Hereby begins single, seperate post, following tempos kind suggestion. It was getting hard for me, too! Thank you tempo!
Notice the "chi" in those eyes: ChessDog and Sheree!
Chess Dog, The Most Evolving: Essay Seven Saturday 30 June/01 July, 2007
I just received a fax marked urgent from the World Bank President Houevos Maximelia in Zurich, and co-signed by Devos World Economic Forum Co-Chair Demetry Bottovorshky, and they have deeply implored me to include
ChessDog of
CTS in the further interest in the maintainance of World Peace, I really have to yield on this one under extraordinary pressure. Many letters and faxes have poured into today, and even temposchlucker weighed in via a direct email.
Improvement can take many forms, such as physical, mental, financial, moral, or even in matters of technique, but real improvement can transcend such specific domains and change a whole persons life, the very fibers of his or her being in a way which is of lasting and enduring altering life value. When these qualities start to awaken, something of true beauty and arresting heartfelt care and connection can flourish...
ORIGINS
How far a distance would not just a person—but two or more respective persons--have to travel in a relationship interpersonally to go from alternating sharp, curt vicious attack then immediate counter recriminations, or from jocular locker room back biting more suited to a Saturday Night Live skit then social psychoanalytic thrusts in kind, how far would persons in this kind of ‘situation’ have to go from that, to get to one centered upon kindness, authentic sharing, tender vulnerability in forthright sharing and mutual support? I can assure you, this is most rare, and as such, is all the more deeply cherished and treasured.
New bloggers cannot know or understand, and this is not the place to share the *hemmm* richly embellished “specifics”, but for now, can only most rapidly note that after hitting my first 10,000 tries at chess tactical server, I made a comment or two about my sense of accomplishment, yes, and there he was, completely himself: chessDog. ChessDog was in a category all of his own, twenty thousand problems at that time towards 96%. This was one tough dude.
I didn’t know him, only that he was most unusual, and I mean that sincerely. But he let it be known quickly that, for whatever reason, that I had his displeasure. Somehow it would die down, or he would make nice (for that moment!) or a friend or two such as LikeForests or Spacecowboy would weigh in with some supportive remarks, but it got to where I couldn’t make a single comment without him being right there on my tail. Whether he felt justified or how or what we it went, is not our story now, for it really turns out well in the end about my friend chessDog. But it got so disturbing I hadn’t read a single CTS comment at the message board for four months, with no plans to ever go back, closing my eyes there and practicing only. “OK. Say what ever you want, but I will never see it”.
TRIGGERSI broke a rib in November, nothing really terrible, but one of those little things that happens is bad but not unbearable, but days latter when you ‘just sneeze once’ it literally feels like you’ve been hit straight on with a baseball bat and fall to you knees. Thereafter I was home on medication and painkillers on State L&I for 12 days, and started playing hundreds upon hundreds of bullet chess games, luxuriating in Dionysian frenzy.
Don’t ask me why, but as psychic as I am (and those who know me, know how across hundreds of occasions I ‘just’ seem to know things such as who died, or who is where, or what will happen, in dreams and bodily sensations that are knows as ‘something’), I just knew to go to the CTS message board. I told this to him in one of our many subsequent exchanges at my post before we became truly acquainted directly, but don’t ask me why, I read the first line at the most recent post and there he is saying simply: “dktransform, I really miss you”. My goodness. And then I knew something was really up... The Twilight Zone indeed!
I don’t mean anything more than that. I didn’t know the disposition, only that I needed to pay real attention, as did he had been, and of course as I had been doing in my own way. In therapy, there comes a point where you cannot go any more or much rather, really don’t need to go any more, and this is not a bad thing. You get over someone having betrayed you in love and see how you empowered them to betray you by turning a blind eye to the truth in order to get something thought of as value, or start to fathom how the missing parent figure (and I mean me, not chessDog here please) has tainted all you social communication, or learn how to commingle in the work place by supporting others and communicating constructively and clearly.
MINIMAL SIGNALS
So when you graduate, it is when you can do therapy with yourself, and the learning is permanently and operatively and ongoingly installed in you, much as software would be installed, but it is in your brain and gut and heart, your eyes and your fingers… So you learn, most of all, to watch or learn and listen, or as my therapist Steven R from the late 90’s called ‘the signals’, ‘the signs’, or more specifically ‘the minimal signals’.
In what I now like to call adulthood, we still can stand on what I like to call the train track, and if we get hit with a train (and again, I don’t mean chessDog here but me directly) we start to where we see it coming. We vocalize and stand, saying: ‘Boy, do I see that train coming!’ We start to get what Bertrand Russell co-author, mathematician, logician, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called ‘foresight’. We start to see and have discrimination. We start to view others and study them, and not just project from our own needs and feelings. In ‘noticing’, we start to see when we are talking with people how they turn their shoulders away, or their eye pupils contract, or how they flick their ear with a finger, or a lip dips to one side. We get past noise and see what ‘the content’ is. The real content.
