More Confessions - Illusions 5/16/2010

 [If you have tender sensibilities, you may wish to skip reading this post. I discuss the subject of my arrest. You should also be aware that this is a truncated version. I am missing a page - they were loose. Oh, yeah, I am editing some of my language. I have monitoring software on this computer and do not want to again bar myself from my own blog. sch 9/17/22]

Talking to the soon-to-be-ex and K is making me think. Thinking on how, regardless what I do, I eff up.

I thought I had neither the support and attachment being reported to me. Left to what I sensed and had in my own head, I thought myself pretty much worth only of loathing,

The damage done - the damage I saw myself creating since one day in the Spring of '84- kept rattling about my brain. Last year I had writer's block on a case. Not much of a thing? I put it on par with a musician becoming deaf, a dancer lame, a politician mute, Could I trust myself not cause harm to my clients?

I have both the soon-to-be-ex and K asking why I did not talk about all this.

Let me give an answer that only husbands caught in their effing up will understand:  I knew she would just go back to nagging me about Muncie and crack cocaine. No discussion, no dialog - just her exasperation blasting at me.

As for everyone else in the world - I was just ashamed. I would find my own solution. Six days later, that solution seems both incomplete and creating more problems.

[Okay, the last sentence makes no sense to me. I do not know to what the six days refers. Rather vague about my solution, too. I must have been referring to my plans for suicide.]

The soon-to-be-ex thinks I need to be in a hospital. I do not see how that will help me or anyone else. I have been fighting my self-destructive streak for decades - most of my life? - here I thought I had found a way to finally stop it. What is the thing called when they start a fire to stop a fire? That is what I tried to do.

Nietzsche says we cannot live without illusions. Jeff Goldblum got the idea in The Big Chill when he does the shtick about a day without rationalizations. I am pulling away a lot of illusions. Yes, Joe, it has been a life of illusion. So here are mine:

I thought I was a horrible human being since TJ collapsed on my kitchen floor, telling me to call Kathy to take her to the hospital - refusing to let me take her. I killed a person of great beauty that day.

That I was not cut out for a picket fence and a middle class life. I thought that after TJ went to Florida. After T1 told me that being pregnant was not a good reason to get married; after T2 left for New Albany; this idea kept getting reinforced. I told CC about this, and she never believed me when I asked her to marry me. 

That I was vile. I spent too much time in the wrong places online, reinforcing this idea. I still have a feeling of uncleanness. Yet, when given the opportunity to be vile, I lost my nerve. The reality was too boring to go forward.

One more illusion to shred: I am a bore and a coward. I was not wild enough to actually do what the government thinks I am capable of doing.

Dr. Johnson said a hanging clarifies the mind. I have right and truly hung myself - of this I have no illusions. Career and reputation utterly destroyed. No, I have no illusion of how much I have destroyed myself. Too bad I lacked the dignity to end it quickly, before a reason came along to stop with the suicide attempts. After all, there would be none of this to read!

I still think my sins are enough, my penance so small, the punishment required by the law s fit. You can take the boy out of church, but not the Church out of the boy.

I believe that I could simply disappear into the federal prison system to die or be ejected in 20 years. My wife has left me and is looking to date - any reconciliation I fumbled/we fumbled. I knew I could never just walk away from familial and professional obligations. I needed something to blow away all those tendrils encircling me that were my life. My arrest accomplished all that, and was to pave the way to my making sure the next suicide attempt succeeded.

Instead of dying, I learned my wife still had some love for me. 

I learned I meant more to more people than I ever thought possible. 

I apologize to A and my friends.

Go my clients, I apologize also.

But let me try to puncture another illusion, or several: my imprisonment will deter no one, the illegal pictures will keep replicating across the internet, the dangers supposed are not as great as proposed by those drawing salaries to police the internet, and the reasons for this activity are not as clear-cut as thought to be such as a psychological predilection in the subject matter.

sch

[Now I have almost everything into chronological order. That was a bit more work. I do not know when I got smart enough to date everything with the day and month and year. I am glad that I did so. I have a pile of notes on yellow pages that are only dated 2010. It is 7:48 pm. Typing up the post on legalizing drugs left me with a headache and more than a bit annoyed with my 50-year-old self's verbosity. Certainly, I am tired of reading my handwriting. Death will probably come before I clear space on the table-top so I can get to work on my fiction. Since the next pad is white and has a June date, I am going to stuff these generically dated notes after this post. Which I will admit is a pretty long-winded way of giving myself an excuse to work on my stories or read for the rest of the evening. sch 10/22/22.]