Lunch: Taco Taco, small burrito, two crunchy tacos, huge soda
Dinner: Crappy, limp salad, a couple of spoons/tastes of some truly heinous clam chowder, some oyster crackers and three lemon wedges
Snack: The better part of a pound of cherries on the way home from my crappy day, some Kruncher chips
Breakfast with my friends, great coffee, lousy and surly service. What the hell is wrong with people? Seriously, the world seems to be full of seriously cranky people, which is somewhat comforting because I can be very cranky and cranked-up, although I keep it to myself, well, most of the time.
I ate out three times today and accept how messed-up that is. The lunch one was a place where you are not allowed to give tips, and the counter guy there left his counter during a lull and went around asking everyone if their food was O.K., and if they needed anything, which is totally not the kind of sweet service one would expect in such a humble place, but there it was and the guy was so nice. When I had ordered and paid for my food, I saw a sign for a lemonade drink that had fruit, as in actual fruit and juice, in it and asked if it had been sweetened, and when the counter guy confirmed that, I mentioned that it looked really great, but that I had to avoid sugar and his reply was, "Well, in that case, just to help you feel better, that stuff is nasty, nasty, nasty!" He referenced it again when he wandered by to ask if we needed anything. Such a nice touch. It happened again later at the drug store when a young guy came up to me and asked if he could help me find anything, which he could and which he did, telling me a couple of cool stories about rock climbing in the process of being super-duper helpful.
The world is full of nice people like that, which makes the perpetual corps of doofuses (or, is it doofi?) just that much more noticeable. Dinner with the friend that needs hauling everywhere had the same kind of person. Sad service and really bad soup. And, you know, when it comes to receiving service, I am a very low maintenance diner/customer/client/ordinary person. I never send stuff back when dining. I am a good consumer so that I never, ever, ever have to return anything to a store. I do not request any kind of special attention and just go with the flow as much as possible so as to avoid even the merest suggestion of any problem. I am just as non-confrontational in public as I am in the more private parts of my life. That makes me sound like a doormat, and I guess that I mostly am that.
Whatever. You know, I get to where I can stand up and then it just drifts away, that feeling that I have the ability and self-responsibility to do it. Just...drifts...away...poof...there it goes.
And, it is not helping that I was clearing out some of the junk that I never revisit from my computer files and stumbled into the writings of a friend who lost her son a few years ago. I read and then went back in time and read from the beginning of that loss, the tragedy and pain of losing that lovely boy. Then, I was no longer weeping for my own losses and problems, but for the absence of that sweet and wonderful boy and all of the people and places and things that we no longer have in our lives, individually and collectively, all that stuff that makes life worth the struggle, at least it did before it came up missing.
I know that my sorrow is not unique, at least in the larger aspect of a life, mine, yours, the lives of everyone. You know that saying about how happy families are alike in their happiness, but unhappy families are unique in their unhappiness. Yeah, like that. But, even though our individual pain is specific to the qualities and experiences of each of our lives, the entirety of sadness connects us because we all feel loss and sorrow and pain pretty much the same, as only human bodies and minds and hearts can...that is what connects us.
So, my friend's pain at losing her son is sort of my pain, too, because I knew and loved him in my own way, but it mirrors all of the suffering of my own life. I feel the same qualities of pain for her loss as I do for my own.
It is like this stupid visual disorder that I have and that other people, not many, but more than enough, have and when someone reads about what another person's symptoms are like and how it fucks up their life, someone else might say that they really do not have anything to complain about because they view their own symptoms as being less somehow, and that is total bullshit. The difficulty each person has is equal in significance to that of another person and to compare them is pointless. We all suffer at our own level of discomfort, pain. And, it is, it is how we are connected.
So, I am feeling sad about all of this stuff again, and instead of trying to get rid of it, I think that I might want to, might actually honor it a bit tonight. I do not intend to wallow, but I am going to allow myself to feel it as fully as possible, immerse myself in the experience, re-experience it as completely as I can, acknowledge it and then let it pass through me, fall away from my physical body and into the earth, my planet, our Mother, where it can be honored and transformed into something good, something wonderful, something life-affirming. I can do that.
I did not draw this GP, but I did pay for it in a collection of clip art and it (and the slight alteration I made to it) perfectly suits my general lack of understanding and intelligence today. Yep. It does. But, I can transcend it, yes?
Yes.
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