62 + 1 and Eve of No More of This

I slept poorly. Too much on my mind after talking to my niece. My son may be alive 

Here is how the day looked just before the start of my work day:

The days are getting longer.

We ran out of trucks and I put metal lids on canning jars.

I withdrew money for the group therapy thing. What else bothers me is the counselor emphasizing the price and it needing to be in cash. I got a surprise from the ATM. I spent more over the weekend than I recalled. I spoke with management here and will pay rent after I get off work on Friday (payday) rather than Thursday.

To celebrate and as a late birthday present, I ordered a pizza and a 2 liter of Coke. I called KH, watched Farscape, and texted my niece. I tracked down the last three videos below for this post.

Now let finish what I started last night.

***

Joe Ely has line about if you start something new you must give up some old. I gave up a lot of things - self-respect, integrity - until I thought the only way to pay off the debts to friends and family was suicide. We know this did not work out as planned.

I got sober in pretrial detention - nicotine, caffeine snd crack cocaine. I began working on lucidity after reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez in prison. 

I worked through my past. I decided every important decision I had made was done so wrongly. 

The Rolling Stones have about sometimes needing to just scrape the shit off your shoes. I started scraping.

KH thought I should go back to writing fiction. I looked back trying to learn why I had quit doing something I loved doing. My answer was cowardice.

I started reading like I had not in decades. Philosophy and theology. I began noticing as my depression increased, my reading had shrunk.

I decided I had to give up the life that I had been living from around 1980. I had already given up my law license. That which I had dedicated most of my life.

And that was what I did: going back to myself. I do not want to push the limits with wild women as I used to fo. I do not even care about dating. Celibacy, I learned, felt like freedom. My life of crime had bored me before my arrest. They still bore me. The supervised release order does not restrict me because I agree with its prohibitions.

What does restrict me is the PO's refusal to approve the new laptop. With that I might do some positive good. Good for myself and for others. 

Religion also played a part. My father wanted me to go to church in prison. Having embarrassed him enough, I did so. The Protestants were not to my taste. I was too much of a Protestant to accept papal infallibility. By what had come to seem as another of a series of events that felt right, I found some people interested in Orthodox Christianity. I stayed with them until there came a time I could join the church or not. I decided I agreed with the Nicene Creed and I found a spiritual  peacefulness in the church's teachings. It was time for me to take a stand, to stop blithely drifting through a life without meaning.

The following videos might further explain why I joined the Orthodox Church. T2 thinks I joined up with the crazies, E worries I joined a cult and KH tries to understand.

What the Church stands for:

Or try this one:

Amazing how much of what this priest says applies to me:

And also with this fellow:

And even with this fellow there are some shared responses, if not including his first reaction to the liturgy.

If these are not enough cluck on the Religion label below, or go to web page view to go to my religion links on the right hand side of the screen.

No, I have no interest in going back to 2009. You could say I am trying to go back to 1980 and live better than I did. I say  have decided the kind of life I want to live and first and foremost is to live a useful, creative, positive life in the time left me.

I do not ask for your sympathy or your acceptance. I only want you to pay attention and educate yourself. I am what a bad example looks like. Do not follow me. Do better by yourself and to others. I have come to the conclusion, mostly through Orthodoxy, that the truly rebellious rebel against the inhumanity of the universe. Where I gave up; where I indulged in ugliness;  where I tried suicide as an escape from that same ugliness; there was no rebellion. What should have been was a fight for the beauties of life. Fighting that fight is all I ask of you.

Good night and let us hope this will not be the last post on this topic.

sch