My Brain Today

She keeps my notes.  They aren’t special, only quickly scribbled thoughts on torn pieces of paper.  She hangs onto them as if looking for a place to put them.  I wonder if her internal placement of these notes is similarly carried out.  Is the note in the dish a symbol for the fact that I wrote such a note in the first place?  Is the message important to her? Is it confusing?  Is it just more noise in her already cacophonous mental territory?

I’ve often thought that the state of my car and house is a metaphor for the organizational structure of my mind.  Perhaps it’s a puzzle to be solved, a puzzle of my own making.  My world has been crafted by my hands, under the direction of my brain and to the consternation of my conscious self.  What else resides in my mind?

I’ve been running for so long, because I feared the answer to that question.  To see the truth of who I might be or what I might have done, to be surprised by the upsetting of my cherished apple cart of reality, seemed too unsettling.  My mind chose to know less rather than to face the frightening possibility of something lurking in the darkness.  I don’t so much fear that I’ll be alone.  I fear that my own thoughts might be too much for me to bear.  Running from conversation to conversation, distraction to distraction, has kept me from facing my unknown fears.

Life and love lost finally forced me to look.  Something deep within me would not let me ignore it any longer.  I call it my self-saboteur. The Wrecker.  Mainly through public social “failure,” I have forced myself to consider myself. Maybe at just the right time, when I was finally strong enough, I was able to let myself act the pain out.  All of my life tells the story.  Even though I’ve resisted self-discovery, hoping to get by with an acceptable self-presentation, the unfolding has continued.   And now, after years of struggle, I’m actually starting to embrace the process.

I don‘t know how to solve my romantic issues or clean my car, so I‘m using this blog as a stepping-stone to cleaning, organizing, or at least doing a fearless moral inventory of my mental mess.  Thank you for reading.

Up until now, I’ve been posting in a way that feels random to me.  I’ve just been getting out what I feel.  Convinced that everything is allegorical, that the metaphors of my everyday life are a window of sorts through which I can understand past events too tragically dramatic to be processed and held in clear memory form.

Here’s another example:  At 42, I’m starting to lose my close-range vision.  A lifetime at 20/10 had me thinking I was seeing clearly. My ego has always been tied to having an eagle eye.  Now, holding my phone at just the right distance from my face is becoming unnerving.  Today though, I stepped outside, coffee and cigarette in hand, and gazed upon the skies.  It’s a cloudy day, like the beginning of so many stormy days on the sea with my dad.  And, well, I noticed something about the clouds.  I noticed everything about the clouds.  Their detail is exquisite!  Really, I’m only noticing what I’m noticing.  What’s right in front of me has always been wrapped in fantasy and dissociative denial.  Now that I’m writing, I am seeing my own way of looking.  What’s in front of me, my car, my career, my love life, and the conversation in front of me are all blurry.  The possible contents of other people’s heads are fuzzy, hazy, and undecipherable to me.  But, from a distance, I’m seeing the whole picture much more clearly.

This blog is raw.  I don’t edit much.  I just throw out my thoughts, and what ends up posted is constantly changing.  If you’re enjoying the process, thank you for coming along.  I’m sorting.  The themes and direction may seem to shift in the coming months, but what you’ll get is going to be me, more and more clearly.  That’s what I’m hoping to get from all of this.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Fear of Fighting Back

All children go through the process of individuating from their parents, more or less, and becoming their own persons in adulthood.  I am no different in that regard.  Admittedly, I got a little stuck along the way; there were some speed bumps and derailments along the path of my psychological development.  I think it’s that way for all of us.

We become physically separate before we are physically independent.  Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy.  I used to set traps for my dad.  I used to plot and threaten.  I don’t know what he thought.  I thought I was going to kill him.  After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.

At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me.  I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.

At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.

By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.

After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious.  Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison.  That’s right; he was being merciful.  Killing me was the only path that made sense.  If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her.  Well, that’s how he would present the situation.  See? Things got serious.

I began to study the beatings.  I was waking up, at least to my physical reality.  Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response.  I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it.  After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk.  I was starting to take pride in my strength.  Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty.  I wasn’t the one running the show.

Still, it was miserable to live that way.  I wanted a change so desperately!  I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission.  He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself.  So, I knew that was an option.  I just couldn’t do it.  Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back.  I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of  the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.

Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me.  It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience.  Back then, I just went through the motions of  school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.

Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill.  This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car.  He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination.  When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride.  Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them.  Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task.  Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.

