Thanksgiving

"Just hope you're heaven-sent and you're hell-proof" -Drop the World by Lil Wayne.

We spent Thanksgiving home. My first turkey was a success; also, a spectacular potato salad to complement. It's a physical relationship; it's not of the head or the mind like my previous one, and it's not like I was looking for anything. In fact, she had plans to spend Thanksgiving with a girl friend, renting a luxurious suite in a Manhattan hotel with a kitchen, shedding half a grant on the sweet spot. She asked if I didn't mind.

"Go for it" I told her. And I meant it. 

In the end, she takes so long readying herself that the girlfriend who's expecting her calls the whole thing off. I could sympathize with her friend, after all I had been waiting for her to meet up at the train station with a 20-pound turkey under my arm, a bag full of doritos and other snacks, and no sign of her anywhere. Like all beautiful young things, she's utterly narcissistic and intolerable. But at the very least I did my best to wrap between my legs the hideous tail of my own narcissism and happily obliged to offer my undivided attention and servirude. She fumes about her friend and I point out that she isn't being fair in her judgment, teasingly of course and poignantly so, but to no avail. We rarely get a glimpse of the monster that lies in wait, once that beast is summoned upon out of the genie bottle, it is hard to see what has become of us. So I leave it alone before my very own ugly side surfaces. Glad I had the decency to go along with her plans but more glad to not having seen them come to fruition. 

We already live together. I will make the mistake of seeing someone far younger than me but not commit to the sin of depriving her in any way: no jealousy, no sexual possesiveness, no proverbial territorial pissing. It's not like we haven't been here before, but one thing is conducting drills to prepare in case of an emergency and another to face catastrophe. When you find yourself in the threshold of a heightened emotional state of affairs, reason usually goes down the drain, flushed away along with whatever's left of aplomb, serenity and patience. Thoughts race and crash unto actions without recourse, a momentary lapse of reason, shoot first and ask questions later. 

She just turned 22, and I'm going to be forty one years old in a few months. I've lived to be 22 years old many times over, right up to when I was 31 years old, I got to be 22. I had my fun, and so in my old age, I became sedentary. If I'm not working, I'm usually home, unless a son of mine happens to be around then I become more active. I take things slowly, never really feeling an urge to run do something, and I've fought against it because of it I've paid the price of carelessness. In love, it spells doom. We can never love enough to dismiss these inner voices, specters of a time long gone that we can't let go of, it is where doom nests and lays its ghostly eggs.

I'm a serial monogamist, married twice, engaged once. I've found I could rarely go beyond the threshold of six months, a little less, a little more, without unease settling in my relationship, as if it were time to move on and find another. Therefore, I love the midterm game, relationships that aren't short-term nor long-term. These types of relationships have the best of both worlds. Whenever things end (not without a fight), I may seem to move fast onto the very next thing but hey, I am forty years old and there's little room for grieving longer than necessary. Idealistic as only a borderline case can be, I usually await a period of forty days (quarantine), in which I meet no one, I see no one, just lay low; nowadays, forty days are a luxury I cannot afford. I didn't go out there running to meet someone else; things happened. And I moved on.

Look, I won't deny the suffering, but nothing casts the skulls of an old flame like burning with passion in the arms of another lover. A young, slender, tall, dark-skin girl with a glorious ass, raised and born in the Bahamas, fluent in French. We met as roommates, and as roommates, I kept my distance. She didn't say much and I only worried she felt comfortable, so I began to offer her some of the food I cooked and she gladly accepted. Until one afternoon when I didn't feel like cooking and asked her if she were hungry, we could go to the local bar and take advantage of the entries on sale for happy hour. This girl does not drink, does not smoke, is a God fearing young woman and that is about all I'm complaining about.

Of course, you still deal with regret. It's a healthy dose of regret, just a bitter drop, a pill hard to swallow. You get to be one with the pain and be thankful for the times you had, remain receptive to the unlimited options any given instance grants you, if you would only dare. 

It's what kept me young, always living life as if there were no tomorrow, looking late-twenties in my forties. It's also to do with always procrastinating, I guess I procrastinated on aging as well. 

Procrastination is one of my deadliest sins. It isn't really procrastination if you don't get to do the things that you should. That you eventually get things done, things you could've tackled before, it shows that you've been unconscionable in your approach, wasteful with your most treasured possession: your time.

It's okay if emotional paralysis has set in, you get to pay the price of your past actions and know that karma truly is a bitch. Hurting the one we love is like putting our own hand on a burning stove. It hurts like hell but the pain is heaven-sent and I am one willful mofo who's not in the least bit intimidated by feelings of discontent. Like the legendary song writer Andres Calamaro once said: "It's amoral to feel bad when you've loved so much."

