From Up On Frederick's Stone

I think that an obstacle to my wellbeing is that I feel that if only I was living in this dreamy state where I was only doing the right things, and then the unreality of that repels me from the good things that I could do. The sense of shouldness is dominated by the superceding ideality. Maybe the things I recognize as noble are not primarily for my happiness or wellness or something. As if doing those things were for my self-betterment. I’m still in the aftermath of God.

It’s been a long hiatus since I last published here. I don’t really know what this blog represents other than a journal with a touch of potential peer readership, just a nudge more than if I were to scribble in my own journal. I don’t anymore like the idea of journalling for myself, at least not currently or for a while. In the past, I was so religiously dedicated, so driven by ambition, moral idealism, and the confidence of being extremely successful in school that the loss of those things, whether by burnout or by change in circumstance, has been a silent loss, a deathlike presence in my life. I’m in the depressive fallout of the muse. I’m in this peculiar circumstance of feeling extremely capable but not being recognized or utilized. I feel discarded, like what I have to offer the world doesn’t matter. I would rather love rocks than society. Am I just dehydrated? I feel the dirth of love in my life. I feel the dirth of momentum. I just want to live a quiet life doing things that I’m good at, surrounded by people and things that make me feel whole. For Christ’s sake, I’m working at a pizzeria! (I mean, it’s a pretty good gig at a mom-and-pop for being in limbo, and the pizza is delicious.) But how am I supposed to get out of this limbo?

It’s been the central theme in my life since I finished grad school, really. I felt so compelled by my spiritual path to attain an expression of the essential unity between order and chaos, a deeply personal and guttural expression, that once I had expressed it into the silent, unlistening choir of angelic clouds, I didn’t know who to be or what to become. I felt washed up, perhaps like ex-athletes do. I had become an art piece, a project to present something. I had sort of stepped out of the slipstream of society’s maw, the sense of compulsion to conform. I felt like a freed spirit. I fell into a depression. I was going to kill myself, and I wasn’t telling anyone about it. I hit the big red button of prayer. It’s the only time I’ve ever prayed that deeply. I asked the rainbow serpent of creation, the cosmic power of creation and destruction in the universe—God—to lift me out of it, I wanted a woman to bond with. I knew I was just socially starved, and that a wholesome love would be what I needed. A therapeutic presence in my crepuscular darkness and an undying light of my life. I wanted to love someone deeply. And God answered.

She was exactly what I was dreaming of. A sort of freespirited, intelligent, whimsical, melancholic girl whose head was often in the clouds. She was like the air—flowing on marvellously, eddying, storming. It was inspiring. I don’t think she realized how much she inspired me or how much I admired her. She was like a bridge to the sky for me. She felt infinite to me. Her personality called me to be the full stature of myself. I began chasing my dreams radically. I moved to Big Sur. I ravenously learned about local flora and fauna in the Garden of Eden that is Big Sur. I sunk my teeth into geology. I started going on lengthy, strenuous hikes on a regular basis. I began solo backpacking and peakbagging, frequently driving hundreds of miles on my weekends. I stood up for myself. I had a confidence I never had before. And I felt like I could tell her anything about myself. She was so receptive. Or at least it seemed that way to me. When I was in California, the dream was all around me. The land bubbled brightly with possibility in every direction. I was zooming on the weekends, splitting my time with my girlfriend and adventures. But she and I were drifting apart even in our laughter and intimacy.

She reciprocated my desire to be in a bubble. And as in all breakups, there are always multiple competing narratives. Her narrative that she published on reddit was that I was a horrific narcissist (“Narc”) who never cared about her. She was probably just mad when she wrote those things, trying to get at her negative feelings without explaining them. The narrative she told me that day, on April 11th or whatever, was that she wanted to be single, she was tired of being criticized, she needed space. I told her that was a perfectly good reason to breakup. Which made me look awful to my friends in Atascadero and all other friends henceforth when I retell the story. But I didn’t do much to protect my image retrospectively. My “friends” of many years didn’t bother to ask me about my side of the story. They trusted a girl who they barely knew, who I introduced them to. Posturing has never been my thing. She probably still tells the same story.