I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly.  That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously.  Fear and shame angered him.  He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous.  How far would he go?  Would he kill me like he killed Sandy?  He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last.  I started thinking more about hitting him back.  That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it. Previous fatherly encouragements are hard to hang onto when your father is in the middle of stripping away your dignity.

In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times, often prompted by some simple mistake I had made at the grocery store.  He would begin to threaten me.  Once he saw my fear mounting, he would become more aggressive and more violent.  After a certain point, fighting back no longer felt like an option.  I would stand there helplessly, hopelessly, waiting for him to get tired.  Then, carrying pride for being so strong with shame for being so cowardly, I would sleep soundly and wake to try and please him again the next day.  But the beatings were getting worse.  His words of hatred and disdain were getting darker....

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

We're Strangers

A couple of years after my father's death, I was flying back to Humboldt next to a gentleman who inquired about my business. He was a little older than me, a kindly, smaller man with a narrow face and a straggly goatee. I told him everything I knew. I was going back home to spend some time trying to find myself.  "Don't take too long,"  he said. Then his face retreated to a shruggish smile and our conversation was over. He read his book. I thought of something else.

I live in a strange world.  School children of the 70's heard about the Great American Melting Pot.  We were fed dreams about cooperation, potential, and a better tomorrow. At least, I was.  Teachers told me I might become the President.  Everyone praised me for being smart, tall, athletic, artistically talented.  I just wanted to be loved, to not feel so alone.  The story adults told me about the world I lived in didn't exactly fit with what I wanted, but I was good at adjusting myself to imagine happiness in it.  Of course, times alone with my dad were a complete nightmare, but I had accepted that as a temporary component of my life, a soon-to-be-overcome hindrance to my full connection with the rest of humanity, a humanity that had something figured out, something I had never quite fleshed out in my own mind.

I live in a strange world. Teenagers in the 80's sang along to "We Are The World".  We were scared by threats of nuclear war in a climate of adults who acted like the crises would be resolved soon, leaving room for something.  Peace?  No one fed me big dreams anymore.  I was hoping to land somewhere in between my grandmother insisting I could be a doctor and my dad's "you could be a good cocksucker in prison" mantras.  As my dad got more and more violent with me, I felt more and more alienated from the possibility of ever figuring out how to be like the other kids.  By my senior year, I was happy with keeping a calm look on my face, hoping for no more than an invisibility of sorts.  Can no one see how devastatingly out-of-place and disconnected I feel?  Good.  If no one saw it, maybe I didn't need to feel it.

False confidence is a machine of inertia.  Through strength of will or fear of complete rejection and destruction, I learned to keep acting as if everything was ok.  A day at school might be followed by a night waiting in the car for my dad to be kicked out of this bar so I could drive him to the next one.  Getting up and doing it all over again with a straight face took a lot of self-control, especially when I didn't know what insanity might be unfolding at home while I struggled to focus on my physics test.  The difference between refracted and reflected light got all mixed up in recalling last night's speed purchase and the general mood of my father while his female companion for the evening asked if he would buy heroin for her.  What was this one's name?  He didn't like buying heroin for women.  That look in his eye was often a precursor to murderous violence.  Coming back to the classroom, I would look around to see if anyone had noticed me, the one in the class who didn't fit.  Then I would turn back to my test paper quickly, gripped with fear that my thoughts had been on display.  What question was I working on?  Wishing I had had time to study, I felt my self-confidence falling.  Smart was all I felt like I had.  This would surely be another mediocre performance, another failure.  I always got the third highest score on these exams, always third.  What if I had the chance to really try.  At least I still had my potential.

I live in a strange world.  It's strange to me.  When dad killed Sandy in front of me, I felt like the stranger.  I hadn't let go yet of my idea that I would someday assimilate and belong, not until that moment.  Before that day, before those magnificent, gasoline and tire-fueled flames engulfing her body, mocking the light drizzle through the trees, I had had a chance to make it.  Before that grey day, before that very second, I could have fooled everyone, passed for normal, acceptable.  I watched him staring into the fire.  A single drop of rain struck my brow and dropped from the tip of my nose.  The cold mist in the air was my messenger from God.  This was the end of my hopes. I was too dirty to ever be clean again.

I gave up on my life when I was 16, and I've been beating myself into faking it ever since.  Every morning the sun has risen and forced me to keep up the charade.  At times, like everyone else, I've felt happy and hopeful, forgetting my childhood trauma for years at a time.  It's always been there, along with the nagging reality that I just don't belong here, driving me to recreate and also retreat from the patterns of my youth, sabotaging my happiness and wreaking havoc on the people around me.  At 42, I can honestly say, this is as much as I've been able to figure out.  My life is still a train wreck.  The cars stopped moving years ago, but the parts of me that still see it happening are still impacting the parts of me that tried to forget and pass for normal in this world that still seems so strange to me.

In finding myself, how long is too long?  If I don't take my whole life to do it, won't I just be accepting a false construct?  Could I be satisfied to live out the rest of my life based upon a version of me that I made up for the sake of peace?  Should I shorten the search for self to lessen the difficulty of life;  move forward in false happiness with my fingers in my ears, blind to the nightmare swirling at my deepest core?  No thanks, man on a plane who has no fucking idea what it's like to be me.  I get that people just want me to be happy, but I'm not.  Would you be?  Are you? Would it be the end of the world if we all admitted how we really feel about this life, this strange world?  Maybe it would only be the end of feeling like strangers.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Bible Reading and Writing

Writing about Sandy's murder is hard work.  The Investigation Discovery channel has done a couple of shows on the subject featuring well-diced interview clips with me.  I am working on my own version. It's a big story to tell, for me, because remembering watching my dad kill his girlfriend opens more than just a can of worms in my mind.  I've spent most of my life stuffing that shit down and keeping the cork in tight!

Those who know me personally, while professing to like me a lot, have certainly witnessed the pressure of whatever's in my head leaking out in angry outbursts, financial failure, and self-destructive sexual scandal.  At this point, I want so badly to be the captain of my own mind, that I am going in, win or lose, to whatever horribly frightening shame and pain resides there.  I simply must. Jesus!  Why would I want to do that?  I'm not really jumping in.  I'm creeping forward, testing the waters, and, up until now, I've taken entirely too long.

If you read the rest of my blog entries, you may find them somewhat incomplete, filled with snippets of truth, shreds of emotion, and vague explanations.  I'm circling the burning bush of my soul, with no lessor goal than to integrate my history, my God, and my own true life-purpose in a way that might just alienate me from family and friends.  When, in the Bible, a man or woman follows God's direction, it's usually with an automatic judgment and death sentence from the church leaders of their time.  If I'm on the right track, I expect nothing different.  I hope for it.

Am I just looking for a fight? Sure, but my dad is dead.  I wish no one physical pain.  I cannot bring myself to fight in anger against any one.  So, I intend to fight ideas.  I intend to fight American Christianity and family values for their role in the alienation of my father and therefore, the death of my mother and LaSandra Turpin.  Perhaps my anger is misplaced, but why not?  The church needs to be judged before they successfully inoculate the whole world against ever taking seriously the book I bled for.

Yes, Christians, your book is a laughing stock among the uninitiated.  Surely you know this.  I know it's a wonderful book, full of useful guidance for turning this world around.  Properly applied, the principles in the New Testament could have saved me from my childhood nightmare.  Of course it's too late for me, but the world still groans in suffering.  And, just hold your horses.  We don't suffer because we don't have Jesus in our hearts.  The world suffers for lack of the thing offered by Jesus that the church misses as well.  Here's a good litmus test.  Church, if non-believers aren't commenting on how you're following Jesus, there's no reason for you to announce it.  Stay home on Sunday.  Beat yourself over the head until your blood stains the pages of your Bible.  That's how I read it growing up, and, after a lifetime in church, I know that hardly anyone else read the damned thing at all.  Church, if you're not going to take the word seriously, just shut up.  Even Greek mythology is useful because no one is crazily insisting on faith in Zeus!  We non worshippers are free to learn the lessons of a system.  Bending of the knee in a fancy building is no path to righteousness.  Surely, we all know that.  Surely, I don't have to explain.

So, what have I learned in this life about God, the Bible, and humanity?  Honestly, I haven't learned much.  I've mostly been caught up in unlearning.  Don't we just take in what our parents teach us at first? Then they tell us there's no Santa Claus after all, or we come to realize that they're dangerous.  Later in life, if we're lucky enough to be broken enough to seek help, we may come to see our parents as separate individuals and ourselves as changeable.  Do some parents impart this to their children peacefully?  hmm...  Interesting...

 Society discusses the rebellion issues of youth as if it's a foregone conclusion that adult systems are perfect. Surely, children who do not joyfully conform must be flawed in some way! Terrible Twos, Teenage Rebellion.  Are two year olds completely responsible for not responding well to our systems?  Are teenagers just too sinful to get things right without physical "discipline" of some sort? Do kids need to be scared by ideas like coal in their stocking or a Hell if they don't do what Mommy and Daddy say?  I don't mean to be rude and beat up on religion, but when it's used to tell children they have something wrong with them, then it's just a fancy version of all the ways in which we communicate to children that they have something wrong with them.  Maybe children ARE messed up.  But are the adult world conventions we've bought into necessarily less messed-up?

