Personal Journal

Transvestite Blues

So this is my 35th birthday.
I don’t know how to characterize it yet.
Lonesome, which is an entirely different word than lonely.
Lonesome is like a penetrating coldness, damp and dreary. Lonesome is the wet fog that gets in under your trench coat on a cobblestone street. Lonely is just cold.
I had a moment, like I think lots of people do, where I wished I was dead. It’s not quite suicidal, well, far from it. It’s that moment where you wish that the threads that hold the fabric of the universe together would tear away right in front of your car on the freeway, and you and you alone would escape this dimension, and you’d be alone in the car with your music and your thoughts and a sense of peaceful motion, endless. Gliding.
But it wouldn’t happen for me, I only had 7 miles of freeway to try for it, then it was back here, to this dark hotel room, headphones on, praying. Praying for fulfillment, because 35 years of living has brought precious few moments of it.
The line of buddhist monks that patrol the hallways of my inner universe are chanting, preaching that desire is the source of all suffering, and today, I know they are right. I suffer so much because I desire so strongly. I desire to cool my soul off of the endless ceaseless incessant and infinite craving for something that I’ve yet to find someone who can even begin to understand it on its surface, let alone to comprehend how that key unlocks this piece of me that atrophies in a cage like a calf whose existence is defined by the cruel suffering of the box in which he is turned into veal for some aristocrat to surfeit himself upon for only a single meal.
I would relinquish these desires if I could, and there, you line of buddhists and I will have to disagree. I am not going to learn how in this life, of that I am certain. In this life, perhaps, I am intended to learn to endure the height of the suffering. Maybe in future ones I will learn to release the desires.

In the movie A Man Called Horse, the Englishman, oh nevermind.
Nevermind.

Nevermind.

The sound of my own thoughts.
The hunger, the depravity, the pain, the fear, the hope, the ability to see the future and the past and understand that this cycle cannot yet be broken.
Captive I am, but not the way I might desire. Captive to a vacuum that cannot be filled.
Abhorred by a nature that I don’t understand.

Nevermind.
Nevermind.

I’m 35 today.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn