her in any conversation where I could understand her. Talk to her. Tell me what to say.

It's late, and this and other troubling thoughts run through my mind. After the prayers have been said, laying on the couch, the one I sleep on when I don't feel like being on a bed.

Her sister had called and I could have said that, I think now. And then other thoughts. The ones to tell my son when he's older; now only five and not ready to hear about what daddy's drinking cost from his life.

I drank before I met your mommy. We seperated because of it. Then when we had too much to settle, I turned to it again, and you became less important to what I thought I had been missing out on.

No, son, your father is a very imperfect man. He struggles to face himself in the mirror. He struggles to look within. It's not easy for him. Not easy for me. But I have made many mistakes for which I am not proud. I only want you to learn from these mistakes, as I am learning from them. Don't but excel. Don't but do what is right by you, your God, your people.

Then the blame. First the blame. The order here is wrong. If only I had not put so much hope on money. Thought that it was important enough that if I were around it, networked with it, I would count. This, and I trail off to thinking of all the immensely important people who have been in my life. Some fleeting brushes with greatness, some enduring bonds with it.

If all were networking, being at the right social status, my life would have been more than alright. In fact, meeting a Nobel Peace Prize winner could have turned into a collaboration for social movements here. The bonds with those great people around me, my support to acheive what I truly dream for my world. The one your involved in.

But I keep coming full circle back within. After all, its only me and my dog on the sofa tonight. Only myself, pecking away at these keys. Only the thoughts of my own mind producing the necessary activity to run through these things with me. And you.

And the books. The offer for a ghostwriter opportunity. The one for a biography. Was I really too tired, all the hours of menial labor I was doing? Being in a new marriage and having a new son? Was it really so much to try and do that which excited me? Wasn't I ready for it?

And I remember now how long it's been, and how it was only once, that my likeness appeared halfway on a self portrait. Here I wonder what my reluctance is to look so long at myself.

And I remember the mistakes. So many of them. The cruelty I have. Violence. Poverty. Addiction. I have enough on my agenda to work through. Enough so that I haven't wanted to get started on it until now. I am thirty one, as I told my barber today. Thirty one, and only now realizing its easier to be bad. But inwardly I know its so much less rewarding.

So what of the poets and artista who said it was better that way? The tumult that brings art to life? Lies? Or is it that I am not strong as they? That my destiny is not like theirs? Not anymore. Not in the excess that i have practised it. Not when it affects those I love. I am not Bukowski. I have a loving family, believe or not, a loving ex wife, a loving child, and loving friends, whichever remember me or are still around.

I can be likable, although I remember bringing up a dark secret of hers with the rabbi and feeling like I had gained a victory. I tell my sister I have a machismo issue like it is a joke, afraid to tell her the truth as truth. I lie with the truth that way. Divert its intelligence by cracking it up with humorous tone, and cackling ends.

I am mad. No, Dali, nothing seperates me from the madman. I am he. There is not the difference of my not being mad. The fact is that I have slipped into it as soon as I stopped being sane.

And I am wondering when that was, if at all it ever was. The Catholic Church Seder where I drank all my wine to piss off my mother? The time I shot beebies at my brother's G.I Joe's, pretending I was a firing squad? The time I almost choked on a cookie?

Eat and drink to excess. Dioneses, you wish me death. And to the process of death by gluttoney and consumption doesn't seem to have any mysterious attraction to me now. Can I reverse this spell, or only slow it down now? I've grown fat, my mind is dull, and I have lost the color of my cheeks and eyes. Their is nothing attractive about that. I have become an embodiment of Mr. Fender's wasted days and wasted nights. I am now wasted years. What romance can be had from it?

The years without true love. The days without true work. My ambitions have softened with my age and my age accelerated by my lifestyle. I can only allow myself promises of improvements.

And I let her go. Their were chances to win her back. It gets harder every passing day. The relationship was founded on poor excuses, but their are every right reasons to remain together. Isn't a child a reason enough to try and rekindle love, and try dutifully to sustain it? Doesn't another parent understand this?

It's lost, let it go, I correct myself. What happened, like so many things for normal people, the kind that are sane and know it, if only insecurely, is that life provides each of us with psychological problems. It is our duty to process them, to learn from them, to grow from them.
It is this process that makes us each unique; not so much what we live through, but how we live through it that gives us our peronality.

I have not done so, for many of these problems. The ones that were par with my kind, neither the ones that were more specialized to my own life experience. And then what, what am I left with? Tableu Larasza, is it? The Eternal Sunshine of a Blank Lobotomy?

A full inbox to go through. A full agenda to complete. While my son keeps growing, and reaching new milestones. While my career is somewhere around oblivion waiting to be resurrected. While my friends drift further apart from my affections. While my body aches and slows all the more.

So within. The spiritual center where their is bliss. Where I fear and find complete comfort. Where I am most myself, and most afraid of my own power. This deity that God has placed within each of us. This is where I seek endurance and strength. The clarity to stay away from deceitful things, the questions which will send me packing for the hermetic lifestyle. Here I ask myself who I have become, what I am, and who dwells here within. And I know, and find comfort again...

waiting for the growing to begin anew. Twain, the youth would be wasted on the young, if youth were only a fountain of de Vaca.