No, it's natural to rebel against that which is unnatural.  It's also natural to adapt, conform, and tell ourselves we're happy to be advancing the righteous system that was handed to us.  Can it be natural to question all that we've accepted?

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Lend Me Your Light

I had a pretty sweet childhood.  Mom was a beautiful artist, intelligent and kind. Dad was all-powerful and safe.  I lived on a peaceful goat farm, spending my days playing alone in the fields or listening to my favorite music in my room.  I had nightmares.  Why did I have nightmares?  Was something wrong with me?

Everyone in the family knew it was remarkable that I predicted my mother's death one day in advance.  At age five, I concluded that Jesus had magically revealed the future to me.  In retrospect, I suppose their awestruck comments about my mental prowess were covering up that everyone knew he HAD actually killed her.  I bet it impressed or shocked them that such a young man might have been more clued in than they realized.

Throughout my adolescence and teen years, Dad did his best to support my fairy-tale version of Mom's death while continually acting out the truth of the matter on my ever-stronger body and mind.  He would drink and cry, sharing his shame over not being a good enough husband to her.  I heard it so many times, but I relished in the retelling.  These were the times when he was peaceful and proud of me.  Perhaps deep in my mind, the part of me that knew the truth enjoyed these lies so much because it was just a matter of days before the scene would shift.  Not consciously, but I was aware that I would soon be cowering under his blows, hearing in loud, angry, definite tones, how glad he was that my mother had not lived to see what a worthless cocksucker I had become.  It was coming.  It was always coming.  I would endure his abuse in the moment, but when it wasn't happening, I didn't give it a thought.  I lived in a delusion.

Thirty years after he killed her, almost to the day, my Dad also died.  I wrote a respectful, dutiful obituary.  I delivered his eulogy, fairly, kindly, blindly.  I was happy he was gone, until he came back.  In the months that followed his death, my mind began a multi-year unfolding that put my teenage anguish to shame.  Friends remind me that I survived the hard times, that everything is fine now.  That's so sweet.  They're just wrong.  I have mostly suffered alone the last seven years with feelings long buried.  I've coped by largely distracting myself.  Even fleeting memory glimpses have kept me on the edge of suicide for more of this time than I would have thought I could survive.

Finally, I'm starting to face that I HAVE TO face what happened.  All of it's in there, in my head, driving me, hurting those around me, keeping me in the prison constructed for me.  Hey, happy people of today, I get it.  You might think I deserve to smile and enjoy life.  Maybe you think I should put it all behind me and life the kind of life I want.  Well, how about if we compromise?  I'll live the happy life you think I deserve.  Just please accept that the life I want to live is the brutal, demon-slaying bloodbath of exploring my emotions and memories.  I must not run.

When Dad killed Sandy, I was numb inside.  The year before, when he almost killed Patty, I was barely awake enough to see her as a person.  Rewinding through my childhood, for most of my life, always lead to an idyllic story of my Mom's accidental drowning.  After seven years of feeling and opening my mind, as much as I felt I could, I am coming to what feels like my most helpless failure, the failure not only to act but even to see what he did to my Mom.  There in that trailer, alone in the country, the three of us wrote my tragic script.  Visually, I only remember the time he cut her nose off.  The rest I've pieced together from his stories, my knowledge of his lying style, and my own adult-life failures, the tapestry upon which the intuitive five-year-old in me acts out what he knows.

Now, I'm not like my dad.  I paint pain, anger and bloodshed in self-destruction and passive-aggressive emotional manipulation.  I wear the chaos in my painted, torn clothing.  I carry the baggage in mangled possessions, stacked high in my car and the room I occupy in my ex-wife's basement.  I parade my internal feelings of failure.  I always remembered hiding in my closet.  Now I'm starting to hear her screams from the adjacent room.

I want to write my life story.  I have to write it.  Soon, I'm going to be unveiling an investment plan for self-publishing, an opportunity for you, my readers to invest in this project.  It's too much for me to struggle to survive, fixing people's houses, running out of money before payday each week, while bearing the enormous burden of entering the evil dungeon of my mind.  I don't know if I can make it this way.  Stay tuned for a chance to make a difference in my life and perhaps the world we live in.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

I'm God, and I'm Crazy

Warning: If you are prone to strong negative emotions and judgments when hearing unorthodox and potentially "heretical" declarations, turn back NOW!

