Tsuris: Trouble, Aggravation

I am sick of replaying your comments to me in my head, and sick of hearing my therapist's derisive voice. I am sick of finding out after the fact that little has been like it should have been. I am sick of wondering when I am going to have a lover who really loves me, who can understand and want me for who I am. I know I'm complicated.














"I don't understand. Why can't you just be a girl who prefers a certain kind of sexuality with men?" -My therapist, with disdain
"Can't you--aren't there men out there--who would want to play the role of the woman, and you play the role of the man...you know?" -My father
"Are you touching your pussy?" -Brian, during sex
"You actually like that?" -Brian, while I'm touching his bum
"I feel like holding you down and forcibly [having intercourse] with you," -N., drunk
"You're not that hairy." -N.

I am not a girl who needs to be brought out of her shell or shown the tender passion of your lovemaking. I don't cover my chest because I am insecure as a woman. I cover my chest because I want me and you and the universe to understand who I am. You want me to be comfortable? Try accepting me as I am. I'll show you everything.

Image from trannypunk.com

Recently, I was contemplating different options for altering my body, and I had a brief and intense vision of my post-operation chest. I could see the scars, and with that vision came a moment of knowing--not desiring or wondering-that I was going to have chest surgery, that I was seeing my own post-op chest.

I have an attachment to my breasts. It isn't about liking them; rather, it is that they are part of my body, and I've had them for 8-9 years now. The other part of that attachment is my feelings about my size. I am hesitant to lose any flesh, even flesh that seems superfluous. I both love and hate feeling like a child.

Often I think that my ideal set of body mods would be more testosterone, followed by surgery to cut the ligament holding my clit/dick (more length) and a chest reduction. There a few problems standing in my way, mostly that I can never settle on anything. I've never regretted taking T for four months, and I love the leg hair and happy trail acquired.

Oh yeah, and I love Norm, and miss him.

Note to self: Dr. Perry Johnson in Omaha, NE.

New set on Vegporn: Exam Table

Oh, the things that will prevent me from ever having a career in politics (I once wanted to be president of the United States) or being Miss Universe (the very hairiest).

Your Imperial Majesty Most Greatful, Most Faithful

I have licked up your tears with a forked tongue
I have strung your tears out like dewdrops n sewn them together
Into a spiderweb's nightgown:
Tears u shed for yr daughter, yr childhood, and for the madness of love; and
for the emptiness inside of my cunt where u wanted to spread yr seed like starbursts
on an empty clouded sky.

Ashen Fingers & Immutable Blue Skies

I left Portland yesterday. I walk on the Earth and the Earth walks with me.

Day: 2
Location: Dennis, MA
Miles Travelled: 212

Goodnight, Moon.

The last couple of days have felt brutal. I have arrived in Portland and my friend Zoe is at Broadway Crossings [the crisis unit of Ingraham].

If I am to have a lover, ze needs to be queer-not straight, not gay, not bisexual. I'm not sure I want to hold out any hope or expend any effort towards love whatsoever. Having sex usually means being compromised in some way or compromising someone else. An extended relationship with someone often means being eventually seen as female as the person sees more of my body, sees me in moments of weakness or emotion. This is especially confusing for me right now as I am in so much of a state of transition with my psyche, my gender, my life in general. But dating people who are very queer (usually genderqueer or trans themselves, involved in trans issues, interested in radical sexuality) has always been successful for me; everything else has not been. I want to be seen as human being who lives in a female body. This is even not correct, for I don't feel I live in a female body. How do you know I do? How do I know I do? My body exists in potentia when it is not known. If it happens to manifest as female at every recordable opportunity (ei. when undressing) that does not definitively prove its femaleness. I REALLY FUCKING HATE GENDER.

I feel very much in my body--very much female--today, and last night, and the sensation has been very negative and extraordinarily alien. I felt so male upon waking yesterday morning and this resulted in one of those hopeless sexual situations where each partner wants distinctly separate things and often have very different sexualities. I also-likely without reason- felt laughed at and not taken seriously in my masculinity/sexuality by Norm, and had a loss of self confidence. I feel awful, actually, and have since then. Everywhere I go, I do not want to interact with anyone, because I know I will only be seen as a woman. My body is so small and thin. If I have to be taken for a woman and told I am a woman and treated like a woman, can I at least feel like a woman? Could I at least appreciate things that I'm told come with being a woman? Could I at least understand womanhood? I want to go in the woods and make my campfire and cook my food and be around things that are sentient and green. I want the world to go fuck itself. Call me anything you want, I don't want to be a part of this anymore. I can't handle it.

