My various journals, diaries, memoirs, and personal letters range across the times and spaces of my life. Sometimes I kept extensive private records, usually with an eye toward possible publication. Nearly everything I wrote was written with the intention, indeed a commitment to share with the world. Most anyone was welcomed to at least read my work. For perhaps too many other times, unfortunately, I didn’t record anything. Most of what I wrote prior to the house fire of 2010, boxes filled with letters, journals, and diaries are gone forever. All burned up. Regardless of what others thought, however, I wrote with the determination to show, tell, and share the truth as I believed and experienced events and the emotions, thoughts, and feelings related to them. Of those matters I felt too ashamed, embarrassed, hurt, or afraid of to address in public, well, I simply didn’t even write about such things. Those things may follow me into death for all I know. This diary-journal hybrid represents 2019. One last thing: I don’t use the full names of certain friends, relatives, and acquaintances. Some of them are disguised. Thank you.

Wednesday 23 January

Life is like a rollercoaster off the rails, ha ha! I’ve a muck hole fulla crappo, and ya know what? It sux, lol! And life is great anyway! Yeah, I’m good. 

Sometimes in the Silence I can feel energy from afar like water in the body. Can’t explain it, really.

In the moment an opening existed thru which I could feel you far away. I was reminded what a beautiful, brainy, emotional, & sensual woman you are way over there. It’s all reading energy by feeling into the energy as the conscious mind expands out into the world.

Praying for lots of peace & healing. Altho I don’t really pray. Not in a conventional sense. Maybe it’s time we just frakken beg for all we desire without any shame.

Part of it, truly, & please don’t misunderstand this, is spiritual awareness, or rather awareness of consciousness everywhere beyond our bodies. Also, ahem, I feel intense sexuality & erotic energy. I’m often horny as hell, and at the same time it doesn’t run me. Just ignites awareness! For a time anyway. Then the doors, those doors of perception, those windows thru which the soul flies out further than the edge of biological mind, they all close. As if the walls of the Mansion of God fall away to reveal what is greater than one brain can behold, to experience what anyone stuck in a mind limited by bone of skull and flesh of cranium can process. Lay all thoughts aside and be what is beheld to allow thy self to be held as one of the many become one.

Also see people rushing too quickly up what’s called “the relationship escalator” every time they do hold hands & more. I don’t wanna rush anywhere or even walk slowly unless it’s with consensual, conscientious choice.

Relationship escalators, by the way, refer to the way we humans tend to automatically and unconsciously move in our sexualoving romantic relationships. We often move without questioning the underlying factors driving what we believe to be our conscious choices. Common examples are as follows: Two people meet. They like each other. They agree to meet up for coffee or tea followed by a walk in the park. They hold hands. They revel in mutual commonalities and ignore their differences. They kiss. Maybe they have dinner together. Or dance. And kiss again. Oh, this is going somewhere now, so it must mean they really, really like each other, yes? Arousal kicks in as hormones flood the body. They have sex, sleep together, wake up the next day, and make love. Suddenly they feel they must therefore be a couple because they had sex together, and they had sex together because, hey, they kissed and held hands and went for romantic walks and have so much in common and they laughed over dinner and kissed and hugged and looked into each other’s happy eyes. So they must automatically be a couple now, yes? Next thing you know they moved in to live together or got engaged to get married. Sooner or later they break up or divorce, and repeat, and repeat yet again. We are driven by socio-cultural conditioning, influenced by the habits of our parents and grandparents, by religion and music and politics, and seek to imitate our neo-tribes on social media. Both memes and genes rule. We are social mammals driven by biological and chemical processes underlaid by physics. Have you found yourself on the relationship escalator?

(From my journalistic texts to my friend Br.)

 

Sunday morning of 6 April

Moments ago I sat in the kitchen nook gazing out the window as I finished my breakfast and sipped my coffee. Aye, coffee, strong, kickass black and with 3 ice cubes, too. 

Sometimes I feel ungrounded, untethered, as I do in this moment. Sometimes I feel as if I am a ghost. I feel like a ghost. I am a ghost. Embodied.

My life is similar to many lives as I’ve had my share of failures and successes. I’ve fallen many times and got back up each time. Often I pull myself up alone. More often I had help. Joys and sorrows, curses and blessings, happy times and sad times, gains, losses, triumphs, rewards, and losing nearly everything but life itself.

