Counting the days...

The day is getting closer
The time draws short fast
She thinks I'm not counting
But I am
In my own way.
Her eyes will shine upon me
And she'll see the grin she inspires
...And someone may have to turn a hose on us!

As you might guess by the above snippet of poetry, I have a visitor coming, and I am growing increasingly excited. I have lots of plans, a few surprises, but no expectations. She is who she is, I am who I am and I won't force her into changes she isn't ready for. She knows how I feel about things going on in her life, and I've given my opinion on it, on what she could do. But the choice, whatever it may be, has to be hers. If I push, I'm no better than the people who are already beating her down emotionally. But that aside, fun will be had, old friends met and new ones made while she's here. Who knows, I may even be able to see this old waterfront town freshly through her eyes.

Cages, Questions, and The Hunt

Is it instinct or emotion that makes me chew her cage.
She's stuck in here
It's not right I won't let it stand.
Did I get here and make here mine
Or was she mine before I got here?
We keep pacing, dancing
Nipping, sniffing
Thu hunt goes on

An old lesson re-learned.

I recently did a post on joy, whether it can be counted, measured, tracked and given a number. Well, the jury is still out on that for me, but I did figure out a bit more about what joy is. It isn't always running around screamingly happy or the out loud whoops of joy or running around raising hell with your friends. Though these things can be sources of joy sometimes. Outlets, I guess. But it settled on me tonight that joy is in the simple things. Talking to your girl for even just a few minutes. Watching a favorite TV show, even though you've seen every episode, and still loving it. Playing the video game you just bought, replaying an old favorite. Or just chilling around the pad with an old friend, having a few beers, eating pizza and just letting all the bullshit out their roll on by without touching you. At least, for a night. Ah... Gods bless simple pleasures!

My Nemesis, My Friend

I received a rather prolonged visit from what I have at times referred to as 'an old friend. And honestly, at time's that's true. But often, I think probably more often than not it's more my nemesis than my friend. And this visitor, this force, it's name is Anger. We go way back, anger and me. It was always the first and most common reaction and emotion project at me, through me, upon me, by the Beast-man who was sadly my male role model. So, of course, over time 2 things happened, pretty much in tandom; I began to both loath and imitate this reactionary behavior. You see, what I would eventually piece together as I grew older (and, in theory, wiser) is that The Beast (To be known as such from here on out) didn't understand any emotion, could not process, deal with or project any emotion, other than anger.
And so from this rather volcanic environment, I was born, a man of similar behaviors. Only by The Grace of The Gods, did I not become a mirror of this old generation, bitter, emotionally stunted, angry Beast. But the demon of anger did find a hold in me. I did not become an openly volent miscreant, or a physically violent woman beater or any such. But the anger was always there, bubbling, waiting. And often it seeps out at unexpected times, or boils over in great bursts, and am like Vesuvius, spewing lava everywhere, reeking havoc and destroying all caught in my wake. So in this way, has it been my Nemesis. But also it has been my friend. It has seved me in defending my own life, in portecting friends and in keeping myself and others safe by instinct and that extra edge it can provide. But the sneaky little bastard in it's negative aspect has cost me much. A connection other friends had that passed me by like dust on the wind, friends that the loss of felt like losing limbs, relationships, that if the anger had not shattered may have altered the course of my life.
Anger has popped up here and there, but not majorly for a while. But over the last days it hasn't just raised it's head, it's been a fucking Hydra! Every time I 'cut off it's head', two more of the damnable things grew back! Again and again this happened until at last I found the 'fire' to burn the stumps, remove all the heads and find calm again for a time. But it was a real deluge of suck and I hope to be able to learn to keep it at bay longer and longer. Because I, in point of sad fact, can become emotionally abusive from it, and I don't want to be that douche ever again. I hope to one day bury that lousy Son Of A Bitch for good.

Snarl!

My hackles are up
My fangs are bared
I need to run
I need to hunt
I need to fight
I need to fuck

Tonight my howl is stuck in my throat
Growls are all that come out
My nose is to the wind
But all I smell is sour
I want to lick my chops and taste blood
And let the crimson stain my muzzle
As a reminder
As a warning!

