A Casual Glance

Really going through the meat grinder here. Amazing how uncomfortable other people can make your life. Amazing how they steal your time.

A casual glance over at a Rolling Stone magazine this morning, as I sipped coffee, short breaking from sweet reading relief.

Saw my name on the label.

Hit me how weird that is. Just a name on an address label. But that name is my name, it identifies who I am. That name and my life are inextricably interwoven 'till death do us part. Even in death it will still be used to reference the guy who once was.

There is and always will be all sorts of confusion as to the meaning of that name. Everybody has a different impression. People who know me intimately, people who know me casually.

Even me. Myself. The name has different meanings.

So the name is essentially meaningless.

I am not the man I thought I would become. Deeper than that, I don't like the man that I am.

I'm a million different people from one day to the next.

The only time I am me is when I am alone. And even then there is confusion. The mind recoiling at this life, at this person, debating who I really am, who I should become and how to get there. Wondering how it is that I cannot become who I am. Thinking how strange that is.

"I know Jesus and I know the devil, they're both inside of me, all the time." John Mellencamp - "Right Behind Me" from "No Better Than This."

As soon as one other person is in front of me, I become another Joe. Very bizarre. I react in certain ways, brain waves travel different routes.

Introduce a few people into the circle and I change even more.

Words come out of my mouth derived from a source that doesn't exist. An alter ego that is not me, talking out of my mouth.

How bizarre. How bizarre.

That's the casual stuff.

Throw me into the work environment, especially the one I am in now, and I experience myself as if I am sitting front row center at a play.

So far outside of myself, feeling emotions I can't control and don't want, spewing words I don't mean, talking as if I care about things I don't give one good goddamn about.

It amazes me that I don't twist up my face in horror, shock and surprise at some of the things I say and do. They are so foreign to my true nature.

Assuming I know what my true nature is.

Lately I have taken to yelling full force in my truck on the way to or from work. Without thought. Thinking about what I should do and suddenly the words "Do it!" explode from my mouth in purple anger.

Just read an interview with Johnny Depp. Talking about Marlon Brando he said - "Marlon got to a point in his life where he just said "I don't care." And that must be some species of nirvana. It has to be. It's freedom."

That just might be the best approach to life. Forget the therapy, the analysis, the introspection. Skip right over all that work and effort and commitment.

Go directly to I don't care.

Thinking I might rip all the labels off all my magazines before I head in to The Asylum today.

That guy doesn't exist anyway.