Eat, Play, Love

“I have lived with several Zen masters -- all of them cats.”

[Eckhart Tolle]

Every morning, when we wake to start our day, Hachi immediately greets us with a strong series of cries that I firmly believe could best be translated as "Good morning.  Breakfast?  Breakfast?  BREAKFAST?  BREAKFAST?  BREAKFAST??"  He's polite and/or patient enough to not try to wake us.  I've had cats that would climb on you and breath in your face to try to rouse you.  He doesn't do that.  He'll sleep at the bottom of the bed or wait nearby, or sit on the windowsill (warm weather) or radiator below the windowsill (cold weather).  But once alarms start going off, he knows that means it's time for us to get up, and that means it's time for breakfast.  He, like me, is a creature of habit.

I wake each morning with an odd discomfort in my stomach.  I believe it's a side-effect of a medication I have been taking for years, because I first noticed it only after I'd first started taking it regularly, and its side effects are all on the digestive tract.  When my stomach is empty it's not just uncomfortable but can be quite painful.  The more empty, the more painful it gets, such that fasting for a blood test is a terrible experience, but most mornings - provided I had my usual late evening snack - are just a discomfort until I get something in me.  It's not a big deal.  I think of it as a reminder that it's good to start your day with breakfast - something I didn't do for years prior - and Hachi certainly agrees.  Food first!

When we go downstairs for breakfast and to feed Hachi, he resists being pet or picked up.  He has no interest in affection while he is hungry.  He's not even always truly hungry; sometimes once you set the food in front of him he sniffs it and walks away and will come back later to eat.  He just needs that box checked.  It's his routine, and he sticks to his routine.  

After he eats, or at least after he knows breakfast is set out for him when he gets hungry, he wants to play.  He'll try to lead you to the hallway where his toys are.  He may even tag you on the leg and run away, hoping you'll chase him.

I work from home these days, and nine times out of ten I have what I refer to as "my 9 o'clock meeting".  At 9am (almost punctually, which is a little creepy), Hachi will come to where I'm working and rub against my legs and meow a few times to be picked up and set in my lap.  There he will lie down and purr and cuddle into me.  If I'm wearing a wool sweater and wrap him up in it, he'll purr extra loud and stay extra long.  He's usually there for about 10-15 minutes, or until an outside noise startles him, after which he'll either leave or move to a nearby chair to sleep.

This is our cat's morning routine:  Eat. Play. Love.

I'm off today, so I'm upstairs instead.  I started writing this just before 9am.  He arrived about that time, meowed as if so say "You weren't in your office!" and is now curled up asleep next to me.  If Liza-Ann were home, he'd spend at least some of his day in her lap or curled up near her.  When Dan returns from school he'll spend some time at the foot of Dan's bed, purring away curled up next to his legs.

When suppertime approaches, it will be the same routine again.  He'll scream about supper.  He'll want to play just after.  In the evening he'll often curl up between Liza-Ann and I on the couch when we're watching TV.  (He recently binged all six seasons of The Expanse with us and I think he only missed maybe two episodes.)

It's a simple life, and an incredibly good one.  I try to do the same but work and errands obviously consume far more of our lives than any of us would prefer.  The errands I don't resent.  Life has certain requirements.  The work I used to enjoy, but these days not so much.  My stress to satisfaction ratio is on tilt.  I look forward to retiring, hopefully in about ten years, give or take.  I'm envious of our cat, you see.  He seems to have adopted the lifestyle I want.

Liza-Ann, Dan, and I are universally agreed that Hachi is the best thing we've ever purchased.  We provide him a good life, and in exchange he provides us with comfort, consolation, and a powerful lesson in Zen philosophy:

Eat. Play. Love. 

We should all be so fortunate.

Carcosa

"It must've been very hard
To have lived and never learnt
To be content with who you are
We all want the same things don't we?"

["Forever Can Be", ASHES dIVIDE]

I feel sometimes as though I exist now in two parallel worlds, as two parallel Patricks.  On the surface, they look the same.  But they are not at all the same.  It's a bit like the failed TV series "Awake", but in my case there is no doubt that both worlds are quite real.  I am not asleep.

