The end of the inconveniece of it all
. . .
a passing year
a way of life
a different point of view
an ultimate solution to end it all
don’t destroy the infrastructure!
just let it fall and rot
don’t hand out guns
just let all buy their own
don’t outright kill
just silence any other truth
feed all you can a diet of steady fears
and keep the volume high
find guilt in those that raised them
tell them up is down
and any who say different are fools
show them folly and call it reality
lie, cheat and steal
and encourage all to do the same
but let them cast out any that might object
turn the precious staples of everyday life into useless gold
turn frivolus whims into meaningful inaction
turn common sense reason into treasonous unlawful thinking
bundle up the past in the wrapper of filthy rags
and toss out the future as if it no longer matters
. . .
have them poison themselves to show their goodness
have them murder their children to guard their health
have them single out those who won’t and call them dangerous
and go to war with those that they once called their own
. . .
An then those few that are remain may enjoy a new age
one without any further incovenience according to the new rules
to wait in any type of action for instructions from on high
and treasure deeply the empty void free of all that once was
Archives
All posts for the month December, 2021
There is was, Christmas Eve, set in a place that could never been imagned a mere three months before. An old house, partly reconverted from the nineteen-twenties with two levels owned by a mixed couple adept at suvival. Mixed not by the convenient topic of race, but by region and ethnicity. The pattern of life no different than most though. The usual forthcoming argument releasing tensions in a world gone south. Insecurities, disappointments, missed opportunities, all piled up upon each other over other unresolved personal disagreements that were on the point of exploding. What was one supposed to celebrate that could not be put off by way of some cooling off time? The guest from the rented level above arrived early. Not early in terms of when, one who had not had guidelines as to when to show up, should. But as someone who had an acapella ability to forver step in a puddle and deposit a momento of his presence. Fortunately for all, there was no puddle on the staircase that led from the attic apartment down to the steep staired back entrance. That feeling of unstable older feet on short treads giving one the sensation of a crippled giant careening down a beanstalk. All doubts concerning his time of arrival being erased by the disembodied voice of his male host. The locker room tenor inviting the guest in with a booming, “What do you want to drink, beer or scotch?” As the guest had his own bag of alcohol destined to be gifted, the was no chance to do other than to comply. “Scotch!” Though his aching tummy was still undecided as when it was appropriate to start slugging them down. He could feel the clash of his own long lost well-ingrained sense of decorum grinding against that of his well-meaning host. The drink presented, and a seat in the back of the kitchen offered, the guest was settled sitting alone waiting for the next chapter.
One that was not long in coming to this stage. A feminine voice from a forward remote location boiling over with angst. And though not directed at him, unsettling to the fact that it was most likely coming from the bathroom. It was now obvious that the guest had indeed been ushered in too early. His male host having run off to the adjoining building leaving him in a solitary quandry as whether to break hos corner of the reigning silence in his corner of the house with an apology? Or to rise up and as silently as possible leave the premises with the intention to return a little later? His own set of well-recollected experiences advising him silently to choose carefully. Sitting there frozen with a phalanx of incongruous possibilities playing rapicly in the stage of his head from cinematic excerpts of a softened version of a blind Audrey Hepburn “Don’t Look Now” overlayering a classic vignette of a John Wilkes Booth entering the presidenial booth surrepticiously. The other combinations of same conjured as well casting him as the most appropriate villain. This perpetual sense of the inappropriate destroying any potential for adapting the initiative of a, “What the Fuck!”, sensability about his life. He was a plodder on the chess board of life ever feeling the need to proceed with caution or find himeself caught short. And maybe, in some repressed way, the one who should be appropriately singled out? For wasn’t this lack of action just another embodiment of an unwanted encumbrance upon his hosts? Who needed another ego to be stroked at a time when their own were at a point of shattering? Nude and dripping wet or not, with building ferocity of a suprised tigress, he decided to hold his ground and pretend to be nonplussed. “Why?”, he thought, were these inappropriate possibilities always coming down to thoughts of him goal tending his own penis? If not for covering over some irrepressible otherwise inappropropriate tendencies that maliciously threatened to reveal a ingrained sense of perpetual mischeiviousnous. One that seemed to work overtime to cast him into the dock as the accused? One that if revealed would give any shrink a field day of possibilities to explore. Guilt not being a matter of intent or inner desire to commit to by that defendent but simply by time and place.