I'm God.  No, seriously, I think I Am. Yeah... well, hang on a bit, and I'll try to explain. I want to address everything, all at once, my life, the human experience, the meaning of existence, and the dizzying circus of my own mental perception and interaction with the whole.  How can I boil down my experience growing up with my dad and it's deeply interwoven religious training component. I'm not exactly sure how to summarize my ideas here in a single blog entry, but I think, if I had to boil down my overall direction into a one word, one question, one answer, it would be "God."  Three words? "I am God."  Let's see if I can get there, with a surprise ending for you, my lucky reader. Save your thanks til the end. :)

Today I caused pain for someone close to me.  I probably do it every day, for someone. I could argue my case, but that's how I hurt my friend. I see that I'm always defending myself, even though I'm tragically at odds with myself or rather, my selves.

After I went forward with the circumstances of Sandy's death and whereabouts http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/09/california.body.found/index.html  some suggested I was an accomplice to murder. Aren't we all accomplices to the entire human experience? My dad grew up in this country, in this culture, in a Christian home, in a Christian nation, in a society that worships money, individualists, and violence.  By purchasing and participating in this society, all of us are accomplices. If we did not work to stop it, we allowed it through inaction.  Of all the people in America in 1987, I was the only one that saw what my father did. I didn't stop him, ultimately, but I was trying. All of human history is complicit in the making of Ernie Christie Jr, Sandy Turpin's murder, and my traumatic childhood.  I should ask the "accomplice" crowd if it's sinking in on any level that they are accomplices through their own passivity, not only to Sandy's plight but to the suffering of a whole world, using accusation as a way to salve the shame of their own helpless inaction.  Can I let you in on a little secret? I don't think turning the tables on my dad would have been an easy manner. There were great risks.  I didn't want to get killed.  What's your excuse? We as individuals don't know how to find out who's being abused, and we don't know how to help.  True.  But do any of us spend any time trying to figure out what could be done?  How many of us are even trying? How many of us have the time? Aren't we all too busy working our jobs to pay our loans and keep our houses? Are the rich to blame? I think I'm to blame for allowing there to be rich and poor in my world. I'm certainly not doing all I can to even the playing field. I didn't stop my dad from overpowering Sandy, but I don't do anything to stop CEOs of large corporations from living high off of the sweat and misery of their armies of minimum wage slaves either.  I didn't do anything to stop my country's government from murdering millions of civilians in Iraq.

Why is it offensive for me to suggest I'm a god? Because none of us want to carry the shame of selfishly denying benefit to others when it is in our power. We want to feel justified.  How dare I acknowledge my power and lift the curtain of plausible powerlessness to which we all cling! I'm sorry.  I know it might trigger shame to think about what we're not doing.  I personally would not be able to read a blog like this, but I think people are generally better than me and less likely to take things personally than me.  Well, no, that's a lie.  I know my writing will offend.  Who cares?

I'm offended by anyone who judges me over Sandy.  Do you know why? It's because such judgment automatically puts me in a cross. I think we should choose one of two paths of thought about the crimes I witnessed.  Either I should have done everything I could to save her or I should be excused from any responsibility.  If you think I should have saved her, then I think it would only be fair for you to devote your life and finances to saving someone or something.  If you want to get away with living your life in complete denial, then please allow that I was perfectly within my rights to watch and not intervene in Sandy's death.

Of course, I'm only offended because of some expectation of fair treatment.   Clearly, my dad taught me that life is inherently unfair; he said as much on many occasions. Jesus even teaches that Heaven requires accepting less than our "fair" share for the sake of love.  Philosophically, I agree.  How about this?  I totally failed to stop my dad from killing Sandy, but I don't want to blame anyone for being oblivious to the suffering they do not see. How about we all just try to evaluate ourselves and our own contributions with the greater good of others in our minds? How about we learn from our mistakes? I'm writing a blog.  Yes, the rest of my life might be ordinary, but I try to love people as much as I can without allowing them to run over me and beat me into the ground.  Can I let you in on another secret? Do you know how people can be kind of selfish, ruthless, and uncaring? I've known a lot of cruel people. On the whole, my dad was just like everyone else.

My dad used to say "If you don't get to Heaven in this life, nothing will change when you die."  What in the world did he mean? I've spent a lot of years pondering his ideas about salvation.  I don't believe the way I used to believe, but there is a sense in which I was saved.  Through faith in something greater than the world of me and Ernie Christie Jr, I managed to hold on to hope for something greater for me.  I learned to suffer and wait.  I learned that I was capable of choosing my path, even when I didn't feel like I had a choice at all. I've been saved by Jesus in that I didn't just follow my dad's path completely.