If anything, what happened is that our coping mechanisms slipped into a spiral. She wanted to dissolve from herself, I wanted to solidify myself. Those two forces under stress become incompatible. That’s the classic male-female headbutting, no? Women dissociating versus the male ego. That’s the real import of the myth of Narcissus and Echo. It’s currently popular to identify selfish traits as narcissistic, but it’s unpopular to turn the mirror back at Echo and identify codependent dissociation. It’s not a personality disorder so much as an interrelational dynamic. Someone with empathy isn’t a fucking narcissist. I’m waaay too sensitive to others’ feelings to be a narcissist. It was an insult more than anything. Anger. And I wish she had said it to my face. But it would have been a losing battle because I was Mr. Right. She dumped me like trash. We were together, talking daily, laughing and crying together, spending days together every week, for a year and a half. When suddenly she goes cold and radio silent. I inquire. She eventually admits via text she wants to be single. I call her. She doesn’t want to meet up to break up. I refuse, and drive enraged and heartbroken far over the speed limit to her house, across landslide closures and a whole mountain range, blowing my radiator thermostat while redlining my honda civic, which eventually led to a head gasket replacement. I just want to have a properly dignified breakup in person. I arrive and she beams with smiles at me, as if she missed me and was really happy to see me. So much for supposedly hating my guts.

You see, she had a point. I was wrapped up in my passions and my sense of self. I was becoming distanced from her, a bit fatherly, occasionally patronizing. But if you stop there, it looks like I’m the bad guy. There was no villain in our relationship. Frankly, I was tired of feeling like I had to care for a girl whose blood glucose levels, mood, and attention span all fluctuated wildly on a daily basis. When I drove her like an ambulance back to her house 120 miles along the Big Sur coastline to get insulin because she goofed and held her pump underwater for ten minutes while we watched an American Dipper in the Big Sur River—she didn’t care. I was panicked. I drove back to Atascadero in three hours. It’s supposed to take four hours. When I would walk into her house and it was covered in trash and things she frivolously purchased off amazon. When she donated $100 for someone on reddit claiming they were poor and needed diaper money. When she continually refused to use her BGL sensor and would swing up into the 300s almost daily, 400s weekly, then plunged back down to the 50s. And then I lost patience for her changing thoughts from her ADHD. I couldn’t take her natural lack of concentration. And she was also depressed often, in a self-demeaning way. Would ask me to tell her she’s pretty, explicitly ask for complements to make her feel better. That was very unattractive to me. I loved the spark in her and I didn’t want to let go. If she wants to insult me as a Narc then she should think of herself as an Echo.

I sympathized, but it also drove me nuts. But I still loved her. I loved her whimsy and lack of strictness. Her sadness and her depth. Her insightfulness and brilliance. Her capacity for love. Her playfulness, love of music, stationary crafts, seals. I wanted her to feel cared for within herself, so that she could still have fun while also looking out for long-term goals, like her health. It was pretty unattractive to me for her to be so erratic. But I believed in her so much. I believed she could retain her sense of playful, freespirited self and also have a more balanced life. I wanted to be with her to the point she could take care of herself. She was full of care for others, but struggled to care for herself. I mean how can you blame her? She got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was a senior (or junior?) in high school. That amount of responsibility kind of sucks the fun out of things. No one wants a chronic illness, and we all struggle with self-care. The people who have disabilities just make our chronic difficulties in self-care more apparent, because the consequences are amplified. She says that I weaponized her illnesses. I don’t blame her for feeling put-down. I was caught in the complex position of loving her, feeling like she’s the only person who ever has or possibly ever would love me that much, and I was scared of loneliness, so I was stubbornly holding onto her even when she drove me nuts, just like she kept holding onto me. I’m sure she feels great about having overcome her narc ex and tellss her bf about how bad I was, just like she did when she was with me, shitting on all her exes as awful people. In retrospect, I bet they were normal guys.

Here’s an innocuous example. She was eating candy and snacks for most of our relationship. One, because she was fun and liked sweets. Two, because type 1 diabetics need sugar to restore their BGL in a pinch. Three, because she didn’t come from a family that cooked and didn’t herself know how. I would try so hard to encourage her to eat healthy snacks like crunchy vegetable packs, nuts, cheese, etc so that she could snack to her heart’s content

