One Hit KO

Several people have commented on the lack of activity. I feel I should explain the situation and remedy it as quickly as possible.

Two weeks ago I started getting headaches. Not minor headaches. Full-blown migraines.
My entire life I’ve rarely ever gotten headaches, and never migraines. I took some painkillers and went back to my day. Later that night I attended a LAN party and nearly passed out. Since then I have been in a cycle of slowly rising headaches followed by crippling migraines. As I have no health insurance and significant debt from my previous health problems I cannot see a doctor.

For me the migraine is perhaps the ultimate and most potent enemy. Years back when I was stronger I could simply will away a minor headache or shut down pain completely in an injured limb. It was one of a variety of interesting abilities I picked up in my life. Another was the ability to control my heart rate, body temp, breathing and metabolism.
Such gifts are wonderful and incredibly useful in many situations. They are however just that: Gifts.

They are gifts that require a certain outlook on life, they require a strong spirit and a soul free of artificial evils (I.E. Greed, lust, sloth. Etc). I became unworthy of them when I slipped into a selfish and ultimately self-damaging path. It requires an unconventional combination of perfectionist and zen guru to avoid excesses and focus on goals and self improvement.

At the LAN party I was playing Warcraft 3 when my migraine struck so fiercely that I nearly passed out. Warcraft 3 isn’t a regular game to me; I’m a champion at it. Literally.
I was playing my best race, with my beat hero on a map I knew very well.
The harder I would focus the more intense the migraine became. I was ambushed, pincer-ed and destroyed. It was by the barest of margins that I slipped my workers away and rebuilt.

My teammate was dead, my base was destroyed and my two heroes were level 4 and 3. My enemies (people I taught to play, so hardly weak) had 7 heroes over level 6 between the 4 of them. Each skirmish, each calculation turned the screws again until my body began to convulse. This would be where most people give up. But I kept building, kept scouting and kept planning.

Finally my chance arrived, In a spectacular battle I killed 5 enemy heroes, 2 full armies and the bases they were guarding. If I had been at full health it would’ve been an impossible feat. But with my arms violently shaking and my eyes filled with searing pain it surpassed anything within human capacity. I won that incredible but meaningless victory. Shortly afterwards the pain forced me to collapse.

The reason migraines are so awful is they get worse when you concentrate. The intense mental focus required for RTS games is one example of something not wise to do under a migraine attack. The harder I pushed myself the worse the migraine became. It might seem silly that I endured so much pain because of a game. But I feel that if anything is worth doing it is worth doing well. You should never quit something you love and you should never give up.

The gift to surpass your human limits, even for a short time is one that I lost from my own folly. It seems a tad unusual but I was able, for that one battle to surpass my limits in every way. I have freed myself from that terrible and haunting pain by the strength of my own spirit.

Up to this point I haven’t been able to write very well, but I am slowly learning to understand and control the headaches enough that I can resume a normal work and play.If I am right, willpower and soul are enough to overcome anything. Anything.

Forgiveness

I’ve come down off the roller coaster of the last few weeks very successfully.
Since I am only now getting back to the work I love (and hate) I have had a lot of time to think and meditate on what path I walk now.

Some people have misunderstood my earlier blogpost relating to death. I did not in fact try to kill myself; rather I didn’t particularly want to stay alive. My body had maxed out on pain and I simply wanted to move on. It was a peaceful almost serene feeling. I didn’t feel bad about the things left undone, or the people I would leave behind. I felt completely detached from everything in the world.

Reality has such gravity to me after that. Everything seems more real then it was before. Colors are more vibrant and sharp; food has more taste and aroma. The unworldliness I brushed upon changed me in ways I didn’t notice immediately.

The second thing I noticed was an argument I had online just recently. I asserted that anyone who neglected spirituality was broken as a human being. I debated with great fervor the existence of god and of deeper spiritual meaning. While I’ve long believed in god and of deeper spiritual meaning, I never forcefully asserted it to a non-believer. I felt oddly compelled to do so in this case.

It feels like the experience has allowed me to grow spiritually in ways I hadn’t realized or expected. While emotionally I feel disconnected still, spiritually I feel calm and fulfilled.
If I am becoming something else I am doing so at without my perception. My thoughts and feelings appear the same, yet I am most certainly not the same person I was months ago. The rush of thoughts on the matter overwhelmed me and it is only now I can speak of them with clarity.