Once I felt on top of the mountains and near the pinnacle of my success. I needed to go on just a little bit more. I was happily married to a magnificent woman, the third of now three ex-wives. After much work, we had achieved a what was to us an astonishing level of financial success with investments well up into the 7-figure range. We owned two beautiful homes, nothing fancy, but they were breath taking for us working class artist folks. Nearly all of our furniture, even the really nice, expensive pieces, was used. We drove used cars, even old ones, and a secondhand minivan was our family travelmobile. In some ways we were as those low-key “millionaires next door” one sometimes read about in the news. Also had three awesome and wonderfully challenging children between us, and we were friends with my 2nd ex-wife. And we lost it all. Everything but life itself. We even lost each other.

So now I sit and, no, I cannot mope. Writing liberates me from the sandbag-heavy tentacles of depression. The kraken of my mind slides back into my damaged id as I continue to heal. But, alas, am I ruminating here? Or is this contemplation? Is this self-absorbed narcissism? Am I gaslighting myself? No, I am mourning. Grieving. Mourning still. As I do so my mindbodysoul surfs along the continuum between rumination and contemplation as I grapple with loss and the liberation loss provides.

I feel broken but cannot see what to fix. Deep down there isn’t anything to fix really. Even the great engines of civilization will grind on in spite of long overdue needs for radical, revolutionary transformation. 

The gap between myself and the Divine grows wider. Isn’t separation from God one facet of Hell? I am lonely. I share a house with two lonely men, one at the end of his young adult years and the others into his elder years. I turn 60 myself in a few weeks. It’s a double-decade pivot from middle age into, what, I’m not old-old, but, aye, I do feel it coming. For me young adulthood begins in the adolescent turmoil of ages 16-18 and really starts at 20. Continues until 39 or 40. Middle age kicks in then and lasts until, when? Well, let’s arbitrarily declare it 59 and 60. But another 20 years brings us to 80, then to 100, then to 120. Even the most vigor folks in their vibrant 60s and 70s seem to hit a biological wall at around 81 or so. BAM! 

So while I embrace the wisdom of age I mourn the healthy vitality of youth. But in no way in hell would I want to relive any of those years. I would have made difference choices along the way, however, and those distinctions are for another time to ponder.

All of my best male friends live far away. I am good buddies with people at work, but we are at work.

My retail job, which I highly value, has me working weekends and many evenings. Plays hell with my social life where so many not in retail are available in the evenings or on weekends. Unless they’re entrepreneurs or working artists. So I am lonely for a mate. 

I am so done with the self-love phase. Been there, done that. I love myself. I appreciate the freedom and the solitude. I really do like what Elvis used to call “that high-lonesome feeling.” I am just fine by myself. But I prefer to share life with a companion and do things together with one other.

Miss my kids. They seem not to know what to do with Daddy, especially when Daddy is broke and doesn’t have any money and just keeps on reminding them he’s gonna die eventually.

Ha Ha!!!

OK, I must go now. Must continue to get ready for work. Giving up going to the Gym. Just don’t have the energy to push forward out of my nesty rut, and my back hurts like a string of cliches.

Bye for now.

Later:

Email CJx back re asking to help me untangling my twin threads of wealth generation and partnership creation with one or several divinatory readings. Thank you.

 

Monday 13 May

Yes, Life is messy. Whatever you do must be acceptable for only you. I don’t trot about in your shoes, so what do I know?

My opinions aren’t true or false, just more noise perhaps.

Hard to be an HSP (a Highly Sensitive Person) in such a judgmental, whiplash culture.

I’m sad to feel such pain inside you. Wish I could help. I don’t see nature as good or bad but as gigantic, interlocking forces powerful & as destructive as well as creative. I’ver known some good rednecks & some vile urbanites. It’s a tough one. My current situation isn’t pretty in appearance, not at all, tho I like the kitchen, but it gives me time & space to heal myself. Isn’t perfect.  I share an old ass house w/2 other divorced, single men, one 40, the other mid-60s. None of us date. Life itself is messy from birth to death. I’ve learned to accept things even if I dislike them. Doesn’t mean I give up, but acceptance first allows for change should I choose change. Anyway, I need to go unload my car & work on my writing before going to bed. Peace be upon thee.