The situation being quickly resolved by the owner of the voice fully clothed and seemingly too preoccuped to mind the fact of his presence. from down the hall. The object of that voice’s tremulous angist being the husband who it seemed was due for a lightning bold or a torpedo in his amidships. The spirit of the holiday. The guest wondering if his own unwanted mental machinations were simply a form of soul grapes at being left in the latter stage of life with both actors and setting to play out his own storehouse of amassed insecurities of this soon to be ending year? A sort of let down in a way verifying to him his own lack of importance to the current world in mid-stride passing along beyond him. Wouldn’t it be better to be caught short in some impotent farce than to be left in the dust of total indifference. Ego, indeed! A good reason for changing his previously guarded sip of the scotch in his hand into a gulp! The role of guest too much politely obsessed with perpetual surrender of wants rather than than natural unspoken demands. Demands to be coddled! Demands to be loved! Demands to be the center of the universe pulling in all attention to his own silent suffering so long unspoken. One left silent by a misbegotten personal strategy of him pushing the ignorance of its longstanding presence. The one guilty of allowing it to fester being him for not pressing forth long ago into the muddy pile of irreconcilable emotions with some significant other and contest his own culpability as to guilt in terms of his own set of muddly footprints on the newly cleaned white carpet of a long ago now long forgotten ‘her’.
The husband now re-arrived into the kitchen from the exterior cover of the open back door. The fact of another running holiday inspired battle now much in evidence. Some misdeamenor on his part having gone unacknowledged a few minutes earlier now flourishing into a five alarm conflagration of hot verbal conflict. And the guest like a bug impaled upn the chair silently admonished to not make a move one way or another but suffer the role of unwanted spectator. As with all such things, from the respective view of both parties be cast both as audience and empathic jury giving their unacknowledged sympathies to them alone. Any verbal utterance on this guest’s part greviously unadvised let it be misinterpreted by those two other’s as a sign of positive affirmation as an ally on their side of this rapidly degenrating emotional fault zone. Random shots now being fired about the kitchen’s countertop island like commerce raiders vying for a quick kill. The drink finished with only a single watery ice cube to bespeak its former presence, the guest being ready to rise up on that pretext and escape, the doorbell chimed in the fashion of Big Ben. The arrival of the other expected guests shifting the verbal donnybrook back into neutral corners. The intercession of the requisite formalities of the season blowing the smoke of battle away. The guest internally toasting that near to empty glass to once more in his long existence to welcome the Christmas present.
Big presents await for all the virtue seekers on earth for all those that still observe his birthday around this time each year. That might seem sacriligious to some? But for the time being, at least for what may be the last time around, everyone who goes out their way to perform the basic rituals will be blessed. Be advised of course that these rituals are modified each year so as to fall into line with those that keep up a pseudo facade of supporting them. But in fact, utilize them to build their own personal wealth and power. As well as that of their own band of lowly synchophants that serve them. The primary group among those that pretend to be in power to lead the rest of us. Their notion of birthday celebraion for the one that they reckon is biggest man in the universe involves pretending to be him in some way. And then being admonished for contiung to do same for more than this short holiday season. To explain it best it is a sort of a birth/death, spend to give to others to the point of going into debt for the coming year so others get a brief free ride. Or at least feel guilty about not having done enough by the end of this year now passing. In a way it is like a car commercial on TV where one is invited to purchase at an especially low discount a vehicle that you can drive way over the speed limit in a place that the chances of visiting are near to zero. A place that like God you can break all the rules such as all reasonable earthly speed limits. The biggest payoff being to indenture one’s self for manhy years to come to pay off its costs much in the way that it took year several years to buy the last previous model of same. Of course you get a new car smell, and the initial fear of dents and the cost of an uprgraded insurance policy. Something that any real God of the universe worth their never has to contend with!