I started to work out again, I’ve started to meditate and practice my Qigong again. My body is slowly forgetting the terrible pain it has endured. I feel oddly alive to stretch my legs and run again. I appreciate the beauty of the trees and stars once more. It took death to fully understand that I was taking life for granted. I don’t think I will ever hate the sensation of a good midnight run.

I cannot be free of all burdens however. Some weigh upon me so heavily that I feel compelled to struggle and free myself. One is forgiveness.

It can be said that I have great emotional endurance, that I can withstand incredible amounts of punishment before I finally yield. That endurance was pushed to it’s limited and broken over a year ago when I first became ill. Since then I have had limited emotional strength in my life. It was not one cut, but a hundred biting stinging wounds that bled me of my strength.

When you hold in hurt and anger it consumes you like a fire. Repressed feelings become deviant and unhealthy… sometimes they lead to obsession, apathy or deeper more unsettling deviance. In the past I sought forgiveness and to mend the small wounds. When you do not keep attending to them the wounds reopen and bleed anew. They are not given a full chance to heal. Many of those wounds now close, I have dozens and dozens left to fix. The hardest ones however are impossible.

Trust and forgiveness are precious and powerful things. I feel that before I move on I must attempt to do as much as possible. In my spirit I feel that I it is somehow vital that I repair all my relationships, from the smallest to the most deepest. Mostly I have been successful, but a few holdouts refuse to talk to me, or are outright hostile. Some of been tricked into believing I am more sinister then I am in truth. Miscommunication and false information have made an unflattering mockery of my true self.

More spiritual? Yes. But my heart still bleeds when it is cut. It is an emptiness to overcome with friendship and love. I am most tired. Perhaps I’ll clear this up tomorrow. Goodnight.

Veiled Threats

I received some criticism after my last blogpost, much of it personal in nature.
It seems some people thought of my honest words as manipulative and my motivations selfish.
For quite a long time I’ve ignored when people attack me, I’ve ignored scathing attacks on both my character and quality of my work. (I can accept the latter but not the former.)
I have even ignored obvious attacks on my personal life, many of which came at the benefit of my rivals. I have come to people with frank honesty and myself been deceived into trust and then betrayed.

This e-mail however was little more then a veiled threat.
The apathy surrounding me in recent months has done nothing to help. Apathy caused by the heartbreak surrounding both my social and spiritual life. I had no real desire to lash out at detractors before. That changed. Whoever this is… and I have my ideas; is going to regret everything he has said.

I do not take well to threats. Even subtle ones.

Still Alive

I apologize for the lack of updates over the past few weeks. It has been a poorly concealed fact that my health has been poor the last few months. Those closest to me have known the truth: That an infection was eating my brain and nervous system. It's been removed and I'll make a full recovery.Earlier I wrote a lengthy description of what happened. Ultimately I decided that a detailed account of my suffering would further no ends. There is only one event that I feel should be told. I had to wait 10 days for my operation.

Around the seventh day the pain, hallucinations, isolation and emotional pain finally took it’s toll on me. My body grew cold and my heart slowed. The life slowly drained from my body. My breathing grew shallow. I knew instinctively that my body was dying. Part of me wanted to let go; I wanted to leave that body filled with pain. But I couldn’t go. People who loved me called me back.
I teetered on the edge for a while. Several times I lapsed into unconsciousness only to be shaken awake again.

I could not in my heart find a reason to live. Over the past two years most of them had disappeared. I ignored the slow destruction of my soul until precious few things matter to me anymore.
But still I could not ignore the pleading of a few who would not let me go.
It is a strange thing to say, but I was not afraid of death. When I was young I feared the certainty of death with such fervor; when I became a Taoist I looked at death as merely the start of a new adventure.

All of these things swirled around in my mind, until I remembered a quote from the Tao Te Ching. “The sage is filled with life so death cannot enter him.”
I had abandoned the fullness of my life. The realization that I had given up before I had finished struck me hard. And so I took the deepest breaths that I could, and I filled my soul with life.

Two days later (and 1 day before I was scheduled) I had my operation.