One is the world I was raised in.  Patriarchal.  Capitalist.  Religious.  Often misogynist.  A world of politics and business, where it's all about agency and power dynamics.  For lack of a better term, "the world of men".  (Rich, white ones.)  A world where profits and performance are important.

The other is the world that's has been revealed to me in recent years as I've worked to broaden my views.  Leftist.  Inclusive.  Socialist.  Feminist.  A world about people and how they socialize.  A world struggling working to find balance and comfort and fairness.  A world where work-life balance and mental health are important.

I spend most of my professional life in the former.  I spend as much of my personal life as able in the latter.  It's a bit like Yin and Yang.  I'm reminded of the old Taoist proverb: know the role of the male, but stick to the role of the female.

I found myself this morning reflecting on one of the latest challenges put before me at work, thinking about it in a very... philosophical way.  A religious way, one might even say.  I thought about these two worlds in which I dwell.  I thought of how much I've grown and changed and evolved and adapted over time.  It was not always in the right directions, and it dawned on me that one of the most difficult and challenging things I ever faced in life, one of the biggest things I ever learned, never made it into my "Treatise on Life" because it never happened until my 30s, and oddly, I never thought to include it in either of my Appendix entries in 2020 either.

I've written before about the "journey of self-discovery" and how much value I place on self-awareness.  I've also talked about how - as fruitful a journey as it is - it's also sometimes a difficult one.  While it's my hope that anyone brave enough to really put themselves under a microscope and come to a fuller understanding of themselves will ultimately come to a peaceful self-acceptance, recognizing the bad, and sometimes unchangeable (or not easily changeable) things about oneself can be difficult.

But we all grow, and change, adapt and evolve.  We do so in reaction to our changing environments, our changing worlds, and our changing relationships.

When we find ourselves in toxic, dysfunctional relationships, it's normally because it's happened "an inch at a time".  We didn't dive headlong into something obviously bad for us.  We started in something good but just ever so slightly tainted, and which drifted, little by little, until we wake up one day and wonder how we've gone so far astray, and what we can do - if anything - to get back to good.  This is true of friendships, of romantic relationships, of employer-employee relationships, and... for the self-aware, for the relationship with ourselves.

One day, long ago, I realized that in response to a particularly difficult time of my life, in adapting and changing and evolving and simply surviving...  that I had become someone I did not wish to be.  Not only was I in a toxic relationship, but that I had become a toxic person in response to it.  I had become someone terrible.  On the road back from hell, I had to train myself, to work at leaving the baggage behind, in order to get back to being a better person, to being someone I loved, someone I respected, someone I was comfortable being.

So a few days ago, when this philosophical line of thought came up, I was reminded of "The Prophet", when Gibran spoke of crime and punishment saying "...even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which his in each one of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also."  There's a difference between being capable of operating in both worlds and being comfortable operating in both worlds.  I know the sorts of things I'm capable of.  I consider myself capable of terrible things.  I don't choose them.  I'm not comfortable or willing.  At my age and agency I'm seldom forced to make terrible decisions in order to survive or even thrive.

I grow less and less comfortable operating in that old world all the time, because my heart is in the new.  We are navigating changing social and political ideologies, and I'm not one of the dinosaurs clinging to the past.  But these dinosaurs hold the power.  They still control things.  Social change is an evolution not a revolution.  (To reluctantly quote Paglia.)  I still deftly vacillate back and forth as required.

Being less and less comfortable with this all the time is not a bad thing, but a good one.  I expect I'll make it to retirement without theses parallel words inverting, but on the off chance I find myself needing to move on to a different environment before I do reach that age, I chuckle at the thought that when inevitably asked in a job interview why I'm out looking, I imagine it would raise a few confused eyebrows when I respond:

I have become uncomfortable with my current role within the social fabric.

Swansongs

"YOU will be what you will to be;

    Let failure find its false content
    In that poor word 'environment,'
But spirit scorns it, and is free,

It masters time, it conquers space,
    It cows that boastful trickster Chance,
    And bids the tyrant Circumstance
Uncrown and fill a servant's place.

