That's what I get for writing

Oh sure, I'm a writer. Sure I'm supposed to write. But here's the thing. Writing is my higher power. All you 12 steppers shut the fuck up. Writing is my God. And I worship it. When I leave my higher power it's cuz making me crazy, then I'm willfully denying myself a god. a god that gives and takes away.

So anyway, I start writing last night and it gave me some very good stuff. And within 24 hours I've lost footing in two major components in my life. One of them I said I'd never talk about on a blog. The other is my sense of community. So yet again, I gotta say "fuck you, writing. fuck you, god."

I live in an intentional community. We commune with intent. And I have been spending 24 hours with a cold, healing a crack in my heart, and really pondering what I'm doing here. Not here on the planet, but here in this space. This space that has a mission statement and core values and goals and projects and needs and offerings.

I'm gonna put it on a universal level and venture to say that what I'm about to say is relatable in all parts of life: finance, career, love, sex, housing, friendships...

Universal level: We all want purpose. In every aspect of our lives we are asking that facet to give us purpose. We want a lover to want our love. We want a friend to want our comraderie, we want a community to want us to do all these things within it...to enrich it. I found that community, but the crazy thing about getting what you want is you then have to give what you're asked.

And my community is asking me to create change.

And I don't know how to do that.

I'm sitting here among activism literature, KPFK is playing upstairs, roommates are talking about drug legalization downstairs, a cheesy heist film in on tv (okay, it ain't ALL about the change). And where am I? Sitting here wondering how to keep a good man down.

It's all quite pathetic. And it's been all day.

I've been working in Beverly Hills, shopping for accessories for my cell phone, checking my blackberry, etc etc. And I get home to mid-city and look around and I see my community and how much there is to do. And I don't want it to be the community I came from -sheltered lives with their crack in starbucks mugs and dogs in pink sweaters. I look around my community and I don't want it to stay what it is. From my car window I see where someone got shot, where someone else got purse snatched, where a woman got propositioned, and where a guy exposed himself to my roommate's mother. So here is a community that needs change and we have no model to change it to.

It made me so crazy, I looked at an apartment in West Hollywood. $750 for a small room, refrigerator, stove, and bathroom you can barely bend over in to shave your legs. Cheap, but not. I wanted to move there. I wanted to get out. Out of sight, out of mind.

I'm now in the computer room on the house computer and I'm writing this looking at so much space. Space that I love and covet and need like a drug and it's space that feels wasted on me. Because I don't know how to change it.

I can't change the fact that someone died fifty feet from where I sit. I can't change the fact that a woman was knocked to the ground and robbed before entering my own home. And on a tangent and yet the most pertinent powerlessness of all, I can't change the fact that she wouldn't recognize the man who robbed her because -for lack of a better phrase- they all look a like to her. And for lack of a better analogy, she was most disturbed that she lost her filofax.

I can't change the fact that no one else knows how to change things. All I can do is want to leave because I feel completely powerless. Completely invisible. Every thing I grasp goes right through my fingers.

And I want to leave.