Given time the scars will heal, the debts will be repaid, the soul will become whole again. I didn’t have a startling epiphany about the true purpose of my life. I received no insight into the universe. Nothing-profound happening to me except one thing: I’m still alive.

I guess I lied when I said I gained nothing profound from my experiences. Everything that I was before, all that I had lost in pain and torment over the past years came pouring back to me. I gained nothing new. Just things I should’ve remembered all along.
For those interested I’m starting two more blogs soon. One will be about my local political work and the other will be an analyzed view of the gaming industry (and other related fields). On top of that I have a professional grade comic and some other stuff coming down the pipes, plus a redesign (and subsequent editing/reformatting) of this blog. I’m not making it a secret. I need to pay off my medical bills.

Mothers Day

When I was young I enjoyed bird watching. I would watch the progress the local bird’s had over time. One evening I noticed the mother of a nest hadn’t returned for a few days. The lone chick made a very shrill lonely sound, as its hunger grew worse. By the end of the next day the baby chick had died. Without it’s mother it never had a chance.

That little bird had quite an effect on me. I too didn’t have a mother bird to nurture me. Of course I had various surrogates that kept me alive… but a surrogate is not a true mother. I felt a strong, tragic connection with that tiny bird. It wasn’t until that point that I understood the power a mother had. She was responsible for the very life of her child and nothing could ever fully replace her.

It’s easy to become a parent. An act of lustful indiscretion can easily result in a child. It’s another thing entirely to be a mother or father. A true mother shapes the life of her children more then anything else. People with selfish hearts do not make good parents; neither do the vain, the star-struck ideologues, the reckless, the violent or the careless.
Children inherent these traits, or rebel against them. They are shaped by the nature of their parents in ways I can only barely fathom or describe. Even the unfit have children; those children have more unfit children. Drug users sire drug users just like intellectuals sire intellectuals. One could theorize that the world will remain in status quo because of this. But more and more… those fit to be parents are unwilling. The brightest of our society choose to have no children because of the time involved. The poorest and least educated have multiple children early in their lives.

Of the best kinds of mothers there is one I hold in highest esteem. I struggled for a better part of a week looking for the exact word to use. But I couldn’t find one. I searched Internet databases and dusty books looking for the exact and perfect word. There wasn’t one. So I will tell you what the ideal parent is. I will tell you what I hope I can be someday, and I will tell you part of who my mother was.

From a strictly medical standpoint I shouldn’t be alive. My mother had a serious heart condition and having a child would, and almost did kill her. Her doctors urged her to abort me to save her life. She discounted them immediately. Even if it meant her life I would be born. I often wonder what thoughts went through her mind before I was born. She knew the risk it posed to her; she knew the risk it posed to me.

My mother herself never knew her real parents. My grandfather a former navy pilot adopted her and brought her to Utah when she was still very young. I now know from various accounts that she had trouble finding adoptive parents because of the nature of her heart problems. Back in those days it was believed she wouldn’t live past her teenage years.

I did a lot of research on my mother’s early life trying to understand her… and myself a little better. She conflicted with my pious grandparents over their church. I have heard many different accounts of her early life. But her own personal accounts speak of constant fighting with my grandfather, anger towards god and a wild almost reckless disregard for her own safety. Although there are no specifics (thankfully, nobody wants to know everything about their parents.) she talked of things she later regretted and coming to grips with her own mortality and beliefs. She emerged from that dark period a strong compassionate woman. People have told me that my mother was the kindest person they ever knew. People I didn’t know would walk up to me and tell me about my mother. It was no surprise she lived her life with intensity and joy. She outlived her doctor’s estimates by years and years. For the time period she lived it would be considered almost a miracle to survive as long as she did.

It was a bitter irony that it was her heart that failed her. I never knew her yet I could feel her kindness when people spoke about her. She was creative and intelligent, and bubbled with the kind of warmth you rarely see anymore.

I often wonder what went through her mind before I was born. I have been told that her love was so fierce it held off death itself. I have come to believe in recent years that my mother had in mind for me to do what she could not. I know She did not want me to replace her; she never had in mind an heir to her life. Yet I often feel that I have become exactly what my mother wanted. I am a writer, I am not held down by oppressive religions or dogmas. I have a clear strong heart and freedom to be whomever I choose.