The human Will, that force unseen,
    The offspring of a deathless Soul,
    Can hew the way to any goal,
Though walls of granite intervene.

Be not impatient in delay,
    But wait as one who understands;
    When spirit rises and commands,
The gods are ready to obey.

The river, seeking for the sea,
    Confronts the dam and precipice,
    Yet knows it cannot fail or miss;

You will be what you will to be!"

["Will", Ella Wheeler Wilcox*]

Content Warning: discussions of future deaths, most notably my own.

---

I've had occasion a few times in the last few years to prepare slideshows of photos for wakes, overlaid with selected music that was chosen as an appropriate reflection of the content and the person being waked.  One led me to add a new artist to my library, and in doing so, to have something to remember someone by.  

Typically, such slideshows last about four songs.  I've taken to thinking of these tetrads as The Swansongs.

Naturally, the thought appeared in my brain one day:  What would my Swansongs be?  Just as naturally,  me being me, it hasn't gone away since.  Another "splinter of the mind".  Kept popping up.  Usually on long drives.

Normally, Swansongs would be chosen by the people close to the deceased, who know them closely.  I'm curious as to what friends would choose for mine.  What aspects of me would they want to highlight most?  How would they define me and their experience of me?  Would they choose songs based on their musical tastes, or based on what they know of mine?  Shared interests perhaps?  A blend of the two?

What would your Swansongs for me be one day, if it were up to you to choose?  

I also started thinking about what I'd pick for certain others close to me.  It's a bit of morbid thought, so I've settled on very little.  I don't want to dwell on the thought of outliving Liza-Ann, for instance, so I haven't come up with four for her.  I do think I'd pick "Look on Down from the Bridge" by Mazzy Star.  Why?  Well, it's hard to describe.  I'm not one for the idea of heaven, of course.  But I'd like to think that whatever came after, if there was such a thing as an afterlife, she'd still approve of wherever my life went.  That one is more subjective, of course:  I'm the Mazzy Star fan, not her.  I think there'd have to be something from James Taylor, that's where she's the fan, not me.  And there's a number of artists we both share a love of from whose work I could pick:  Coldplay, John Mayer, Pearl Jam...  maybe Be Yourself by Audioslave?  She's not a big Audioslave fan but she once told me she really liked that tune.  

I don't know.  As I said, it's a morbid thought I don't like to focus on, so I've not really fleshed it out fully.

What would you pick for your own four?

For myself, after months or possibly even years of visiting this splinter-of-the-mind, I finally came up with my list of four recently.  Subject to change, assuming I live much longer, which I'm aiming to do.  But if it was tomorrow (note to self: don't dash across the street in front of busses tomorrow), and if I were the one choosing, I think these are the four:

Prizefighter

"Well, if you get sad I'm your friend

I've got an ear I'll always lend

You know that you can always talk to me

Now come on baby take a walk with me" 

["Prizefighter", Eels]

This one wouldn't actually be chosen by me so much as Liza-Ann.  She told me once it reminds her of me, and it's just sort of stuck with me.  It's not one of my favorite tunes, but I like it, and Eels is a musical taste she, Dan, and I all share, so it certainly seems appropriate that way.  I've often been one to charge headlong into confrontation where I felt it was necessary, especially if I thought I was standing up for someone else.  On November 2nd, 1980, on my 9th birthday, I got picked up and thrown back into my desk by a "Christian" brother when I tried to stand up for myself for the first time in my life I can remember.  And when I didn't get my way, it didn't make me back down.  It made me stronger.  I've striven to 'speak truth to power' all my life whenever the opportunity presents itself.  A career in QA is exactly that: telling people the truths they'd rather not hear, based on a belief in 'dwelling in the truth'.  Forever fighting to find it.  Forever fighting to share it.