Loosening The Knot

Saturday night, I did some laid-back, fun, old-school good time drinking with a friend I've known almost 20 years. The current crappy state of our sad economy and a well-crafted lie from another employee desperate to save their own skin had left him briefly jobless -a scary prospect in today's slim job market- but he is pretty sure he's found what could prove to be very gainful employment and so, was sharing his joy with me, via the consumption of good beer and my old friend (and also old nemesis) Mr. Jack Daniels. As we sat there and drank and talked of many things, I think something in me, some great knot I carry around all to often and don't always realize it, began to loosen and unravel a bit. We joked and laughed at current things. We enjoyed the sights of many beautiful young ladies who were moving to and fro, enjoying the teeming nightlife around us. We strolled a bit down our almost two-decades-long memory lane of youthful misdeeds and adult realizations. And when we were done, we settled within my house to chill out the remainder of our evening. He passed out happily while enjoying a movie via the awesome miracle of Netflix, and I got a call about then from a certain young lady with whom I have been cultivating a romantic relationship from afar. Thank you, Mr. Graham-Bell for your lovely invention, which allows us to bridge the states-wide gap between us in and instant and enjoy the pleasure of one-another's company vocally, if not in person.
I must say here, that I am normally a very guarded person. I can express emotions very clearly and much more easily in writing. But, when inter-acting with people I tend to be one to erect walls, play my cards close to my chest as they say, and choose my words very carefully. Alcohol, however, can suddenly become a huge wrecking ball that smashes right through those carefully crafted constructs, redering them inert and tossing inhibitions to the wind.
So...when this call came, that is when the wrecking ball hit and the knot loosened a little. And with that loosening came a loosening of my tongue, as they say and many things I'd kept happily locked away, and things I had been thinking on and analyzing (Probably over-analyzing, knowing me), came pouring fourth.
To my great and joyful surprise, she was quite receptive of all of this and excepting. She was basically just like "OK, this is how it is and I know when you're sober much of this will again get locked away, and that's OK. You'll come to it when you're ready." This made me feel great, and no doubt was a big part of the reason I felt so good Sunday. I don't have "I Feel Awesome!" type days very often, so my thanks to her. She knows who she is. She is among my small readership of the ramblings on this blog, so perhaps she will read this, and within it catch another small glimpse of what she glimpsed that evening...

I Feel Like A Number

I've been thinking. A dangerous past-time, I know... But, I have. I have been thinking about emotions. How they work, how some are easier to understand than others, how some seem more, for lack of a better term, comfortable on some people than others. And chief amid all this quandry is the following question. Can we quantify emotions? Can we separate them out like portions of sugar for a baking recipe and figure out the 'level' of an emotion we feel? Is it possible to measure an emotion on a 0-10 scale like doctors ask us to do for pain? Some say we can. I'm not so sure. At least, not with certain emotions anyway. Pain has always been pretty easy for me to measure on that scale. If I'm in pain (Good or Bad) and you ask me, I can give you an approximate number right off. But emotions are a completely different animal. Hell, it's a zoo full of completely different animals. They are much more ethereal than pain. Harder to grasp and pin down and say "This is exactly what I'm feeling and this is why and here,tify easier because I'm more familiar with them. Anger being the main one. Sad as that is. And Sadness I can probably rate pretty quick if called to do it. But things like Love and Joy are harder for me. By a long shot. And believe me, I'm not an Emo, boo-hoo, the world hates me kinda guy. Seriously. Even though that statement about the emotions I have harder time with may make it sound that way. I'm just trying to figure some things out that have been bouncing around in my noggin and so, here I express them as a part of that sometimes awesome, sometimes sucky process. In fact, not only am I doing that but I invite and challenge any of my readers to post their take on this subject, either through comments or, better yet, though full posts, similar to how Doll recently had several of us do about Humility on her blog.
So, in short, the jury is still out for me on whether or not one can accurately measure emotions by a number or some such thing, though I am leaning towards No. What do you think? Can it be done?

It's hard to be humble...

(For those of you who read my friend Doll's blog "Well, God Damn", this will be a re-post)

I would like to preface this post by apologizing to Doll, who asked me 3 months ago if I would contribute to this topic and give my opinion on Humility. It should have been here sooner, but life intervened. My apologies also to my much more punctual fellow posters on this thread. But now, at last and without any further ado...
What is humility? That's no so easy a question to answer as one might think. If you ask one thousand people this question, I have no doubt you would get nearly as many answers. The reason for this is simple. Well...OK, it's actually NOT so simple. It is actually rather complex. Because we, as humans, are complex. I mean, sure, you can look to Webster or Oxford or even Dictionary.com for a definition, but that is just a scratch on the surface. All you will learn from any of those sources is simply what the WORD humility means. Defining words is easy. It's when you get down to what the concept of what the humility really IS that things get interesting; because it is so, so much more than just a word.

Humility and whether one does or does not have it, are shaped by so many different factors. Spirituality, up-bringing, environment, and the vast gamut of personal experiences, joys and traumas we all expeience as individuals throughout our lives. Which, for example, is why you: the reader, get all these fascinating little essays, rants and perspectives on Humility. Each on different from the next due to all of the factors listed above and more, but none wrong. And who knows, along the way you may discover or re-define what it actually means to you, and the role it - or it's absence - plays in your own life.

And so, all of that being said, humility to me is acceptance of yourself and your place in things with pride, while striving to be the best you you can become. And the real trick in this is to not cross that sometimes hair-thin line from pride into arrogance, which then blows humility all to shit until something happens to again teach you humility. It is, I think an on-going lesson to some degree in everyone's lives. In the legends of my faith and also in those of many other cultures, even the Gods themselves are not immune to the lessons of humility and arrogance. When looked at from that perspective, one realizes how truly powerful a force humility is. It is a place we must all tread with care, lest we fall and suffer the worst fate of all... Becoming self-important pompous douche bags!

The road so far...

