PLAYING WITH FIRE...

April 6th's HEAVY QUESTION...

Where does honesty stop and brutality begin?

One of my Friends Indeed out there wrote:
I've learned (the hard way) that I need to keep the extent of honesty with myself a few steps ahead of my honesty with others. When it gets turned around it is usually brutality not honesty. Now, as to what I have recommended. My advice is based solely on my experience — with most valuable lessons learned the hard way. You seem like a pretty manic, spontaneous guy. Nothing wrong with those characteristics except when you are playing with fire.
You are currently playing with fire. Slow down. That's my advice.

I have been playing with fire. My Friend Indeed has repeatedly warned me that I was playing with fire, but I couldn’t see it. I was just trying to be “honest”.

If I am playing with fire, I am neither getting the fun nor the thrill… I was telling my friend T this afternoon that I wish I had ear-lids to go with my eyelids —but that what I really NEEDED was a mouth-lid. And this evening's discussion has left me with the burning awareness that it is fire I am dealing with — I just don't think I am playing with it —at this point it seems to be playing with me.

Another evening, another failure to find a mouth-lid. And this time, it became clear enough even for me to see that I was indeed playing with fire — every time I opened my mouth and said something “honest” I was setting one without even seeing what I was doing. And, far worse, it became quite clear that this had been going on from the beginning. Where were my eyes? Where were my ears? So I am resolved to do my damnedest to keep my mouth shut, lid or no lid.

Where does honesty stop and brutality begin? Somewhere between my mouth and her ears. Somewhere between my need to vent what has been pressurized for so long, and my complete incapability [?], unwillingness [?], lack of the gumption required, to see how things looked from the other end of the telescope. Until I have some kind of seat in the control room of this Fully Operational Death-star I seem to be flying at high speed toward collision, I think that my only option is to listen to that “still, small voice” saying, “keep your mouth shut”.

It’s not that I haven’t been trying all my life. For years, I would go into business meetings with “KYMS” discreetly written somewhere I could not avoid looking at it: on a legal pad, on my appointment book, on the web of my left hand between thumb and index finger [and how discreet was THAT?] — anything to keep it in sight enough to keep it in MIND, if there is anything left of it at this point. I am beginning to feel that I lost it, not dropped it out of a moving car on the interstate “lost”, but put it down in the middle of a stack of papers that hasn’t been filed “lost”, let it fall down the sink drain baffle into the bottom of the gooseneck “lost” — it’s an “Oh, my God, how long can I go on without one” kind of “lost”.

I may finally have pushed the one person who has stood by me through thick and thin — and things have flown thick and fast here, and things have worn pretty thin here — over the edge. Where once I found myself alone on the brink, on the razor’s edge, and petrified lest I fall wrong, petrified that I fall at all— now we are BOTH literally on the brink, on the razor’s edge, and if we fall, everything else comes down with us. That much finally sank in. Not me, not even “us”, but everything else — which I once so proudly proclaimed that I had resigned myself to losing — and far and away, light-years beyond the “everything”, far and away the worst: EVERYBODY else.

And yesterday, in my ignorance, in my complete thoughtlessness, I did something so terrible that it still makes my blood run cold: I have fallen in love with gmail, and thoughtlessly sent an invitation to join to two family members from my “anonymous” account. As those of you who have contacted me know, every message I send includes the link to this blog, but that did not occur to me until this morning. The invitation went out to one person who would have been devastated by what I have posted, and another, alas not the only one in my family, who would have been unable to resist passing it around. The Non-Resister has already assured me that he had deleted it as spam already — leaving me in the unhappy position of having alerted him to the dynamite the link contained. But that first One, my God, my son, my son.

How will I face the woman I promised not to tell ANYONE until July and tell her I have told one of our children not a bearable, expurgated Cliff Note’s sentence or two, but everything there is to tell, and then some? I think that something like this is what the "sin against the holy spirit" means...

Dear Friend Indeed, dear friends of all stripes and shades of camouflage,
let me be a lesson to you.

I was not,
I am not,
playing with fire.

I AM FIRE.