Brutal.

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Not my day.  It is good.  Other than needing another day of rest.  It wasn't completely unforeseen.  I spilled the wind from my sails fairly liberally last week.  My lower back was spasming yesterday and last night.  I couldn't roll to a place that didn't cause problems, or get my legs situated so they didn't cause problems.  Anicin has been a friend.  Now the pain has worked up to the lower part of my shoulder blades.  It almost always, for me, works it's way up.  It is milder, where it is now located.  I honestly wonder if the pain moves up, because as my body braces for the pain, it stiffens and makes itself sore.  The option is that I can, sometimes, only sense just so much pain.  So I feel the worst.  As that fades, I then sense the next worst, and so on.  No worries, but that isn't what this post is about.

As I have said, I used to be a royal sob.  No, you wouldn't have known it from talking to me.  It was how I lived.  Hard.  I played, worked, and socialized in just such a manner.  I made, and broke, women, friends, and coworkers.  I demanded the sky and gave no room for error, sloth, laziness, and such.  Given the givens, that is still true.  I didn't help, nor hurt, I had my own things to do.  I wasn't even happy with perfection, when I could produce it... within mortal constraints mind you.  Hard as steel and twice as cold.  My folk loved to hate me, and I didn't care, regardless of what I said.  And they knew it.  Can't lie with a certain look on your face.  "Sure, that's fine.", I might have said, while viewing them with the same look I give to dead decayed fish.  Harsh.

That, to be honest, hasn't changed much.  I still have to be careful with my expressions.  Children, and even grown women, can cry when I get a sour gloom on my puss and they take it personal, or sometimes even just seeing it.  Hell, my cats will hide, or get that guilty look, at times.  While I have come to God, I am what I was.  I use Him to temper the wrong parts, but do not shield the righteous parts of that.  None shall pass who haven't really thought about things.

I don't even always like what I am.  It would be so much easier to just get along to go along.  It would be much simpler to have no literal or figurative limits, objective realities and qualities that must be met, and such.  I sometimes even dream of being a simpleton... a graced existence in many cases.  Though too, without guilt, there is no real innocence.  It is... a bit of an illusion.  I won't claim to know that area of God's will or His way with it, only... that it is different.  It is hard to attempt to be a right man, especially being a sinner on top of it, and a failure as well.  I simply have no choice.  I was made as God wanted it.  My choices are slim.  I do attempt to afford their use, to benefit, when available and I am able.  Still, as I have mentioned, I am a bastard.  And it is a bitch to be one.

I once thought I couldn't be loved, shouldn't be.  I certainly didn't love myself.  Perfection was lacking and I had stepped, for my part, away from God.  That is a hard, cold, dark place.  And, as with any other addiction, it only gets worse left untended.  And it did get worse.  As bad as things can get.  What I came to understand, by trusting, after parring, with God, was that... there is room even for me, and things like me.  I thought I didn't need love, and to a degree I don't in the way that love is often mistakenly conflated with acceptance.  I don't need acceptance, more when that veers into the wrong places.  But love?  Yes.  Though God grants enough of that.  And, yet, honest love, as honest as people have it, is not something I turn away.  As long as it isn't just sympathy, or even empathy.  I have no need for that.  Even in my state and condition.  But, while secular, this song sure hit the spot.

A fellow blogger posted something, and I responded.  Lightly at first, but the notion gnawed on my soul bones until I finally gave it a lot of thought.  I am brutal.  I am.  I like to think that isn't the whole of it, or all of it, but it is a real and solid part of who I am. Now... get off my porch!  I have waking to do, and rest and relaxation to tend.  No choice, and it kills me, but... there it is.  Shoo!

Later.