The pain...the pain

The Pain...the Pain...

"The plane, the plane..." Huerve’s distinctive voice keeps repeating over and over in my mind. Somehow the endless repetition distorts the well known phrase and has become "The rain, the rain...". We are going on four months of rain interrupted only occasionally by a few days of partial sun. My mind is slipping into an abyss of escape and obsession. Fantasy is mixing with reality, fiction with fact. Excessively vivid memories of places I have never been invade my conscious thoughts, overwhelming my efforts to remain grounded in the present.

Conversations I have collected, savored, and strung together, like pearls on a necklace are choking me, dragging me deep into an underworld of liquid color where everything is real and yet not, like a Hollywood movie set. Boot’s trips to Costa Rica...Teak’s trips to Baja... Oakie’s last trip to Cabo...Don’s trip to El Salvador...Rick’s trips to Kauai...Rich’s trip to New Zealand and Samoa...Wingnut’s stories while we wait for the tide to rise...Haut’s Fiji trip on his lunch break from the shaping room... I am choking on them. I cannot breath. Countless films and photos of Indo, Seychelles, Nias, Australia, South Africa, Brazil...experienced vicariously like a peasant invited once a year to tour the lord’s estate. I am drowning in dreams. I want to submit to the perfect peace of them all.

They vex me.

The bitter disappointments of my own adventures rise like a fog bank, clouding my thoughts, poisoning my reason. The floods, evacuated one step ahead of disaster...the earthquake, paddling into perfection only to be alerted of desperate events at home...the flatness...the insects...the hostile police...the nausea and fever...the rip-offs...the injuries...the mechanical failures...

I am no longer able to suppress these disappointments beneath my own joyful experience, or a morning surf session...The weight of unfulfilled youthful fantasies is crushing me...The fearful specters of aged regrets and infirmity haunt me...The evil sins of greed and envy consume me as I covet those who I admire, and resent those who I care most about, like some rabid flesh eating bacteria intent on devouring my soul.

I am so easily seduced by such fruitless fantasies.. I am so possessed, and tormented so completely...I am impotent in an uncontrollable tempest of erotic visions.

I am the starving man with my face pressed against the bakery window. So close, and yet impossible to possess...impossible to satisfy the painful gnawing of my empty belly, and the weakness in my body. Seriously contemplating the risks of shattering the glass...against the irrevocable wreckage such a fleeting moment of bliss would inevitably leave in it’s wake.

Where is my Ricardo? Where is my shelter? The dark storm outside my office window mirrors the raging tempest in my self as I surrender to the despair...I am alone...I am lost...I am alone...I am lost...I am alone...I am...

The voice mutates once again, gripping me in a cadence matching the rhythm of the blood thundering in my temples, "The pain, the pain...The pain, the pain..."

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Last modified on 10/12/01.

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