Quote:
Originally Posted by allencollins  Why would you think it was directed towards you? I actuall like your songs
I admit I wouldn't buy it but I though the few tunes I've heard from you that were quailty and were in a very small way actually original.
Every band I was ever in has gotten beaten down by the critics. Why do you think Im so insecure? keep up the good work blue man you have a decent voice too. |
Only 'cause yours was right below mine. So it was assumed guilt by proximity.
But, really, it would have been OK, anyhow. I mean, I really
like having a guy around whose personality is at least a little spikier than mine.
It's all completely good. You and me are fine. 
You keep the rest of us on our toes. Every tribe needs a Jerehmiah -- but that can be tough,
exhausting work... I just hope
you're enjoying life.
A little story for all you youngsters like Allen... (Heck, we've all got time for a little story from the old guy, eh? ;^)
I've always been a kind of spiky guy, for sure. I was quick to find fault and blame growing up. I looked down on my fellow teenagers (at least until I realized I was going to have to socialize with them to get a girl). I came alive in college but then I found myself four years later in a dead end job, my 3 year ex-GF in Europe with one of my college drinkin' buddies who was one of her teachers.
It was the dreary years toward what would prove to be the end of the Vietnam war. I became involved in a hopeless love affair. (We needn't go into the details. Suffice it to say there were secrets and betrayal and the living of lies.)
After that impossible to fulfill desire turned inevitably to emotional defeat and emptiness, I grew ever more dark and cynical... I was always saying that I
hated this or that. And it was sincere, I
felt it. I was defining an ever-larger slice of the world -- the world I live in / the world I carry around inside my head -- as
ugly, evil, vapid, greedy, stupid, just plain bad.
I felt like that ugliness was growing every day and the little bit of light and right in which I stood was shrinking.
And it was destroying me.
I hit a kind of rock bottom. I got physically ill, first a cold, then bronchitis, then pneumonia, ran high fevers, wouldn't let my friends tell my folks, who I was alienated from at the time. I remember being in a delirium and hearing my friends whisper about calling an ambulance. I pulled myself deeper into my sweaty blankets and just hoped everyone would go away. Somehow I sweated it out and started getting better.
I spent a while recuperating and did a lot of reading. I read everything from mysticism to self-help books... and one of the things that really started taking shape for me was that by reacting to the world as I had, by pulling away in revulsion and anger, I was relinquishing dominion over a big part of my world to darkness and fear. It was the world
as it existed in my head that was poisoning me -- not the real world which was/is what it is.
I started looking at those around me who had driven me repeatedly to anger and realized that, at any given moment, their actions were simply growing out of their experience. That, perverse as they might at times seem on the surface, they were acting out the product of their experience
and their reaction to it.
But
then I realized that my angry response to whatever the supposed provocation was, was what was poisoning me. It wasn't the event/action/provocation -- there was nothing I could do about
that once whatever it was had trasnpired -- but the one thing I
could have
some kind of influence on was
my reaction.
As an exercise, I looked at the world as though I was the only one that had free will. Even as I wrestled with the notion that free will seems so
incredibly improbable...
But imagining that others were simply acting out what for them was a natural reaction to the sum of their experience up to that moment was immensely freeing... all of a sudden, the world was still a
dangerous place, perhaps, but it was no longer one of ever-increasing malevolence for me, either. It was just
as it is...
But...
I still found myself frustrated and angry... with
myself. I found myself reacting with anger and allowing myself to
contract in negative abreaction instead of
expanding in an attempt to embrace and understand. I was frustrated and angry with
myself -- almost out of habit.
And I finally realized, wait, I have to extend to
myself the same sort of cosmic,
value-neutral 'forgiveness' that I've been extending to others... I have to forgive myself for my anger even as I'm forgiving whatever jagoff I'm angry at.
I'm kidding. But I'm
not kidding.
It's oft-repeated and one doesn't get it until one
gets it... but, ultimately, the way we change the world around us is by changing the way we react to it. Call it an acceptance of the microcosm within the macrocosm, call it mysticism, call it the Tao, call it Christian love, or any of another thousand names, but there's this
way...
I dunno... it probably just sounds like hippie happy talk.
