The Bumpy Night ...

If you only knew how much I NEED 1 someone. How much I've seen, even before I probably should have seen it in my life. I say need not confusing it with WANT, as I do want 1 someone, but if you knew how many years have gone by since I've had anyone 'special' in my life, you would understand that I indeed KNOW the human part of me does indeed NEED someone.

We are not meant to be alone for long periods of time. Alone time is for breaks, for regrouping, recreating ourselves, times of reflection. I have had way more than my share of THAT.

The years have gone by. No longer a child, no more a youth - somehow though, I have kept alive, inside, that child of joy (on most days). I have a strong sense of self & a great belief in my abilities, gifts, talents. I know what I can do and pretty much who I am at this time in my life. I know the difference between EGO, heart/soul/spirit, & my understanding of being human doesn't allow for being afraid to ask for help. We all will need help from someone outside of ourselves in our earthy journey. There is nothing to be ashamed of in asking, or in the realization of that need. This having been said, I HAVE asked, & asked, and asked again ... to deaf ears, as the majority of people I have encountered in my years do not feel as I do about it being cool to ask people for help when you do not have all of what is needed to get by, or to get to the other side of the bridge.

It gets LONELY - PROFOUNDLY LONELY. Most people will not be able to relate to this kind of deep loneliness which is born out of spending far too much time in a wrong situation, a place in life where you should not remain for too long a period of time. When you have fallen down the well and no one seems to want to trust you enough to help you up & along on your way, you know not only profound loneliness but great sorrow & sadness for fellow humans seemingly to wrapped up in thinking it is ALL ABOUT THEM and investing anything, time, money, belief, in YOU is not an intelligent, forward-thinking move. I am so glad I do not think that way and have known for a long time that life is about the sharing, the caring, the loving & the helping.

There is a 'smile' in my heart somewhere, where I am proud that I have been a man who has helped those struggling. When I discover the great progress in life made by someone I might have barely known but barely hesitated to help in the past, my heart smiles. I was the rung on the ladder that was shaky for them, the rung that got them to the next rung, & so forth - onward to that crucial climb toward their specific destiny. This, I believe, is a huge part of what life is REALLY about. Ha! Why should I, or anyone be ashamed to ask for help? It is part of the human experience. So many people have it wrong, but what is worse: they want us to feel like beggars & even use terms like 'handouts'. That term alone - I cannot believe the legs that awful term has had in the history of the world.

So here I sit in Nova Scotia, place of my birth; place I did not even like much as a child growing up. I'm the artistic/creative square peg in a family rooted in farming (no pun intended) who say I use 'big words' & have often said since my boyhood days that I 'think I know everything' because I have educated myself, & know a bit about varied subjects. That's just me. My actual belief is that a person can live to be over 100 yrs old, like my great grandmother did, but will never EVER know EVERYTHING. There is simply far too much to know, & the learning, at least for me is part of the fun in this journey.

It is twelve years after I returned to the Halifax area of Nova Scotia from Toronto for a break fro the bad times that the late 1990s brought to my life there, & for my maternal grandmother's funeral. Stuck down in the well, as I had not planned on staying here beyond a month or two. Had to pay my respects to one of the most wonderful human beings I had ever met, try and be there for my mother & attempt to regroup, myself. Returning to Toronto, where I left my heart, books & cds among some other things, was always The Plan. Only being turned away by people who had once been 'friends' in Toronto when asking for a place to stay temporarily, & being stabbed in the back by a particular (then) close relative/friend who seemed to misunderstand the term 'I got your back,' which he had said whilst secretly buying his first house on the Toronto outskirts. If you have seen the Bette Davis/Ann Baxter film classic All About Eve you will understand the number my cousin/ex-BFF did on me for 20+ yrs, studying me, emulating how I speak, my words, telling me he was my number 1 fan, as Baxter's character did to Davis' Margo Channing. I helped cousin to the city & gave him my key to it, introducing him to associates & hot spots, which he now claims as his own.

For the first several years here, cousin used to call me from Ontario every four to six months, asking me how I am, I'd sigh but engage in conversation with him, making him laugh with my comedic take on a bunch of different thing, including my long-term suffering, stuck in a place, only he knew as much as I, just how much I DETESTED. Finally, maybe seven or so years ago I decided to be firm & cut him out of my life. Obviously he did not think I was good enough to stay in a guest room at his house or even on the kitchen floor, or sofa. This was a friend? A protege? A 1st cousin?!! WTF? No - he made it clear by lack of action & avoiding the topic, that he was not part of the solution to my great problem. Sad, because he also knew how horrible my mother could be to me behind-closed-doors, yet he choose to watch me fall, to see if I could fly on my own. (This is a dangerous & judgmental thing to do to another human. Results could prove fatal in some cases. Help where you CAN. Always! You will need help from someone one day also.)

I have forgiven my cousin but I cannot, will not forget. Forgetting would allow me to let him back into my life to use me again. Now, as he & his 2 sisters, & the 'money gang' are off on a cruise this week, I suffer at the cruel hands (mouth, more accurately) of my mother who, well, honestly, has not ever been all that well in the head, not since I can remember. Not for lack of trying, I have not been afforded any friends who stay while here in Nova Scotia as an adult. The friends I finally did make, all moved out West eventually. I did not have much time being happy in friendship here with them. People seem more cold to me now. How can a personable man, who was a hit in the Toronto arts-funding community with hundreds of people, once called 'one of the most flexible, adaptable' people ever by an ex-boss NOT have friends, twelve years back in his hometown? Well, this is where the shake-up of my core-belief-system comes into play ...with this & 9/11.

I BELIEVE in many things but when it comes to the WHY of these two subjects especially, I don't know WHAT I believe anymore. What has happened or, in my case, what has NOT happened (making friends, having a social life) is out of step with all I had grown to believe ...until.

It is almost the ten year anniversary of the tragic 9/11. We all know what went down, so to speak. I do not have to expand much more on that aspect here. I will, however, share a bit of what I have earlier referred to as the profound loneliness that I experience most intensely when I return to my basement apartment in the city, where I have lived for maybe ten years. Most people just do not seem to GET IT, but try to imagine how it feels to live somewhere, unable to afford more than the three Canadian TV networks that come without cable, but with a fuzzy picture most of the time; a telephone service, with an old-fashioned answering machine, which rarely rings unless it's the hateful mother, or wrong number! Try to imagine having to spend time at the corner store in the nearby gas-station, talking to the cash attendants, as the closest thing to friends, just to stay sane. Then there's the constant moving in/out of the upstairs neighbors the paper-thin ceiling & walls that bring way too much noise, pounding from walking overhead, taking away from my wishes to write there! & imagine a TV remote that once worked off & on, belong to a TV that does not have an actual function button on the set itself to switch from TV to game/DVD & CD playing mode. Ha! Every universal remote bought has not seemed to work, after programming & so the savior, the escape that kept me going when at home with the four walls, watching mega DVDs has not been available to me for the past several months. This is how a verbally abusive, messed up mother's BAD COMPANY can turn out to be better than the silence & accompanying over-analytical thoughts that come with living as I do, where I do. You see, it is not really living at all. I have been merely EXISTING & have not, in fact, lived since I lived in Toronto, where there were at least many like-minded people, not labeling or judging me. Again & again I tell people online I do not have the money required to go back to Toronto & secure even shared accommodation digs 'til I land on my feet. I do not have the money it would take to finally move my creative self down to Los Angeles or thereabouts. (What WOULD it take? $4-5000 CAN? $6000?) So here I remain.

The 'angels' who seemed to appear in many incarnations in Toronto just when I needed them to cross a bumpy spot, they seem to have misplaced me when I moved back to Nova Scotia, where most of my blessings seem to be BLOCKED. (Perhaps it's my mother's great level of negativity.)

If you only knew how much it hurts to have gifts, skills, talents, to want to share them, to want to GO SOMEWHERE, be somewhere else, but you can't ... Immensely grateful for the gifts but sometimes they feel like a CURSE.