Incident, Part II

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(LS Ratio: 4:6 Mood: Well, I guess 4,000 words is 4,000 words, whether it went in the novel or not)

We need to talk.

I started reading The Art of Conversation by Catherine Blyth back in January, and I haven't picked it up since the 27th of that month. But she led it off with an amazing essay that discusses just how much we are losing the art of discourse, of exchanging ideas.

It's just the sheer communication of what's in your head that we need to have for a healthy society, if even just to purge issues from our individual systems. That's what blogs are good at: it's the freest and most public form of therapy out there.

But there's a risk there for the bloggers, a big one, especially in personal reflection journals like this one in which the authors choose to let anyone in the world with access to the web read them. Especially if those same authors are hoping that one of those readers may be the ones they've been searching and waiting for their whole lives.

I asked in Part I of this blog, how long can one remain damaged by the events that happen to them?

Certain things stay with you. Deaths, divorces, affairs, injuries, battles, embarassments: these all qualify. And they define you, send you off on life tangents that you never expected, or necessarily wanted.

I suppose it's your choice to mitigate the damage as best you can, especially as far as indifidelity and divorce is concerned. I've now met three people in my experience - all in their fifties and sixties, mind you - who went through similar things that I went through and who, even as long as thirty years afterwards are still suffering from the fallout.

Of course, I chose differently. And journalling is a great way to work things out.

But now that you've put it out there, you've represented yourself in a certain way. And for some potential mates, that's the biggest turnoff you can have. Too often, damage stops being something that you experience, and starts being something that's completely in the eye of the beholder. And that's just plain unfair.

My second question: if you find someone you're interested in pursuing, how much do you allow their baggage to determine whether or not they're worth pursuing?

Unwritten fear (well, until now): My twin soul finds me, the perfect person for me that I'm just over the moon about, but she breaks it off as soon as she finds out I'm divorced. Despite the fact I really do feel good the vast majority of the time and that I am demonstrably awesome, she finds out I've been single for six months, or reads my blog history and finds out this has been my main area of focus for most entries, and though the writings were authentic at the time I put fingers to keyboard, and even though she understands that yesterday's reality isn't necessarily today's, she decides to break it off and look for someone undamaged. Only because that's what the "rules" say to do.

Marry Him?

This is what many women in my age range do, according to Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him (thanks again for that book, Julius!). She sat down with three groups of single women for informal discussions. First group was in their twenties, second in their thirties to forties, and third in their fifties.

A few random findings, which I may have noted before, came out of Gottlieb's discussions, and I've also thrown in some forum material I've read on my own time that correspond to her findings:

- Women in their twenties are, by and large, relationship-retarded. When it comes to what to expect in mates, they're still prancing about in some kind of GQ, postfeminist dreamland. Men are to be funny, but not "too funny" (that makes them goofballs and not very attractive); very successful, own their own houses by 25, have high paying jobs, but not be addicted to work; be buff, but not a meathead; have twenty inch penises when flaccid, but not think with them; be "handsome", but not "magazine handsome"; must "be taller than me when I'm in heels", etc.. One girl even dumped her guy after three dates because, despite the great rapport they had, "he hasn't seen Casablanca. My ideal man would have already seen Casablanca".

- Women in their thirties to forties, meanwhile, have become more realistic, but are still caught in a consumer mentality. Worse than that, if they haven't already been married or divorced by now, they are getting desperate because these are their last prime childbearing years and they're looking for validation, finding themselves in vicious cycles of bad relationships in which they get progressively more and more bitter. In Gottlieb's group, they are pining over the guys they had dated in their twenties, but dumped for the same superficial reasons listed above. They've realized the qualities they initially overlooked in those "shy guys" or the "beta males" that didn't attract them a decade ago - expressions of emotional vulnerability, willingness to just let someone else lead, be poorer, but doing something that you love - are now the qualities that they're desperate to find in single men in their age group. When Gottlieb asked her thirty-to-fortysomething focus group where those guys were now, the collective response: "they're all married".*

(*Okay, fair point: not every girl in quarter-life will be an idiot and overlook perfectly good men, meaning that, from a strictly statistical basis alone, the odds are good that the type of girl I'm attracted to will also have the foresight to see what an awesome lifemate I and other guys like me would actually be. And unlike some other women, they wouldn't allow one bad summer to ruin things forever).

