Nearly four decades later, I'm scrambling out of the hole on the other side, from which I entered as more clueless and with few answers to what I was and where I'd be going. It's like I was given a preview of what could be, but had to endure a purgatory to get to this present end of the rabbit-hole.
At the 'front-end' of this rabbit hole I knew there was needed a different culture and society before I would have participatory contentment to go-along and get-along with the consensus. I was to discover the full ramifications to the advice, 'If you want to change the world, change yourself', would be. Those full ramifications would be a tortuous series of adventures and misadventures over the next
thirty-eight years.
The rabbit-hole itself is the general mindset of most materialistic and temporal thinking-the stuff that keeps drama between people and the world in turmoil.
I was a coincidental naif, who believed in the words of the authority figures and their homilies of the generations they were regurgitating in their own turn. Whether my outlook came from some organic and mechanistic affinity to stimuli in my cognitive field, OR,
ala reincarnation, I was commissioned as the spirit that I am to come here to raise holy-hell with this mindset of temporal presumptions. I don't know that much, but I do know that informational forms came along and fit together so
synchronistically and associatively that, in retrospect, this was an inevitable process. The only necessary trigger was my indomitable,
intrepidness that persisted through the desserts of cultural and social distractions and diversions. Those distractions and diversions were like obstructing defenses of this present metaphysical status
quo to slow me down, if not capture me, in some
detentive mindset. I was trusting and innocent enough to have put on quite a few mind-shackles between my first cognitive awareness through to nearly my 44
th birthday.
I had been becoming more of a renegade to the social and cultural posturings before that. Disengaging and estranging myself from the obvious b.s. was easy by May 1970, when I saw how more substantively for real I was with my rhetoric compared to the A-personality types and authority figures who were all lip-service to their paradigms of noise. After the summer of 1970, I knew I was on a journey for which there were few markers along the way to
even give me a clue of where to go.
Having a low draft number and the misfortune (so I thought) of not learning how I could have escaped the draft in December 1971 sent me even more clueless of my future as a draft enlistee of the Army. The Army was seen as a big intellectual and emotional, three year detour, but it did have some useful redeeming qualities that stayed with me. As you see by my
Facebook avatar the motto, 'This We Shall Defend", with the 'Don't Tread on Me'-serpent there ARE somethings I feel that you'd struggle and take a tangible or intangible ass-whipping for, because they are THAT sacred
to and for you. Being in the Army, as well as my other military service with the Air Force and the Army Reserves, gave me an expanded view of the diverse personalities and motivations of American culture and society on the operational end of working-class, public service. I met people who were as sharp intellectually as any I had know about at Yale, but whose life options had them in these more anonymous and less glamorous and enriching, but necessary roles. They were a reminder and icons for the symphony 'Ode to the Common Man' (see
Youtube.com).
Then there were the
compelling people I met along the way. Foremost would be my three spouses who were a reflection of my social outlook and acculturation. My first was a decent person, who like me was lonely for someone she could care for. With the people we had known previously, we WERE the upgrade we'd been hoping to find. BUT we were from backgrounds giving different emotional trajectories for our personalities. It was neither of our faults. We were stuck on the emotional tar-baby of 'needing the completer for our happiness'. The happily-ever-after myth was still the expectational enchantment on our impulses. Life was for joy and its pleasures that we COULD AFFORD, MATERIALLY. We gave it a run and achieved some of those expectations but NOT to the affluence we would have liked to be. The non-achievement was
not the stickler, as it was the realization that
something else and more could be the fulfillment for joy and happiness. The trappings for the process went back to the trajectories from our background. That's where the end-game for that relationship came to an end. Like the Army, there was a redeeming quality learned from the relationship. IT was the importance for passion and meaning in a relationship. That personal experience took me through a concurrent vocational revision of thinking. The early, post-Vietnam Army was an institution in which I had a feeling of doing something noble and worthwhile in my micro-role in the process. I perceived that there was institutional appreciation and consideration for the most humble private. Also, with the Air Force, the way they invested in the training opportunities for their enlisted gave the members seeking a career an
espirit de corp with the institution and the other members. Contrastingly, my civilian jobs during that period were showing the signs of work-place abuse and the
condescensional thinking about the fungible, unimportance of the wage (and salaried) worker. The renegade '
L'Etranger' in me came out in disaffected impatience with the galley-workplace. Not only did I have little impatience, but less loyalty for being a careerist, though I did not degrade my diligence or conscientiousness
to the tasks at had, just to my regard of deference to the management.
