March!

I read people's lives.  I need to disentangle myself from this habit.

What I have found is that I am not only a hustler of being, I am a reader of hope.

Reading hope gives you this much:  I read the only lover that ever gave me back to me.

She (Sylvia Rivera) thought that no one would ever deal with her laughter.

I don't recall her laughter very well.

She loved good ones.

I know she dreamed that she had happiness.  She knew that it would be grueling for her to make others change.

I know that people who knew her did care about her love for peace and revolution.

These, even to me, are not separate.

I know she cared about many lives.  She believed in strong freedoms such as the freedom to make any sexuality that people possess a creative way to be loving.

I sought her life in the good things she made with her beauty.  For example, she knew what it was to believe in her sisters, who were beautiful, to me, so that no one would make them try to make pain the main axis of the universe(s).

I can only account for the disjunction in the last sentence by noting that many kindnesses involve life.

By life I mean openness to one's own love.

I know that no one really cares about what I have done, since I have done so little since Sylvia died that was not directly destructive or self-destructive.  Part of this, especially early on, was a way to stick it to her in my memory, to not let her legacy be my main concern so that I could live my own life -- be my own person.  It turns out that she never made anyone be something that they did not need to be.  So I am here as I am -- in Arizona, with my mother, with no friends in a town of nearly 50,000, with a series of lousy, angry relationships with those close to me, and with a very strong knowledge of why people have made themselves needed for their own happiness.

That which I know is also there to struggle with as a set of underpinnings for the rest of my life about which I am profoundly ambivalent -- because that is the way I have treated myself and others.

Lessons in Karma are multitudinous, almost literally a crowd in my consciousness.

Hopefully anyone who knows what made anger the only part of me that I knew would bring attention to myself will eventually allow the fogs of hostility and conflict to evaporate and see me for what I was and am, a loud crass drunk who preferred my own company and my own dreams to those of others.

Lastly, I am hopeful also that when you (Rusty, Chelsea, etc.) bring me to the destination for which I am fit, that I will have been alive with the Goddess' pleasure in herself.

You will be happy and you will feel good about what strengths your places in the communities to which you belong have accomplished.

Everyone does what they need in their own way.

A reader.