- Women in their fifties and sixties, finally, are the most experienced, and if they're still single, they have completely foregone physical requirements as the primary consideration and now look solely at personality and spirit. Then again, as someone in a Globe article recently pointed out, we can't delude ourselves into thinking that that "sixty is the new forty" because, well, "wrinkly sex isn't all that appealing". Either that, or they've just plain given up and resigned themselves to living their retirement years without romance.

This is a huge digression from "damage" and "baggage", I know, but the one common factor is that the older you get, the less likely you're going to care about a potential mates' "incidents". Unless they're letting it negatively impact their daily tasks such that you're forced to deal with it everyday, or the psychological effects are such that they're still in major therapy of some kind, there's no reason why we should avoid perfectly functional, generally happy, well-balanced, modestly handsome and successful human beings as romantic partners, just because of what they've been through.

And yet, too many 27 to 31 year old women - the potential mates in my desired age range - continue to do just that to 27 to 31 year old men.

What To Consider With Divorced Twentysomething Guys

So let's talk about my "incident", my quote-unquote "damage": being divorced. For many of the women I'm attracted to, my being "divorced" may as well be a scarlet letter. No matter what, they'll feel I'm a used car, and this bothers me, not gonna lie, because I'm a real catch, and I'm not the only one.

There's a whole book called How to Get Divorced by 30 that's all about "starter-marriages". Apparently, that's what I had, even if it didn't start that way. This is apparently a new thing that people are doing: getting married as early as 23 years old, having the princess wedding, living together until 28 or 29, and then splitting, often for the worst fucking reasons you can imagine. ("He won't stop watching TV". "She nags all the time". "He plays too much golf.").

But that's not what I intended. It's not what a lot of guys in my boat - 29 and divorced - wanted. And yes, some divorced guys do deserve to be divorced: they're abusive, non-functional, manipulative, cheaters, or worse. I know that if I was on my game last summer, I'd still be married, though I didn't deserve how it happened to me.

But what should also occur to 27 to 31 year old women meeting a divorced guy like me is the following.

If he's divorced, it means that, once upon a time, at least one girl thought he was special enough to lock down for life. That means there's more to him than what you might be seeing. Get to know him better: you'll be delighted at what you find.

If he's divorced, it means that he made his share of mistakes, but once upon a time, he wanted to be with one girl for life. That means he's got something to his character that, if you're not looking for it now, you're going to regret not taking hold of it when you're fortysomething and lonely. Because it means that if he's into you, he'll be into you for the long run.

If he's divorced, it means that he learned the hard way the importance of knowing what he really wants versus what he doesn't want. No matter how dense or how much of a meathead the man, the percentage of men in the male population who are so learning-impaired that they make the same mistakes twice is smaller than what you'd like to believe. That means that if he's into you, you really are what he wants.

If he's divorced, he is one half of the equation of why it went wrong, but he's only half. That means you can't completely blame him or put the whole blame on his shoulders. It doesn't necessarily mean he's not good at maintaining relatoinships: it may, in fact, mean that some other girl simply didn't see the value in him that you do. Don't punish him for her blindness.

If he's divorced, he's experienced doing the "husbandly" things, like making you laugh, taking care of you when you're sick, or walking your five imaginary dogs*. You definitely want that.

(*yes, I used a Mosbyism)

And finally, if he's divorced, he's had a life experience that, like it or not, have given him more depth, more clarity, more maturity, and - though you can't see it - has made him more likely to be passionate, caring, romantic, nurturing, funny, and life-affirming than what you'd find in someone who's never been there, never took the risk, never fell in love, and never learned.

In short, the divorced quarter life man may very well have had to go through hell to become the man of your dreams. The very least you can do is let him take you to coffee.

The Bottom Line


I guess this is still one more way of purging the last obstacles to success from my system. And yes, I know women will have their own complaints about quarter-life men, but that's for you to discuss from your experience if you want. This is mine.

It's important I write this out and share this with you, because despite what I've been through, I still believe in soul mates, and there is that realization that the One is going to meet me and be with me no matter what my baggage is. Simply put, if destiny has that in store for us, then the baggage and damage won't be obstacles.