Ahhh, light. Dark. Yes. It’s a dance between dark & light. Too much light is as deadly & harsh as too much dark. I appreciate both as I do you. Some storms where both swirl all cyclonic may last a long time, tho, so slingshot out if ya can’t sail on thru. Like around Jupiter.

(from my journalistic texts to my friend Br.)

 

Early Afternoon of Wednesday the 12th of June

Just answered the 65th question of an online world history questionnaire. So far I’ve answered each one correctly. When I take these tests I usually either get them all correct or answer only a few in error. In this moment I wish I had pursued a PhD in History, especially in World History with its interplay of relationships between action events and belief systems. The term, butterfly effect wasn’t in use back then.

When I was a history major at Hampden-Sydney College 1977-1981, my history professors strongly discouraged us from pursuing doctorate degrees in the subject. They claimed we would earn very little, would have to live in “professional housing” presented by the colleges and thus must be kept to certain standards of style, and would be competing against each other for tenure in a world where the Liberal Arts were being pushed back in all directions by the demands of technology and business as it took time and limited resources to manage and run businesses and also to learn to operate and constantly recreate ever-evolving technologies. Technology was leaving the pursuit of science itself in the dust as one focused, back then, anyway, on building and repairing things we didn’t know how to actually fabricate and build.

I got tired of being told what to do.

“Write, don’t disappear into the wilderness.”

Moved West to vanish into the Wild. Away from people telling me what to do and how to live my life.

No balance. Didn’t want to live like a balanced seesaw held motionless in space & time anyway.

Wild=Libre=Free=Liberty

Tests & exams from movement therapy to neuropsych eval demonstrated  genius brain & damaged brain. 

åœΩ∑´´ß∂ç≈®ƒ√†©∫ƒç©†¥¨ˆøπ¬˚∆˙©√∫˜µ≤≥…÷æ[]

 

Tuesday 18 June 2019

Experienced insights this morning as I read the transcripts of Sean Carroll’s interview of cosmologist Anthony Aguirre on “Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information.”

I became self-aware of just how excited, even agitated, I quickly became as I read this piece. Still haven’t finished it! Got so excited I had to write, but first had to finish breakfast and clean up. Chose to, that is, or else all would soon turn into a pigsty of epic messes if I focused solely on things of the mind.

As a child, I wanted to become an astronaut. It’s the adventurer in me, the explorer, the warrior, the daredevil, all rolled into one kid who sought to already be grown and flying across space in my own Star Trek. But the hearing impairment kept me out of the military and indeed all things flying. Eyes, too.

I really wanted to be a scientist. Both grandfathers were scientists. My Mom’s dad was a physics professor at a university, and my Dad’s dad a botanist with the State Dep’t of Agriculture. My Dad’s cousin, or rather his dad’s cousin, was a chemistry professor at a small college. My Mom had a number of uncles on her mother’s side who were big time construction engineers, or rather, employed them. So I had their influence. Science was magick understood and was to save the world.

Anyway, I started out in college majoring in biology. I saw myself as a field biologist a la “Wild Kingdom” TV show I grew up watching. With one eye on the stars above. But I struggled in maths. Maths eluded me. So I withdrew. Looking back, I was interested in what today is called exobiology or astrobiology. I wasn’t aware of such terms back then in 1977 or 78.

But a deeper constant ran thru me, too, a deep appreciation for physics, especially quantum mechanics, as well as meta-astronomy on a vast scale, which tied in somehow with consciousness studies as a part of a novel approach to what we call the spiritual world…perhaps just another parallel universe or set of hyperdimensions?

Again, I failed at the math. 

I wanted to be a scientist, but sucked at managing the necessary tools of mathematics, the most foundational science of all.

What I am really good at, however, indeed excel at is creative writing. But no desire to do the tedious work of finding agents & marketing & publishing & distribution. And no, self-publishing beyond my website wasn’t really an aspiring option. Gross!

 

Thursday 10 October 

To Kurt, Wayne, Edan, Heath, Michael Scott, Ron, anybody…

Anybody?

Anyone? 

Dear ex-wives? Former lovers? Children? Children scattered to the winds who ignore most of my attempts to contact them because I write too much relative to what they want to read from me while they text enough chatter back and forth with their friends to fill a tome?

