I feel off and a bit irritable today although I am starting to feel slightly better as the day goes by. It is 11:08am currently. I went to an appointment with my natural path dr. and she preformed manual therapy on my back. It is like a massage but different in approach and intention. It does help me as I tend to carry so much stress in my back. I need to learn about knots as Alejandro Jodorowsky prescribed in the tarot / psychomagic reading he gave me. I need to learn to tie knots. I end up in more of a tangled knotted state as opposed to having an awareness and intention of how the knot is being formed. Learning there is a process to untying the knots is also a practice I would like to be intentional about. I keep trying to resolve the unresolvable in my brain. This just makes things worse and makes the knots tighter and last longer. I am unintentionally working against myself in this way. Turns out some knots are best handled through manual therapy and stretching. I want this focus of learning knots to become an intentional effort for me in the coming weeks and months. I am already on it in that I think I have most of the pieces on the table. I just need to pay attention to how I can put them together in a way that works for me now. I need a routine to flow with. This is an adjustment of focus.

Adjusting focus in part what I mean by owning my perception. I sometimes wonder if that all power really is at its core is focus adjustment. One of my foundational views of reality is represented in this statement: All life grows and behaves according to the environment. Our focus is a way of creating an environment. It is brings awareness to whatever we are looking at. That awareness begins to interact with the operating system of our mind. And from there our actions flow.

There is a line of thought out there that says our actions begin to happen even before we consciously choose to act. This makes sense to me. Although the idea of learning to control one’s focus is a game changer for me when it comes to the idea of free will. At this point I want to lean into saying there is no “free will”. I say this for two reasons. One, as I just mentioned, our actions begin before we realize it. Two, our will is interdependent on the wills that are around us. My will is not an isolated power that is unaffected by the wills around it. So my will reacts to the wills in its current, past and perceived future environments. A reaction is not a choice. Reactions are more akin to a forced dance.

However, I do at this point think we can develop the ability to have influential wills. What do I mean by influential will? As I grow my awareness I am creating a new environment that will affect the way I react to the wills around me. And ultimately if I am able to bring conscious intention to my ability to focus I am now beginning to curate the internal environment of my will. This then causes a ripple effect to my reactive body and it begins to react according to an environment that I have “chosen” / developed over time. Thus the focused curated will becomes a force of influence on my will and the wills around me. The influential will can be joined by other influential wills to become a collaborative will. The collaborative will is the calibrated joining of multiple individuals intentionally focused and curated influential wills.

To bring this back around the only place that we need to be concerned about developing our power is around our ability to adjust and calibrate our focus. This is the place from which all of our reactive action flows.

One essential part of focus is realizing the structure of our focus. What is our focus looking for? Why is our focus looking for this? What is our focus willing to do to get it? What is our focus forfeiting on? Why is our focus forfeiting?

As I write this I am realizing I may have taken all of this too far. I am ok with that as I think it may not be about the thought I was trying to work out. It may instead be about the view I created by taking a thought too far.

For instance I stated “ the only place that we need to be concerned about developing our power is around our ability to adjust and calibrate our focus.”, I am not sure about this other than I do realize that when I use words like only or all I am assuredly eliminating other legitimate paths that I may or may not be aware of. This is a problem and a sign that I have come full circle from an attempt to liberate back to an effort to contain.

So I relent on this view and stop to take a look around. What thoughts opened up because I was willing to take a thought too far. In this particular case I look around and notice that I now feel less pressure on myself to change my actions. I now see that it is not my actions fault. If I do have fault at all it is in my underdeveloped ability to calibrate and curate my focus. I have been really hard on my body throughout most of my life as it carries so much stress that is not actually mine.

Developing my ability to focus my perception is something that will allow my body to get a better return on my efforts. If I focus on what I have the most ability to influence, I can set my body up to be a more stable environment for navigating my focus. My body will always be reactive. It reacts to the environment. My ability to adjust my focus is my ability to create an environment that my body will react in more sustainable and effective ways.

Again, I may be going to far, and that is ok. Better than that, it is ideal. It is ideal as long as I have the ability to release my focus from having to prove my thought at any and all costs. The benefit is when I let go of the idea and look around. They view is incredible and there are so many other directions to begin to explore. Not to mention the pathways here are getting brighter. We are showing each other the way. Keep going. Don’t be afraid of getting lost. We are in an orbit and will inevitably be coming back around. And when we do come back around let’s take the time to notice. As my instagram bio states: Life is repetition. Notice the part that is the same to see who you have been. Notice the iteration to see who you are becoming.