And this isn't just me: I know too many good men in my age group out there who haven't been snapped up by women with the foresight to see that they are, in fact, all they've wanted.

I'll say that again: guys like me are, in fact, what you've always wanted.

Quarter-life ladies, consider this food for thought, because as long as you don't see our value, we all lose, and lose huge.

That's it for now. Long entry I know: if you've made it this far, props.

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Incident, Part I

(LS Ratio: 4:6. Mood: Seriously, don't ask...)

I was reading a bunch of random blogs about the bad things that happen to people. Bad shit happens to everyone, but not everyone writes about them, so it's always educational to see how people react to life's random incidents.

That got me thinking: how long can one remain damaged by events?

When I landed my job with the government, it really was the last missing brick in the wall of my life. I mean, it's awesome pay, it's in a great office with a great staff, it's a job that I can psychologically leave when I close up shop for the day, and most importantly - for the time - it's a Monday to Friday, nine-to-fiver-type position, meaning for the first time ever in my life, I had full evenings and weekends freed up to do whatever. I could be normal and get my social life back: cottage trips in the summer, weekend getaways to New York or Montreal with the parents or the wife. Date nights, long evening walks, patios. Amazing, simply amazing.

And two weeks into the new job, my wife tells me she wants to separate.

Two months into the new job, I find out the underlying reason behind that is that she was cheating on me with a friend since July. And she didn't tell me: I had to catch her lying to me.

And around the same time, I find out that some of my friends - more than I had originally thought, as I've recently learned - had known about it well before I caught it, and had chosen to say nothing to me. Even those this technically makes them party to the adultery, and thus partly responsible for the damage I had to endure, I've let them off the hook, but take note, I have a long memory (pirates: ye be warned).

And so, just I'd found the last remaining brick, another one fell out, and here I am again, searching.

As damaging events go, this one would have killed many people, it almost killed me: if not for intervention from my friends and family, it would have. And despite having made the most of it, in fact, having done remarkably well by many professional and personal accounts of people in my life, there's a new wrinkle to this business.

For the past three days, I've started having nightmares. Nothing too monstrous, not the stuff of Dean Koontz novels, but dreams where I'm bothered enough to wake up in a sweat. Once, I woke up punching the air.

For instance, I dreamed, two nights ago, that my ex's grandparents, long deceased, all showed up at my family's house. It was Christmas, and they were staying with us for some reason. Now, in waking life, I never met them: they passed not long before my ex and I started dating in high school.

But I've seen pictures, and I had heard a story from my ex that someone in our wedding party - I know who, but I won't say, given the sensitive nature of this topic - who had been present at our ceremony at Webster's Falls had seen all four of them standing around us as we exchanged our vows. No pun intended: the idea that they were there for their granddaughter haunted me, much the same as I wonder if my own grandfathers were around.

Back to the dream. My ex's paternal grandfather handed me a long-stemmed red rose in a box as a Christmas "gift", and it was the oddest thing you could imagine, oddest feeling.

Then my ex showed up with her new boyfriend, who was dressed in the same tux he wore as part of our wedding party - as one of the bride's honour attendants - and started to make out with her in front of me. I knew in the dream mindset that this was a calculated move to piss me off, so I promptly approached him to separate his head from his shoulders. And though I was punching as strongly as I could, I could not hurt him. He just stood there, and I felt so damned helpless, I woke up swinging at air.

Afterwards, I lay there and just interpreted the shit out of what I just seen. (FYI, I tend to be more Jungian than Freudian: Niles Crane, I've got your back, buddy).

What's really significant about the rose, though, is after I woke up and mulled on the dream, it was obvious to me that I had the choice to either take the rose or try to beat the living snot out of my backstabbing former friend.

And, in real life, I'm pretty confident I could disassemble him with the speed and efficiency of a Formula One pit crew member. I have moderate training in taekwondo, and I have been practicing. Truth be told, I haven't ruled out taking advantage of such an opportunity, were it to present itself. A significant part of me honestly craves it. And I am a master of manifestation in my life, I could make this happen if I really wanted to.....but then, that's part of the problem, isn't it?



