Personal Journal

The bunny incident (disturbing content)

Let's bear in mind that I am making a commitment to live life with gratitude, and to live with love and vulnerability in my heart.

But, then "The End" by the Doors comes on. Dr. DeMoss says there are no coincidences...

So the patron song of my Saint of Nihilism comes on.

The Rabbit.
The Gilded people.
The gutter people.

This shit will all end up in a book.
The writer in me is gutter people.
Dr. DeMoss is Gilded people.
Am I gutter people?

I don't know. It's metaphysics, and it's hard to have any light in your metaphysics when you're right back at the opening scene to Apocalypse Now, you're 11, and your mother who will eventually disown you with hate in her heart for you at the hour of her death, likes to expose you to art, so she took you to see it.

And when I saw the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, this song played: The Doors "The End" and I felt myself in it. Napalm in the treeling. Hueys and Loachs darting around. Lost in a Roman Wilderness of Pain. That's where I grew up. I was 11, and I knew my way around the Roman Wilderness, and I knew how to survive in the chaos of war; the war in my home.

I'm convinced my mom was a self-hating lesbian. There's a lot of evidence. It's not worth going in to.

Dr. DeMoss is right: I have to live in gratitude.
The writer in me lives in a dark place, and if I'm going to write 'my stuff' and be authentic, I'm going to have to get down here and wear that skin again, but I'm going to have to find a way to take it off and go back to love and light and hippy shit like that. Because for the rest of my life, suicide will always be just a couple of failures around the corner, a couple of inescapable darknesses.

If I had a deal with god to make right now, it would be to help me get my damn book down, get it published, and then kill me on my bicycle, and then let it go on to be a great American novel. I'd rather be Caravaggio than Rembrandt. I don't know how to enjoy living. Especially as I approach 50...

The rabbit.
For me, my church is still a bicycle (though I'm getting better about appreciating god in all sorts of places; I OBVIOUSLY have a lot of work to do toward that goal).
Dr. DeMoss got me out of atheism and back into agnosticism, but I still have a lot of problem with believing that there's a final arbiter of justice for all of the crimes occurring all around us by people who lust for money or power or both, and more. The problem I have with any gnosticism is that it is clear to me that "The love of money is the root of all evil," absolutely. All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and money is power. By that math, I live in a nation that clearly loves money more than any other single thing in existence, so I live in a society that is clearly rooted in evil. It's hard to believe there's some plan out there to call us all to our knees, as we consume the planet around us in the name of Halloween lights and entertainment media.

(Next song up at random: Supertramp "The Logical Song" - is it any wonder I haven't hung myself from the balcony yet?)

Dr. DeMoss was blinded by her own love of money for me to follow further.

Now I have to find my way alone again.

Don't worry, I'm debating going back to an earlier therapist or finding another.

The Bunny:
Whatever gratitude I want to generate in life, whatever plan god has in store for me, its filled with problems like that explained above - how to stay sane in an insane world. And while I'm doing that, I find myself having a one-on-one encounter with god's plan for me in the following form:

I love to ride my bicycle. It's the primary way I manage my PTSD. I ride 24 miles, minimum, over about 85-95 minutes. Summer is the best time to ride, of course. I even shave my arms and legs because I so enjoy the way air feels across my actual skin (plus hairless IS sexy to me, even as my wife may dislike it).

I was rebuilding my strength in June, starting to get some really good rides in; I set off on my usual ride route down to the reservoir and back, and down by the strip mall where I play Pathfinder, I came up a rise after a long downhill, so I was doing about 30 miles per hour, and I saw roadkill in the bike lane. It's not uncommon. It's always a bummer, particularly if the roadkill is... open to the sky, let's say... So I'm in a good pedal cadence, I'm zigging my bike to the right a little toward the curb to avoid the roadkill, and as I am right beside it, I see the bunny's head and front legs move.

Fuck. It's alive.
I stop my bike. Turn it around. Push myself by foot back toward the road-not-killed bunny.
It sees me, in fear it struggles toward the curb, using only its front legs. It is dragging its hindquarters across the concrete limp behind it.
It is paralyzed.
Now my heart sinks.

It ceases struggling as I stand over it. It is now my problem. Do I strangle it? I have no knife. Do I take it over to the game store? No, too gruesome.

And there I am, though I wasn't conscious of this at the time. This is face to face with god's plan for me again. Morbidity. Morbidity like Jean dying, like being a relief worker amid the rubble after Katrina, like being on the East German border, and like being in the 91 Gulf War.
I guess that's what I call being a gutter person.
My own mother hated me. But that's another story, and I should finish the rabbit story.

My normal ride route takes me within a mile of my normal vet's office. I was wearing my camelback, and I figured I could stuff the rabbit into the cargo pouch of that, safely and relatively comfortably. So that's what the plan became. I called my vet to ask if I could bring the bunny in to be euthanized, because it was clearly paralyzed (and by the way, it had such a tiny wound on its back that I now believe a bicyclist hit it, and almost certainly on accident, but he left this mess for me nonetheless). I told them I did not have any money to pay for it.

They said (and here is a clear place for gratitude) that they would if I brought it in.
So I scooped up the bunny, deposited him or her gently into the pouch (which was more than large enough for the rabbit), then I put the camelback on me backwards (so the rabbit was in front of me, and I could see if it started to struggle its way out of the pouch, but it never did). And off we road to the vet's office. They had me take the bunny out and put him or her on a towel, and I remember his hindquarters lying floppish to one side. The bunny seemed calm, though. And if I have to be grateful as I look at these messes, what I can say is that the bunny died after having been deeply loved, however briefly, by me, and no doubt by the vet's staff.

But that's my walk in god's plan, man. And I'm person enough to deal with it, but it hurts man. According to Keirsey, I'm the Healer archetype. And I walk, apparently, through the Roman Wilderness of Pain.

Hopefully it'll make a good book, and then I'll get killed on my bike.
Amen?

(Next songs: Another One Bites the Dust and Aqualung)

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn