Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline will drive it far away.- Proverbs 22:15
Publisher Stephen G. Barr's personal journey of self discovery, enlightenment and emotional cleansing presented in raw form.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
The Curse of being an Empath
Going through life as I have with the "gift" or "curse" of feeling other people's emotions with the majority of them being negative emotions does wear on me. I rarely get the ability to experience my own emotions because I walk around with a sack of other's emotions on my shoulder all the time and that has resulted with my own emotional maturity being severeley stunted and the only way I've been able to get in touch with my emotions has been through experimentation and exploration with illicit substances. Some work better than others, and some have even more negative affect on me but now after 45 years of self medicating with every known illicit substance known to man I sit here before you at the same emotional maturity level of when I started my experimentations. Hi I'm Stephen's emotions and I'm twelve.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Good Friday....Lou's version anyway
He was lying banged and battered, skewered and bleeding
talking crippled on the Cross
Was his mind reeling and heaving hallucinating
fleeing what a loss
The things he hadn't touched or kissed his senses
slowly stripped away
Not like Buddha not like Vishnu
life wouldn't rise through him again
I find it easy to believe
that he might question his beliefs
The beginning of the Last Temptation
Dime Story Mystery
The duality of nature, Godly nature,
human nature splits the soul
Fully human, fully divine and divided
the great immortal soul
Split into pieces, whirling pieces, opposites
attract
From the front, the side, the back
the mind itself attacks
I know the feeling, I know it from before
descartes through Hegel belief is never sure
Dime Store Mystery, Last Temptation
I was sitting drumming thinking thumping pondering
the Mysteries of Life
Outside the city shrieking screaming whispering
the Mysteries of Life
There's a funeral tomorrow
at St. Patrick's the bells will ring for you
Ah, what must you have been thinking
when you realized the time had come for you
I wish I hadn't thrown away my time
on so much Human and so much less Divine
The end of the Last Temptation
The end of a Dime Store Mystery
Ok...enough outward introspection...
Going to stop focusing on the eternal and tell you all my story, why I'm like how I am, what got me here. Just know that this is it for me...this is the way I'm going to be and that my purpose in this world has been realized in my opinion. My primary purpose was to be the only male of my generation to procreate another male who in turn did as well so Cam and Hendrix were my primary purpose followed up with the other end of the gene pool by my being there for Pop those last 8.5 years of his life in Arizona. I'm a genetic link between the past and future which is what it boils down to for all of us if we strip it all down and pull back and look at mankind in proper context. To do so just go out sometime away from city lights and lay down and look into the night sky. What you did for a living to get through your time here is immaterial, what kind of car you drove a joke, how big your house was or for that matter how big your dick was is all bullshit and totally irrelevant to the 1,000th power. So when I say I feel a great sense of pride in doing just those two things which continued the species two more generations while helping to ease the journey of the previous one is more than some people have accomplished so the fact that I'm 56 and "should" be thinking of retiring and then sitting around watching Mash reruns all day waiting to die is just plain whacked in my opinion. I'm here to do those two things and keep this genetic chain letter moving along and all the rest is just bullshit. Cynical? Jaded? Perhaps, or is it brutally honest and pragmatic? I say the later and you are free to call it anything you damned well please and I'll stand toe to toe with anyone who disagrees with me and fight anyone who says your wrong. We are all masters of our own reality and captains of our own vessels in this sea of human existence even if your's is fucked up as compared to mine. ;-) I'll still defend your right to have your own opinion. That's what my internal gyroscope tells me to do. We all were given one so we all know in our gut what's right and what's wrong....if we stay still a second, close our eyes to remove outside distractions. Every time I did something in my life that got me in trouble with the law I knew in my gut it was wrong. I just didn't care what some group of other beings thought was the line not to be crossed. I don't answer to you, nor do you answer to me! I didn't sign any contract at the time of birth stating that I agreed to follow any man made laws and I never intentionally harmed another human being or animal in my life and don't intend on doing so. I followed that gyroscope in my gut and even when I was caught driving 60 miles an hour above the man made speed limit out in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night with not a solitary soul out there other than some kid half my age who's job it is to sit out there alone all night in case somebody speeds/ Why? So "society" can get some money out of me. I never had an accident, was fully in control, enjoying the exhilaration I get by driving fast. I'll pay your fines or sit in traffic school which is a joke but you'll never ever get me to be remorseful for breaking your law. That's not God's law. No matter what or who you consider to be God, maybe no God at all if that's your choice, whomever it is for you not one of you can tell me your "God" said to you "thou shall not speed in the desert at night" so fuck your speed limits. I conscientiously object to them so there. What's that you say? I can only conscientiously object to going to war? Damn, too late I already volunteered to do that have was honorably discharged decades ago. If that means I'm "antisocial" then oh well, guess I'm "antisocial" then. I can live with that, why can't you? If you didn't have guys like me to pay fines there's be a lot less public services for you couch potato types out there who I'll label "hyper social" how that? Ok, 0k I know....get to the sex parts. I will so with out further adieu here is my story and I'm putting it out here mainly with the hope that some of you will feel a sense of affinity with something I write here and not feel like you're broken because you feel like that too.