GROUP PROCESSI had the good fortune, in my latter stages of getting the basic lay training of what a 'trained therapist' would have, of meeting up with the
Mindell Group Process Work, aka Worldwatch. It is like EST, or The Landmark Forum, or Lifespring, only larger, more inclusive, and more mature not to mention more caring or less confrontational. One of the basic tenants of this work, at once incorporating Jungian psychology and organizational development, is that the seeds of a conflicts resolution lay in fully experiencing the conflict itself; it also says that only by fully investigating a conflict can it be resolved, if not healed.
MY guru Joy always used to say, "No matter what you care to say about David, he keeps showing up." The same can be said about chessDog 100% completely. What is so truly magnificent about WHAT HAPPENED with chessDog as against chessDog himself (that is to say without his or my ego alternately), is that despite his repeated attempts to comment along the edges of my world when our conflict had not yet resolved...
...was that up to and including his emailing me at ICC under an new identity which I of course--at that time!--immediately censored, and despite my three fold repeated STERNLY TELLING HIM that no longer would he get any response from me, in response to his three fold writing comments at my blog post, what is so magnificent about him is that he kept coming back.
This man is a fighter bar none, a warrior down to his bones. I warrior does not need to be right or wrong, only believe. And as we all know, I am not exactly low energy, so go figure the size of that cloud of smoke! Smoldering.
I told him in no uncertain terms, three times, that unless he give me a way of reaching him outside here or providing a place to comment unilaterally, things being what they were, that we are done, and I of course meant it. I can go a long with almost anyone, but when I am 'done', I am 'done'. Then I made him a dinner guest after Dante and Leonardo da Vinchi, and the next thing I knew, he gave me his email, and quickly thereafter, we exchanged many personal and cordial notes off line via email. While out conversation was and is private, temposchlucker, Blue Devil Knight, Chess Relearner were all more or less aware.
ENERGYDid you ever notice how no matter what the resolution to finish a book, or call a friend, or return a phone call, or fix something at home, or even edit a chess database file, somehow the energy is never quite there? And alternately, on three hours sleep to go on an exotic and long dreamed of trip, or in meeting someone for a drink with endless things with which to discuss, somehow we don’t feel tired?
My posts with temposchlucker and Blue Devil Knight were in some ways while truly time consuming relatively easy to conceive since I know these fellows--at least relative to cyber space--quite well. But however much I might regard Grandpatzer, or Wahrheit (or Robert Pearson) significantly, I had to struggle a lot, especially with Robert, since I don’t quite know these guys, again, however great my regard. His post was the hardest for me.
SIDENOTE SEVEN POINT TWO:
Now since 10:55 am Thursday am (when I had 6.2 hours sleep that night, and only 5.0 hours last night) I have had only 11.2 hours sleep in two days, and only one ten minute nap last early last night, and I AM NOT TIRED. Two days at my job, meeting 600 people yesterday and today, 34 bullet games and 3 blitz games in those two nights, and one revision of Warhreit, AND I went to bed at 8:03 am this morning and got up at 1:04pm today
(my goodness: I somehow fell below 1400 bullet, and no matter how hard I tries, EVERY TIME that I got within 2 or 3 elo of that, would loose one more game, so spent, well *himmm* an entire night playing bullet. One whole night...),
and now I have energy for chessDog after ALL THAT, running home after work to type after starting this during 30 minutes at lunch today? Why is that? I am currently working 8 of 9 days in this work period, walking virtually the ENTIRE time.
No matter how young in spirit he is (and similar to temposchlucker, I mean this in the very best way), he has ESSENCE. Now whatever we say about other people, despite Sartre's proclamation in his famous Existential yarn, Nausea, that "
Hell is other people", we can also say that HEAVEN IS OTHER PEOPLE. What can we not say about another which is, after all, but a reflection of ourselves? In honoring others we honor god, we honor creation.
Me at left; my brother in arms Shawn right, at his first wedding. With his being the most familiar with my highly creative investment work somehow was handed the better part of the $40,000,000 either secured or grew at Migrain Stinely Invesment when I 'left' in late 2000, despite my being at his bachelars party and canceled a serious mountain climbing trip with my oldest childhood friend to be there, as solemnly requested by his best man and brother: "It would mean a lot to him if you could be there", despite all that, somehow when I questioned their $40 exit fee when I moved my account out of there, explicably never heard from him again! Ah, the love of our brothers!