I don’t blame her for feeling awful in the relationship. I also felt awful. It was a relief to breakup. But her twosided hate toward me through a beaming smile is essentially what she was feeling when she broke up with me. She wanted to push me away. She loved me a lot. I loved her a lot. But ultimately I wanted someone who was more communicative about her priorities. I would have responded to her much more if she had just told me what she was feeling and asked me to change my behavior. I don’t want to play the game of trying to cater to my partner’s inner states, reading her behavior constantly. I want to be able to talk openly, argue openly, love openly. I would communicate my feelings and she would be more introverted. And when I would be Mr. Right about her struggles—which mind you, were often pretty thoughtful combinations of frustration and compassion—I’m not a fucking demon!—she would get discouraged and not want to change even more. You can’t blame either of us for how we felt, how we still feel about our relationship. Her immaturity and erratic nature drove me nuts. My idealism drove her nuts. She is not a demon, I am not a demon. We are both flawed people with our beauties and struggles. My memory of her is not smeared with hate. I remember her fondly with gratitude for the phase of life we shared together. I know it was not forever. When we broke up I thanked her for being in my life and her positive presence in my life. She said something similar in reply, that I helped her learn to take care of herself more. When we started dating she was living with her ex, had a wildly erratic BGL, no ADHD meds, no depression meds, didn’t know how to cook, no exercise. When we broke up, she had backup insulin pens, a sensor, meds, she could cook, her house felt a lot more herself. Hell, she was going to not go into a house tour, called me, I told her just to go, and she got the house. She kept leaning on me like a dad, and then got exhausted when I didn’t want to be her dad. And I kept leaning on her like a mom, wanting encouragement and support, and got burned out because she couldn’t give me her undivided attention. We just weren’t a good fit in the long run. Why am I the bad guy? It really hurts me that she burned me. I was so open with her, and she shunned that. All I wanted was a more holistic breakup. But if she was capable of doing that, we would be married, because that level of emotional maturity would mean my problems with her wouldn’t have existed. I’m still lost in the wound of heartbreak. She has “moved on” by hating me. I truly hope she’s much happier with her current boyfriend. Someone who feels more relaxed and suitable for her. Someone without a sort of operatic graniosity. I chase the mountains and the flowers. I would talk of mountains much, and I saw her like an alpine flower: seemingly insignificant in the eyes of the world, but eternally pure and fresh, beautiful beyond compare, mystical. How can someone who is supposedly a narcissist admire someone’s complexity like this?

I hope that the FDA approves the self-regulating insulin they just invented last year so that she and all type 1 diabetics don’t have to work so hard with their BGL. I hope the FDA approves the pancreatic stem cell therapy to recover insulin-production so she’s not diabetic anymore. To have someone’s whole life hanging on a thread of insulin like that is stressful. It was traumatizing for me. I felt like she could die at any point. There were a couple days where she slept in waaaaay past her alarm. Once till 3pm. I sent EMS to do a welfare check because I was worried she had died from low blood sugar. Her parents commended me for that.

The question for me is will I accept her hatred of me, to have all her love for me—the most love and intimacy I have ever experienced—culminate into using me as a scapegoat? How do I reconcile this unhealed wound? I think she is unhealed as well. I’ve tried remediative blog posts in the past because she was once subscribed to my blog. But I had to walk on eggshells. I wanted to send her letters explaining what happened to offer emotional resolution and healing for the both of us. She treated me like a rude customer, so that was a shut door. She shut off the depth of sensitivity in my heart and called my soul a narcissist. She still does. That’s the truth of her love for me. She turned the stress of a convoluted relationship into a demonic ex, just like so many people do. It just wasn’t working and both of us were ready to break up. I had written it in my journal just a few days before she broke up with me. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when she sent me weird duck lip poses and asked me for my opinion, was pouting about something in what seemed to me a really girlish way, and she said to herself, “Enough, I’m done.” I guess I thought that too. She was done with feeling rejected by someone who claimed to love her and was usually just lost in a spiral of himself. I was done with feeling strung along by someone who was being absent from herself and not speaking her mind with me. I needed someone to be an independent person who communicated for herself. That’s my expectation. I will be myself bravely, even though disappointment is likely. That’s what I learned from her. Be myself bravely. Is this how a narcissist talks? Someone who tries to understand both sides of a story? If anything, I’m just too strong of a will for her, and that was a wound. I think all I want from her is to see that her view of me was smeared with upsetness, and accept that we just weren’t a good fit instead of demonizing my heart.

I’m rambling in circles. Obviously this is a very meaningful event even two years later. But it was also exactly the same thing I said the morning after she broke up with me, when I was crying so much I didn’t realize I was refilling my broken radiator wrong and I overheated my car, when I drove over the Nacimiento-Fergusson Road, with my hands out the window into the shining April air, accepting its coming and going with gratitude and tears. It was good we broke up, but if she had broken up with me the way I wanted, she would have been a different person, and we would probably still be together.