Someone stole almost all of my food. Since it was stolen from Zoe's locked house inhabited by passively negative sentience, am I wrong in thinking that it may have been stolen by spirits? Or did I just put it somewhere and forget about it?

She won't let me fall

there is a hole in the baseboard of this wall
and through this hole i see the boy i know

and the guarantee that life will always pick me up

and never let me take on water

bail me

if i could become a frame through which the goddess acts
upon the world, and not be there at all:

its so strange to me not to care about Love
it pleases, indistinctly

i do not know the difference between together and apart
and a little porcelain doll with a broken head
says there's not any here.

Louisiana Thunder

New Orleans has been on my mind again, specifically thoughts of a trip down there with my truck for a month or two of work with Common Ground or Wetlands Restoration again this Spring. I miss that smell.
This feels right, right now, yet I am cautious. I am moving into/between paradigms right now, and it is like my life before last week was a string of time, and that string was let go and another picked up. It leaves me with a mind full of questions. What of what I learned before is valuable, what is not, and how much must I debase & prostrate myself now? Totally and completely, I think. What do these dieties want with me and how may I best serve Them? What is the whole and ultimate Truth? I think I may begin planning this trip now while I can still taste it in the back of my THROAT.

This Is the Only Truth I've Ever Told

At an earlier time, I was studying humility--I say studying, not practicing, because I have very little and at the time likely had near to none. Humility was a language I'd never spoken. I came across several things in quick succession: Do I want to glorify others? The idea was new. My next thought was designed to challenge myself, and I asked myself, "Would I still want to be enlightened were I the last person on Earth to recieve it?" This again was very alien to me.

I grew up believing in myself very strongly. I had decided to do so and did. My faith was unwavering. As I grew older, I soon began to conceptualize my place in the world, and in particular the Sixth Sun and the tranformation of reality. At a relatively early age (19) I began to conceptualize how I might take part in the coming change. I saw that as my generation got older, they would accumulate dysfunction and gradually lose their brilliance, innocence, and clarity. I could clearly see the difference between one year and the next. I saw how suffering broke down those I cared about, my "angels." I knew what my role was and I was nearly at the point at which I could accept it. I set as my goal to be the 'first angel not to die.' This meant that I would be the first person of my generation and class to be transformed. This would, of course, transform the world. I saw myself in a very glorious position, and one that would serve the world.

Time went on and challenges ensued, and I made sure to back down from all of them at critical points. I already imagined myself to be so much braver and more lucid than anyone I knew because I was experiencing things far beyond what was expected. I have developed minor to medium, wonderful, wide-ranged abilities in many psychic/consciousness-bending areas for which I am incredibly thankful and joyous. (I can't get this sentence right, but let it suffice to say that I am grateful) I experienced things I had no idea could be possible, too wonderful to be described. I excused myself from participating further with the forces that scared me because it was just "too much for me." I figured it was more than could be expected of anyone. I figured I was already so far ahead that I could sit down and chicken out, knowing that no one else would do what I was already doing.

I was very wrong. I have found that others I know excel much more quickly and with dozens fewer obstacles. They seem to be built simpler, despite seeming at times in the past hopelessly complex and rooted. They let go and surrendered to the flow like it was natural to them. To me, it was not. All the hardship, the crushing decisions, I had allowed to be so powerful to me because I thought I was by myself. When I see others taking them in stride, I realize they weren't so big after all, and all the mountains I made for myself and imagined so large are not so large. Big surprise.

But I did so well. So well. I never knew I could do that. And do so much so fast. It was just that I had so much self importance, but in some ways, I had very much the right things.

Today I thought to myself of something I'd read yesterday, that one can only do one's best. This is in the Four Agreements, which I've read before many times. However, I seem to not have caught part of it in the other readings. Don Miguel goes on to state that if one does BETTER than one's best, not only is the person harmed, but their energy is depleted and everything takes them longer, not the same time or quicker. I have felt horrendous for months because I do better than my best. I thought to myself, ah, I will just be me, and do one unit of work for one day, 100%. I will be one unit of Brandon, and not more nor less, for what I am has to be enough, and if I act as if it were not, it will never be. I will approach Satori a dozen times, a hundred times if neccessary, and I will never pass through. So anyway, I asked myself again today if I would want to recieve enlightenment were I the last person on Earth to recieve it. If every other person who I've looked down upon were at the finish line, encouraging me on, and I the very last one, I who could not understand something very key.