Existential Bias

What you fear tends to materialize. When you project fear of abandonment, for instance, unto a loved one, through jealousy, you're pushing them away. Ironically, you're making them run away by being afraid of them leaving you. People who have been abandoned or suffered greatly at the hands of others tend to act in such a way that they mess up their chances of success in any relationship. They sometimes create drama where there is none, have difficulty owning their emotions and let these take over and run rampant. In doing so, we may push others away with our way of being. But it's not like other people involved in our lives didn't play a role, no one's innocent or at the mercy of someone else's actions or just passively there waiting to be either validated or denied. At times, we find ourselves in the futile effort of trying to persuade others of our convictions. 
Such picture our mind creates that we fail to understand there really isn't anything we can do to change other people's mind. In attempting to do so, we become exasperated and feel at a loss. Keep in mind just how difficult it is to change our own way of seeing things; reserve your energy to do this and forget about changing others. It's worthless.
It's not like they choose to be miserable; some of them actually enjoy being so. And so, we indulge in angry states of mind because that's how our mind has learnt to deal with suffering; it's how you've come to see those closest to you deal with it. Of course, we can do a better job, have more and fine-tuned tools at our disposal than our ancestors did. Our collective mind, the mind that we picked up piece by piece from our surroundings, during our upbringing, is a reflection of the world we were born into, the age we belong to, the stories we were told. Some call reality an illusion; everything we experience is an illusion. 
That it feels real, doesn't make it so. And so, we tend to associate with our own way of seeing things until there really isn't a divide between what we've become accustomed to (homeostasis, the status quo, things done out of habit, impulse, bias, what we've been conditioned to experience time and again) and the boundless opportunities this moment is full of. We can choose our masks and wear them. We can play the role that life really is a good thing and that we could, if we were so ever inclined to, shift the direction of things by a mere action not yet taken. Conceive of the journey ahead, have the courage to take charge, and lead the way. Experiences come in different shapes and forms, and these fit perfectly to the way we conceive them. Isn't that such a coincidence that whatever we tend to believe vehemently is often reflected in our lives? Beliefs drive our lives; it is only prudent to examine them. 
This life is a vivid dream. In a vivid dream, we are aware of being immersed in the dream. We adopt reality like we would a pet, dress in it like the outfit we picked from our wardrobe, but in essence, we're still naked. And even the concept of this whole universe being nothing more than a figment of our imagination, our experience nothing short of a vivid dreamlike state, in which we know we're in a dream but it doesn't make it any less real, is, quite frankly, mind-boggling. The problem is not so much that we can't conceive of a reality in which everything there is to it has been fabricated by our minds since it doesn't make it more real to say that our experience is an illusion; the problem is that it doesn't even register as fact in our tribal minds. It's as if whenever we were confronted by scientific evidence, we rarely wake up in the middle of the night and really ponder upon the question as to what all this means. And meaning is what you give, not something you take; you seek out there what is already inside you, but you also need the external world to make sense of what lies underneath. There's no in or outs in the realm of things, no separation between the physical world (the illusion) and the mind. 
Spiritual gurus speak evils of the ego. In healthy doses, the ego serves as the guardian to our domain. It may fend off potential rivals and frenemies. We were not meant for the masses; we belong to the few. 

You may think that your thoughts guide your way through the rough patch ahead, but in order to transcend our present reality, we must first abandon our way of seeing the world. The truest journey isn't covered by the terrain we set foot in; our truest journey lies within. 

It isn't as difficult as it sounds, and for us to achieve so, all we need to do is just observe ourselves and even others, without prejudice, without judgment, like you would a situation that doesn't pertain to you. 
Let's say you witnessed an accident; obviously, those involved are emotionally taken by the situation. Those involved, being affected by the ordeal, aren't as likely to come up with a course of action as someone from the outside, who can assist and take charge of the situation easily since he/she is not affected directly by it. It's sort of like the mediator in a debate; since you have no stakes in the matter, you can play the neutral party. Similarly, when we observe our minds and the thoughts it festers, we can have a a clearer perspective, more objective, than someone affected by their way of seeing things. We see things the way we do because it's who we are, and who we are is a choice that we make day in and out without even realizing it sometimes. 
By being afraid of losing someone, for instance, we may very well end up making such a predicament true. What we fear becomes real since our minds conceives it as possible; therefore, it is paramount to take notice of the thoughts coming in and out of our minds. There within lies the answers to all that unravels, cooked up by our subconscious and eaten in its entirety by our beliefs. It may not be a conscious choice, and you may not see it as such; we defend vehemently our way of being because our own survival is at stake. We are all in our own path, blinded by our own way of seeing things, and we can only suffer through attachment. Attachment to people as much as attachment to the way we experience them, the latter more so. Attachment to the way we think and believe things to be. In seeing people and the way they deal with us, we're only projecting our own way of experiencing them and the world at large. We can't escape our reality unless we become conscious of it being just a figment of our imagination.

The norm usually dictates that every moment is unique and irreplaceable, and we should enjoy each other as much as we can for as long as we can, make peace with each other; forgive and the sorrow of your rancor will turn into joy. Forgiveness serves a selfish purpose: it absolves the one who genuinely experiences. Forgiveness is classy, it shows aloofness, and you shouldn't brag about it, either. It's not an empirical "I forgive you!" No, no. Forgiveness takes acts of kindness, you can show that you really, really, really hold no grudge over what happened, provided it was nothing more than unnecessary drama and not with the intention of making others like you. If you can live with yourself, then you really don't need the approval or disapproval of others. You may listen to something someone of importance to you may say, but in the end it's your choice. 

Forgiveness puts you on a pedestal, from which you cast down your sentence: "I forgive you." Instead, make it more about "I tolerate you", "It's not a big deal", "Moving on." Melodramatic people find in honorable acts of forgiveness the opportunity to contaminate everything with their ego. We may think ourselves strong but we usually are just plain scared. It takes courage to confront our demons, and I try and do something I fear each passing day. Fear is not the end product; fear is nothing more than an invisible line that separates us from a world of pure bliss and pleasure. We will always do more out of fear than love in spite of it. We should love enough to dare do the things that we want for as long as they want us; if a job or a woman doesn't want it, then there'll be another. But don't leave without a fight and don't pride yourself of just being proud. Nothing is more ridiculous than thinking ourselves brave when we are just pathological or neurotic. We all see our actions as being the most noble, but if we feel wrong is because we're doing something wrong; therefore, either we change the way we perceive things or change things. I think a little bit of both: our focus is a little bit hypersensitive. We have a short fuse, and we pride ourselves of it. We all want to exert self-control. 

When anger takes over, it's over.