No resolutions here, just a goal. My plan is to post on a regular basis, not less than weekly, to A Space True and North. To do this I will have to maintain a focus that has eluded me over the past several months. However I think it is possible to do such a thing. Sit down, put fingers on keys and write. Grab the time early in the day or late an night.
In recent days I have engaged with people from my old home town on Facebook(FB). It has been kind of odd for me to do this. When I left my home I was in full fledged flight. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want any thread of my being to be tied to the place. I wanted pure and simple to be gone.
The departure from one’s home is not pure and simple; it is anything but. Every bit of your being is infused with the zeitgeist of the time and the emotions, the rituals, the fears and the hopes of the place you are departing. In my youth I spent 18 years in one house with a stable two parent family. No matter how I have tried to deny it I am made up of their genetic predispositions. Molded by their hopes and their fears based on their life experiences I still opted to go into the world.
When I was younger I really believed in behaviorism. B.F. Skinner was an idol. Everything about a person was environmental. Now that I am a parent I am pretty sure I was as close to totally wrong as I could be on this point. Watching my children from their earliest days they have had familial behavioral traits that I have and that my father and mother before me had. My wife sees behaviors that mimic her family. These behaviors came too early to have been from the environment of living with us. The behaviors came so strongly that they had to be hard wired.
Somewhere I heard that phrase, “No matter where you go, there you are.” I think in reality it is something like no matter where you go there go the genetic patterns you are predisposed to live out. I have digressed.
In approaching my old hometown mates I decided to share one of the seminal experiences in my life. I had posted it on this site a long time ago but that raw form wasn’t right for the hometown audience. In my redraft for the hometown crowd I took out some names, dealt with some nuances that might be hurtful and just generally cleaned up the writing. I took out a bunch of epithets and toned down the drug use. But given the era of the piece the drug use could not go away in any significant manner. When only one word would do I left it in. Sometimes you just have to say fuck or shit. They just work.
I decided providing a link to this site was a bit risky. I mean the Buddhist ramblings, the depraved talk over the years and you lot who make comments, well it just didn’t seem a good match. I am at 300+ posts and some of them are quite tawdry. I actually had to create a new blog just for the hometown FB crowd. But it was fun. However A Space True and North is still my first love when it comes to writing. I promise (to Chris especially) I will try and say something meaningful as this New Year progresses. My love to all of you who read me on this 2nd day of January 2012 in this my 317th post.
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