I was initially trying to aim this blog post into contrasting Colorado’s slowness and oldness with California’s dreamy newness. I don’t know how to be myself in this new place. I can only act like a Californian to limited effect. I’m basically an inigenous Californian. I know how to live off the land in Big Sur. I love the species, the natural history, the cultural history. If that’s not a criteria for native, I don’t know what is. I love the land and am full of its spirit.

And that breakup is in many ways a reflection of the phase of life I’m in. I feel rejected by the dream that I love. And the level of involvement with desires and attachments cycles from euphoria to depression like a little engine. And I don’t want to become a stoic, beyond desire… cowards. I want to be like the mountain water running fast and clean, like the gneiss is abstract and nonlinear, like the clouds broil and pop, like the sun streams and gleams. Thank you, my former kitten kaboodle, for opening the door and showing me all the colorful containers and pages of the world. You might hate me till the day you die, but it does not change what joy we shared.


Longmont, Colorado

I’m sorry for how I made you feel. The shame you took on, the constant improvement. I was trying to mould you, I meant well, I wanted what was good for you, but we got into a rut, and you absorbed the feelings of not being good enough from me. I loved you, and you were frustrating me, and that made my affection contorting to you. You wanted to feel okay, you deserved to feel affection, but you also had real challenges to face, and got caught between wanting to feel okay as you are, needing to feel better, and craving to feel loved. I’m glad you’re more well now. It wasn’t fair to you to feel like you were under scrutiny often. It was also not good for me to be with someone who felt erratic to me. It was not a you thing, it was not a me thing, it was an us thing. We loved each other, and our love broke down. I’m grateful for what we shared. I’m sorry I hurt you. I remember you said I helped you, and I imagine that even though it made you angry and hurt, part of you remembers that I tried hard to love you, give feedback, be supportive, even if it was hard and imperfecf. I understand how it feels to be criticized; even if it’s rational and empathetic, it’s still criticism. You shouldnt feel under the knife all the time from a lover. I hope you are happy and have a happy life. You made a real positive difference in my life, you were my closest friend for a while, it was a blessing to share what we did. We learned a lot from each other, through each other. I know that we needed different things from a lover. I wish you peace and life all the days of your life. May the greengold jetstream carry you.

You thought I was nothing.
You said I was nothing,
That I did nothing,
Accomplished nothing.
An ivory tower swirling with conceit.
What you did not see was
Yourself in a mirror.
I wanted to create with you
A garden of alpine flowers
For whom bloom no one need see them.
I didn’t really want to write, to publish:
I wanted to create a world of words, a relationship
A spiritual union of two souls.
We were the book I wanted to write.
I expected your equal participation,
But you were fluid and shaped yourself around mine,
Then froze.
Your own self-deprecation and my resentment
Got in the way of seeing that.
Hate me all you wish,
As you did all the others.
It’s done anyway.
There are higher causes, deeper reasons
Than productivity.
It’s what keeps the sick alive
And gives art to the world.
It’s what produces us in the first place,
Before there ever was a “usefulness.”
So don’t smear me with your delusion.
But it’s done anyway.
Just don’t smear what is with your delusion,
Lest you forget what you are:
A soul.



March 31, 2024
Easter

This restaurant is the first I’ve visited that is essentially indistinguishable from mexican restaurants in San Diego, notwithstanding the young white manager who walked in with his laptop and started chatting up with the chicano girls running the cashier, and the plaid red/white plastic table coverings.

The carne asada rule is as follows: if a restaurant can succeed in making a good carne asada taco, they can do all other things well. With the exception of the pollo taco, which I assume was an old and soggy batch of chicken, they did all things well. Rice and beans tasted like home. Great tacos. Good double shelled yellow corn street tortillas heated on meat fat con cilantro y cebolla. Carne asada, mucho gusto. Carnitas, mucho gusto. Lengua, mucho gusto. Salsa, great. Horchata, ordinary. Fútbol en las televisiones y música hispañola en la cocina. Mexicanos y mexicanas comen a las mesas distribuido distanciada. Me recuerde como estoy en casa, en Escondido, solamente media milla.