And I thought about how my friend Zoey was drafted into the service of Dieties and was re-formed and said that I had helped her, that she could not be where she was today without me. And how I had opened Zoel's eyes way back when, had made my mother more open-eyed and helped my father be a different man. How odd that I had helped so much while being so down now. And I thought, if I could be in the service of all of these people, I could be the humble servant of all of humanity. And they could all cross before me, and I could help them selflessly, and I could watch them go until I was the very last, and I WOULD STILL WANT THAT. "The first shall be last, and the last shall be first." And I realized then that nothing would be better just desserts for one who divined themself to be First, and whose very firstness made them the very last. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." (MK 9:35) Jesus of Nazareth makes not one but FIVE first-last references.

Jesus also says "Many are called, but few are chosen." I used to--and I mean quite recently--obsess about my role in the revolution and whether I could "succeed" or "fail" or whether it was destiny or free will or so forth. It occurred to me that nature is redundant. Redundancy seems, to me, to almost be a rule of nature. So if there was to be a conciousness change, wouldn't redundancy be built into that system, so if one avatar failed, there would be others to light the first torch/es?

And here's the thing about me. I am not innocent enough. I have had thoughts I ought not to have had. I have some problems I can't figure out how to get around.

I can't think about things without thinking about winning. There are others who will come before me. They will slip through like fish. I will not want them to, because I will not want them to come by their reward so easily (If you're not familiar with the Parable of the Vineyards, Google it as it explains this magnificently). I didn't want the solution to be that simple for some people.

It is amazing to me that all I have to do on Earth is be myself, that I could be a child and a mere student of a great cosmos. I believe we will have enlightenment when and how we want it. Our whole lives must be exactly as we want them. At the moment that one can choose enlightenment with their whole being, and not just intellectually or sensibly or emotionally, then it is theirs. That is the power of choice. It is every move we make. We move our own mountains.

I can't damage Divinity. I know nothing about it. It is more glorious than I am, it is everything that is glorious in me. There is nothing "I have" that is in any way helpful. Let me tell you the one thing that scares me and makes me suspect I'll turn away from 'truth' again. I had such wonderful things happen, states of being that were crystal clear, in motion, sharp as diamonds. Like those unenlightened Ascetics and their ability to fly, to enter the bodies of animals. Do I get those things if I'm enlightened? I wouldn't want it to be soft. Would I just sit there and rot away, not caring a whit? Because what I really wanted was to keep moving for a long time, to be an alive animal, to be a prism eyed child on the precipice of reason. Not afraid of life nor death. If I can clarify, just tell me. I am really interested in knowing more about this; if you have any kind of solution, please tell me?

This is all the truth that I can recall.

"WELL WHAT THE HECK I WENT AND DID MY BEST
AND BY GOD I REALLY TASTED SOMETHING SWELL
AND FOR A MOMENT, WHY, I EVEN TOUCHED THE SKY
AND AT LEAST I LEFT SOME STORIES THEY CAN TELL,
I DID. AND FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE, I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN
I FELT JUST LIKE MY OLD BONY SELF AGAIN."
-Jack the Pumpkin King

Addendum: None to Speak of.

Bullydogs

Check out the links I put under "Blogs & Sites of Interest." I put some of my friends there whose blogs are especially interesting, and activist and Pagan websites, as well as Bad Rap because they save abandoned and abused pit bulls, a very misunderstood breed that are some of the best behaved and most beautiful dogs. Get a pit bull if you want a wonderful dog who will love everybody in your life. Pit bulls aren't always for people with other pets or little children and you should not buy from breeders. Adopt from a responsible adoption program that socializes their dogs extensively.

Why do pit bulls have such a bad rap? It is because they have been used as guard dogs. This probably evolved from their use in dogfights--they are built, tough and have serious teeth and jaws. So, people want pit bulls to guard, or to be a tough scary dog to show off to their friends. This leads to pit bulls being treated like monsters and left at the end of a chain to grow progressively more violent and aggressive. The problem with using pits as guard dogs? Pit bulls weren't bred for violence against humans. Dogfighting dogs need to have a strong bite inhibition against human handlers. Pit bulls don't bite people naturally, but their reputation as mean dogs led to bad treatment and bad breeding. Pits aren't naturally aggressive. They are super-happy, bouncy dogs that love to cuddle. They won't protect you, but their reputation might.

Butterfly Box

Shortbus came out on DVD today, but the sole copy at Edge Video was out...

Life continues to be baffling and time is shortened and compressed, taking a good long while to get through but not uncomfortable; rather like a heavy cream. I am watching The Illusionist and the manipulation of time is mentioned and demonstrated. The Illusionist is able to drop an orange slowly, and then plant an orange seed and have it grow into a small tree in a few minutes. What does the viscosity of time mean for humans... how does it pertain to our destiny? For enlightenment must be a kind of manipulation of time.

