Pax Nortona - A Blog by Joel Sax

Bill of Human Castration Information (http://www.eunuchinfo.com) writes:

Today I’m a calmer, more rational person. I’m also fatter, and probably less healthy. All in all, I’m happier for what I’ve been through. I think I’ve become a better person than I was before all this.

Sounds like the side effects of Prozac, to name just one psychopharmaceutical.

Technorati Tags: strange, odd, eunuch, castration, depression, antidepressants, eunuchs

+ 7 days….

Brian Kane has posted P.Z. Myer’s nicely worded Atheist Creed.

Still, same old problem that troubles all thinking along the theist/atheist rift: certainty.

My agnostic creed isn’t a creed at all, but just a simple statement of fact:

I don’t have the answers to ultimate questions and I can live without them.

Technorati Tags: Agnosticism, atheism, religion, spirituality

By chance after an especially hard “support group” meeting, I came home and picked up the blue loose-leaf binder that contains the poetry that I wrote while I was manic and during the first months of my stability. It wasn’t as bad as I had dreamed it, though I can’t see how I could create the like now.

Lately, both as I wake and as I sleep, I remember a dream of driving south on the Coast Highway, looking to my right and seeing a large, rocky island of cormorants, drenched by the ocean. I want to get to that island and I do my best to will myself there, but every time I start to glide there, I am brought down, sometimes at the base of a blue police box. I take this as an emblem of my thwartedness to write fine things anymore. The island is beyond my abilities.

Tonight, beneath the white blossoms of a purple plum tree and an electric lamp which hummed away the silence, I stood. Not a very interesting story to tell, but the moment was thick with the immediate presence of the night and the white corners of the condos.

Rabbits have begun to appear in the coyote brush that fringes Portola Hills. I saw three on a short walk around Concourse Park in the fog yesterday. In the spring, they will breed more, and then the offspring will discover that the burnt-out district is quite free of predators. So this year will be a good year for rabbits, at least until the bobcats, the coyotes, and the hawks find places to hide or to perch.

It was foggy until this morning. The hills are bright green where the grass is coming back, a pale green where they were sprayed with a hydroseeding compound, and brown in the places where neither Nature nor Humankind made provision. People still come to gawk: on my Saturday afternoon walk in the park I saw a cluster of tourists led by a man who was pointing. The rabbits paid them no heed. I just hurried home, holding my coat close.

High winds made it coat weather even with the sun.

Be nice, OK? Just vote for the winner.

It has occurred to me, after much therapy and thought about the suggestions that my psychologist makes, that to forgive we must feel safe. That is why it is easy to forgive the dead (unless we are plagued by a belief in ghosts) — they are no longer around physically.

This puts into a new light the exhortation by people of faith to forgive: “Forgive because you are backed by a greater power than this tormentor of yours. They can only wreak physical harm on you. When it is over, there is still the Life Everlasting.” This makes it easy for those faced with the demons of daily life and who believe. But the problem is “Is this just a lie we tell ourselves?”

Forgiveness is a good thing, but to manifest broadly without religion we need to create new terms for safety.

….

Yes, it has been some time. The materials for writing seemed to dry up, so I played The Sims, did volunteer work, and learned Latin. Tonight I harassed my wife into a late bedtime. The ritual goes like this. Late in the evening, I ask her the time which invariably is after 11. “Time for bed,” I say. And she keeps reading blogs without the slightest recognition of the hour. I repeat myself to the point of irritation — for myself if not for her — and watch as she slowly stops her typing then goes to the bathroom for the beginning of the pre-nocturnal postures such as the brushing of the teeth which she adopts, seemingly to irritate me still more, me who usually flops on the bed, waits a bit, and then rises to pursue some forgotten chore. Water runs in the bathroom for several minutes until, finally, she goes to bed, pulling a red night mask over her eyes.

Having seen her to bed, I’ll make the promise not to be such a stranger.

I know how much you like these….

If you were to characterize the posture of my mind lately, it is a figure seated at a table, fingers steepled in thought. I’ve been “gone” because I’ve been reading and studying Latin and generally doing what a few detractors in my life called “serious” things. How blessed blogs are because they reveal that those who buzz around don’t comprise the whole of the world out there, like a horde of naysaying demons, that there are thinkers and reflectors. But I hate writing about the nothing, the empty gray skies and the winds that barely riffle a leaf. Too much is symbol right now — I’m hesitant to describe the few incidents that happen in my life.