Holy hell, I feel like a new man. Almost as if I was born again. It’s a good feeling to roll the stone of illness away and arise as a healthy man. I’m not saying it’s a miracle, but at least I’m not stuck hanging around the house and feeling cross now. Having my freedom to move about resurrected is a blessing that has lifted my spirits. Praise the healing power of faith in the restoration of good health. Alright, I don’t mean to make it sound like a religious experience or anything. Can I get an Amen to that?

Speaking of resurrection, I just had a weird encounter with a ghost from Easter past. I’ve gotten in the habit of doing a quick search to make sure I’ve not used the title for a post previously. Originally, I was going to call this one “Holy Hell”, but I discovered that last May I did a post with that name. The search results also brought up a post from June 2005 I called “And so begins the task“. This is how it begins:

Some things in life just don’t turn out the way we had imagined or intended. And sometimes the consequences for actions and bad decisions are harsh. Hell, devastating. The past few weeks I’ve felt my life spinning out of control and I have felt powerless to do a thing about it. I’m a dreaming man, and dreams for me die hard.

So I have been incredibly sad. Full of regret and remorse and a fair amount of self-loathing.

But that doesn’t change a thing. I have to take responsibility for my mistakes, just as I also must take responsibility for my life, such as it is. I am powerless to change the past. And I can not live in the past.

I know I can be a bit melodramatic at times, but damn, it seems like I must have been going through some serious shit. Except for the life of me, I can’t remember what the hell was going on back then. I thought maybe it was the end of marriage number three, but the timing doesn’t seem right. I had only been in Korea for six months at that point. Things ended with Carol when she declined to join me in Seoul, as we had agreed, after daughter Hillary returned from deployment in Afghanistan. That would have been well after June 2005. No idea what was going on when I wrote that post.

The other thing that stands out is that I quoted Kevin Kim’s Easter meditation: put it down at length in my post. It remains one of my all-time favorites of his, and the coincidence of me coming across it on Easter Sunday sixteen years later is a little mind-boggling.

Since I and a few people I know are all going through a painful period, each of us for various reasons, I thought it might be good to write about “putting it down.”

In Zen Buddhism, the maxim is “don’t make anything.” Your mind is so often the source of your troubles. You choose to face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune either negatively or positively. Often, at the beginning of a troublesome period in your life, it is difficult to realize how responsible you are for your own choices. It’s easier to shift blame to your surroundings. But ultimately, the healthiest route out of the forest of troubles is to start by looking in a mirror. Behold what’s actually there; don’t needlessly manufacture problems for yourself and others.

I’m not a scriptural literalist, so I don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead. But the story of the passion and resurrection nevertheless holds power for me, because it’s a story about a man who put everything down, including his own life, for the sake of love. How many of us can claim to be ready and willing to do something like that? Not many, I suspect.

Most of us, like little children, cling desperately to our cherished notions, preconceptions, and delusions, unwilling to countenance truth and change. We face the world with fear, and create clever rationales for our spiritual cowardice. In a crisis period, this instinct intensifies. The ego swells to enormous size– everything is about getting hurt, everything is about me, me, me. The world doesn’t understand my pain, and only I am in pain!

I’ve felt like that before. I’ve looked out at a street full of people and wondered why they didn’t see my agony, which was plain as day to me. The world kept right on turning, resisting my egocentric interpretation of it.

And there’s a lesson in that. Life is change, ceaseless change. All we have is this moment. If we try to keep the past with us, we merely create more suffering for ourselves. If we try to hold on to our anger, or our hurt, or whatever it is we’re feeling, we poison ourselves.

It’s better simply to put it all down.

I must have taken Kevin’s words of wisdom to heart–I’ve put whatever it was that was troubling me back then so far down I don’t even remember what it was!

I did go back and look at some of my other posts from that timeframe looking for a clue and didn’t find one. But I did discover this:

In my personal life I am just filling time these days. Last night, my Air Force buddy, Jeff, called and interrupted a game of CIV so we could meet at Caroline’s for a couple of beers. We wound up playing darts. I can’t remember the last time I’ve tried to hit a dart board, but it has probably been over 20 years ago. I assumed my darts would be worse than my pool, but surprisingly I played pretty well. Not well enough to win (Jeff is really good), but most of the time it came down to who got the last bullseye first. I really enjoyed myself and I’m thinking with some practice I might actually be a decent player.

So, there you have it. I began my darts “career” on June 16, 2005. What a life!

Enough with the past, the future is now! Since I was feeling better by yesterday afternoon, and noting that my fever had be gone for 36 hours, I deemed it safe for me to venture out of the house for some, um, exercise. I took it easy on myself and did the short walk to Baloy Beach. Then I saw the floating bar and thought “why not?”. I told myself I would make sure to practice social distancing, just in case. And that’s just what I did!

It was late in the afternoon on a Saturday and the floater was in full swing. I secured a seat at the far end of the bar and safely observed the goings-on. The first thing I noticed was the crowd was not the usual locals I’m used to seeing around. Quite a few of them were actually young looking (yeah, that stands out in a community of retired fuckers) and it appeared they had brought their own womenfolk with them, much to the chagrin of the local bargirls present, no doubt.

Turns out the other guests on the floating bar had come up from Angeles City, which is currently on full lockdown. That means no bars or restaurants are open at all. I’m hearing reports from around town that it was a booming weekend for the Barretto bars as those with the means made their escape from AC. Good for them!

I wasn’t going to push my luck (or anyone else’s) so I confined myself to my seat in the open air floater. I don’t think it gets much safer than that. Had myself some beers and did what I do best–watched the sun go down.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I woke up feeling healthy and refreshed. I figured the best way to celebrate was a nice morning walk. Wanna join me?

Thanks for coming along. Its nice to feel normal again. Not like this guy: