Diary Style Velociraptor Story- 20151121

I just know life goes through seasons. I went to lunch today at Abraham's nursing home for this Thanksgiving thing. He's telling me how he prays the rosary everyday and goes through each person. He says he prays for me to find happiness and also for me to come back to the church, which frankly I find kind of charming in an old grandpa Simpson sort of way. I see the non-religious facility pray to Jesus before the meal and everyone bow their heads in the room on a command. I keep mine up to stare around like everyone just put moon pies over their eyelids and strapped on salad bowls for helmets. I try to make eye contact with anybody that is daring not to bow to the ceiling fan deity. My cousin was there with her son Cecil with a velociraptor toy and so I crouch down into an impersonation to make tiny arms and walk like one, while holding his toy. This makes him laugh. This is the highlight of my day.

I know somewhere in my guts I want a family. I try to deny it; tell myself I am invincibly able to gut out alone; that I want to be alone, that this introvert translation that the past doesn't matter, that I will be fine if all the family I ever know is my daughter for the rest of my life and I accept I don't know and it doesn't matter, but inside I know what my dreams were growing up and still in me was to be a dad and a husband and be a good human. I just have this fantasy in my head that there is a spot for me and my daughter in some family that we are supposed to be a part of and that is not too much to ask.

So I keep my eyes open and not hope, not go to faith or any crutch, just realistic day by day filled with meditation, art, yoga, music, writing, whatever New Orleans brings me, but somewhere in all of that is this staring match with this old idea of god. Like come on mother fucker blink, show me the point of all this shit, of the trials and the needle point stitching pricks and slashes of abandonment all down my spine until god asks me to bend over, curve down and worship, say the ultimate uncle like god deserves props or some shit in this game of real, not real, chicken, karma, purpose, reason, nothing, interconnection, the universe, my place in it, all of it.

I write. I wonder, I ponder, I laugh, I put myself out there, dive in again and again and hold no animosity or anger beyond a thimble and spit before swallowing any forms of addiction or reliance or ego centered pity or that I actually have a real reason to even be sad about a damn thing and chalk it up to impatience or being fidgety, unwilling to hold breath. So I breathe. I breathe in mediation and contemplation and try to say ah, that's my thing, to be alone to do this, to have some rat in the machine of thoughts to write shit no one is going to read, but the thought to put it out there has some sort of pin ball collide surprise consequence I don't ever have to see because time and again that is how I see the universe pan out. That is what the universe does, life is, that these little sequences of volition and apparent randomness are all of consequence and relevance not because of some plan, of voyeuristic sadist, but because when I move everything moves and it is the movement, the illusion of time progressing in the act of doing that is one big giant beautiful portrait and it doesn't much matter what I do or what happens to me or if I ever get a family again. All I have to focus on is the portrait, the big one where god is an illusion with time in the background to what is, it simply is and all I have to be is in the moment.

So many nights that is what brings me peace and a place and the shedding of crutches like worry or fear or want; but some nights I just want a family, a shoulder, a spirit vessel to put love in, food for that aching place that just wants to know someone else sees it; the portrait, and in the one they see, I'm in it. I am part of the portrait, maybe beautiful and not replaceable, like a seed to a forest worth growing so that when anyone else looks there they see it; all the work, all the hours, all the dreams, blooming. Because that is what we all are, mini-sections of a common universe blooming and creating and beaming and maybe it's enough to know you have that in you, but sometimes, just sometimes it feels really good to be seen for who you are and someone else to say, "I want nothing more than to live in your branches."