F O G

I’m not going to the Whole Health Expo in Northampton today.

I thought about it and looked at the flyer. Lots of New Age healers ready to answer your deepest questions from their informed perspective, with the beliefs and visions they have gained on their journey. All those perspectives are nicely packed up in glossy sound bytes, designed to be appealing to urban professionals who have more money than peace, who want comfort and solace more than they want challenge.

That’s the way we do it nowadays. You don’t have to go to the mountain top to find the guru anymore, having to seek enlightenment as a man whose hair is on fire seeks water, as Krishnamurti said, rather there is a mini-guru in your neighborhood with a franchised message who can come to you in a convenient one hour block.

I’m not really useful for much other than being a guru. Heck even in the day I was always the corporate shaman, the one who walked through walls and showed the way.

TantraGal, who has advertisements for her practice in stylish vinyl letters on the outside of her minivan saw it immediately. “There aren’t any powerful trans based books out there,” she told me. “It’s a niche!”

Yeah, it is. Package me up as an author, rather than just the messy writer I am now, and I can sell the message of transformation and change. Cut me up into meal sized pieces, seal me in plastic, and people will grab me off the shelf.

It’s just the way we do guru in this culture.

Me, well, I have a Fear Of Guru in that manner. I look at the workshops schedules and know these people are going to stay on message, because they are much more missionaries than visionaries, message carriers rather than deep seers.

But still, as I told TantraGal when she was feeling uncomfortable about being objectified and commoditized, we have to believe that the message transcends the packaging. We have to believe that, otherwise we are up shit, because packages of some sort or other are required.

Somehow, I gotta get over my FOG and do the packaging. TantraGal wanted to help for a couple of minutes, but she is scrambling for her own practice, and doesn’t need my call to go deeper and write. She may know that’s important, but now, well, now — is it ever really a good time? We will see where that goes.

Could I engage and enthrall an audience for an hour?

I’m pretty sure that I could.

Could I feel good about that?

I don’t remember.

Worst Enemy

I also hope you no longer feel the need to be quite so miserable as you once were.[I know I just stated that very poorly, but please try to hear me on this.]

You are such a beautiful and magical person in your own right,
it always pained me when I saw you become your own worst enemy, etc.

Holly B, note to me, 07 March 2008.

I don’t think I ever had the need to be miserable.

But I did have the need to challenge & question every desire I had, did have the need to deny those desires. Discipline, always discipline.

Of course, that made me miserable. Same difference, eh?

Being my own worst enemy, the one whose job was to confront me so as to keep me small & scared, well, that was — is — second nature to me. It’s what I was trained to do, all that vigorous and intrusive self-policing.

But maybe, somehow, I can figure out how to shut the doors to that asshole, to my own worst enemy.

Closing Doors

I’m not good at closing doors.

Just ask my father. He likes to watch me, prepared to pounce when a door isn’t shut tight. To him, of course it’s a symptom of my going too fast and not thinking, which he has identified as the root cause of all my problems.

It’s been true since they have been away. I have to keep the door to the basement closed, so what little heat is left on stays down in this basement to combat the cement floor and drafty flue that like to steal heat.

And twice I have come back to see the garage door open and the opener’s light blinking, stopped and retracted due to some block. It’s winter, so I need to get to the shovels, but the pile of dissapeared items is large enough to get in the way.

Running out of the house so I will embarass people less by my presence in the neighborhood, well, that means I don’t have time to secure things nicely. Tranny go, go tranny.

I had been meaning to write about this phenomenon, but the New York Times beat me to it. They review Dan Areily’s book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by looking at his work on how cutting off some options can focus our thinking and our efforts.

TBB understands this. She cut of her options (and some other bits) when she had genital reconstruction surgery (GRS), and says that the best part is that no one now tries to convince her she should try to make it work as a man again. She is freed by the limits now set, and that is empowering to her.

This is the deep part where I need to look at my own doors. Oy.

Next entry, please.