So I’ve been working on shooting a movie and all throughout the day I’ve been getting more and more ill and now I’m only sitting in this coffeehouse because I’m too tired to walk to my car. The coffee isn’t doing much, the sea of cute girls to watch here has dried up as they get ready to strut on the town tonight, my pants are inexplicably dirty.

My mind has been drifting in and out of consciousness for about an hour and I’ve pondered how I’ve been in front of the camera and around it and have been giving direction and orders to all sorts of people and then I’ve been thinking about how difficult that would have been for me a few months ago much less a few years ago. And that thinking lead to other thinking and the thought I thought at that moment took me back to another observation I had a few weeks ago.

My ego is slowly being crushed. Not in the bad group of women laughing at your shriveled penis after a swim in the cold Pacific Ocean kind of way. Not in that high school kid existence way or the artist being slaughtered by the critic kind of way.

Nope. This ego crushing has been fairly deliberate in the grinding path to a grander understanding kind way.

I am continually amazed at how I’ve changed over the past few months. It’s just weird. I’m just happier and I’m not sure how to deal with that. Everything up until recent times was an unending torrent of self-imposed misery and depression. My life is essentially the same as it has been over the past year, and yet, there is a vast difficult to describe sea of change in the very fiber of my being.

That’s a weird thing to notice about yourself.

I have a mostly pointless job where I make food for people who couldn’t care what crap they jammed into their gullets and sometimes I even deliver the food to those ravenous bastards. This is nearly as low on the social status rung as you can go and still be considered part of society. I used to care about that. It used to bother me that I had a kind fo cool job in a kind of cool industry (IT manager for an advertising agency) and now I’m doing the job of an 18 year old college drop out.

But, what’s kind of cool is that while I now can see, appreciate, and experience other’s reactions to my withered and diminished state, I just don’t care and that ego withering happened in the past 6 months or so. Ego destruction is always the first thing every mystical tradition, the first stip every teacher of a way demands, every single way of living deeper, proscribes.

This was apparent when I had two days in a row where I delivered food to people I knew through the moved-on-one mentioned earlier and in a much more whiny state than I’d be in if similar events happened to me right now. I did indeed have a moment of panic (”OH CRAP I CAN’T BELIEVE THEIR GOING TO SEE ME LIKE THIS!” when I first saw them and then I quieted my mind and let that go, let it just kind of flow away since they didn’t matter and I didn’t matter and it was all okay in the grand scheme of things. And you know what? That was pretty fucking cool to feel.

I managed to stumble into a clearing after years of being lost in a forest and all it took was a simple failed relationship to do it. Much of the fear of life I had cluched near and dear to my heart has left me and much of what I took to be the core of me was shown to be a silly childish fantasy.

Man, if I had known this would happen I’d have had my ego crushed by a woman years ago. No one tells you this though. No one ever helps you out with information you really need. Information like, don’t eat so much wheat, it might be making you sleepy.

Had I learned that years ago I’d have taken a hell of a lot less naps and I’d have gotten a whole lot more thinking done. I’d have never guessed that something as innocuous and tastey as a good loaf of bread was killing me. I’d have never guessed that I needed to crush my ego either. What the hell else am I missing? I can’t even being to imagine.