10 April 2004: Shake the Dust From Your Feet

I've been spending a lot of time alone.

Resting.

Cocooning.

Integrating four months of initatic experience.

Updating my maps of reality, my concepts of who I am.

True initiations are psychic depth charges. One feels the impact, but one doesn't truly know the results until later, as one watches the bits and pieces of information float to the surface.

Some interesting pieces have surfaced this evening. They've been swimming around just below the surface for a long time now, and would have been visible if I'd really looked. Well, now I've seen them, and I can't look away. No sleep tonight until I've put them in writing...

Piece Number One: The notion of "Pack" is no longer meaningful to me. I am part of many tribes, many communities, with fluid boundaries, and I always will be. And I have friends. Many good friends, who are very dear to me. But there is no Pack for me anymore.

Piece Number Two: The specific community of people I used to think of, when I thought of "Pack," the group of people I thought of as my tribe or my community, has failed as a community, has failed as a tribe. Some of those people remain among my dearest friends, and always shall. Others haven't really been my friends for a long time, or never were, and many of them have never, quite frankly, shown any sign that they're even capable of anything resembling true friendship. Which need no longer concern me - now that I've renounced the "Pack," I no longer have any need to play anyone's reindeer games.

Piece Number Three: Most of the people who I thought of as my friends, even a year ago, haven't even met most of the people I think of as my friends now.

Piece Number Four: I don't know what I'll be doing next New Year's Eve, but I sure as hell won't be going back to Aleph's - not for another New Year's Eve party, and probably not for anything else, ever.

Geminica, Lexicat, Stagewalker: I know I've been a hermit lately, but rest assured that you are among those I still count as dear friends. If you want to be. I address the three of you here because you are the three I thought of who are regular readers of this journal who are so entwined with the scene I'm talking about that I thought that after reading the above, you might not be sure where you stood with me. Be sure.

Yoko: Despite not yet having met you face-to-face, I count you, too, as a good friend - one of the new ones in my life who has helped to remind me of what's real and important to me in friends and in community, and of how severely I've been compromising those values out of stubborn loyalty to people who have never shown the slightest capacity for loyalty themselves. This post must seem odd to you, because the friends of mine that you've met are all among the real ones, the very best ones. The failed community of which I speak, you have never had the misfortune to encounter, and now you won't have to - I'm finding better ones, helping to form better ones.

Ace: In retrospect, your visit last year was probably my first big reminder from the universe about what I was missing and where I was making bad compromises. Many of my decisions in the past weeks, days, and hours have been the fruition of that visit, and of our contact since. Thank you for being my friend, for being real, and for the good example you set of how to get the dream back on track.

"Do you take me for a fool,
Do you think that I don't see
That ditch out in the valley
That they're digging just for me?"

- Steely Dan, "Bad Sneakers"