Life is a journey, not a destination. That might sound corny to some, but I have always believed it to be a simple, solid truth. And man, has my journey gotten interesting, spiritually speaking.
I have always been a very spiritual person and am always open to things on that level, or try to be. But I never expected to be where I am...

I was raised Christian, 'Salvationist' to be specific. It is a very open-minded church; in mission statement at least. When I was a child I was always happy and excited to get up on Sunday mornings and go to church. To praise, to learn. It was fun and wonderful for me. As time went on and I grew as a person, I learned there were other faiths out there, something I never heard of at home. This exposure is thanks to my very spiritually diverse group of friends and acquaintances over the years. As time went on and I opened myself up, explored, I stayed Christian but one day found myself veering in to the territory of Shamanism, a practice which had fascinated me for years. And when a close friend at the time said he saw a veritable spiritual menagerie of animals around me and then looked me in the eye and said "You are a shaman" I found then the courage to take that first step toward excpeting Shamanistic and Animist beliefs into my own. After some time, contemplation and study, I was soon calling myself a Christian Shaman. For several years I walked this path. The whole time, both as a Christan and then as a Christian Shaman I felt...pullings another way. Their were signs, hints, but I ignored them. To follow those feeling would take me fully away from the Christan beliefs and I couldn't do it. Things like the fact that I'd go to hell for doing it, were to ingrained into my psyche. And so, I stayed as I was, where I was and thought (pretended?) that that was enough.
As years went by and life rolled on, I saw back-biting and betrayal in church, a place supposed to be holy and free of judgement. I saw people more concerned about their own 'rank' socially and within the church then with actually being a truly good Christian and following the tenants of tolerance love, unity and forgiveness that are supposed to be at the core there. But part of the problem was that people were more concerned with the Religion of Christianity and not the Spirituality of it. I also looked around me at the world and within me at questions I had that I could not satisfactorily answer. Why was such a good deity turning a blind eye to SOOOOOO much pain and suffering and evil? That was but one of the questions that just kept nearly pecking a hole in my damn head. I also found I was growing increasingly fed up with the threat of Hell that is held of the head of Christians like a sword of Damocles. If you don't do X thing right, you're going to hell. You have modifications to your body, you're going to hell. You have sex and you aren't married, yup, hell again. It gets ludicrous after a point. Like a damn boogie man for adults. Put there to scare everybody into line.
At various points throughout all of this in my life, I found interest in 'viking' culture. Runes, stories, ect. I always felt drawn to the runes and to one in particular. 'Thorn'. I always loved storms and at times (Think me nuts if you like) I could swear I heard a voice in them. Finally, after years of searching to right myself with what I did or did not believe, and of denying those pulls, I was at a pagan festival with a friend I'd grown up with, and one of the vendors had a Thor's Hammer and a Valk-knot pendant on her table. I felt drawn to both of these. But I had always heard that to mark yourself with that knot is to basically say you're ready to die and I mean soon, in the service of The All-Father, Odin. I'm still looking into finding out the truth to that. But, I finally said "Aw, fuck it!" and picked up and purchased the Thor' s Hammer that now hang around my neck. I feel comfortable here, on my new path. Shaky sometimes, sure, and sometimes old beliefs try to crop up in my head and remind me of that Christian specter of hell., but I find I can shake it off. I have found a new strength and I am more comfortable here than I possibly imagined I ever would be. That fire I once felt as a child on Sunday mornings, that eagerness to learn has returned, but now it's aimed at things like learning all about The Rune, setting up an alter and learning all I can about the Gods and Goddesses of The Asatru faith. I am still Shamanic, it fits right in there too. The Norse had shamans. The really funny part to me, is not ONE of my 'Pagan' friends, be they Asatru, Wicca or some other, were surprised that my feet found this path. Apparently it only surprised me. Which of course makes me laugh, in the good way. So now I walk this road and wonder, with excitement and curiosity, what lies ahead for me.
Hail, Thor!

Catharsis

We all need some catharsis in our lives. So that is exactly what this blog will hopefully be for me. A place to purge emotions; the good, the bad, and everything in between. Sometimes the posts here will be rantings, other times it may contain long diatribes of contemplation and sometimes what's up here may not make any sense to anyone other than I. So, kindly bear that in mind, dear reader, if you choose to read the posts I make. Comments will, of course be welcomed. To me it makes little sense to keep a blog - a public diary, essentially - if you don't expect comments at least from time to time. And who knows? The comments themselves may well spark ideas for posts from me at times. I chose to call this blog "Thunder Struck" because it feels to me like I have been just that in so many ways in my life in the past five or six months. Some good, some bad, but stormy, loud, ground-shaking and electric, one and all. In that relatively short time I have lost a very close family member who in their own way very much help shape the man I am, lost a second family member who was not as close, but still loved, both to the cold clutches of death, lost my best friend in the wold because of my own bad temper and blindness, lost another very, very close friend to the same, changed spiritual paths, and reconciled with old friends I didn't expect to, learned the value of forgiveness... And there have been other things too, but some I must still place 'close to my chest' for now, for personal reasons. So, for those brave enough to subscirbe, buckle up and hold on, it's often one hell of a roller coaster ride!