Now, he believed in Jesus as an actual being with a personality and a plan for our lives.  I believed the same until after my dad died. Then, I began to think about all the things God "saw" when I was growing up.  Sure, I never stopped my dad, but neither did God.  Whatever impact I had on my dad was god-like in its proportions.  I never saw God adjust the situation at all.  At least I started telling dad he was wrong.  At least I convinced him to stop hitting women.  The only gods in those private moments in my childhood home were my dad, me, and the ideas of "God" in our heads.

For me, the only useful application of religion is done here, on Earth, while we live.  I turned the other cheek thousands of times.  In one sense, that got me hit a lot more.  In another sense, perhaps I had a positive impact on the whole course of things.  Either way, following Jesus kept me stuck there loving him, and following Jesus gave me the strength to survive it.  But in the end, I'm the one who was there, made choices, and now carries the weight of it all.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Dirty Old Man

I once had a lover, and she used to call me her Dirty Old Man. I won't go into much extra description of the circumstances surrounding such a nickname. It paints it's own picture. Anyway, that's what she called me. It was sexy and romantic. It was her special name for me.  I guess I imagined that, for the rest of my life I would look back and remember "Dirty Old Man" as simply the super hot and creatively personal nickname she charmingly bestowed upon me with a wink.

Today, while getting a haircut, my mental paradigms about myself and my place in the world were drastically shifted by the young girl with brown hair getting her hair cut in the chair next to mine. When I first noticed her reflection in the mirror through a darting glance, I was vaguely aware that she was looking at me.  I made conversation with my stylist for a few minutes and then looked again, this time purposefully.  She was looking at me again. We stared.  I felt uncomfortable, smiled.  She smiled in return.  Afterward, I realized she was quite young, perhaps under fourteen years old.  I avoided making eye contact again.  Now, I'm not the kind of grown man that is going to try and capitalize on sexual opportunities with underage girls, but we had had what I like to call a moment.  I couldn't help but notice, throughout the rest of my haircut, that she was looking my way from time to time. Who could blame me for avoiding such an interaction? I felt shame for having even entered into that short, shared smile. Yes, aren't you relieved?  And yet, I felt bad for not returning to our friendly exchange, bad that I might make her feel unappreciated, undesirable.

Do you ever feel like we have signs on our foreheads like "Hey, you can take advantage of me." or "Hey, I won't fight back!" or "Over here! I'm easily fooled?"  I sure feel that way.  No one knew what I was going through growing up, but the bullies at school didn't need to read my book to know they could get away with harassing me. It seems unfair, but I think I wore my victim role on my face, inviting new people to try and exploit me.  I can make sense of getting hit at home and getting hit by bullies, but, and this is the point, it hasn't been so clear to me what sign is on my forehead with women.

Just for now, let's try on "Dirty Old Man."  What if that's the sign my young lover saw?  What if the much younger girl getting her haircut was reading the same sign?  It's hard for me to know what she read. Generally, I attract women with dysfunctional relationship habits, lots of self-hatred, and lots of anger toward some man in their lives who greatly disappointed them.  Dirty Old Man sounds sexy and desirable, but leaves plenty of room for hatred and judgment later on.  There might be something to all of this, but assuming women are reading a sign on my head is convoluted and keeps me from looking at my own part in interacting with other humans and myself.  Plus, whatever any girl reads on my head is most likely more about her than me.  There's something to the types of people we draw, but I can't sort it out at that level anymore.

How does Dirty Old Man apply to me?  Getting easy stuff out of the way first, I am a man.  To an ever increasing number of people, I am old.  Dirty?  Well, with a wink, I'll tell you I'm not so bad.  In my defense, I live among human beings, a species that conspicuously hides its sexuality with clothing, lies, and shaming judgments.  At least we don't stone adulterers in the streets anymore.  No, we just destroy them socially, if we can.  Some people shudder at the growth of shamelessness about sexual behavior, but, what good has all this shame done for us?  So, I'm sexual.  I enjoy it.  Sex in this society is already hidden and forbidden so much, and my family was full of rules, secrets, and lies about it.  So, yeah, a little bit of dirt is a little bit exciting to me.  I'll admit that.

What draws me to women is something different, something about their vulnerability, something connected to my mom and my shame for allowing my dad to beat her for years and ultimately kill her.  I guess my heart is drawn to abused women like the fists of those bullies were drawn to my face.  I don't mean to be abusive. I don't think I really am, but, in these recreations, it always seems to get told that way.  From my side, I feel compassion and reach out, the woman shares her vulnerabilities, and then I'm an asshole for not having loved the right way or for having needs of my own.  That's fair.  I usually enter romance as a man without needs.  I'll give for a long time and then start wanting something back.

