an obscure guilt. i declined an invitation last night to dine at my brother's with a high school friend. i felt guilty though i know i was being true to myself. how many things we do or do not do in a cloud of obscuring quilt. we are conditioned by fear and guilt to obey the strictures of the group we didn't choose nor wish to belong to. in high school we were high. we were stoned idealists. my friend drew me to a peace rally downtown. he had a shirt that said Do you want a hole in your body like this? with a red drawn and torn gaping hole in his tshirt. when we fell out 35 years on he was calling to thank me for a book i gave him by alan watts, cloud-hidden whereabouts unknown. he said he'd never thanked me and had written an essay about me and the book for class.somehow we got on to what was happening now in the world, the murderous rampage america was conducting, endless slaughter under the facile lie of prosecuting terror. i got very angry when he condoned the occupation of countries, the mass murder of civilians. he called this collateral damage. i was rage. i cursed him. i was disgusted by his bogus spiritualism and casual warmongering, his disconnection from reality. i wanted nothing to do with his essay and thanks if he had gone from an idealist peacenik to an unthinking american with ersatz spiritualism in a book. this is often the progress of a soul in america. idealism is leeched out or compartmentalized so that you can condone state murder and pay for it in taxes and find refuge in alan watts, cloud hidden. this is hasty, i do too fast, i'm bad at getting it down right, i don't edit and i am sorry i can't slow down and say it better. oh, the guilt.

p.s. i know i appear harsh. it's really that i'm vulnerable and need protection. i'm the only one who can give that. it seems the friend says i misunderstood, then sent some quotes, some ecological spiritual writers i looked at and gleaned from, then he was silent, and i was still unsettled, i felt he was kicking over the traces. the traces remain.