"I was born to run, it is in my blood. Without it a part of me is dead. I will always be out there, no matter how ill or injured, trying to get into a running groove. I love it too much to let it get away from me."
- March 13, 2009
I was not planning on doing any more writing, and yet, in the 2 1/2 years which have passed since my last entry there are things which I want to set down, the reason is I may read this years later and it will help me to remember details which otherwise would be lost to time and the erosion of memory. There are too many stories to recall and recreate with any sense of accuracy, but I will write what I can.
I have reached the point of my life where I consider myself old, which means I have entered the final segment and path of being human. One reason I consider myself old is not because of the number of years I have passed through, but rather the quality and strength of my mind and body are in steep decline. Due to this there are things which I have adjusted in my mind and in my day to day life. I retired from all forms of competitive activities, chess, poker, running, etc. I still study chess from a solitary perspective, and for running, well, what I wrote in 2009 was accurate, being in my blood running is not something I can easily let go of no matter how old and frail I may be feeling on any given day. I guess this entry is to document my passing through the threshold of old age, how I have coped with the idea of becoming old and weak, no longer blessed with the creative fire, observing the body slowly breaking itself down.
I am no longer an active participant in the flow of human society, I am one of those people you see walking down the street who you know in an instant is walking the plank. I have not worked a wage job since 2018 and thus do not have substantial money saved in the bank. There is not a rational explanation as to how I have survived to the year 2024 and so I will not attempt to provide one. Since my material life no longer operates on a rational level I consider each new day I witness to be a gift from the Great Protector. And so I begin each new morning by offering the day to the entities and beings which protect me - The Great Protector, The Wish-fulfilling Jewel Tree, The Seven Warrior Sages, the Rainbow Light, and lastly, my old and ugly body. I then go out into the light of day to walk and run and exercise. I no longer have the endurance to run more than a few minutes at a time so I have compensated by turning myself into a sprinter. I run short bursts followed by muscle exercises, repeated until too tired to continue. Some days I walk to Northerly Island and run up the tallest hill, repeating until exhaustion. My knees ache in the evenings and I doubt my ability to run the next day, but when the next day comes I find a way to run regardless of pain and shortness of breath.
I have witnessed peculiar things, material things which should be following the laws of physics, but for a brief moment those laws appear to be bent and manipulated. I have experienced a sea-change of thought, my psyche undergoing a transformation. I was given a spirit name, Francis. Protective medallions were gifted to me. I discovered three Wish-fulfilling Jewel Trees in the city of Chicago and I attempt to make daily food offerings to them. I am not the only one who makes offerings to the Jewel Trees. One of the trees, adjacent Navy Pier, has weekly offerings of flowers and food. One morning, as the sun was rising, I had made my offering and was standing north of the tree. The wind was blowing hard and when I turned my face to the south to light my chillum an angel dressed in pink walked close past me, carrying flowers and food, which she then placed beneath the tree. Nearby was a stone alter with a Bible and I would stop to read random passages whenever I passed. One day there was a hand written sign at the alter, it read "even if failure is possible" and the idea came into my mind to attempt a solitary ten day meditation retreat. That same day I started the retreat and completed seven days. A stone alter appeared at the 12th street beach Wish-fulfilling Jewel Tree and I decided to work on its construction, adding stones and colored bricks. It lasted a week before the lake water buried it under fresh sand.
I read Socrates, Aristotle, Pascal, Kierkegaard in the evenings. Aristotle wrote "ugly people can't be happy", and I being particularly ugly wonder if it is really true that I have not experienced happiness in this life. In the social sense it is true that I was doomed to unhappiness due to the ugliness of my face. I was shunned by my peers as a child and adolescent because of my ugliness and thus I was socially unhappy. Driven into solitude I discovered a richness and beauty within which did not match my dour exterior. I could be happy, but mostly when alone in nature, where no human eyes could judge my looks. My ugliness influenced my adult life because no human group would invite me into its fold, meaning I was doomed to live on the low rungs of society's ladder. I had little social life and even less money. And yet, I made my way, mostly peacefully, perhaps even with a little bit of happiness.
My family for many years called me lucky and even coined a term for it. Whenever something good happened to anyone in the family it was called "Jimmy Luck." I found it humorous and ironic that someone born ugly could be called lucky, but I knew it was because I had simply survived for so long, and in seemingly good spirits, without many bad things happening to me, and that this could rightly be called good luck. And yet, humans being creatures who thrive in a hive mind, I had to content myself with being outside of its harmony, safety, and happiness. The elite belong to secret groups and even the middling of humanity have their hidden societies which allow members financial security and physical pleasures. That I could survive in a human hive without being a part of the true inner hive is perhaps the most startling thing about my life. I should have died years ago and I concluded the reason I did not was because I, a solitary ugly human, somehow was blessed with a Great Protector which watched over me constantly and made sure I was set up in places where I could feel good about my existence and perhaps experience a small amount of happiness from time to time.
Now I am old and in the habit of being blessed by The Great Protector, and by force of long habit I expect things to continue - to continue being lucky, to continue existing, even though I no longer participate in or contribute to the human hive. I know, though, that I cannot continue to escape time and time again, that one day soon I will have to face death. My main goal, therefore, is to smile at the face of death.
"Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward."
— Socrates