Photo at Shawns (left) second wedding (me, right), after insulting me in the chapel right before things got 'started'.
WARRIOR
We have all seen the fast friends come and gone, the loves of such vigor come and gone. But where are all those people now? Whatever happened? Oh the love people proclaim, and the friendships forever! But sometimes it is better to never say such things, I have finally learned. And sometimes, as my teacher of architecture, great architect John Hejduk of the New York Five (cf. Five Architects, Museum of Modern Art, or Richard Meyer, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, and Peter Eisenman of the White Architecture Movement) used to say: "I have noticed how your friends become you enemies (wormwood) and you enemies become your friends (chessDog)". It is best to let it flow, and let those who need to go (wormwood's short reply to my post, while drunk and not much of anything there after?) and those who need to come, arrive. One door closes and another opens, the cosmic principle.
And as often happens, after two men resort to fisticuffs, what with such pugilistic rancor and bludgeoning as occurs in the primordial and primeval cosmic school yard, after the blood dries, and they latter admit, 'boy, you nearly kicked my ass', or 'Man, dude, you sure know how to fight'.
Photo of Wrestler Chris Benoit applying his craft, long before his recent ill fated 'murder suicide'Somehow in football or boxing, there is a certain charm, that even god loving men enjoy in seeing a bunch of men kicking ass. There is a certain brotherhood or kinship which is real and enduring, or, as Sandra Ray in her highly recommended book
Loving Relationships said: "love drives out everything unlike itself". And, for chessDog, I feel a certain love, much as I do for temposchlucker and Chess Relearner (latter has not posted much, but we have a now large and varied intimate correspondence which is, of course, private).
MOST EVOLVING
I started to write last week, that he was 'ChessDog, The most improved', but to say that he is the most evolving is far better. You can improve the finish on your car, or kitchen floor, or being on time to work, but 'evolution' is far grander, for his potential as a HUMAN BEING IS enormous. His passion is so deep, and his ferocity so great, that when he integrates his core, he will be a complete man with the loyalty and heart of a fierce and indomitable warrior. I am not a complete man yet, close but no cigar. This is often a lifelong quest and not many get there.
More on this subject must come latter, but for now, can but note the tip of the iceberg, and let everybody know that my father was arrested by the FBI six months after I was born. So much tension was around me, that my mother did not want to leave the house for an entire year, being naturally too ashamed to show her face. He got straightened out in a big way, and fast, and we were all raised to be upright and honest, and to face all challenges, to help others, and to speak the truth, with of course my mother adamently behind all this. So we never know what other folks must face, or what mental illness two parents could carry, and how we would have to learn all from a zero start line, stone cold, alone. There were no parents. I have had to become the parent of my own self.
LOVE AND TRIALS
We do not choose such things, but follow where the muse pulls us, or, as Homer says: "Sing us of Muse, Oh rosy finger Dawn" in the opening lines of the Odyssey, written 2700 years ago.
It
took Odysseus nine years to reach Ithaca after leaving Troy, and I can but note, that we all accept chessDog as he is, and whether he choose not to blog, or comment only, or not at all, respectfully note, that with or without proper 'is's and are's', if the day were to come that he simply had a tiny post, if only for a place to put comments with one tiny word alone saying "post", or now and again tell us of his world, or his chess, we would all embrace him with dignity and good cheer (after of course the requisite initial rubbing by temposchlucker, and good natured fun by Blue Devil Knight).
It is not my place to divulge the details of his personal life, and this if ever is for him to tell, but I can tell you that he is a performing artist (big surprise to me!), has recently returned to the gym as an accomplished boxer again at his local gym (IS ANYONE AT ALL SURPRISED AT THIS??) after some hiatus, has a very good woman named Sheree whom he dearly loves and whom must be the most special woman in the world to be with him and love him, and has a hand in guiding some special young people in this world, and, with Temposchlucker and Chess Relearner, is one of the three bloggers that I think that I will probably meet or talk with one day on the phone, or both, and what a day that will be!
I realized with a shudder months ago, when I was on Wall Street, managing the big bucks, that I told my guru that I'd like to mentor young Afro Americans, never making the connection that I have been doing this for the last five years at my very inner city store, all very rough and tough and in your face (and I mean it is very brutal as only such can be, day after day).
And somehow it all fits, and with chessDog showing up as he has now, it is spiritually a major sign of my own change in Karma, and I often joke with some grain of truth, that my current job is like some type of prison sentence, and that I am 'doing time', or 'serving time' for my own previous boundless arrogance, and his at times riveting authenticity is so freshing, and a blossoming friendship with chessDog is very dear to me, and I treasure him, as I hope you do, too.
