I have forsaken many things in favor of chasing other people's dreams. Once upon a time, the idea of becoming a professional musician seemed possible. I could write songs. I knew various keys, chords, scales, etc. I gave up too easily. I couldn't take criticism. I knew I had something, but I needed the constant validation of others, as if random other people were all instruments of God pointing me in the right direction through positive or negative feedback.

I wanted to play something on piano or guitar that would make the other person or people listening feel the same way I did. Music hits me so hard sometimes. There is a Philip Glass song from The Hours that can make me cry. There are songs by John Coltrane that make me feel like I am sitting in on an entirely different group of language-speakers having angelic conversations with each other. Forget speaking in tongues. Speak music and you'll start to feel something bigger trying to break into your tiny material reality.

I wanted to make something for my wife that she would find pleasing. She hated my piano playing. She said she liked my art, but then it was tossed in the move. I felt like I had read too much poetry to write something for her in the way of romantic poetry that wouldn't sound like a cliche or lacking in sincerity.

I wanted to please everyone, including my dead mother and my father who hardly seemed to care anyway what I did with my life once I finally got engaged to someone. He'd stepped on the phone line when I tried to joint the Army to cut things off with the recruiter. He'd told me all I would be able to do is flip burgers if I decided to leave Austin for SF to find tech work. Once I'd found a wife to potentially help me carry on the family line, old friendless me needed a best man and some groom's men to satisfy my fiance's desire for a certain type of wedding. He'd turned down my request to have him be my best man. Unorthodox, but not unheard of. (Though he did ask the night before the rehearsal if I needed him to be my best man, apparently not remembering his previous statement and the fact that I'd gotten my quasi-cousin to be my best man.)

I was trying to please my oldest brother after he died, honoring his memory by being rebellious and not trying too hard in school--perhaps also as a protest against my parents for seeming to care so little about him passing away.

Most of the time, in my people-pleasing attempts, I have gone astray because there was too much disparity in my household (and then adult life), and because I have many times just imagined or assumed I knew what the other person wanted from me instead of trying to find out exactly what they expected and then actually believing it. In my household growing up, it seemed like my parents were always at odds with each other--my agnostic dad and hyper-religious, Pentecostal mom. My adopted older brothers and my parents.

I'd like to think I have matured somewhat past this, and can more realistically anticipate another person's expectations or listen more carefully and act accordingly. But, somehow, here I am sitting at the tail end of my marriage, waiting for the court to finish processing it. Somehow, I am stuck in a "career" that is more or less the best of bad office jobs (at least ones that I might be hired to do). I never really wanted a life of working in an office--I loved the kitchen jobs of my youth and even the horseshit digging jobs. I loved camping and generally being outside all day, and saw the web design jobs and other office roles as being stepping stones to having enough money in the bank to go work shit manual jobs across the country while pretending everyone still needed another Kerouac-style novel from a nobody hetero white dude. Back then, I thought I was somehow extra special in God's eyes--if not chosen, at least gifted and blessed with the kind of life that would inevitably see me become famous at something.

I desperately wanted to write that amazing piece of autofiction in the tradition of Kerouac or Thomas Wolfe or Proust. Then I discovered Knausgard, and then over the past month or so, I've suddenly found myself living inside a Knausgardian novel, complete with dying father inside hoarder house and a divorce. Knausgard's story of his relationship with his dad and his older brother seems all to familiar. You can bet my surviving older brother, who was the recipient of much more corporal punishment at the hands of my dad, would snort with derision if I published my own kind of My Struggle type work.

What's more, I finally realized I don't have the patience to be that good of a literary writer. I am doing this to try to make sense of all this madness. When my younger biological brother died in a car wreck at 16 (I was 22), I felt like I had stepped into an alternate reality that would never be quite right again, never would I feel whole in this reality, and never would I again see life as being something special for me. Of course, that faded with time, and I came to live without my litte brother in my own desperate, drunken sort of way. Then, of course, this same feeling after the divorce--I will never be made whole again and am probably headed for hell.

More than ever, I start to feel like I'm in someone else's dream like in the movie Inception where all of the dream characters are trying to boot me out. Simple interactions with people go south so quickly. Times where I don't completely scare the person off turn out to be times where I am merely a useful work tool, providing them help in their job and in exchange they seem slightly more polite or kind to me. In my dreams, I find myself wanting to return to this building that is like a cross between a dorm/school/research lab/monastery--where I go up to a nook in an upper room to sit among others like me who suffer in this world and seek a few minutes of reprieve before they have to wake back up.

I go to a place where I am not worried about dying suddenly or anyone else in my life dying. I'm not worried about some malicious government or other principality or power taking me over, because we are all under the same watchful Eye of our Creator. Except the Creator lets us be to sort things out, only we no longer have the endless heaven/hell anxiety or any other stress caused by ancestral fears embedded in us since birth/childhood.

I know these individuals aren't seeking to get something from me or give me advice/support I am not looking for. Nor are they putting out fake love or other polite veneers for the sake of merely functioning in a semi-peaceful society. There is no need to fake politeness because the nakedness of this reality means there really can be none of the competition among human animals that results in endless wars and busted relations.

I know that they see me and get me. I don't have to write endless, long-winded journals explaining my actions or intentions because all of that is right out in the open. If I were to suddenly have hostile thoughts toward them, they would know immediately, and I would be cut off from them completely. Except, the inclination toward hostile thoughts never arises, and I realize that this sort of thing only comes from my DNA body. It's like we don't have to spend much time extolling the virtues of peace, love and understanding because these are baked into the fabric of this particular reality.

It is the only time I know everything will be okay, and most of the time I simply wake up feeling somewhat cleaner of anger, lust and other controlling thoughts and emotions with vague feelings of having just been some place better than any vacation you can take here on Earth.