Revenge is such a primal urge, caveman justice. I've had at least one friend suggest that maybe a fistfight, no holds barred, no consequence, no charges, is what we need to sort this out like men, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. Maybe it's what I need: after all, this asshole already has my woman.

But she was never mine to possess. Women aren't possessions, but I suspect any man worth his testicles will always have that part of him that views them as such, no matter how enlightened or progressive he may otherwise be. For me to pretend to be any different would make me a hypocrite of the highest order: this is how I authentically feel in this moment. And authenticity is everything.

And the other problem with that fistfight solution: I would make sure it got out of hand. I would make it a point to escalate this: as Tom Cruise said in Tropic Thunder, "I'm talking scorched earth, motherfucker".

Because Caveman Jody maintains that he took someone I was in love with for half my life: that's not something that one simple fistfight is going to remedy, and anyone who honestly thinks as much must have a Texas-sized mental block when it comes to the dynamics of romantic love.

And if that were to happen, I would lose everything I have left, which is quite a lot. Meaning that it's not going to happen. Not a chance in hell.

Now, I have been doing a pretty good job facing these issues down, and the differences I've seen in the other blogs between the emo people - of which I'm still one, though I'm getting it out - still stuck in a rut and the ones who are genuinely growing as individuals is that they are willing to not bury their problems, even if it means metaphorically setting themselves on fire, Buddhist-monk style, just for a little while to, as Robin Williams says, "make you deal with your shit".

That's what these dreams are doing. This is the last bit of baggage left from the affair. I've been avoiding accepting this, have avoided even looking at it, but that's a form of suppression in itself. And now that it's in blog form, it's out there. Consider it purged.

So, I'm hereby drafting the following memo:

Dear Subconscious,

I get it. Message received. You can stop the nightmares now and let me sleep my normal nightly 6.5 hours where I'm a Viking or on a road trip down east or flying through the air on my own awesomeness.

Because I'd rather have the rose than bloody knuckles, dong ma? I choose the rose. There's no ambiguity there. Mmmm...kay?

KTHXBYE,

Jody
There, that should take care of that.

But now that I've put it out there, there's a new risk, one shared by every one of the bloggers I've read so far. Especially the ones looking for the same missing brick in their wall of life as I am. Stay tuned...




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Jorge Garcia has a....Jedi Moment...

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Leave it to me to wait until the end of the series to not only find what is possibly the greatest cast-member blog on Blogspot from LOST, but to find the two entries in which Jorge Garcia realizes that he used the Law of Attraction to end up on the cast of the show.*

Here they are: Write It Down...and be specific.

Way ahead of you, dude.

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(*even if he doesn't call it that by name....a jar of DHARMA-Initiative Ranch Composite by any other name would smell as sweet....)

Something Wicked This Way Comes...Part I

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(LS Ratio: 4:10. Mood: Sleepy)

Anthropologist-turned-brujo Carlos Castaneda, in A Separate Reality, writes of an instance in which he and his mentor, Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, are on their way to a house where a group of Don Juan's associates will be seeking out Mescalito, the spirit figure accessible only through consumption of peyote. The road in Sonora, Mexico, that they drive at night rises and falls over a series of hillsides. Cresting one of those rises, Castaneda looks back and sees two lights, which he initially perceives to be a car that's been following them for some time.

"Not so," says Don Juan (paraphrasing here, of course). "The lights are Death. Death follows us, all the time, and it may catch us." Castaneda, at the time, was unclear on his teacher's meaning: Don Juan never spoke in metaphors. To him, the world was literally filled with deities and spirits, demons and angels, so whenever he spoke of them, they were as real as anything in our daily experience. To Castaneda, they were just car headlights.

Was Death really following Castaneda and Don Juan on that hot, dry desert night in Sonora? Conjecture still follows the late Castaneda, a former anthropologist who "went native" with the Yaqui, as to whether or not he'd just invented Juan Matus and Don Gennaro for narrative purposes.

Then again, I recently read a great quote - can't remember it now, can't find it now, either - that says that it's frightening to think of what's actually possible in the world, so we choose to believe that many of those things that scare us can't exist. I believe Don Juan existed. And I can say that if it were me in that car, I would have likely given the Yaqui sorcerer the benefit of the doubt. A death omen is a death omen. Keep driving. Don't stop.