It is so new to me, this idea of the worldview free from the impetus for approval. I still write thinking of the reader and zir response, not because I believe that is the best thing for me to have in mind, but as a default mode of understanding and operation...one I would desperately like to leave permanently in the dust.

My newest focus and plan is to follow the Four Agreements, and to look into another area which I will not mention here, as it is most personal.

"He cut me in half...I came out whole."
Maura O'Connor

Goldenrodpink Morning & the Core of Unfathomable Beingness

I lay in bed last night and felt my mind slipping away from me. What happens after the destruction of the ego? Why did I pretend that I could return to life as it was before, rather than going forever and on into the future? In a soft and hot jungle of mind, I couldn't rest; I squirmed in the sheets.

Dawn came, and I got up and went out. At the road by the lake, the passing cars seemed unfathomably loud, and I wondered why there were so many at 4 am. I started on a private trail leading to the camps nearby, my feet breaking through the crest of snow. The day was dawning with stunning passion and alacrity. Someone else had walked this path before, and I stepped in their iced footprints. There, at the clearing, their footprints turned about, and I stepped onto the crust of snow. It held me as surely as it would a bird.

I walked across the snow to the shoreline, behind the dock that had been pulled up for the season. The island was visible from here, shot through with pink and gold. On my back, the sky above was an unfathomable blue, a color that has no known name or composition, dawn's own color. Static birch trees hung in the sky above me, their branches touching the flat bright-dark sky, and it reminded me-or it was-the dream I had had once of the place at the edge of the world, the eerie, still, manmade quality to the trees. I was affected--I felt in me the freshness of morning and the world and its utter lack of understanding for the hell and darkness I deigned myself fit to live in. Joy has no room for pain-- Joy is just joy and joy and joy forever, never understanding a purpose for stopping.

I got up and walked to the clearing again, spying the untouched snow in its center, and I knew I wanted to run to it and dance in it, but wondered if it would collapse under my weight. I thought about fear and how if I was to travel, really, and see the world, if I was to look at everything and anything, I must get used to operating without inertia and fear. I ran and my feet marred the crest of snow but it did not break in the least, and in the center I found myself in a spin, and I spun and spun and in a moment I fell down and then I got up again and I fell again.

And in that second, I experienced a shriek of joy, aloneness and aliveness, vibrating straight through my whole being and I was shaken clear out of my body and knew what I couldn't understand but it made me remember...

I walked out onto the ice despite its frosted wetness and the whole pond was lit up by pink and yellow, lit from north sky end to south sky end. I walked very slow and quiet. I knew that I hadn't really known anything right all of my life, and that all my struggling and suffering was for nothing, and I knew there was something I couldn't understand. I knew also that I'd come this close before to knowing it, and even farther too, and I couldn't understand it. I knew there must be more to it than the sentence blocked out in capitals in my mind: IT ISN'T LIKE THAT...(FOOL!) I talked up to the sky and laughed and cried that this was true and real and there and that humans lived in the shadow of the sun, that we suffered and struggled as did I, never able to grasp the unfathomable truth, that all we had to do was simply to love, and that there was no game and no winning of it, and there never had been...and how wrong I had been...

And that the truth was far more beautiful than we would guess. And I knelt and put my hands together and said, "Whatever this thing is, I can see it but I cannot taste it! Please, deliver it into my arms." And I walked off the ice and cried in an ironic way, wondering if our minds would ever be big enough to apprehend such majesty, and laughing because they wouldn't and it hardly mattered, and shaking a little in the knowledge that I was surely going to forget again before really remembering at all!


"Breaking open the sun on a fine young goldenrodpink morning
with pink traveler's suitcase words and saying:
yes, this is living, yes, this is dying, yes, yes yes."

Post-Shower Blues

But I always forget that, after the rain, there comes the Sun.

Half-drowned but with Breath & Fruits of Fall

I am nothing. I used to be a person worth knowing. I was constantly painting, making films, devising direct action schemes, was a great lover & a good friend. People loved me; people wanted to know me. Now there is nothing. I believe my own family wants to get away from me sometimes. I no longer have a personality, a job, a position on anything, or goals of any sort. I no longer see or sense beauty. My friends are very few, and even around them I am uncomfortable, sensing that something is ajar in the composition of the physical and cognitive world.

