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3/2/2016 8:56:05 AM
---- Updated 3/2/2016 9:21:10 AM
Very interesting thread. Let me see if I can lend anything useful to it.
Ken raises some very interesting points, well spoken too.
Is it a question of fear?
Or
Is it a question of self-doubt?
Byron has basically figured out how not to pay fear
any mind, which is pretty much what I do, now more than ever.
Nothing like actually surviving your own physical death
and still be around to talk about it, to make you realize,
there is very little fear.
For me, it came down to God, I feared having him
warn me even more sternly, so I quit the pot and the drink,
and now He seems okay and happy enough with me, so I fear nothing.
Now,
you've really not given me much to go on here, Fly,
therefore, I have little idea of what to say to you per se.
I can however respond at length to Ken, and I will.
First of all, Ken,
I do not think you are a bad person.
You seem to at least fear that you are,
but I want to try to get you past that.
The very fact that you question
"am I a bad person?" is an act of introspection
that people who generally are arguably bad, rarely if ever do.
Arguably bad people generally share a characteristic,
they think everything about them is fantastic,
they never so much as entertain a differing point of view,
it's 'I'm always right, you're always wrong, and by the way f*** you'
to put it bluntly....
What you need, Ken,
is someone who gives a damn enough
to say 'hear what I have to say,
I have been where you are,
and I know the way out'.
Well consider me the person to have just said that, 'cause I am.
That reminds me of a parable....
(Oh God, here she goes....)
A guy's walkin' along,
and he falls down this really really deep hole...
and he's stuck down there, no doubts about it....
so he begins to call for help...
"Help!" he cries, "Can anybody hear me??"
after a while crying for help,
along comes a fireman,
who says 'here!'
and throws him down a rope,
only it's the whole rope,
then he walks away....
so he keeps calling for help.
After a time, a priest walks along,
'What's all the noise my son?'
says the priest...
"Father, I'm stuck down here in this hole
can you help me?"
The priest says two Our Fathers and Three Hail Marys,
and walks on his way.
The guy's beside himself by now,
"HELP!!!! ANYBODY!!!"
Just then, the guy's friend walks along....
"Hey Buddy, what's goin' on?"
"Oh man, I fell down into this hole, and I'm stuck here, can you help me?"
His Buddy says "Sure thing."
And Jumps Down Into The Hole With Him.
The guy's dumbfounded,
says to his Buddy,
"What'd you do THAT for? Now we're BOTH stuck down here."
His Buddy says,
"it's okay, I've been here before, I know the way out."
-Ta-DA!-
Okay, so what's the way out?
Basically, it's self-discipline.
I once upon a time had all that you've described.
"Am I good enough?"
I've regretted things I've done in life, and the way not to be felled by them,
is to be committed to learning from these mistakes.
We reinvent ourselves each and every day,
and Bryon's right, sitting on your laurels is a waste of time,
it's regurgitating what you ate yesterday, and eating it again
today, calling it a meal. It is not a meal. It's yecch.
The past is the past. If you did something good, fantastic.
Learn from that too, try to better it.
Look, Ken.
I have skills, by now skills up the yik-yack.
I know I do. I know I do, because I made it my personal mission,
made it my business, but beyond that,
made it my f***ing mission in life, do or die, to make myself, be
able to do, what I am now able to do.
I didn't just pop out of the womb like this. Though at the time
I didn't know how to do what I can do now, I wished I had.
Even sensed, I had extraordinary talent.
But let me tell you about the red-eyed monster,
you have described.
It is, ourself.
Look, I can tell you shit about self-doubt,
and self-worth issues, that you probably don't even need to know about.
But you want an idea?
I was raped as a child.
This fact was blocked in my head, for most of my life,
and thankfully for my late wife, all of my 26 years of marriage.
It's after she died, and they brought me back
from the dead myself, (ooh I was almost outa here I tell ya! totally!)
that I had nothing but time, and that's where I thought of stuff
I'd never thought of before... like remembering how once
a grown man, seemingly normal old-ish guy
who lived with his wife, drugged me unconscious,
wasn't till I asked the eventually inevitable question,
'why does a grown man, drug a child unconscious',
and it hit me. And the answer horrified me,
and has in fact scarred me for life.
I am afraid to be intimate anymore, with anyone, man, or woman,
because I figured out this much:
While I was unconscious, the man raped me, and his wife helped him do it.
Held me down, in place, and he did his business to me.
Now, how I survived, that,
was, well odd, because I didn't entirely survive it,
some of me was pretty caved in, from then on....
I've been a woman before, probably many times,
but I happen to in this life, have had what is now a term
(though wasn't at the time it happened to me) 'past life regression'.
I'd been a woman, named Jane.
Well simply put, Ken, my feminine side was able to navigate,
and mentally handle, what was happening to me.
My male side, was not. As a result, my male side,
to this day, has issues I deal with constantly,
not dissimilar to that which you've mentioned,
'am I good enough'? though in my case,
"am I a worthless piece of shit who should have died ages ago?"
is more the speed of it.
Because, the male side, couldn't deal with that,
what little boy could? And because, he could not defend himself,
and because half of his very soul's only way to handle it,
was to somehow accept and get through it,
he not only hates himself, he hates her too!