I believe in what late Holographic Universe author Michael Talbot called "a participatory universe", in which the boundaries we in the West believe separate the human mind from the human experience do not exist, and are themselves constructs that we can dismantle at will. That's what all that "physicists' blackboard" stuff was about in my past few entries.

Physicists share a number of things in common with shamans: taking themselves out of the world to redefine and study, in their own way, what is possible in that world, and returning to find that the world has, in fact, grown from their studies. Working on oneself, by oneself, ends up redefining our perceptions and feelings, and both serve to re-shape the outside world after their own images.



I've been experiencing omens. We all do, but most of us dismiss them as coincidences, if we notice them at all. Then again, the Law of Attraction presumes a participatory reality, meaning that your mind and emotions influence external events. This is where the process loses many would-be believers: after all, thoughts can't make things happen in reality, right?

I've heard almost all the arguments and "explanations" for how these supposedly supernatural, meaningful synchroncities can all be either accounted for as psychological tricks of the mind or by explanable empirical phenomenon. And all of them miss the point. By light years.

The one that concerns me here, for this purpose of this post, is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which, LOA skeptics assert, accounts for the meaningful synchronicities that occur whenever we are looking for something in particular (i.e. why, if you're shopping for a particular Corvette, you start seeing Corvettes or Corvette references everywhere in your daily experience.)

(Strangely enough, in Googling the term Baader-Meinhof for this link, I found a definition on 1000 Awesome Things, a website and book I only first heard about yesterday on French-language Radio Canada as I drove into work. Spooky.)

That's the trick, though: it may be all in your subjective experience, but that's the only thing that matters, isn't it?

After all, you don't subject your daily experience to empirical testing: you just live your day. The Law of Attraction, the Path of the Beam, are not about what the happenings are, but about what they mean to you. And yet, others experience omens of their own, making this a distinctly transpersonal phenomenon.

Is there the possibility that this stuff is "real", in that the results can be eventually measured by scientific instruments? I'd like to think so, considering that other forces previously dismissed by the leading thinkers of the day as "mystical" - notably electromagnetism, speaking of attraction - are now powering our cities and iPods.

Anyone who kept an open mind back then is now thought of as a pioneer, since time and study proved there was quantifiable evidence of these phenomena. In their own times, without that evidence, others thought they were off their collective gourd, much the same way that we dismiss today's psychics and parapsychologists, alien abductees, and believers in life after death. Faith was and remains the key word. And wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the game?

So yeah, I believe in omens, same way I believe in gravity, electricity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and all the other energies that make up our daily lives in the first half of the 21st Century A.D.

What omens have I been getting lately? Stay tuned....

Why the LOST Ending Works (and why some of you forgot why it works)

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(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 8:10. Mood: "Duuude.....")

Preamble: I started watching LOST during the height of my Lord of the Rings obsession, when I learned that trilogy cast member and Hobbit Dominic Monaghan was starring in the ABC pilot. I caught it from the very first episode onwards, missed the second, but was really hooked when I saw the fourth episode Walkabout, revealing that (highlight to read)the only way wheelchair-bound John Locke was able to walk again was for Oceanic Flight 815 to crash on the Island. It was pretty damned compelling for this creative personality.

So I've been there from the beginning, and though I spent last Sunday night driving through New Jersey on the way home from Manhattan, as soon as I was rested and able, I watched the ending with my family on Monday morning.

And it was worth it. The entire series was worth it.

Why? Why, when a series notorious for unanswered questions, for supremely strange puzzles and occurrences, left so many of them still unanswered by the climax, would LOST be worth purchasing on Blu Ray and DVD for those who are wondering what it's all about? Why, when so many bloggers, fans, and critics alike are positively black with vitriol over the finale?

First, there is always that cadre of people who aren't happy with anything. Evidence for the existence of these people ranges from the bitter nature of their Facebook updates and Tweets - bitching about the only cloud on a beautiful summer day, typically - the trends set by past reviewers of the episodes to date (the Vulture reviewer, in particular, readily admits to her own vitriol since the final season started), to, well, who they are as human beings on a daily basis.

It goes to your personality type. If you're a rational, by-the-numbers person (and not 4-8-15-16-23-42, BTW) who typically likes to label everything in life and sort them into nice little boxes....what the hell were you doing watching LOST??! You were bound to be disappointed by everything that didn't make sense, so you deserve to be pissed. You've probably been pissed since Locke and Jack managed to blow open the Hatch.

For those fans who are, by nature, open-minded, upbeat, optimistic, and positive -or at least neutral - who still find themselves legitimately disappointed in the ending, fear not. The last six years of investment in this show will not go the way of your average Miami hedge fund.

LOST, and its finale, are worth it because both were what the show has always been about: the characters.

This was a show whose entire first season was about the survivors: the weirdness of the Island was simply the backdrop to learning about their secrets, seeing how they interacted with each other, see the human side of survival. We grew to love and care for, and at other times hate and fear, these people as if they were real, in the spirit of any good drama.

The Oceanic 815 survivors - most of them, anyway - are what drew most of us to the show, but remember the frustration many fans felt in Season 2 when they kept introducing new cast members beyond the original 815 crew that we all loved. The series couldn't just keep going on a character-centric basis, so they evolved the story: who is the DHARMA Initiative? How did the Black Rock end up so far inland? Who were the Others?. Once they shifted the focus on the story, they had to maintain the mystery as best as they could, introducing all of the mysteries designed to keep you guessing, and bringing in new characters - like Juliet and Widmore and Richard - only within the context of the new storyline.

But never forget that it all started with our core favorites: Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Hugo, Boone, Shannon, Michael, Walt, Sayid, Jin, Sun, Claire, and Charlie.



Sure, along the way, they created anomalies in the storyline - what was the real deal with Walt? How was Jacob able to leave the Island while Smokey couldn't? The true secrets of the Hanso Foundation? What was the Light, really? - that never got decisively answered, but I'm glad they didn't.

If they had answered all of the questions, we would have inevitably been disappointed even moreso by the answers, much like how the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica felt so rushed, overwrought, and really thin given the context of the show (Seriously, how do you have "angels" appear in a show based in gritty realism? ), because Ron Moore tried to tie up all the loose ends in three hours. No, it wouldn't be good, and it wouldn't be LOST, without a little bit of mystery left to it.

Oddly, not answering everything made the show more like real life. LOST began as a fraud, in many respects: it was a science-fiction and fantasy show posing as a primetime drama. It was a convincing drama that even attracted fans who hated sci-fi/fantasy, real enough to be believable at first, and then gradually taking us down this path to the point where guys who talk to dead people and time travel one day became acceptable parts of the show's reality.

The sense of realism from the show applied to the narrative as well. As horror writer (and LOST fan) Stephen King said, real life doesn't tie up all of its loose ends. Somebody dies, and there are threads that never get picked up again. The endings aren't convenient, not even all meaningful. Similarly, you can't solve all the mysteries in a story if you want it to retain that sense of verisimilitude, because strange things happen in real life to which nobody gets all the answers.

Ultimately, what got me about the finale was the drama, the spectacle and emotion, learning about the real nature of the alternate universe . I watch TV to feel good, as I do with other things, and I felt damned good watching this episode, if a little misty throughout.

Some critics panned the "goopy" New Agey aspects of the reunion of the castaways in the Afterlife, and while I'm partisan on the New Agey-count, I nonetheless found it deeply moving, and I'm very grateful that the writers chose to return to the relationships between the characters instead of just sticking to the plot. You would have had to have had a heart of uranium-235 not to have teared up, even a little, during the episode's final moments.

LOST managed to integrate nearly every story you can imagine - romance, sex, horror, sci-fi, comedy - into a single, coherent, for the most part believable epic. And it worked: why else would so many of you be pissed?

So, LOST is what it is, and what it is is a unique, wonderful, compelling, and intelligent story - far more intelligent, admittedly, than most of the audience members, myself included - that I will gladly share with any willing novice (or unwitting captive). It is a novel for TV combining a surreal story with a believable verisimilitude and emotional core that that no show will ever again be able to match. And the ending suited the series quite well.

Yes, I'm done gushing. Now, off to get some dinner....