At the height of my experience, locked up & away in the cat's tower, I considered how I had divorced myself from seemingly every aspect of my life and come to spend most of my days walking about weakly, or buried in bed, and an ironic female voice spoke to me: "If you DO nothing, you will BE nothing."

It was both an admonishment and an instruction.

I am at my mother's house. My future is an open-wide casket, which could be a calm resting place, shut away and safe. I feel hope growing drowsily inside me, like a flower opening. Once I understand that I can please no one with my development, where will I be, and what will I see? Such a deep dearth of love, beauty, realization and understanding, such a narrow shaft of light that I have available in my life, does admittedly have myriad positive effects. Those effects can perhaps only be realized once the shadow is lifted. It is like weaving a very small, threadbare peice of cloth in the dark. With so little to work with, I have learned to make each stitch of my work impossibly spare and perfectly ordered, so that come sun or rain or whatever season, I will no longer be swayed by the external temperature.

An added benefit of this that would be oh, so nice, would be if I could no longer give credence to whether another cares what I do or not, if the opinions of others could be like water under a very strong bridge. That is part of the reason I have moved off of Livejournal, to distance myself further from the readers of this journal. If they do read it, I want them to come to my own territory, my own website, to do so, since it creates a delicious sovereignty.

Holy Ghost

Last night I talked to Gregory on the phone for a few hours... I believe all that it would take for me to come face to face with total non-conflict reality would be to look into the eyes of someone who was pure, who was not pretending anything, and this has made me afraid before-- afraid of finding there's nothing behind the curtain; of looking into my own face forever.

When we both know there's no up or down, nothing to gain or to lose, no judgements, what is it that we could possibly want with one another? Would we make something up to want?

I packed up my ice skates to go skating today, but the cold was too intense for me. It penetrates right through my gloves and jacket. I don't mind when it's brisk or even cold, but there's a certain kind of cold that's not just an absence of warmth, but something aggressive, something that scares you in a way that's primeval. This is when it's -20, -30, with windchill. I camped in my pickup truck's bed during this type of weather twice, once in a blustery, snow-covered seasonal campground, parked behind a massive tower of stacked picnic tables. Twice that night, my nightmares were interrupted by the passing of a train on nearby tracks. It wasn't till the end of the second passing that I was able to place the sounds and lights of the mechanical giant as being that of a train.

My dreams that night were of sinister creatures that were anatomically wrong- one of my least favorite types of dreams. I know now that these "animals" in my dreams are the dysfunctional thoughts that I have that I'm most ashamed of.

I also had one of those "darkness" dreams--this one of travelling backwards in the truck bed down my own road, in the dark. The dreams are interminable and daylight seems impossibly far away. No one is available to help and light is scarce.

I saw my therapist today, again, for the first time since I had just turned 17. She is very smart... She accepted all of my wildness without so much as blinking. She doesn't believe that I'm delusional, which is a great start, I think. She quickly let me know that spiritual breakthrough is not limited in any way by age, and I felt a little embarrassed.

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hypoglycemia

This blood sugar thing is getting out of hand. I can't seem to stay awake, and when I am, I'm often too out of it to do anything. I feel really muddled and drugged.

I'm practicing being assertive, and this is really new to me. I've spent so much time trying to address conflict with nuetrality or kindness and never saying what it is I want. Most of the time, I don't even know what I want. I try really hard not to offend anyone, or bother them in any way...no wonder I have low self worth sometimes.

I was checking out stuff on roller derby online. Maine has a roller derby team (Vacactionland Vixens). It looks extremely fun and reminds me of my dream last night... nevermind the fact that I can barely remain standing on my rollerskates.

"A woman came up to me and said
"I'd like to poison your mind
With wrong ideas that appeal to you
Though I am not unkind"
She looked at me, I looked at something
Written across her scalp
And these are the words that it faintly said
As I tried to call for help:

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you,
Be what you're like,
Be like yourself,
And so I'm having a wonderful time
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
There's only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark

A man came up to me and said
"I'd like to change your mind
By hitting it with a rock," he said,
"Though I am not unkind."
We laughed at his little joke
And then I happily walked away
And hit my head on the wall of the jail
Where the two of us live today.

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you,
Be what you're like,
Be like yourself,
And so I'm having a wonderful time
But I'd rather be whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
Whistling in the dark
There's only one thing that I like
And that is whistling in the dark"

-They Might Be Giants

Syndication

I'd like to find out how to syndicate posts from this Blogger journal into my new, yet-to-be-created personal hub website. However, I would also like the Archive to be available on the new site, with entries listed by title rather than soley by date posted.

New Blogspot Website

This is a test post.