It was during this first marriage that 'the call' was confirmed. Strange, because it was during this time that I was most motivated to be part of the 'great upwardly mobile herd of affluent
indulgent'. The call was a serial continuation of a dream of personal prophecy I had during the last months before my college graduation. The continuation came in the form of dreams and insights. Those forms culminated in the 'Testament' I labeled my 'Cosmic Religion'. That WAS the break with the conformity to the cultural patterns of my contemporaries. Being in the military created inherent constraints on the exploration of the intellectual and emotional expressions this 'religion' insinuated. My pragmatic, temporal side knew that my nomadic, vocational habits would be best served if I submitted to a military career.
Well.... Then came my second spouse. I met her near the end of my marriage with my first. I had no personal or intimate dealings with her during my first marriage, but she had caught my radar. She and my second marriage were the mercenary consequences inflicted on carnal impulsiveness. And it was,
analogously, the seeming, mercenary, general abandonment of my institutional and familial support for me, though I had was no more guilty than being
idiosyncratic to the ways and habits of the institution and the relatives of my world. their 'abandonment' of me gave me the secular and emotional freedom to be whatever and whomever I wanted to be since there were no longer any constraining voices or counter-
pointing, authoritative thoughts obstructing my inquisitive
intrepidness. The spouse, our marriage, the institutions, and family were parallel dramas on disenchantment and estrangement. What would normally be seen as the 'end of the world',
emotionally for most became 'new adventures
in the wilderness'. My social and cultural exile to my own meager resources and talents gave me the TIME to finally explore the expressions of the 'Cosmic Religion', my 'Self'. The non-necessity of carnal companionship, family-in-name-only, and mercenary vocational conditions were strongly imprinted on my
perspectives of being.
The popular advent of the
Internet freed me from the limiting, local and provincial thinking of my physical circumstances. This
communication form, with my new found independence gave me a medium to 'Be the Expression of Your S
oul', Junyah-Be@webtv.net and all the other pseudonyms of mood and expression I have had as my email logos and egoes.
Then the reality of age and mortality, the mid-life crisis, fell on me like a ton of bricks. More than that, it was a temporal mocking of what I cared for the most in my thoughts and concerns. What did I have to show for those thoughts and concerns. In the terms and means of the accepted conventions I had miserably under-achieved. I first bought that, on my return from a poorly planned relocation to very nice Pueblo, Colorado. It was aided by a series of horrendous circumstances that ranged from living conditions shared with back-sliding substance abusers in a roach-trap, to a series of expensive car repairs, to a hopeful new location being in a
Funkstown on a street named for the bloodiest battle of the Civil War-Antietam, at the end of that street and the ends of the road across from a
cemetery, with me staying in a basement apartment-I was at the rock-bottom of my luck. 'Better luckier than good' seemed to have deserted me. That was the point I had to learn. Living on the expectation and the entitlement of being luckier than good would not and did not last. Far from being cursed, I had deluded myself with that cavalier attitude. Now, I had to not only work myself from the pit of this vocational, but psychological dead-end I had arrived at. Just getting over the self-recriminations to this circumstance, which manifested itself in a mild form of depression was the worst year, my 50
th, of my life. On top of that the well and ill-meaning patronization and condescension I had to experience from others was even less help to me. It took a string of happenings where I had to go-it-alone to accomplish something I wanted to do that brought me back to my confident, but, now, more practical
cavalierness.
In doing that I, incidentally, got the opportunity to meet my third and present spouse. Meeting her was another carnal impulsiveness that was intensely framed by serendipitous events, and capped by a revival of willing, altruistic duty-away from my previous cynical and mercenary skepticism of people. It has been through this process of refining and
nuancing these duties of altruism that I came to this opening thirty-eight years after entering a hole which I knew where not I might end up..
ONTO VIRGINIA... OR PUEBLO.... OR CORPUS CHRISTI!!!
