(Re)Born

I shot lat night with a younger model.  I had made the date before I got sick, and I don't like to cancel, so even though I was shaky and foggy and knew I would be weak and tired, we shot.  I thought to shoot quickly and briefly, but it went on and on.  After we shot, she sat on my couch and talked for hours.  I am a good listener, a good interviewer, because I am truly fascinated by people and their lives.  They tell me things that are thrilling.  They reveal themselves in intimate ways.  I am a sweet man, sincere, honest. . . .  It is a talent.

Her tale went from here to there in no order.  I will tell it here sometime in the future.  Perhaps.  I am finding it tricky to tell people's secrets here, not because they are secrets (they are stories we all hold somewhere deep inside us), but because I can't make the stories not reflect poorly on me somehow.  I mean, how can a poor old bastard tell the tale of a naif without looking. . . well. . . probably like what he looks?  Sometimes I think to go underground with a new blog with nothing but stories and no narrator, no personality connected to the tales.  I am so first person here that it is difficult now to step out of that.  I hear the voices in my head.

"Oh, yea, there goes that shit C.S. again."

If I start another blog, I won't let you know.  Unless you ask me.

So today everything will remain abstract rather than concrete (always the kiss of death in writing).

I am very lucky to hear what I hear, to process it and to figure out without watching it on television that things have changed.  Everyone knows that people are different than they used to be in some way, but ask a baby boomer how and they begin to stumble.

We have not experienced some cataclysmic change in the gene pool since a generation or two ago.  It is the same.  People have the same aggregate I.Q. as they did.  And the desires are all the same, too.  What changes is how they choose to satisfy those chthonic needs.  And that is what I hear as I solicit those stories.  People want to tell if you give them the chance.  They seem to fall back as in a trance, speaking things they don't get to say, speaking in "tongues."

I must have an honest face!

But it has been misshapen badly by the disease.  Parts are swollen and twisted now.  I have lumps and a nose that goes every which way.  Perhaps, I imagine, I have become hideous.  When I was younger, I would have found it tragic.  Now, I swear, it seems merely fascinating.  Hideously fascinating.

So I tried it out last night, this new face.  She didn't know the old one, took this to be "me" and not something altered from what he was before.  I imagined she was looking at a beast.  I saw myself as such.  A little deformity might be a good thing.  I'll not worry about the way I look again.  I'll stare into the eyes that see the carnage boldly.  It is an awful(ly) good face.

I've ambled and rambled this morning.  I am so full of chemicals I don't feel myself.  Yesterday, I tried to use my debit card, but I could not remember the PIN.  It still has not come back to me.  And even that is not troubling me so much.  An altered face, an altered mind.  There is a sense of rebirth in it.