Entry and Descent

Sitting at the Kuan Yin Tea House reading the news, I understand that I am avoiding the obvious.  Though only 6:10 PM in the early evening I have to pack up and get myself to bed.  Currently I have given myself no alternative. There are financial obligations to keep and so again two days will be given to driving a taxi in and around Seattle. I no longer want to do it.  My years of blind justification are over, as they should be.  It is not an exaggeration that I find myself looking at the prison walls of my own making so it isn't surprising that I am planning an escape.  Despite the taxi weekends a comfortable gaol it has been.  I can call it illness.  I can call it self-hypnotism. I can call it self-deception.  Regardless of genesis and fault the consequences remain.  I have kept and continue to keep myself from keeping the promise I made to myself many years ago.  To read and write and publish and daily continue my attempt toward deciphering this life and world and existence.  Reading the obituary of the historian Jacques Barzon serves to underline my notion.  His seminal book, "From Dawn to Decadence," remains unread amongst all the other partially read and unread books stacked at my bedside.  In a few hours I enter and descend into an underworld.  Call it Hades.  Call it a reality no longer worthy of intimate participation.  Call it my undoing if I remain, a scenario demented and grim.  I curse though having avoided one unacceptable conscription I have allowed myself instead to be drafted into something better left to someone else.  I have other items upon the agenda.  Clearly I will begin attending to them, saying goodbye and hello, welcoming myself back.  Hopefully I will look into a mirror and actually see and recognize this person.  I have been too long in the arrival as weekly I leave myself behind.