Happy birthday to Me

It took 45 minutes to get here. I am drinking a Coke before I go across the street to the restaurant. Google says the.temp is 29 and feels like 27. I am out of the wind, so it is not so bad.

The morning looked like this:

***

I did not walk back. I started to do so. I stopped off at the BP I had stopped at earlier. I called KH. I did some email. That took a half hour. I started walking. The owners came by and offered me a ride. I could not really refuse. I hate imposing on people. They brought me back to the room. Nice people. Good people.

I ate dinner. I called my sister. Phone gave out.   Talked to my eldest niece. Phone gave out again. This is view now, the same as I posted yesterday:

Now I am going to finish this piece. It may be long. Please have patience. I hope it will not be mawkish. I am trying to be honest. I apologize if it seems foolish or if it makes you uncomfortable.

***

These posts have not gone as I planned when I was in prison. I had meant to be publishing my prison journal st the same time. My big feet tangling in the laptop's power cord left me with no laptop. My PO putting approval of my new laptop at a low priority leaves me with typing on a phone. It is a major PITA.

Tuesday, I again see the sex therapy counselor. I go planning on learning something. I expect to lose my internet access although I never received any information on the ban's therapeutic purpose. I do not know how long might be this possible ban, so I write now what I thought yo write abou over time.

I was suicidal for some time before my arrest in 2010. Not immediately before, though. For two months before my arrest, I had given up running with the Muncie crackheads and hanging out in Yahoo chatrooms hitting on single women and trading pictures (legal and illegal). When the cops showed up, I went backwards towards suicide. I took their appearance as the hand of fate. I gave up. I became fatalistic. I had trapped myself. A trap I also saw an escape from this world and my life that I had come to hate.

After my arrest, the only reason I did not continue seeking the means of killing myself was one of my step-sons. My visited me, told me her middle child had been threatening suicide. I had enough lucidity to know I could not go forward with my plans. I had felt I had done damage to enough people - another reason I was suicidal - and wanted to harm only myself.

(I got a call that lasted 3 hours. It is now 9:58. I cannot finish this piece now. But I got some good news - my son may be alive.)

I never thought about being thought of as a potential child molester. My first thought was was the teenagers might not be illegal - so much of the internet is BS. Then it was more about doing what is forbidden. For the same reason as running with the Muncie crackheads  - not the drugs but the getting away with what I was not supposed to be doing. I think I am now over liking pushing boundaries. Then came the idea of being caught would give me no other course but suicide (other attempts being quite unsuccessful). I thought just having the pictures were bad enough. Well, what I did not expect came to be. Perhaps the best reason to think I should have killed myself regardless of why I did not.

The sex therapist asked if I had never aroused by the images. I answered ss if she had asked about sexual arousal and my answer to that question was a truthful No. I never studied them; the subject matter held no fascination for me. But my answer was not truthful for the question as stated. One video I opened thinking its subject was not illegal did arouse me. I wanted to commit grievous bodily harm on its maker. Nor did it help my mental health one bit. 

Being alive I had to figure what to with myself. My prison journals are about that process. Instead of sleeping my way through prison, I confronted myself. 

I had meant to drive away my friends. Some did go, but not others. They propelled me. That if I did not find some way to fix what had gone wrong with me, to do better with myself and my life, to live up in their faith in me who thought of himself as worthless, then I would feel a shame even greater than being alive.

I reacquainted myself with Aristotle and Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau. Against them I examined my life.

I scrapped off the over-complications of my life. KH had suggested writing fiction. I had already started my journal where I was describing what I had done to my life and why and tried to discern where to go. I started writing fiction.

It was all therapy. Which raises some of my problems with therapy. I am no longer in 2010 but the government is.

Whatever comes, I will continue to write. It is what I should have been doing 40 years ago. People believed I could be a writer but I had not enough faith. I let those people down. I wasted whatever talent I had. Some of those people died. I cannot do this again.

I ran away from a fight. The fight against the ugliness of nihilism. That nihilism fed my depression and led to some dumbass crazy attempts at suicide. 

Camus in The Rebel wrote the only creativity could fight nihilism. I also got reacquainted with that idea while in prison. I kept writing. I will keep writing. That is the only means I have to fight the all-devouring maw of nothingness. It is only way by creating something that I can pay back the debt owed to my friends.

I wanted to write about going back to the church. That will need be for tomorrow.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this Hemmings song meant to me when I heard on WXPN years ago or how much it still means. This is is how I feel about my friends. Uncanny, it was. Please give it a listen.

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