The Day I Tried to Live

"The day I tried to live

I wallowed in the blood and mud

With all the other pigs" 

["The Day I Tried to Live", Soundgarden]

This is one of my favorite songs of all time.  It has resonated with a certain idea in my head for many years, based on my own interpretation of it.  That interpretation of it being this:

To me, the song is about trying to seize the day but coming up short.  I wrote many times in the past about Carpe Diem and Dead Poet's Society and the idea that we should all be passionately and aggressively seeking our happiness.  But at the same time, that's simply exhausting.  There's a Taoist/Zen idea about knowing ourselves and accepting our limitations, which I've seen expressed roughly as 'the wind doesn't blow all day, if even the heavens must rest, so too must you.'  Carpe Diem is a great idea, but don't forget to take out the trash, pay the bills, and cycle the laundry.  (I'm terrible at remembering to cycle the laundry.)  Have the passion, but know your limits and accept them.

Now, in the last year or so, I discovered I misinterpreted Chris Cornell's intentions with this song, but not by much.  Essentially, it was about his version of seizing the day.  In an interview, he actually described what he was writing about as: "It's about trying to step out of being patterned and closed off and reclusive, which I've always had a problem with. It's about attempting to be normal and just go out and be around other people and hang out. I have a tendency to sometimes be pretty closed off and not see people for long periods of time and not call anyone. It's actually, in a way, a hopeful song. Especially the lines 'One more time around/Might do it', which is basically saying, 'I tried today to understand and belong and get along with other people, and I failed, but I'll probably try again tomorrow.'"

But while I might have been off, slightly, it only resonated with me even further, because one of my most frequent "oh we should..." that falls flat, is socializing.  So many friends I really want to have in, but "never get around to" (especially now with the pandemic).  And I don't consider myself an extrovert by any means, but socially awkward and socially anxious.  But more on that below.

So there you have it: my intentions, my desires, my ambitions - write a novel, publish D&D stuff, etc. - may never come to fruition, but I believe in having passions and dreams for their own sake, even if they go unfulfilled.  Aim for the stars, settle for the moon.

Watching the Wheels

"I'm just sittin' here watchin' the wheels go round and round

I really love to watch them roll

No longer ridin' on the merry-go-round

I just had to let it go" 

["Watching the Wheels", John Lennon]

I first discovered this song by listening to Chris Cornell's cover of it, which I love, but that brought me to the original versions by Lennon, and it seems a bit much to have Cornell on here twice.  So I'd go with the original (but not the acoustic - I prefer the remastered studio version, for what it's worth).

The reason it speaks to me is because I've never had the same ambitions as most people around me.  I've never defined myself by my work, but more so by my relationships.  When it comes to jobs, I've always insisted 'I want to get paid for my headaches'.  I once turned down a raise to negotiate more vacation days, saying 'Lots of people on their death bed wish they'd had more time with their loved ones; no one wishes they'd spent more time at the office.'  I know what's important to me are my friendships, far more than money.  (And yes, I also acknowledge the privilege I have in being paid well enough to say that.) I enjoy conversations, and board games, and time spent relaxing with others.  Hearing others' perspectives.  Learning from them.  These are the things that are precious to me.  If the house burned down, I'd go after the people and the cat.  The rest?  Fuck it.  Start over.  The only item I care about is a ring I almost never take off.

If you're even someone who knows me well enough to be reading this, even if you consider me only an acquaintance and presume I feel the same about you, there is probably still at least some small part in my heart reserved for you.  You may very well be on that well-intentioned "I really ought to get a coffee with..." or "We should have them for dinner..." list and never even know it.  Some of you would be surprised.  If I'm ever able to travel as freely as I'd like, some of you will be.

Sneak Out the Back Door

"And when my life is over

I'm gonna sneak out the back door

Before the mood turns sober

I'm gonna sneak out the back door" 

["Sneak out the Back Door", Ron Sexsmith]

I came to this one sort of accidentally.  A best friend of mine gave me an insightful look into his social anxiety once when he referenced "Not too Big" by Ron Sexsmith.  It resonated strongly with me as well.  And when I was thinking about Swansongs, it crossed my mind for both of us, and I thought "well, I guess it depends which of us dies first..."  But when I went looking for it, having not heard it in years, I mistakenly stumbled on Sneak out the Back Door, and mistook it for the same.  (It is a similarly themed song, after all.)  I only realized the difference today.  So I guess we don't have to share.  I'll keep Not too Big in mind if I were ever asked to put together his, and take Sneak out the Back Door for myself.

Despite public speaking, leadership roles, instructional jobs, my propensity to volunteer to give presentations at work, despite my willingness to be confrontational at times, despite all that, I've always been an introvert, or what some term "an extroverted introvert".  Socializing seldom "recharges my batteries" except in very specific circumstances.  Time alone is what usually does that.  And "what recharges you?" is, I think, the best measure.  I feel awkward and anxious in many social situations.  I tend to assume all my friends' partners dislike me, which may or may not be true, but I always assume from the onset.  Always have. I rehearse conversations in my head before I have them when able.  Sometimes, not always, but sometimes it's an act of will just to ask a waiter for salt or to flag them down for a glass of water.  I try to sneak out of most social venues as soon as able, having a very limited endurance for them.

So there you have it, I guess?  

Apparently I see myself as a shy guy with passion in his heart, who tries to pursue his peculiar, limited ambitions with not seldom enough energy to see them all fulfilled, who tries to stick up for others as best he can, and to not get caught up in the rat race of consumerism, but to find contentment in relationships with the people around him.

I'd like to think that's a fair characterization if I must say so myself.  And certainly one I can live (or die) with.

--------------------

*This poem is a favorite of mine, but one of the reasons I chose it for this is also because it is often misattributed to James Allen, who used it in a book (without properly citing the source, I think).  And whenever I do finally leave this world, I hope "feminist" is a word on the lips of my friends.

Enumeration

"It's not like I'm giving up

I'm just so tired of hurting

and sometimes it's all too much

when every wound takes its toll

I'll just be silently waiting

for death by a thousand cuts"

 ["Death by a Thousand Cuts", Bullet for My Valentine]

the above is fitting but hyperbolic there's nothing to worry about it's just an accounting of sorts besides it's not for you anyway sometimes I don't write for you just for me because I have things I feel I need to remember it's like if there's a last page in the back of a journal where one jots notes down often when I write I just use a particular turn of phrase or odd title a little easter egg that when I see it later I will remember a tiny detail that no one else would notice or be aware of other times rare times it's just for me in its entirety I typed it because I wanted to remember it but I didn't bother to share it I wouldn't even link it publicly except that if I hid the link I'd forget about it this is a waste of time for anyone else because it will make zero sense it's not meant for you seriously go away why are you still reading run along ok Patrick in no particular order road rage sometimes my own but especially that time on barter's hill the great and terrible smencil incident one cutting comment in a tiny airport the never-ending nosebleed nigel's report had three gray areas cuddles to snoring a few last occasions in that tiny basement and the greatest of regrets that time I should have walked away am I truly that anxious no one would believe it even if I explained well two would believe me one because he loves me and one because he truly understands (and loves me) paul michael gary davey davey davey johnny rod so many times should they even count paddy twice raymond ray or was it mike is he really dead fuck him I hope so darren darrel what was his name is he dead too him I could forgive and then maybe I'd forgive myself those two wishes three on one five on one with a last minute reprieve burt but I don't blame him steps of the po po and not much help the mugging the one I didn't show up for chris and scott for unnecessary near misses terry too the banana peel in the tea cup the bath was the first near-drowning before or after that deodorant I get it no need to shout the useless bike light recurring dreams chasing mom ghost in the closet bike on the church cliff brakes on the hill and the one that wasn't mine was it even real damn girl dressed down on the dance floor of the mess and damn well deserved it dressing down in the games room and back bar twice more harsh than necessary failing so many times to really get the gravity for another 25 years the movie poster breakdown naked and wrapped around a garbage can in the middle of the macdonald bridge no less nineteen or twenty give or take fuck the physical scars are the easier ones...  or perhaps they just don't require as much thought you still here I told you to go away don't bother you won't get answers it's not a puzzle to be solved it's just a few of the 1000 tiny cuts