My dad was this way, except his interactions often included violence.  He would present himself as cool and without needs, until he started feeling attached.  Then he would begin building a case against the woman, ultimately unleashing his anger.  He wasn't a serial killer or stalker.  He didn't kidnap anyone, well, unless they had been lovers previously.  He had a nasty habit of believing that he owned anyone he had ever slept with.  I guess I'm included there.

What was the sign on his head?  Had he been sexually molested as a child and felt like the other person took all power from him?  Just questions prompted by the last paragraph....  Your thoughts?

As I learn to let go and grow, I'm finding that my perceptions are not so permanent. At the wise age of 42, I'm seeing myself in everyday life like never before. I'm feeling my feelings more powerfully and fully, and, yes, making those I love most quite miserable as well. I'm probably pissing off lots of people, and I just haven't noticed. Maybe it's been this way all my life. I've been doing lots of writing and soul-searching, and it sounds good to attribute the changes to my heroic efforts to be a better person and bestow my gifts upon mankind. Oh, how I love to represent myself that way. Really, that's only part of my story. I say I'm wise and 42 with tongue in cheek, a high-five to a very special young woman who has spent the last couple of years experiencing my foolishness first-hand, perhaps for her own selfish reasons, perhaps to give me the gift of insight.  Maybe it's both.  Maybe neither of us knew what we were doing.  I'm trying to learn about how the world sees me and how I choose to interact.

We all have patterns of loving and patterns of pain that seem to go hand in hand.  May we all learn about ourselves and make the healthiest choices we can.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Why Men Enjoy Porn

I tell my stories in a rather round-a-bout way. I'm just discovering this. Do you do that too? :) Me too. Well, I said it already, I guess. I don't really know if I should apologize for the quality of my example. Anyway, welcome to what I am pretty sure will be a story, told all backwards, kind of like me and the mind I am learning to love, mine.

So, I'm apparently really smart. Yeah, thanks, I'm tall too. Oh, and I'm white and attractive. I've had a lot going for me in life. Smart people like me are supposed to go to college. I withdrew from classes in my first semester. See, this seems all backwards, but how do I just come out and say my dad beat me up in the kitchen over my alleged intention in interacting with the woman he currently had at the house and then made me drop out of school?  Don't worry; it's all very anticlimactic.

Without any further subjection of this already abusively stretched blog to the chaos of detail, I give you this:

Dear Reader,

Forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been 40 days since my last blog entry.  I'll admit it; life has not gone the way I expected since I last wrote here.  I had ideas of self-reliance mixed with good love and renewed purpose.  I got all those things, but not by stoically quoting scripture and bravely denying my appetites.  Jesus, it is written, spent 40 days in the desert, being tempted by Satan. I spent 40 days thinking about the ways in which I enter these roles as well as that of God, their silent partner.

Satan challenged Jesus to make the stones into bread.  I have been working hard to earn more money after years of being stuck in poverty, living paycheck to pawn shop visit and back again. I haven't been offered a deal to betray my values. I do that for free.  Satan offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world if He would bow down and worship him.  I've considered life's questions and the reasoning of my mind, in some cases choosing to set aside old virtues and parental directives.  If the fruit looks good, sometimes I eat it. Satan dared Jesus to jump off the temple, presumably to impress the people with his immortality.  I don't put much stock in angels catching me, but I did fall off a ladder yesterday, more accurately, I fell into it, toppling and hitting the ground along with it. Strangely, I don't have a mark on me.

Please, lovers of Jesus, don't take offense.  I mean no disrespect. Quite seriously, I have been meditating on God, Jesus, and the Devil and how the drama of my mind can be understood through their stories, contained in the Bible.  I used to think the Devil was evil, God was good, and Jesus was safe, all of them actual beings with those distinct personalities represented by Christianity. I've got a metaphorical angle going on God.  Let's see if I can show you what I mean.

Remember me dropping out of college? There was this woman named Sam, just like me. She had arrived in Eureka sometime in the previous year, finding refuge in a warehouse controlled by a small group of semi-homeless men. My dad knew them. I remember hearing them talk about her.  She was the "whore" they all wanted to fuck. They spoke disdainfully of her. "She can't be trusted." Then they would drag me into the conversation laughingly adding, "Don't leave her alone with Sammy!"  I thought she was attractive, but, at 17, I didn't join in with such revelry. The fishermen and downtown drunks would join my dad in mocking me for my facial reactions to their comments, but I was determined to continue seeing Sam as a down-on-her-luck human being, not a sex opportunity to be exploited.  How could they joke about using her for sex without any consideration of how to help her regain her dignity? Oh, that's right; her shameful position was part of the attraction.