5 de Marzo, 2024

Longmont, Colorado

That might be the phrase, the quality in the high Sierra that called me, in the soul, the pure water of existence. Undetracted, undiminished, undissipated, undeclined, etc. etc. In this book I’m reading, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Southern Rockies, the section on montane weather and solar radiation, it talks about sunlight passing through the atmosphere, and the various gases scattering different wavelengths in different directions, and that the blue color of the sky is a result of water vapor deflecting blue wavelengths more than other wavelengths. Red light, invisible to our eye, is undeflected. “Most people have noticed how much bluer the clear sky looks in the mountains than at lower elevations. This intensity of color results from a decrease in molecular scattering, which primarily affects wavelengths in the short-wave, or blue, end of the spectrum, and the greater availability of short wavelengths at higher elevations because of this decreased scattering” (pg 157). Thus, to ascend into the high mountains is to approach the undeflected radiance of the light, the shining elemental insight Ansel Adams talked about epiphanically, the vision of an archetypal Sierra glacial lake basin near treeline that caught my imagination and stirred me to go to Thousand Island Lake, and I happened to go on the waning gibbous moon, the same as the vision. “All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation… My approach to photography is based upon my belief in the vigor and values of the world of nature, in aspects of grandeur and minutiae all about us.”

“I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses… the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks… I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world—and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience.”
~Ansel Adams

Mystical, lovely, profound—what we know in our minds is also in the high mountains. We see something in common. The pure abstraction of mind is especially present, prescient in the high mountains. Minds are mountains; mountains, minds.

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
~GM Hopkins

The deep, abstracted blue in the mountain’s elevation, the sky is pure as the water and the knowledge thereof. Dzogpa chenpo, natural perfection, dzogchen. It is divine, the glory of the Lord, the face of God that cannot be brought down into the valley, the sacred pneumos that is stirring over the mirror-face of the deep. The black inside iridescence is undeflected radiance.


March 4, 2024
Longmont, Colorado

Oh my God this is so good. Tastes like my neighbor friend Jose’s mama’s cooking. Yellow masa tortillas. The carnitas gordita was euphorically good. Unbelievably good. Probably one of the best pieces of mexican food I’ve ever had. The street tacos were damn good too, but not orgasmic. Meat was a little squishy. Carne asada, carnitas, barbacoa. Onion, cilantro, lime, delicious rojo y verde salsas. Cheap too.

I tried going to a place next door which was very busy, was teeming with white people, the menu was impossibly small font, none of the employees acknowledged my presence when I came up to the counter and waited there right in front of them for a minute (they were at the cash register). So I walked out.

February 27, 2024
Longmont, Colorado

So although my location is a thousand miles from where I was living for the last ten years, some things are constant. The prominence of the twin peaks of Longs Peak, the steep cline of the easternmost Rockies, the vast sedimentary plains mirror the prominence of the twin peaks of Cone Peak, the steep cline of the westernmost Santa Lucia mountains, the vast oceanic plain of the Pacific. I have gone from one bookened of mountains to the other, in a sage rainbow. Big Sur to the Front Range. The local tribe that lived here were the Arapahoe, though I’m reading that sometime in the not too distant past they were pushed west by either white settlers or another tribe. They were a warlike tribe, it seems. And I am unsurprised that they too have a flood myth involving thunderbird and a water monster. Tsowem and Neniisotoyu’u.

For the next x number of weeks, on each Tuesday I will be trying tacos from each of the various taco restaurants in Longmont, scrutinizing and likely enjoying each of them. Taco Tuesday. This week I went to Blue Corn Tacos.

So I’m starting to see that I want some organization in my blog. I’m getting to that point in my life where I have so many directions I want to go, so many topics I want to dive into and divulge, and since the topics are different, it’s ineffective to approach them from a position of broadscanning. When I was in grad school etc., the topics I was interested in were rather universal and centralized—spirituality, creativity psychology, engineering, mystic poetry. I could be in a broad scanning state, divergently thinking, accessing feelings in many directions to accrue valuable words and filter them into a central idea. This still works for my attitudes and opinions, for my philosophy, but for various topics I want to refine, it seems that I should blaze a trail for myself. I would like to use the written form like a trail. Plowing in with intuition and working memory is alright, but I’m at a level where I’m wanting to produce and work with high-caliber scientific research. I know I’m just a freelance scholar, so I don’t have as many resources at my disposal, but what I do have is freedom and enthusiasm. I can study the topics I want to. Reflection can be through reading and writing and filing.