There were 4 days between post 40/?? and 41/??. I successfully wrote one thousand words a day for 40 days. And then it took 4 days to write the 41st day. The past 4 days have held more intensity and potency than the last 40. And that is saying something. I am not sure yet how much I am ready to write about the past 4 days directly.

For now, I begin with the film Backrooms. I have seen it twice now. Never has a film visually unnerved me in such a way. Regardless of the plot, this film visually took me to a place of memory and yes even madness. Things being the same and different simultaneously. The non-sequential nature of narrative pieces showing up in unpredictable and distorted ways. This is the undoing of fascism. This is the undoing of the imposed psychological structure of our perception. This is release of our coded desire. And it is terrifying.

How does one rest when there is not a sense of continuity to ones surroundings? Will we not immediately and instinctively start to create familiarity and predictability once again? This was the difference between my first viewing of the film and my second. The first time I was viscerally unnerved. The second time not as much because I knew what was coming. The predictability was much less terrifying and more, well, boring. Not that the film was boring. I just did not feel it as much in my body and I wanted more. I wanted more liminal terror. Liminal terror is the feeling of the unfamiliar, the unpredictable and the unknown taking place in an environment that is familiar. These feelings we do our best to keep locked and in the back in favor of everything being in its right place.

Last week I packed my bags the night before leaving for my trip to Lexington, Kentucky. I was taking two bags so that I could take extra items for my family. One of the bags I took had a built-in lock. This bag had some excess room in it and I forgot to pack something. When I awoke on the day of my flight I went to put the item in my bag and I could not get the lock to work. I tried. My partner tried. I looked up videos online. Nothing worked and it was time to go. I thought oh well, maybe security will check my bag and in doing so they will undo the lock. Sure enough, when I arrived in Lexington at the airport the lock was released and I could access the contents.

To prevent myself from dealing with this again, I decided to buy a different luggage lock. In theory this is a good idea. However for it to actually work I need to not misplace the new lock I just purchased. I did not end up finalizing my packing and looking for the lock until just before I left. And guess what? I could not find the lock. I looked in all the places I thought it was and could not find it so once again I am going to the airport with my bag having lock issues.

Fortunately though my other bag had a lock and this one worked. At least so I thought. When I arrived in Seattle I went to the baggage claim to collect the bags from the luggage carousel. I had a spot to get the bag right where they came out and slide onto the carousel. My bag came out, slid down and off popped the lock and it landed right at my feet! I immediately turned to my kid and said, “You saw that, right?” And she replied yes and was amazed. She had been witness to this journey of me being stuck locked in Seattle, coming unlocked in transit, the lost lock in Lexington and then the lock just popping off and landing at my feet back here in Seattle.

All of this as I attempt to unlock the coding of my mind and release a bit of the madness. And by madness I mean the untamed. The instinctual. The misunderstood. The imagination. The brilliance. The new familiar. The future mundane. This is an attempt to enter my backrooms. To reveal them to you. To allow you the space to bring your own resonance and projection to these walls that are not quite how you remember them being, but yet are still recognizable.

Yes this is unnerving for yourself and for me. I don’t like it anymore than you do, at least not at first. Then once you start to find your footing, well, we both have a lot of exploring to do. I encourage you to bring yourself as you read along with me in these essays. Listen to your body. Notice your feelings. What backroom lights flicker in you as we venture forth in the undoing of narrative and indulgence in process. Terror is to be expected. This is just excitement for the unpredictable or is it for the predictable. Either way, enjoy the rush.

If you happen to find yourself bored, note the opportunity you have to push the limits. What are you craving in your boredom? This may be the space you need to say fuck it and jump in. Let yourself write without reservation, hesitation or censorship. Allow your voice to flow with whatever comes out. And then keep going.

As I have learned recently, it is a good practice to allow yourself to just express until you discover what it is you are wanting to say or to explore. Starting to write with no direction is like starting to open the door or pass through the wall to an unexplored backroom. Yes some of the doors are locked until they are not. You can do your best to unlock them yourself, but as I have learned sometimes the locks have minds of their own.