Siblings? Relatives? Acquaintances? Colleagues? Hell, socmed friends on Facebook? Workshop buddies & wannabe too far away girlfriends & housemates? Some one, any body? 

Ahhh, whatever…everybody’s busy. Yes, every one is too damn busy to be unbusy. 

I’m slowly going mad.

I’m not in the same place of life as I was at age 25 or 35 or 45. I’ve let go of so much. And more. Looks as if I’m using too many damn “I” pronouns, too, huh? Means I’m already insane, yo. Even tho we’re not supposed to use such a non-PC word. Recent research seems to demonstrate those afflicted with various degrees of narcissism, psychopathy, and, yes, even dementia tend to overuse the I pronoun. Well, shit, OK, because, see, I am slowly going mad, & I’m OK with it. 

Acceptance of my own madness. Isn’t doing so crazy in & of itself?

Depression abides beneath my “me.” It does not lurk. Or poke. It is silent, still, deep, black as ink. My depression is a nothingness, a living abyss sucking on my soul as a lover sucks my cock without ever wanting to let go. But even vampires, their crazed hunger satiated, eventually turn loose those drained corpses lolling in their arms like soft sacks of morbidious jelly. God, I use too many adjectives, dammit, and Goddess knows. Melancholia indulges in the beauty of a garden bursting open with rottenous decay. Shades of gray become stacks of silver.

I’ve learned to live with my psychic cancer. Nor do I wish to dull its edge. Or bury it.  Otherwise this depression may rise up to bury the rest of me. I am in so much pain I just lay around naked in the bed under the covers to stay warm because everything else hurts. I drug myself not with opiates but with video streaming. I lay around hurting in bed and bury my dreams of sharing the wilderness with a lover or seeing the larches turn tangerine lemon yellow orange in October by binging on Netflix.

A parade of movies and shows parade past my naked ass. These march forward across and thru spacetime right on past my piles of papers to sort and file. I keep watching these films, too, even when yawing myself sleepy, while stacks of boring, unopened mail pile up until I accidentally step on them and scatter them apart. Chores pile up, too. I lose weight. Takes a great effort to make myself go brush and floss my teeth, or to bathe, or shave, or to even get outside of the house when not at work or asleep. Aye, chores do pile up. Melancholy makes everything feel a lot less jolly.

I sleep little. Hard to get enough sleep. Awake so many time to piss. Fill up one to two quart jars of urine so I don’t have to wake myself up even further by going far away down convoluted stairs to a distant toilet. Or I sleep too much. Either way I am groggy with deadly brain fog for hours after waking up. For hours!

This October is so beautiful so far. Especially after an unusually wet August & September.

I drift thru beautiful days & ugly ones, too.

help

HELP

HeLppppp

Oh, nevermind, yo. That’s melodrama, y’all. Just.melodrama. Mellow Rama?

There is no intention to commit suicide or homicide. Nope, not me. My tumors of melancholia desire to live! 

Help me to deal with my ADHD. It eats me up. Always late.

2019 – 1912 = 107 years.

Whatever the Hell that means. Jeeezus…!

 

Sunday 12 October

The alarm clock glows as a dim 2:40 in the morning kicks up to 2:41 am. 

Growing old increases perspective. Sort of, anyway.

I slipped in the tub yesterday morning as I showered for work. Was an old, large, enamel bathtub in a house on the side of a hill in Seattle back in 1912 107 years ago. I didn’t fall, however, but quickly reached out & steadied myself against the tile wall.

Something happened, some combination of a surface made slick by soap & water  and a momentary loss of balance. Yes, as if my sense of balance vanished for a moment as I lost myself while stepping into the wet curve of tub. 

For a brief fraction of time the fabric of space unraveled, then knitted itself back into spacetime as if nothing had occurred, nothing at all, yet something happened to leave behind invisible scars in the psyche of my mindbody.

I’m 60 now. And while I feel I’m in better shape than many younger than me, still I’m afflicted with this disease of aging. Slipping in the tub at age 60 feels different from slipping in the tub at age 40, or even age 20. I shudder to think of slipping in the tub at age 80 & actually falling where I to slip. Imagine slipping & tumbling at age 100. Again at 120! And yet again I may live to those ages and more without even slipping in the tub at all. I want to live nearly forever, you see.

