I’m Aurelius Secundus. I’ve published “A Life Worth Living”!

My book is finally “finished”! It started off as scrappy essays, a journal, that grew as things continued to happen . It’s been incredibly challenging revisiting things I had written 5, 10, years ago. I was much less wise back then and seeing how strongly I felt about certain things was awkward. I tried to keep the emotions intact. If I went back and “corrected” all of my entries then it would strip all the raw emotion from my stories.

The other challenge in writing my book was that the essays/journal was completely unformatted!! I’d just dump out all my feelings onto paper and never bothered to go back and check for grammar and great sentence structure. What for? I never imagined I’d be compiling it all into a book. Trying to clean up the grammar was awful, particularly trying to create a tense that made sense. It was such a challenge consolidating what was the past with what was the present, because my essays were written while they were present-time to me, but are now in the past. Fuck. Nevermind that I never really had time to write this. My personal life and career have been relentlessly busy. I took 4 days of PTO this month to focus on the book; that’s the greatest amount of time I’ve gotten!

I published under a pen-name, Aurelius. Amazon made me get a last name so I went with Secundus. I have a relative with a similar name so I went with that. I couldn’t afford to have the book professionally edited and I designed the cover on a whim; one which I think worked out pretty well, no?

Because my book is about a suicide attempt that’s only 5 years ago, I worry that if people knew what I’d done it might have career implications. I still worry that if my job finds out that I could be fired. Telling all of my friends on Facebook was awkward too. I’m not proud of what I did and there’s already been judgement, but, if my book can help others chart a better direction than me then it’ll all have been worth it. Anywho, I published!! Fuck yeah!!! I’ve reread that book like a million times, it was exhausting. It’s done! It’s available on Amazon, Kobo, and some other sites in e-format. I doubt it will sell much, but if it does, maybe I can make print versions available too. I hope it’s good! Here’s link to the Kobo version.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-life-worth-living-40

Old Paradigms

I’ve had a few water dreams again…flooding. Just a lot of rain filling up a building. Quickly overflowing it or sweeping me away. I’m never panicked during it either. It’s not scary…I’m shocked at first but then as I ease into it it’s ok….I just allow it to happen.

It makes me think of every single one of my relationships…all of the ones older than 8 years. They meant so much for me 8 years ago….today, I think about them and I try to reignite that spark, try to make them fit that same mold and I just can’t. The places my dear friends occupied are no longer there…the situation has changed…I’m not the same person I used to be. I can’t force my old friends to fit the mold they served 10 years ago…I can however, shine the brightest I can on this world, and shine on my friends. Would that create a new relationship with them? A more loving one?

Friends

All of us, every single one of us, has no clue what we’re doing here. We have our ideas…God put us here to do his will. The Universe exploded out of a fabric of existence and we evolved from fish-men to be here.

There’s no absolute proof, in the end. We have to BELIEVE what we believe, no matter if you’re a scientist or a devoted disciple.

Here’s what IS definite. This existence, our life, it’s a fucking trip. A mind fuck. It’s complex and beautiful beyond all understanding, and it has power in it that can make it an absolute wonder.

We’re all in it together…we’re all we have, fighting against an expansive and unknown space. Our Earth is a tiny speck in the Universe and we’re all we have against it’s enormity. Some of us, when we meet, understand our plight more than others. That’s what a friend is…someone that you look into, that you live with, and see “here, in this moment, we stand together”. Friends come and go, breach distances and time, but ultimately, if you open your heart and your eyes, you’ll see that we’re all in this together.

25July16 – Another Day of Violence

Another shooting in Florida…teens. A knife stabbing in Tokyo. Nice, Paris only a few weeks ago. It’s been a string of violence over these past months and at the start of them I remember catching interest at a suggestion that there were political motivations behind them. There weren’t. People are filled with hatred but only because they can’t find love within themselves. An excerpt from the Bhagavad-Gita:

Brooding about sensuous objects
makes attachment to them grow;
from attachment desire arises,
from desire anger is born.

From anger comes confusion;
from confusion memory lapses;
from broken memory understanding is lost;
from loss of understanding, he is ruined

This is real folks. Hatred and anger take root from unmet expectations, whatever those expectations may be. The power of the mind to convince us that life is anything but beautiful is extremely powerful and should never be underestimated.