Solomon, the Ming Dynasty, and Jackson Pollock...

I am a man who loves to be left to his own devices, even the ones that don't exactly... work.
I hate asking for help and admitting that what I have cooking isn't amazing and will someday be the next thing that shocks the world.

I don't let people in. If I were some sort of mad scientist I would make it my first order of business to create the world's strongest lock to keep everyone from meddling with the very thing that I wanted to create to change the world that I want to keep away... and so you see a nasty case of the catch-22's forming.

When I write a song, I don't want anybody to hear it, because I don't want their opinion,( even though, what motivates alot of what I write is people's opinions, however unspoken they may be.)

When I am giong through a crisis in my life, however big or small, I don't want to let people into the laboratory of my mind and life becuase they might have a solution that wasn't already on my chalkboard.

The thing that brought about this realization was a few things that happened tonight. I came home to find my cat with a soaking wet head and the smoking gun of a squirt bottle sitting on the living room end table which I use to deter less than desirable behavior. However, I was not the one to inflict this punishment. I felt indignant that someone could call out negative behavior in my cat besides me. I went on to find an empty pizza box in the kitchen and traces of marinara sauce in the living room which led me to infer that my roomates saw an acceptable deterrent to Felix's insatiable love for anything that humans are eating, and used it.

The next happened when I was looking for something to keep my sleepless mind occupied that wasn't TV watching. Partly becuase I watch entirely too much TV, the practice of which is slowly ruining my life, and partly becuase CW5 changed their programming line up and I couldn't watch south park and King of the Hill reruns when I fel I should.

SO I turned to youtube, that glorious beacon of timewasting, and I decided that guitar tutorials might do the trick, but I 'just found myself getting frustrated, trying to take the things the video was showing and play a simplified version myself and just ended up shutting off the video and playing material I already knew that I thought was pretty good. Was I just tired? was it too hard? No. I just didn't' want to be told what to do.

I am coming more and more to the realization that in my life I haven't learned how to accept criticism and instruction, but rather how to more gracefully deflect it. Like so many things that have turned south in my life, if I can't take it, I just build up scar tisue until I don't even notice what may be a constant barrage of teaching, warning etc.

I haven't learned how to internalize things from those wiser, I have just learned to look more interested while just beneath the surface I compile my cynical pithy little opinion on what is being thrown at me.

Solomon teaches over and over and over about how we are to accept instruction and change. I think that sadly I am finding more said about me in the advice given to those outside of myself when solomon gives the advice to the wise about teaching fools

Proverbs 23:9 - Do not speak to a fool, for he will scorn the wisdom of your words.

This calls to mind how I have built up a tolerance to the advice of my parents. For so long I thought that they just didn't know me and were so far removed from my thought processes and situations that they could never speak anything into my life. But I found out one very important thing, they are almost always RIGHT. Looking back I wish I would have let them in. Letting them know what was going on in my life instead of just saying that I had everything under control could have saved me from so many scrapes and bruises I've had to take.

Even in something as simple as getting through school I've kept them clueless and just now I'm starting to see that it's really hurt them, and on an even larger scale, the distance that I've put between us to keep control of my life and my image,has caused them to see a different person than I know myself to be. So much for trying to be perceived how I want to be right?

Proverbs 18:2 - A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own
opinions.

this stings even as I write it into the blogosphere. I take an undue amount of pride in being opinionated and too many times, it's gotten me into trouble that I can't talk my way out of and that I can't build up enough scar tissue to avoid, which leads into the next scripture...


Proverbs 17:10 - A rebuke impresses a man of discernment more than a hundred lashes a fool.

What would take a simple rediriection for most would take my entire world crashing around me for me to realize - I would sit back and scoff at people who were so anal about school work and gettign through school and getting their life started, and little did I know that at that very moment I was laying bricks in a foundation that would leave me failing classes, breaking relationships, losing jobs and sinking into a depression I don't have the motivation to fight my may out of.

Like so many things in my life, I can draw it back to a scene from the simpsons,...

Lisa is conducting and experiment to see who is smarter, a hamster, or her brother. in one test, she sends an electric charge through a cupcake. The hamster approaches it, sniffs it, bites it, receives a shock and runs away having learned a valuable lesson "never trust the hand of man". In the next scene, bart approaches the cupcake and after grabbing it and receiving a shock bcomes frustrated in the manner of curly the "stooge" and proceeds to continuously grab the sweet treat, and continuously receive ashock simply repeating "ouch... ouch.... ouch..."

Funny and haunting... It makes me wonder what it will take for me to learn. When the words of those I love, those I trust, the government, the ones who created my body and the one who saved my soul stop having an effect, what kind of intellectual and emotional fortres have I built?

What will it take to tear it down? Can I disassemble from the inside out? or are the invading hordes already marching forward to my doom?

All I can do is just start something. I can stop swallowing wisdom like a snake, just choking it down whole, never trying to break it down, just caring that it's no longer outside my body, and maybe being more like a cow. Chewing, regurgitating, digesting, neither paints a prety picture, but the psychological and spiritual landscape I've created would make jackson pollock turn his head.....