Well not really forever. I do want to explore what’s beyond death & go farther and further into the Afterlife as I am able to do, even if there isn’t any Hereafter. If good health prevails, if nurturing relationships enrich me, and I’m financially stable, why would I want to die? 

Bored? Nawww…there’s so much yet to accomplish and experience all across the Solar System alone. I’ll never be bored, not for as there is always so much to do here and there. So many foods to taste. So much to cook and create. So many people to love. So much art to create! Heck, I haven’t started painting yet.

 

Monday 14 October

I’m torn between the time & energy demanded by the entrepreneurial impulse & my desire/drive to write & create art with language. My deep life purpose is to create art with language. If I don’t write, I die. 

Tho I am spending far more time watching videos streaming on Netflix and to a lesser degree YouTube & elsewhere. Used to read large numbers of books a year. Now my capacity to read books or anything in a linear fashion has deteriorated. Concerns me, it does.

On a fundamental level, however, I feel driven to write everything down as it erupts from my mind, heart, soul, & body before I die. Spending time & energy on the business side of the art, which doesn’t generate needed income in the short term, seems a waste when I may not have much longer to live & write. Who knows, tho?

 

Wednesday 16 October

Burst into tears as I read an essay in The Atlantic. I’d stumbled upon it while scrolling thru articles on my smartfone.

Ahhh… “Being Busy is Eliminating the Joys of Shared Free Time,” the magazine declared. Judith Shulevitz pens, “Why You Never See Your Friends Anymore,” as “Our unpredictable and overburdened schedules are taking a dire toll on American society.” No wonder we’re so damn depressed and lonely. 

This essay explains and describes what is killing my soul:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/why-dont-i-see-you-anymore/598336/.

 

Wednesday 30 October

Life is messy. We are messy. Relationships are messy. I’ve learned to navigate. Sometimes I wreck, LOL!

So I don’t expect anyone to be “on” all the time.

It’s ok…not the challenges facing our species (our lives genetically disrupted to live short lives so we never mature into a wise species per some exobiologists), but the way you are as an HSP. I appreciate you as you are, “off” messes & all. It’s still possible to feel love, desire, “pace & space,” any feeling, actually, for anyone, including you.  

I’ve come to appreciate the POV of the relationship anarchy folks – live & love in the moment without things having to look a certain socio-culturally conditioned way.  Freedom to be with responsibility but not necessarily fixed into anything except whatever consenting adult participants choose.

(From my journalistic texts to my friend Br.)

 

Thursday 12 December

I’m sorry to inform thee I am a bawdy fella who lusts with an open, naughty heart grounded in ethics & the capacity to to love as a choice. Ahhh banish me from all thoughts of heavenly bliss for I’d much rather wallow in our primal wildness. Well, with some clothes on when it’s truly cold, of course.

Last few days have been unexpectedly rich with new insights as I recognize more & more of the larger socio-cultural, religious, & political drivers running me unconsciously with expectations & so on. My practice is to recognize them, & once acknowledged, let them go. To celebrate melancholia as much as bliss, to honor the darkness from which springs light, and learning to love without expectations anything has to look a certain way or go somewhere. Remove our metaphors such as those glasses half empty & half full & simply be real with what is, and what is is a mess, lol. OK, time for bed. Unless one is a wolf chronotype like me, LOL!

Believe it or not, I haven’t had sex with anyone in over 4 years…could have, I suppose…simply realized I’m not at all interested in dating, courtship, and seduction & financial games. To be with me requires bypassing such matters to connect without attachments or expectations or shouldas. Oh, such a messy, messy practice! 

(From my journalistic texts to my friend Br.)

 

Friday 13 December

In the end all things end to once again begin.

Sometimes I feel safe to be unfettered around some people, and I absolutely respect boundaries. The best boundaries are cellular, yes? Not rigid like the Great Wall of China or the Maginot Line of France. Life builds up the best walls from mud & sticks & stuff.

(From my journalistic texts to my friend Br.)

 

***This is an unfinished work in progress. More entries written elsewhere will be added here as they’re processed. Please enjoy anyway, thank you!***

William Dudley Bass
Friday 28 February 2020
Seattle, Washington
USA
Cascadia
Sol

 

Copyright © 2019, 2020 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.