Now she, is smarter than he is, and knows, 'hey, I got us through it, idiot.'
but you wanna talk, dealing with being all torn apart,
there's worse case scenarios than you seem to be dealing with,
so I am able to help you navigate through yours.
Look, as I said, I wasn't born this amazing. I made it my business
to make myself so. Would not accept otherwise.
And I have to say, I also was in the habit of kidding myself,
and gotta tell ya, pot helped me do that.
I actually believed when I was high on pot,
that I was musically better, that all the ideas were 'right there'...
what I was, was stoned, self-indulgent,
and honestly Ken, I go back, and listen to stuff
that when I was high I thought was great,
and cringe... I think 'why, did I ever ever at all think this, was Good?'
But now? Now I'm straight and sober and not bullshitting myself.
And my records have never sounded better.
I'm publishing this, I'll continue
(too much and it all goes flop and disappears...)
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3/2/2016 9:05:28 AM
---- Updated 3/2/2016 9:34:18 AM
Okay Ken, continuing....
Now, if you can recognize,
"Hey, I'm not as good at this as I want to be"
well that's being ahead of the game, really...
'cause a lot of people think they're 'all that' and don't
even look at maybe they're not quite 'all that'.
Even now, with all I can do, I'm constantly questioning,
'can I do this better? if so, how?'
But really, like I said,
the key is self-discipline,
not letting yourself whine your way out of it to yourself...
because if you will allow yourself to do that,
and you will accept it when you do,
THAT is exactly when the red eyed monster you speak of
will begin to have you on the ropes....
because Ken, we may develop skills in life, some of us,
to bullshit people....
there's a saying,
"Oh what a tangled web we weave
when first we practice to deceive"
one of the possible interpretations of that saying is,
"if you bullshit yourself, no one's to blame
but the idiot you listened to"
I will tell you two basic scripts, Ken.
One I call 'the life script'
and one I call 'the death script'.
Ken,
I watched my poor wife die.
26 years we'd been married,
knew each other longer than that,
met as virtual kids, in high school.
I watched her die,
and I heard, her death chant.
Know what it was, Ken?
"I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't..." over and over and over.
Just like that.
I thought to myself as I heard her doing it,
"f*** if she ain't talking herself right into it"
So, it wasn't a surprise, she proved herself right. She couldn't. Wouldn't.
And Didn't.
So guess what my script is now, Ken?
I Can I Can I Can I Can I Can I Can I Can I CAN I CAN I FUCKING CAN
AND I GODDAMNED FUCKING WILL.
Now that, right there,
this time without the censoring,
because, hey, to save a life, it's worth once the unedited version, huh?
Is it.
That's it.
Decide, not to wimp out, and refuse to accept stopping, Ken,
at 'good enough',
because good enough is neither.
You want to be excellent?
You must not stop at merely good.
Know who Lesley Gore is?
"It's My Party (And I'll Cry If I Want To)"?
Well in 1995, Ken,
Lesley was my mentor.
It's why I took her name,
she made me what I am today in a great many respects.
More than I'll go into here.
But she said to me,
"you're good, but it's not enough to be good,
when you can be great".
Get it?
You go for it.
You don't accept "I can't I can't I can't I can't"
because then, once again, you deal with the red-eyed monster
(good way to put it by the way)
and that monster,
is your own self pissed off that you allowed, yourself, to lie to you,
and pissed even more, that you believed it.
Get it?
Go To The Mirror, Boy.
Then pick up, and try, harder. Again.
And again. And Again.
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Stoneman
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3/2/2016 1:25:50 PM
Personally, there is not much that I fear for me. After all, I have survived, child abuse, abandonment, street gang violence, beatings by the L.A. police, riots, 2 tours in Vietnam, Heroine addiction, racism,17 bouts with pneumonia, cancer, stroke and an assortment of other ailments. At this point, I think I can handle almost anything that comes at me. That would include death. I don't want to die but I know that when my day comes, I will be ready.
My fears are more for other people. I have great fear for my children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. For the boys/men I have fear that on any day I will get a call saying they have been gunned down by the police or criminals. It is a very dangerous world out there. It is hunting season seems to be open on Black men and boys by the police. Even though they are all upstanding citizens with college degrees or working towards degrees, the fact still remains that the color of their skin paints a target that police aim for. I fear that the girls will be held back by a society that fails to see the beauty in them because of the skin color that covers who they are. I fear that no matter how far they go in education and experience, they will be held to lower wage brackets created by men for women. I fear that the tone of this nation has turned back to the days I remember so well. Days when the unnecessary assassinations of Black people was considered a normal and unimportant occurrence. I fear that a maniac will reach the presidency and usher in a new era of war, poverty, struggle, division, intolerance and hatred. These are the things that I think of when I see the word fear. I see the past images of Black people hanging from trees and I know that those days have been replaced with bullets and choke holds. My fear is that after all we went through. all the marches, riots, reorganizations, reformations, integrations, assimilations, affiliations and humiliation, the dream we all bought into continues to be a nightmare. My fear is that the blood of my ancestors will never stop bleeding because people continue to see color as a valid reason for murder. The American dream for me and my people has always been tainted by second hand citizenship realities. These are my deepest fears.
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