There's an integrity in remaining, without apology, the person you are even when that person's a snobbish, arrogant, destructive bastard. I've been exhausting myself just lately trying to be a blissed-out holy man brimming with selfless love for his fellow sufferers. Who am I kidding? I'm too selfish to be selfless. I'm too hell-bent to be holy. I can't know bliss, too many of my nerve-endings are dead. If I really want to meet people on a plane of honesty, they've got to know I'm attracted to Heaven but inclined to erratic mortal behaviour that will probably destroy everything in its path. I can't help it; I'm not proud of it; but it's who I am.
I spent most of my time when I was a kid trying to prove to my mother that I saw and understood everything like some sort of Old Soul. It was just my way of defining myself in the crowd because I wasn't tough like one brother or smart like the other.
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Please oh please tell me this is the beginning of the return of the Bruce we used to know. Am I the only one who misses "Old" Bruce? I miss the ranting and raving. I miss the poetry. Please come back Bruce!!
Still here, Leo, biding my time. Today that motherfucking holy-roller almost let his guard down too...
(The Old Bruce)
I am an extremist. May even be vaguely bipolar. I tend to swing massively between one state of mind and its opposite. I have noticed this tendency much more since I quit drinking. So I have been absolutely one way (drunken degenerate), and then I tried to be absolutely the opposite (pious saint). But I can't be a pious saint. I got too much of what Darth Vader would call "the dark side" in me. As if to illustrate, Johnny Cash was singing "Hurt" on the tv when I started writing this. Okay, in the absurd context of an advert for sportswear, but it's still my autobiography in song...
The truth is you're looking for the truth.
Aye, and the truth may be relative to the ever-changing person, so how do you pin it down?
Yeah, you know I can see more and more that there is a richness to my experience. When I think about the people I have known, the places I have been, the adventures I have had, and how all those things continue colourfully to the present day, I know there's plenty here to celebrate. And I'm much more conscious of that than I used to be. But there's an angst and a streak of fear running through me that makes even the appreciation of beauty a kind of sad and desperate act at times. And this is what I would like to move beyond, though I don't know if it will ever happen...
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