alternative title, SO what! (an all over the place monologue)
I was recently chastized for my writing here on the blog. Which I found characteristicly funny,,, I was chastized for “Metaphors, Allegories, and euphimisms”
THAT, isn’t a bad thing, thats a STYLE, nothing more. Maybe it could be percieved as ‘hiding behind a mask’ and ya might be right, but then, you might be totally friggin’ wrong too. I found a long time ago, when I first started blogging, people didn’t want the unvarnished truth; They wanted it whitewashed and sanitized for consumption. Whether that truth were about the world at large or about something going on in my personal realm, they wanted it ‘prettified’, not the military debrief version.
So I complied. I even had thousands of readers way back when. Things have changed in the spheres since then. Fakebook, X(formerly Twitter) before those was MySpace,,, as those grew, blogging has seen a steady drop in popularity. My site here is one that started feeling that back in 2012 or so. In no small part this blog was a casualty of an inner war amongst patriots, and I really couldn’t care less about the readership numbers anymore. This is more a place for me to vent out things, instead of letting them dwell internally, potentially starting infections or even worse things. (do you see the metaphor there? nothing hidden, its just a different way of saying ‘THIS IS MY CATHARSIS” nicer, with imagry and feeling added. STYLE,,, understand better?)
I spent 16 years on this hillside, self appointed isolation from society at large, with only the nets and an occasional foray into societal circles (VERY small group of close friends slowly acquired for that) I did that, not out of fear, but out of growth. I needed to make sure that the problems I had seen were ‘MINE’ or something else. Well, after 16 years, I can own them,,, they weren’t all “mine”, but I did chose to accept them and let them control who I was then.
Not anymore.
See, I LIKE who I have become. I like the fact that I can hear falsehoods as they are being spoke, and I choose whether or not to let the speaker ‘get away with it’. Usually, I just ignore it, and keep it in my mind that there is a distrust in that person: either they are hiding something, or they are trying to hide something from themselves. Usually the latter. Most people aren’t even aware of how much they lie to themselves. I guess its a sign of the times where we have an active media system that convolutes the truth on a daily basis to keep the masses at ease. Societal lubrication writ large if you will.
So when I look back on a dialogue and my head starts itching, I have to ask,,, whats the truth? And I am reminded of something a cop once told me; “there are three sides to every story, His, Hers, And the Truth”. Everyone has a different perception of reality.. its the nature of the beast that we are what we are: 8lbs of salty fatty tissue hidden in the cranium of a meat puppet with very limited sensory organs for input. The only serious sensory organ we have is our skin, the largest organ on our body. and its only capable of so much. Our eyesight is limited to a finite number of frequencies, same with our hearing,, our olfactory senses are pretty damned strong, but usually tied to emotion and survival, but even there, we are handicapped compared to our four-footed brethern,,, They “Read” smells like we read books.
Perceptions lie. Thats not an accusation, thats a fact. Our filters are biased and what you see is not what someone else sees. Ask any interrogator: If they are interviewing two people and those people have the exact same story, they are both lying. PERIOD, So the stories being different doesn’t mean they are lying outright, only that their senses told them what they did, and THOSE may have been wrong.
Another aspect is memory. Very few people can retain ‘video-like’ memories for more than 24 hours. You’ll start to massage the memory for ‘storage’ reasons. Verbatim recall is even worse.
It took me 16 years to learn to let people be people, living in their limited scope realities, perceiving as they trained themselves to.
It took me 16 years of letting go to find that I could let go of reality as I see it and accept that others see it differently. I always had something of an autisitic streak about details. And thats not to say I have eidetic memory (I do, but only for written words) Even so, like anyone, my memory can be skewed, waylaid, forgotten, Especially that ‘forgotten’ part. There are events that I have been involved in, that I do not recall, but others, more than one, DO.
There are also events that I have been involved in, that are etched like an acid pictograph in my brain.. THOSE, not pretty by any means, but I hold them close because to forget those would change me. They are solid reasons I am who I am today. Why I decided to ‘drop out’ 16 years ago.
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We honor our fallen, those that ‘gave all’ on today. Some of us, honor those same every time we think of them, think of those times. We never forget ‘then’. ‘we have seen the elephant’ and know what beasts await on that side: Why do you think we hold back so much when we ‘should be stackin’ bodies’,,,, We know,,,,
So what? Remember them, remember then if you were there. Some saw far more than I did, but what I saw was more then enough. I can still smell the bodies burning on the Highway of Death, I can still see the dead in the trenches and bunkers we destroyed; smelled before seen. I can still recall vividly that ‘day’ of darkness, sitting on an ammo can shitting my guts out, high noon and so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, if it weren’t for the oil well fires in the distance. I see the rain pooling anywhere it could pool, and it was as dark as the sky, black, inky black.
Those memories are why I started writing; the first sword in the arsenal. Sometimes those words cut back; critiques of those that think someone is hiding behind a mask. So what if I am. I know the beast the mask hides, shackled and chained, rarely loosed upon the world because the destruction that follows is never repairable. Keep that in mind when you are dealing with one of the quiet ones,,, And don’t take it personal when you tell such, ‘Goodbye’ and they concur without argument. They know when to walk away, save face, respect memories. They know who they are inside; they don’t need your approval, nor your ‘fixing’. They just ‘Are’,,,,
Today, Honor those that have fallen. Those of us that didn’t fall, wish they were still with us today, we could really use them in these days, the days yet to come.
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