I've been the go to guy as far back as I can remember, at least as far back as 1st grade for sure. Ever since then thing have just come easy to me. I win radio call in contests, I win student elections, I get picked for special projects, I get A's and B's with never studying, I win in sports you name it. I'm one of those people that everyone pretty much likes or at least tolerates even though I have a classic in your face Type A personality. I hail from New York so toss that on top too yet I'm well accepted in all social circles, from the straight up hood to ballrooms and boardrooms. One of my early mentors told me "Kid? You got the gift of gab....things will always come easy for you!" I doubted him at the time but when reflecting back on my life now at the age of 56 I'll be damned if he wasn't right. He was also the one that gave me one particular piece of advise that I've pulled out of my bag of tricks more times than I care to admit but it was..."Walk into any room like you own it and more times than not you will." I've had a series of mentors through out my life beginning with my Dad who for someone who came from pretty much poverty in Altoona, PA during the Great Depression had a somewhat elitist attitude about him. We lived in a lower middle class neighborhood as he was very frugal so we were the "rich family" by comparison to the rest of the neighborhood but as a painfully thin white boy with glasses in a mixed blue collar neighborhood I had t0o come up with a set of survival skills pretty quick or get daily beat downs from kids half my age so I did just that. I found ways to be accepted and even lauded within the gang of delinquents who inhabited my hood. Being small and wire I was a natural to shimmy down through basement windows to then run up and unlock the door for the rest of the guys who would ransack the homes of people from the next neighborhood over as well as the first one boosted over a fence to retrieve lost softballs, footballs or Frisbee's. I had indeed found ways to make myself useful to the crowd so things went pretty easy for me while the rest in my age group got beat, ridiculed, harassed and robbed by the older guys pretty much as a daily matter of course so my "peers" were the tough guys that were a few years older than me so I did things they were doing only at a younger age. By the time I was 14 and hanging out with guys who were shaving, driving, drinking and had girlfriends I found a new way to make myself indispensable. I was their "test pilot" whenever they encountered a new type of booze or drug they had never tried. When this occurred they would feed me massive quantities of whatever substance they wanted go try and watch what happened to me before they tried it themselves. I thought this was great most of the time because I got really large amounts of substances for free but as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson so wisely observed: "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." I can certainly qualify as an "edge explorer" from the age of 14 on to well, to this day if I'm honest with you and at this point there shouldn't be too many people to whom that should find shocking by any stretch of the imagination. I've been pulled over my cops more than once in my life that when queried as to what prompted them to detain me stated simply "You just looked bad". To this day, no matter how cleaned up I get, wearing an Armani suit with hair cut short and the finest luggage made I always get the "Ummm Sir could you please step out of line and place your bags on that table over there." when entering the security line at any airport. Some might say the creases in my face are like a road map of where my mind has travelled
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)