I never saw her hang her head. She was proud and defiant when she stood up for herself. Maybe she was a little crass at times, but she was kind and polite to me.  I liked her.  They viewed her like a devil, untrustworthy, unfairly beautiful, and unworthy of their Christian charity or virtue.

Dad brought her out to the house a number of times.  They would do drugs and have sex. By the way, now that I'm older, I would just like to say that doing drugs and having sex can be really fun!  Growing up, I had no idea. Maybe that saved me some trouble as a youth, but I found it anyway as an adult.  Why is our society so uptight about making sure kids stay on some straight and narrow path to recreating the currently broken social system? But that's another subject.

My dad, the God of the Bible, and most evil characters in fairy tales have this in common: They are all guided, to some degree, by their own selfish goals and personal emotional states of the moment.  You could argue that God is good, but I will say that God's "good" is whatever he says it is.  He is not guided by some greater idea of what is good or evil. If so, then that rule would be above God, begging the question "from whence did it come?"  In that self-directed way, he's just like my dad.  Stick with me here....

I had just gotten home from my morning classes at the University.  I knew Sam had spent the night with my dad, but I was hoping to slip into the house, make lunch, and leave for my afternoon drawing class, unnoticed.  As I finished making my mac & cheese and sat down at the bar in our kitchen, the two of them entered the dining room arguing.  Dad's hair was wet with sweat and matted, his eyes refusing to make contact. He was on speed.  I prepared to eat quickly and make my exit.

I heard her ask for a drink. She turned and headed toward me, just half a step, and I was already planning.  Dad had expressed concern that I might be attracted to her in the past. In his paranoid, unpredictable state at that moment, I was trying to avoid any hint of inappropriate interaction between Sam and I.  She was coming for a glass. I was sitting directly under that cabinet.  To keep her from reaching over me, arousing his anger, I reached up and got one for her. She moved to other side of the kitchen and prepared to pour some juice.

Dad interrupted her, yelling at her, and made her leave the house without her juice. I guess she walked home. I thought he was putting the juice away until I felt that gallon burst against the back of my head. I withdrew from my classes the next day and went to work for him. Anyway, that's how I quit college.

So, how can I understand my mind in this story through the metaphorical characters in the Bible? I don't even know what I was thinking or feeling.  I was just reacting to those around me.  In that way I am both the Devil  in his role as God's dependent second opinion and God in his role of omnipotent denial of his own internal self-judgment (the devil).  Jesus is perhaps the forward step that I need to take. Jesus, in his setting aside of his own life and ego for the sake of some higher purpose, is attempting to lead me out of my God vs. Satan duality, my raging emotions overpowering and condemning my calm rational thought, arrogant animal impulses vs. sober self-judgment and patience.  I believe it's a trap to think of these characters as separate beings.  When they're seen as parts of the whole of the mind, then they start to make sense.

By the way, if all of this seems confusing, please accept my apology.  I'm just trying to get the words out.  Please offer comments and questions.  I love questions!

As soon as I saw that God, Satan, and Jesus were all archetypes for stuff that happens in my own head, I remembered the words of Jesus.

"I and the Father are one."
"The kingdom of heaven is within you."

What if Jesus is the ultimate ego model?  Fully pleased to follow the Father, he is free to act bravely.
What if God is an imperfect emotion model? If he wasn't so bad, Jesus wouldn't need to be so self-sacrificial.
What if Satan is a model for dispassionate skepticism? Is there any way to help these three get along?

"Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

What if giving up what I want for me and making my choices based upon my own highest values would actually make me happier and braver than if I chose what seemed best in the moment?

I just didn't want to get hit.  I just wanted to avoid Dad's anger. I work hard to anticipate what other people need. I stress about it.  I have for years.  Ironically, it hasn't worked well. I'm totally inept when it comes to setting people at ease or making them feel loved.  In this way, the blind Father God of my ego must make peace with the objective questioner of my intellect, and it may require that my body make the sacrifices of its appetites in order to do that, to bring my whole being completely under the direction of my own mind.  Maybe self-direction sounds scary.  What if I do things like my dad did?  What if I justify bad behavior by insisting that I may decide right and wrong?  Well, it's good enough for your god to do the same, right?

Ok, this one's a mess, so I'm expecting your lively debate!

Thanks,
© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III