So last night I went to see Tesoro do a show at City Limits way over on the godforsaken east side of Tucson after having been at a film production meeting with a group of people looking to do a mock documentary about wannabe superheros deep in the heart of godforsaken Marana northwest of Tucson.

Miles and miles of driving, nary a moments rest last night, to cross a city that does not want to be crossed.

Tesoro is tough to describe for me since I have few referents to call upon. They utilize powerful rythyms tainted with a millenia old hint of Arabic and Persian music coupled with Meixcan and Spanish themes, during this flamenco dancers accompany them.

So I great time listening to some fun music.

I also got to see the moved-on one mentioned on this website way earlier in the process of opening up my mind.

All the anger I once wallowed and swam through from having to contend with a change I did not want to make, has long since left me and the conscious effort I’ve been trying to make to stay in a more postivie frame of mind, a kind of conscious consciousness, has been paying off I think. I’m much less prone to saying things that I’ll regret later although I am far from the perfection I seek in the rhythym of life. At least I’m trying to get my wheels back on track after decades of a train wreck of a life. It’s something if not much.

What’s prompted this particular meditation on my life today is noticing that moment of utter powerlessness you some times have in the face of others. Powerlessness was never a factor in my previous life until I stumbled out of the sea of my wandering and fell onto these dessicated desert shores here in Tucson.

Okay, I take that back. I was never a particularly social person and the severe and unparalleled lack of understanding in that realm was a kind of powerlessness. It could be argued that experiencing such a state for so long allowed me to understand more fully this place I am now, so in some ways, the total lack of connectedness for a very long time gave me perspective to understand just how important such connectedness really is to a happy health prosperous life of dancing and singing.

With that aside out of the way, I realized last night while trying to make small talk with a woman who I had shared a good bit of my life with and who appeared to hold little interest in even small talk with me, that what I hated most about this moment was the utter powerlessness of it.

There was nothing I could imagine I could do or say where this would stop being uncomfortable. All the questions I’d love to ask, all the lengthy debated I’d relish having, are all pointless and born of powerlessness. Of a lack of knowledge I cannot acquire, feelings that I can do nothing with, of no resolution, of a hole that cannot be filled.

A curious thing love, emotion, humanity, connectedness, and their opposites of loss, loneliness, confusion and powerlessness. Without one you can’t see the other and without the other you can’t feel the one.

What amazes me is that every thought I had of my own internal conception up until a few years ago was one of absolute ability to cope, of a kind of simple power that afforded me a modicum of ultimate confidence, and now that is mostly gone.

For most of my life I got by with the self-image that if I were faced with a situation I’d never seen or problem I’d never encountered I would just muddle through and it would work out. I’d fix that thing that was broken or improvise and make that situation work.

This was my power, this was how I coped with life, this was how I managed to get up every day and muddle through the samsara I was experiencing. Computer broke? I’ll fix it. How does one wander? Who cares? I’ll figure it out!

I got a job running a computer department for a small ad agency by lying about my qualifications (like most people do to move up to new jobs) because I had ultimate confidence that I’d figure out anything that came my way.

Which I did for the most part. The few failures were mostly failures of will rather than failures of ability to figure things out.

Then I traveled aimlessly and that was a whole new set of problems I’d never encountered and that was okay too. How does one actually camp out in the wild? How does one find a place to stay? How do you talk to strangers in a strange land?

That generally worked out okay too. Could have been better, could have been worse, could have forced myself to do more, could have stayed in some places longer and learned more. For the most part though, I was able to muddle and improvise my way through the United States pretty well.

Then I got tired, got lazy and fell into Tucson where I muddled through more and more poorly until I was confronted with every notion of power I had, every notion of efficacy I harbored, crumbling away into nothingness. No longer could I figure anything out, fix anything, solve problems, improvise my way through my life. The drummer was drumming and I was dancing but I was dancing to a waltz and the drummer was beating out a raucous tribal rite. I became Ronald Reagan trying to clap to gospel music.

[note: I saw that on Not Necessarily the News on HBO in the mid 80's and his lack of rhythm was painful to watch. It was, however, hilarious to laugh at. A long search has failed me in trying to find a copy of this on the web. Damn that discontinuity where not much is available if it happened before 2000.]

I had to rely on others and I had no idea how to do that. My self-image was built around the notion of absolute independence, that was my power. I was an island, dammit!

Then I slowly meshed my life, by accident more than design, into the moved-on one’s life and while my mental image of a certain kind of power crumbled at least I had someone who actually seemed to care and that was a different kind of power which was different than what I knew and good. And then she moved on for her own reasons.

She moved on, went off on her own path, and all my notions of efficacy were gone. Now I was just some guy who does a few things reasonably well, who has some interests, who can move and shake and whirl a bit, to a drum that rarely keeps time with the world.

My ego needed to be crushed before I could get a glimpse of what life is, before I could even understand what I was thinking and feeling. Powerlessness is that route for me and that’s weird. You have to lose everything before you’re free to do anything.

Fuck. That sure is annoying.