I am in transition. I am currently living in my past, present, and future all at the same time. I am where I was, where I am and where I will be. None of this is in order. None of this is sequential. I orbit my life and lived reality with speed that is so fast it feels slow. My body shows me the signs of the speed. And yet it simultaneously mocks these signs with a reactiveness that takes me back to the very beginning. And truth be told there is no beginning. At least not one that I can be sure about. For the stories change. The memories morph. Even the images do not appear as they once did. For what am I seeing in the image now is not what I saw before. And yet it is exactly what I saw. This makes no sense. None of it makes any sense! Both the comfort and the discomfort are palpable. My mouth utters the phrase “I am scared.” compulsively throughout the day. I don’t know how to rest. How do I relax?! My stomach holds a rebellion and I hurl and then hurl again. My daughter looks at me and says your eye is bleeding! My eye is bleeding! And this is not a big deal. It looks worse than it is. It will go away in one to two weeks. It is caused by the pressure from hurling last night. I am old. I am young. No I am old. Not that old. Not that young. But I am old. Which makes me young. For I am older than my mother and I am younger than my sister and my daughter. There is an arc to life. I have passed the tipping point.

I perhaps crossed this threshold just before the pandemic in 2018 or 2019. I think it was when my dad died. He died just down the hall from where I lay as I type this in bed. It was a Sunday after post church family dinner. I was in Las Vegas (the city of Lost Wages as he called it) at a metal music festival. I had eaten some gummies and was about to see the most intense band in the lineup that day; Indian. My dad once said that in his family there were 7 chiefs and 1 indian. He was the indian. And I got a call from my brother in law as Indian was about to take the stage. He never calls. I let it go to voicemail because it was so loud. I stepped out and the message said to call back as soon as I could. My dad was / had died. Now I am here and my mom is across the hall in their / her bedroom. It is 8 years later. I am now 50. My daughter is now 20. So much has changed and yet it is all just as it was only completely different.

The physical world is the most linear of all reality. It is the slowest to change without brute force. And yet the change is constant and consistent. You would not know the world is spinning at 795 miles per hour here in Lexington, Kentucky. Did you know the Earth spins at the equator at 1,040 miles per hour and at exactly 0 miles per hour at the North and South Pole! I wonder if a person can feel the difference between the world spinning and not spinning. I doubt it. We are so small we can barely notice anything. And yet it is all happening all the the time. Like the movie title of that film that won best picture at the Oscars in 2023; Everything Everywhere All At Once.

So my stomach spins when I lose my faith and acknowledge that all of my core beliefs are in fact fictional. I hurl from the awareness and the blood vessel in the corner of my left eye can’t take the pressure and decides to explode and I am not even aware!

I get so upset at madness. I disdain the madness in me and in others. I want order. I want predictability and understanding. This is the way of fascism. My body is an aspiring fascist. And yet the madness of my mind saves me once again from the tyranny of the lust of such comfort in predicable familiarity. So I indulge my madness and play with the absurdity of all things all the time. Yes I do trust in science and use it to spring myself into the air of the inevitable as I pretend I can fly while I am simply laying in this bed across the hall from my widowed aging mother and down the hall from the spot where my father died. I am in transition. I am in between. I am so old that I am actually growing younger. I have passed the point of peak sanity and now get to return to the delights of the playful imagination. I get to indulge my madness because I am both old enough and young enough to accept the absurdity of this existence. I yawn and a single tear slides down my cheek. My stomach feels off still and I wonder if I will be able to sleep tonight.

Tomorrow is another day of facing how much things have changed and stayed the same all at the same time. My daughter and I will visit family members I have known my entire life and she will ask them about their experience as an Arab American and what it was like to grow up and be a part of the Dawahare family. I will be with her to facilitate the meetings and to observe. I will pay attention to myself, to her and to them. And hopefully if I am lucky I will catch a glimpse of who I was, who I am and who I am becoming.

aiming for just enough conformity to loosen and disrupt your convictions

pro-collaborator / anti-follower

free palestine from the river to the sea

eliminating the patriarchal colonial fascist capitalist system one philosophically aligned breath to thought to action at a time

misunderstanding is valued here

unbuckle your seatbelts cause nothing is sacred

process is in / narrative is out

let’s do this