This repetative cycle applies to all chochkees both big and small. including toys to the latest incriments in the world of fashion. Where women and children are splurged upon by their spouse, he generally gets a tie and the option when a month later the bills come piling in and he can choose to hang himself with it. How many divorces and alimony payments have been initially signaled by the oversight of not monetarily acknowlegeing the symbolic renewal of affection with a few more carots bestowed of the world’s hardest glass on aniother finger to assure another form of possibly temporal indenture? The expected ritual of emulating anyone to whom is ceded powers that overmatch the one’s normally in force like the money system can easily remind them that they indeed they are not above ‘him’ but rather there to serve his desgnated servants. The “good will and peace to all men”, business no longer holding sand in the evolution of our ‘woke’ existence where those that worship Gods of the past. Those that are designated by those on earth who call themselves the lords of the universe by virtue of how many billions that they have magically amassed from the unchecked spending occuring at this time of the year. A point of order that almost all who are not, but still continue to fail to acknowledge when at this time of year they take on a second job and empty their bank accounts. Who among them could stand not being able to demonstrate their measure of love for all by way of the amount that they spend? If nothing else, the season reminds us that being a God is not easy when one knows that for all your power on earth, or lack of it, you are always likely to be forgotten if you don’t fess up on demand to substantiate such holidays. Unlike the power of those earthly humans that rule on earth who daily overstep their rightful bounds, the rest of us are destined to always be reminded to observe them.
Merry Christmas, all you fellow suckers!
It was the final test of some unspecified meaure of faith. A test of belief that rested on the scattered stones of a former belief in the durabilities of a fading lifetime of persistent existence of furthering all things past and supposedly meaningful squeezed into the paucity of what seemed a dimishing future. Such a place now defaulted to thin tissues of agendas of diabolical mistruths sheltering unspeakable falsehoods slowly displacing truths once considered as implacable. The world rearranged around one in a way that demanded an extinction of such things leaving one’s emotions quivering in the cold wind of a doubt in the continuance of all things familiar to be replaced by ‘what’? The assurance of a familiarity with material things that one could count to summon all those whose presence was now long past challenged by the removal of all that had housed them in stable and mundane framework of easy recognition. It was a stale bisquit to bite into. A piece of old wedding cake from a passsing anniversary now found to be turned to a frozen block of ice. The number of familiar faces dispersed into a recitation of names only. A recod of memorable events increasingly more parsimonious in description within one’s own increasingly feeble recollections. Whose responsibility is it to guarantee such situations remain unsullied by inevitable change? Winter of the spirit challenging one to resist. An oft recited Christmas carol whose words suddenly coming to mind in the dead of night at the hint of melody. Something so intangible as to suggest a condition of non-existence in a forest of anonymity. What did heavily beset boughs with shiny baubbles amount to if they could not go the next step and speak to you as if they were part of your’s?
Instead, the threat of chilled aging limbs caught short by the inevitable drafts within an otherwise dark room with only the keys of things no longer there but once keenly felt and memorable to sustain once’s hope for a reliable access into the assurance that the wonder of one’s childhood and the love from family and friends truly once existed. And perhaps in some way might continue to persist? Hard decisions to balance personal survival over the loss of familiar surroundings to weave a new blanket around one. Something that might promise an unexpected ability to regain that which now seemed so quickly diminishing and transform it into a new situation? How to add the inclusion of such slim possibilities into one’s other needfully rapid plans? Questions without immediately workable answers! Caught up in the tremulous landscapes of ‘maybe’. Something to prevent such memories of a once happy past from becoming daggers in one’s sides. Where could one count on a situation of renewal in transition to a who knew what?
“Ok!”, one might say in the face of the challenge of permanenetly losing their own identity! What, if not who, comes along on this personal ark? Who if any could I convince to board same to make a pair from only one to avoid such solitude? An avalanche of questions without answers that provide assurance. But a diatribe that at least showed that one was struggling in the deep waters of an ocean of endless existence. Something so vast that it must over time dilute one’s expectations for maintaining a continuity between all that was but is no more. As music speaks a language that is familiar but indecipherable to rationally cognate beyond the emotions one is familiar with, so one must become familiar with one’s own song and continue to sing it loudly within on appropriate public holidays. The celebration must continue ever if all who are strangers to one have no idea of what its true significance provides to the teller of that tale. So many, “I remember when’s!”, to be shared around the fire in recitation of one’s internal text. Wanderers must have good stories at the ready to shared for all occasions to survive. An anecdote or two to share the fact of being human and subject to the vagaries of loss. The passing on of an experience along to foriegners to spread forth as if a part of their own. The Christmas carol redefined on a personal level of some mutual understanding. A rejoicing for being alive in the sense of a larger ever growing sense of appreciation for the path one has been on to handed forth to, hopefully, survive as one hopes one’s self might as well.
“It’s Science!”
(Her voice rang out across the length and breadth of the entire coffe shop)
“It’s Science!”
(Her voice rangling out accompanied by her unconsciously scrinching her nose.)
