Revision of Pain from 10 July 2006 - 12:24pm

This is a total navel-gazing moment but eff it, it's my blog!

I'm in a lot of physical and emotional pain. Forty has hit me like a frying pan on a toon's nogging and it has taken me almost a month to write about my passage into official middleagehood because ... well ... it's painful.

I don't like it.

It sucks.

I hate being old.

Not because I look old but because I feel old. Every bone and muscle in my body has started to sink into decrepitude. I don't feel emotionally older than 30 yet here I am seeing my body crash and burn further and further away from my self.

What is worse than the pain is the horrible, terrible fear that keeps me awake at night : Four years ago I woke in a pool of sweat, smacked with the horrible realization that I would be cursed with ... the gift of longevity.

Longevity : It has long in it. You could force it and say it also has levity in there as well; though the levity starts at the L and stops for long before it comes back at the end with the EVITY and EVITY sounds fateful because its like brevity but for the longwinded.

Longevity. A gift and a curse.

At least five people, on both sides of my family, have died at 100 year plus. The people who have died at the ages of 70 or 80 have done so due to life-style illnesses : diabetes, heart disease, dementia. The others who have died younger did so due to either pandemics (flu), epidemics (dissentery, AIDS) or just plain old random tragedies.

My father died of dementia. His sister has Alzheimers. My mother's mother also died demented.

I don't have diabetes or heart disease. I don't have the work ethic to be attached to a drug problem. My cholesterol levels are laughably slow (or so said my doc). My blood pressure is always at a snail's pace. Even though all of these accelerate senility (which means, I may well be spared of it), they still don't ward off fate : My fear is that I will spend the last 10 or 15 years of my life completely bed bound and completely out of my wits, not even being able to scream my name because I will have forgotten even my own face.

I fear living in the hellish limbo of senility.

So I write so I wont forget.

I write to keep busy, active, purposeful, meaningful.

My blogs are not finished products. The blogs I produce and write are all about the process. The process is the site itself; the technological backbones that make it possible for me and you to share our pain and joy and insights to the world.

The writing here is not meant to be didactic eventhough I can never help but be 'teacherly' most of the time. The writing here is about bringing balance to our universe, to my personal universe and your personal universe.

I am constantly asked why I blog, why I publish blogs. My answers have gotten shorter and shorter : I blog because I can. I blog because I must.

The word that keeps popping is aliciente; salve. Communication shares its root with community and communion. That's what blogging is to me. That is the foundation of networking. It's about how we make connections through the convergence of our dreams and desires, our fears and nightmares or just our need to shoot the shit.

Today I just read the most fantastic philoshophical insight I have had in a long time. G.H. Hovagimyan is an artist and writer for the mother-site of the netart movement, Thing.net. It was for a discussion at the Empyre mailing list that he wrote the following :

The artist makes it possible to continue living in spite of a shattering event. Make no mistake; art is not social work or psychoanalysis. Most of all it is not a diversion (divertissement) or entertainment. It is not about teaching (didacticism) or the marketing of high priced objects for the idle rich. True art does not make one comfortable. What it does is reorder our sense of the world and our internal narrative.

Along with the changes in my body, my life has been changing drastically for the past year.

My current joke is that blogging killed my marriage. I am still legally married and given our financial constraints we still share the same apartment, but the marriage we once had is naught. Cognitively, the marriage we once had is gone, it's done. What we have at the moment? We don't know. That not knowing is both a source of hope and pain.

I sometimes wish I had never started writing again. Now I understand why I had writer's block : There are writers that write for the money. Others write to discover the Truth. Then others, like me, who believe the moment you try to put down living into words is the moment life becomes literature.

There is a whole life of Liza spread all across the internets. Most instances I remember yet I am sure there are moments I have long forgotten. This realization of a public life and a public voice and a place in the building of History as it unfold on the internet is what makes it impossible for me to go back to a life blissfully alienated from my self. i refuse to go back to a life focused with the trappings of domesticity, of a job, of trophy kids in good schools, in the SUV or the suburban home with a life filled with the 'right' friends and the 'right' connections and the 'right' possessions, the 'right' attitude.

Living life as I do is a painfully countercultural experience. At least in the 70's I would have had the punk clothes to go with my attitude.

Every decision I make in my life, in the privacy of my home, has become burdened with the realization of every consequence and the fear of having to live with 40, 50, 60 years of regret.

I know I need levity.

I know I need to smile.

Yet there is no laughter after pain.

Such is life.

Such is art.

Part of my distrust of political bloggers and my disgust at their echo chambering is recognizing how they feed into each other's alienation. It's so great to live a life blissfully unaware that you're not only an asshole but you are part of the problem you feign to want to correct. It's so great to be lost in the cesspool of dogmatic cheerleading.

I honestly don't get any satisfaction out of living a life of politics. Politics not only corrupt but they are not transformative. Politics is all about keeping the status quo going. Politics has nothing to do with revolution for revolution is about changing not just governments but the structure of the culture that created the oppressive government in the first place.

Revolution is about changing the way we do things in our lives, in our communities, in our businesses, in our governments and ultimately in our world. It's about changing habits, changing ways of seeing and thinking.

Revolution is a way of life.

For a revolutionary to truly have an impact in her country, she needs to trasform her life and make it revolutionary. With every action, with every decision, with every move. Revolution is uncomfortable, painful, destrutive because it is transformative.

Revolution is about changing the way we live Life.

And so with change comes pain.

The trick is to take that pain and not turn it into suffering. The trick is to take that pain and turn it into, and to paraphrase G.H., a new internal world order.

I may not make art but I blog.

It's a start.

It's a must.

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