She survived my birth barely, but it took a lot out of her. Two years and two months later she died. To live as long as she did was nothing short of a miracle. I know now and will forever know that it was her love that kept her alive those years. And each year on mother’s day I leave her flowers to show her that I haven’t forgotten her love or her sacrifice. There is no word appropriate to call a person of that caliber. The only word I know is mom.

Sundering the Light and Dark

Sorry for the lack of activity late, I’ve been pulled in a hundred directions recently and my mood hasn’t been conducive to new writing.

Given a brief glance a person seems so full of contradictions and inconsistencies that it is a wonder we function at all. A caring priest harbors pedophilia, a loving husband and father is an adulterer, a policemen steals or a teacher lies. On the outside we polish out and minimize the inconsistencies. We put forward a solid message about our identity. I am a Taoist; I present that to the world when in truth I frequently doubt if I am what I say I am. I fail to practice my beliefs often and find myself in situations I know I could’ve avoided. We lie to the entire world about what he are, he hide disabilities, weaknesses, feelings, secrets and our true beliefs. The conflict between who we really are and whom we present ourselves as is perhaps one of the greatest and least told.

The illusion and façade is vital, without it we wouldn’t survive. We wrap ourselves in a deep crust of apathy, normalcy, arrogance, religion, pride and status. Even when we speak of things that are true we spin them with an air of drama or feign effortlessness. It is rare now that a person’s heart matches the persona they put forth.

Last week at Virginia Tech a student killed 30 of his classmates. He honed an identity of an outsider and a rebel. He portrayed the world as a cold enemy. Nobody challenged it; nobody confronted him about it. I cannot speak for what was truly in his heart. But when I saw this on TV everyone around me condemned him as a monster, it’s not an unfairly earned label. But the first thing I felt for him was sympathy. A long time ago I felt the same way he did. He became a monster and I didn’t.

We embrace labels and titles. We seek to define ourselves to one another: To craft and hone an image. I know an overwhelming number of people who call themselves “catholic” or “mormon” or “atheist” or “vegan” who do not follow their beliefs and only speak of them when trying to portray themselves as religious or spiritual. The second you make a crack about the pope you awake the indigent catholic in an otherwise un-catholic person.

The labels that we seek to define us are truly nothing more then anchors to mediocrity and sameness. They restrict us to being a specific person and bind us from becoming another different. In essence we impede our own spiritual, social, emotional and physical growth. A martial artist neglects to strengthen his mind, a priest neglects his body, a socialite starves her soul of spiritual nourishment. A single mother once asked me what she should do, she was depressed and lost with her life. I thought about it and told her to go hiking. “Single mothers don’t go hiking.” She told me. It boggles my mind that she wouldn’t go hiking because she didn’t think that’s what single mothers did. She took a negative label (Don’t write hate mail. It’s still a negative label no matter how much I hate it that way.) like single mother and used it to restrict her life. Months later I talked her into hiking with me and she loved it.


I have over time sought to wrap myself in different labels: boyfriend, writer, taoist, gamer, guild-officer, democrat, martial artist, dungeon-master, big brother and warrior.
Each defined me in a different way, before I became a democrat I never thought about social reform in a broader sense. I never felt strongly about freedom and choice. The positive aspect of that label helped me understand new things about myself. But at the same time I turned against beliefs I had held my entire life (Gun Control most obviously).
You make the label and the label makes you. Or worse someone else makes the label and it makes you.

Before you decide to reject labels. Remember you still need them. When I started to become sick my images and self-concept unraveled quickly. I was a helpless warrior, a dungeon-master with no players, and a martial artist with no technique, a Taoist with no soul, a gamer with no skills, a guild-officer without a guild and a writer with no passion.

My karmic punishment was the loss of my self-image, the loss of my abilities and labels.
When I lost the use of my hands I could not play games, I could not grasp my sword or make a fist. The labels that defined me also defined my worth. Without them I felt increasingly useless and distant from my true self.

That is after all what I have been talking about: The true self. We show it to a few special people before we lock it away once more. We harbor doubts in the darkest parts of our soul. It is a dark mirror that reflects light. We seek to eliminate the inconsistencies and contradictions for our outer persona; yet when we examine with honesty we realize that we are filled with both light and darkness. Without both we are incomplete and imbalanced.