The old coffee drinker who had been engaged in his scribbles swiveled his head in the direction of the woman as one might in switching gears in a conversation. He forcing himself to refrain from engaging his own opinion on all such matters. Though internally he felt like adding that the term “Science” had now been politicized as to be meaningless. There were opinions, of course. That was evident, especially in this current era. The airwaves bore no hesistence in tacking on the term at the end of any pronouncement that the politicians and their sponsors sought to introdorse or endorse. But now this habitual employ had worked its way down into the general usage of the ‘proles’. Their need for assurance requiring a monosyllable backstop to prop up any argument within which they felt unsure.
“It’s Science!”
(The voice of her otherwise silently attentive understudy being cut off at the pass.)
“It’s Science!”
In earlier non prolific media savvy times of the middle of the last century, the muzzle of a gun, or perhaps a gendarme’s truncheon was sufficient to inhibit speech. But now the blanket of consensus by way of the degree of wokeness held sway. Was it attentive enough to the issue of color. The only color to adjudicate being the opposite of white. Most obviously something not mentioned save by those that were considered to be embodied within it. Personalities of those within not considered or explored. Rhetoric circling like a swarm of perpetually angry bees based upon the nuances filled in on the regular media. Innuendoes of of undending malefeasance daily discovered easily to be unearthed like corpses in a graveyard..
“It’s Science!”
(Side comments tossed back and forth in angry frenzy back by the register)
The old coffee drinker paused his thought process. Saying to humself, “Wasn’t ‘Science’ a matter of consensus?” One where the same phenomena would bare itself out regardless of opinion or the influence of rhetorical persuasions. The old defaults from earlier High School classes of a method where one had to pick an insoluble question, theorize, configure an experiment, with a blind study of placebos, and then corrolate the resultant data to present it to other’s like minded interested in solving the question for universal verification, now out the window. Now that had been streamlined into merely stating it. Again, and again, and again, and so forth, in the most public way possible.
“It’s Science!”
Flocks of birds can fly backwards in a hurricane at will!
“It’s Science!”
Schools of fish can naturally postulate the square root of Pi!
“It’s Science!”
Your doctor and politicians always know what’s best for you. Because!
“It’s . . . ?”
Which would term the world’s greatest stalls in history? The Donner pass of settlers caught in an winter? The Spartan’s appearance unexpected appearence before Xerxes hordes at Thermopylae? The European canton’s resistence to the Chinese emperor at Peking for fifty-five days? Each suggesting a sense of trauma over-layered by unrelieved frustrations. The only clear alternative being to play along and endure while conserving one’s resources as best as the shortcomings of the current situation will allow. To pontificate about what is wrong without any inkling of an alternate vision suggesting a possible way out of the dilemma is itself wearing on one’s consciousness! The present era being peppered with experts vending common sense but absolutely no solutions? Somewhere, some people listen to better founded opinions that rely back to strategies both tried and true. But then, one would never know that to see the present tense popular media. That not being their intended task, but quite the opposite. To paralyze while the prosthelytize so as to elongate the general sense of malaise and dampen any unplanned popular response. In other words, to stall. A true spider’s strategem! Anything that will interfere with the paralysis of having one’s will digested slowly from within by that stealthy monster whose true presence rests like the shadow of one’s nemesis on its web, doing all that are caught up within it permanent and fatal harm.
It was dark. It was cold. And he was jealous. A mystical incantation based on the fact of three’s. It was well-knpwn to him that if you said anything three times, repeated same, then it wasn’t simply an observation but a spell. A deep desire or more likely an internalized desire that was so fundamental that it was leading by way of one’s unconscious towards some action of significance. The true intent of same surfacing much like lava bursting forth from an unruly volcano. He was jealous! It was true, though he loathed to admit it. Who was Paco? A voice from a phone call that suddenly introduced himself after she shushed him as the call was coming in. The innocence of the situation disappearing quickly with his demands for her obedience to his will. And of course, her unhesitating compliance to this stranger. The worst part of this whole situation being that sitting there mute he knew that he dare not question it! Perhaps he would think a bit later while formulating his thoughts, that is why he was there at all? The relations between the two in terms of man and woman had been defined from the start. A man and a woman, friends. That’s it.
But after several years of occasional encounters that were frequently leading to more and more time spent in her company, not to mention, daily phone calls demanding in a friendly was to know his activites, one might have surmised that there was more to it? He did. Dammit! He was jealous and he knew from too much past experience that if he let that sort monster out of the cage things would irrevocably flare up and end. Too much experience with his own inability to act appropriately in this regard in fielding the subtlties without descending into an ego bound competition of wills. Those with the softer center and a bigger temper always turned things into a battle. And then, feeling as if they had won, punished those that they were guilty of misloyalty. That side of him, he knew too well, was remorseless. The act of betrayal leading to an inability to ever trust again and a prompt dismissal of any tender emotions that might have settled in his own heart. Armageddon!
His own lack of demonstrable actions in letting the tapers from the evolving tree of entangling emotions were probably his own worst enemy he thought as he sat there fuming in the passenger seat of her car. He dare not ask any questions about this character, though to him, the answer was obvious. The golden bowl, as a street side Henry James would have remarked, had a flaw in it. The flaw being a situation that he knew within had put a crack in whatever resolve that he was forming to advance to more initmacy. His memory efficient enough to summon all those demons of his past who like characters in a Hollywood horror movie reliably transformed by the end of the film into monsters and had to be banished or destroyed. To see her, was to realize that for her there was no moral contradiction. Sure she demanded a kiss from him at the beginning of every encounter. But it only meant that she like to be kissed! To here this was not amoral. To him it meant something much more, though he realized that this act was not held in the same regard. It was in some sense a concession.
The concession was to accomodate her viewpoint while locking his own in limbo. That limbo of repression that like a volcano left building pressures that eventually had to be addressed in some way. It was a much as an animal thing of the unconscious as it was a form of intellectual decision. This Paco character by the tone of his voice had no such strictures. How he hated those types. Had he been a tyrant at the head of a vast horde of Huns, he would had made piles of skulls of same such types. There was no reasoning with them. There was only an uncompromising test of wills that only the unhesitating application of overwhelming force on sight could resolve. It was evident that the monster within was gearing up stirring his worse inclinations. And of course, spoiling any chance of proceeding forward in any substantial way with further romantic attentions. Worse yet, he thought, “How juvenile!” He hated the fact that too many previously acquired rocky crags within prevented his own lava flow from proceeding more normally to build rather than to get pent up and eventually destroy.
That was, after all, why he was forever so cautious in terms of matters touching his heart. Once the devil was released from its cage it seemed, all was spoiled. Perhaps that was the fundamental reason that those men that challenged the fate by engaging their heart in terms of the web of female emotions were prone to culture a sense of indifference. One had to be the same as another to retain one’s sanity! The failures to climb to the summit of euphoric bliss compelled to shelve the experience to that extended romantic based travelogue of past adventures. Ones that had gone awry perhaps, but that offered an intensity that one could recall loudly amidst similarly struck brothers in the wee hours of the night at the bar. The dangers presented in the paradigm of how life seemed to present opportunities as being anything but reliable. And so oft times an obvious trap. An admonishment to all those older war weary elder travelers to go slow and not get hung up on repeating the same old mistakes of the past. Sure he felt jealous. And that was dark and cold.
The current era offers some pretty grim prospects for many. At least that is the mental fog that by default I am enjoined to believe. A rotating zoetrope spinning the same collection of sequential images that form the logic that this time offers. A movement of no movement. Stragnation of a mental projection of being stopped on the tracks in the midst of a blizzard of propaganda. You can’t run a society on that for long. Where has that elusive thing called happiness gone in a place where only a Jeremy Benhtham would feel at ease? A place of bedrooms for the incaceration of a new generation of Marquis DeSade’s. The present that promises of future no longer reliant upon analogies of the past. Erase the personnages but retain their techniques? Lies to routinely replace proven fact now with severe consequences for not conforming to a unified consensus of belief. The norm. Consider the encient myths of old where the old gods enraged by the defile of their temples invoke the punishment of perpetual banishment along with a slow but calculated program of incremental decimation.
One cannot help but feel an affinity with an ancient Ulysses who gets caught in a cave governed by a monocular genocidal tyrant. The keynote of current Liberalism being a strict adherence to seeing the world and one’s options as being governed by a constant self-serving narrative. A mythical disease that everyone must acknowledge or be immediately sidelined as dangerous to society. Can no one see the self-serving fallacy of this? How can one call out the current imfamy of society within the confines of their opponent’s rhetoric? The absurdity of the situation where a society is percverted at its foundations by falling victim to such an obvious dodge! The fear of offending someone or some ‘thing’ by calling out the obviousness of its behaviors and transgressions. The abrogation of common sense rule for an ever expanding tyranny. The popularization of terminology based on the theft of basic meanings to reconstrue them to mean to exact opposite. The complete inversion of society as governed by the governmental threat of defunding, and deprivation of wealth.
