Man the barricades!

I just woke up from another bizarre and unpleasant dream about my former career. These come so frequently - one about every two weeks - that I think there must be some unresolved issues.

Make no mistake: I consider that 25 years of my life to be an almost complete waste of mental, emotional and physical energy. If I took all the positive memories I hold from that time of my life and placed them end to end, they might cover about eighteen months. The rest was crap.

I think part of the reason I have all these dreams even after nine years away from that life is because I've built a lot of barricades against those memories during my waking hours. I don't want to remember that stuff or think about it.

As I lay in bed thinking about this, it occurred to me I have other barricades. I let that wisteria tree grow until it covered half the front of my house so it could serve as a physical barrier against seeing or being seen by neighbors and passers-by.

I have read and have been told that people who accumulate clutter the way I do use it as a barricade to keep other people away. I'm not 100% sure this is true in my case, but damn, I do like my privacy.

I have sometimes dozed off when surrounded by eight or nine people carrying on three or four simultaneous conversations at the Red Cup. I can feel myself getting sleepy as soon as the din reaches a certain level. This is another barricade to shut out the sensory overload.

I sometimes daydream about going Cold Mountain and just living somewhere almost isolated from society.

From a Buddhist perspective, I'm not sure how useful or healthy these barricades are. There are some contemporary writers who talk about being soft, open and accepting, but I'm not sure I buy that.

We live, like it or not, in a culture that tends to encourage and celebrate predatory behavior. It's only the most extreme cases that evoke our dismay and contempt; our reaction to most everything else ranges from mild amusement to outright admiration. So you have to watch your step out there... guard your heart and count your change.

I've posted here before about how I've cut myself off from mass media. I built a barricade to protect myself from the barrage of marketing and advertising messages, and a big part of the reason I can live so simply now is that I don't expose myself to messages telling me I'd be a lot happier if I bought a SUV or bleached my teeth or got botox or wore Tommy. But it's another barricade.

I've also posted about being 'emotionally unavailable.' This is also a barricade, and one I've consciously built to protect my own sanity and stability. I won't go into that again - more than enough has been said previously.

Even my current profile pic sort of says, "stay the fuck away from me." I could have used a smiling full-face picture shot on a sunny day, but this one more accurately reflects my state of mind.

I don't know how zen or taoist it is to throw up coils of razor wire all around msyelf, but I'll tell you this: I don't know how I would have lasted this long without them.