When will the average citizen respond to the pain inflicted and say enough? It is obvious that half of societys in general have committed suicide by following a path of blind consensus. The task as usual defaults to the remainder who realize that submitting to this is nothing more than following along their less courageous neighbors who have subjected themselves to disease and early death by foolish a compliance to what has become a coopted system of governing based on an unprovable fable that has decended into parasitism. One that is beginning to extend its reach to overwhelm all independent judgement and descend one into the lowly status of a thrall. One that is at any point expendable. A sense of disregard fro human life that may continue to the point where one part thinks nothing of disposing of the other part whose evil intentions are to do the same. The actual object of all this being to destroy the country and its empire. And obviously, be dammed the final cost.
Perhaps the most serious events and consequences that drive the narrative of our live begin with something trivial that in our haste we tend to overlook. Something that at the time of encounter we tend to dismiss as having no bearing on the moment. Yet like a proverbial bad penny they return to haunt us and weigh our judgments down. The overlooked elements swept aside, the important portions waylaid and forgotten. Perhaps discarded? People that seem more a task or an annoyance that in hindsight turned out to be our possible salvation. The truth so glaringly evident when it is too late that we find no other choice but to engage in a lifetime of penitence to atone. So great can these misjudgments go awry. So say dreamers caught up too readily in the past.
Yet one’s mistakes have no real benchmarks to absolutely pronounce what was a wrong turn in real time. A pirate can become a lord whereas the business of ruling over others entails piracy. Some might say it is what one can get away with? Yet that path when taken too long and without some degree of remorse can only lead to one’s demise. The adjustment is most likely internal. An ability to adapt to circumstances that one finds themselves within. Yet much like magnetism, the ability to stay clear of making stilted conclusions is affected by the bad bathwater of constant angst and fear that now is delivered twenty-four seven throughout every part of the supposedly civilized world. Civilization now includes that right of those few that have sought and obtained power to intimidate and harass their respective societies en masse.
Those who operate their lives outside a pattern of relentless angst are considered not only anti-social but dangerous. If you don’t wear a mask then many conclude that you must be an undesirable threat to humanity. If you refuse to be innoculated by a government mandated unspecified substance that provides no assurance of liability for damage done, then you must be out of your mind? How can it be that a generally unmotivated passive body of humanity could have been so completely indoctrinated as to recklessly place themselves in a situation where they pay no regard to what appear to be most likely outcomes of hastening their own demise and that of their children. Has the notion of pure evil been diluted so far as to be unrecognizeable to the taste? The notion of the risks involved not important enough to lift a tiny finger of protest at what will end in dire consequences? Perhaps in a biblical sense, this truly is a divine punishment for those tha surrender their existence to the guidepost of the deadly seven by mistaking animal common sense for social consensus with trivial pursuit? Aberence provides it own rewards.
So here I am. My new home. Not longer a resident of where I grew up But it is afordable. Though it is small. Small as my current current expectations. Another world, strange to me. I don’t k now if I should even drink the water. But now that I signed my life away, I am forced to become an advocate of this choice. Maybe good? Maybe fucked up. Everything new, but small. I know that I won’t fit. But will I? No matter how old you are, you still tremble inside like a child. Merry Christmas, your present is Devil’s Island. Now I have to learn to love it!
It isn’t that bad really! It is just a new start. Getting used to a new tribe. Different customs, different ways of looking at things. Will I fit? That is where the fear comes in? I gotta be careful. It is a clean slate. Don’t fuck thngs up to poison things. Alone in a shitty motel room. A long cold gtrip back to Chicago for the slow motion goodbye. Goodbye to all things long familiar. Goodbye to close association with friends such as they are. Goodbye to that direct unconscious link to the past. A big disconnection to the past!
But why all this muling? You did everything that you said you would. Didn’t you? But there is a cost to everything. An emotional cost. You paid it when you made the decsion to divorce your wife. It cast a shadow that still shuts out the light over your happiness. A new start, the possibility of a future. But in the end the swing of one’s feelings will lead their logic. So for the time being this change will sit on a knife’s edge.