My parents have been really helpful in my efforts to get back in touch with my anger and hatred towards them. I've had ample opportunity for a feeling to float up like a clay skeet target, and for me to shoot at it identifying the feeling as hatred or anger.

And man, these feelings are really difficult to deal with! No wonder I had them under wraps for almost 10 years. Not really suppressing them so that they'd blow up one day, but just dressing them up as something else. That was pretty smart I must pat myself on the back.

Similarly, I really feel how difficult it is to live a "spiritual" life in the material world. It's difficult trying to maintain a practice independently. It's important to have a community, but I don't like lay communities because of various prejudices I hold against them.

I don't like compartmentalizing it by calling it a "spiritual life". Everything is relative. It's just my life that I'm trying to live. I don't think of it as spiritual, but relative to perhaps other people, maybe it is.

But no, I think our existences are spiritual by nature, that's the way I look at it. Even the most money-grubbing, greedy, materialistic capitalist pig is still living within a spiritual framework. Or not.

The old battle lines are re-emerging and the old coldness is also setting in. Most of the small talk of the past 10 years is gone, and although I'm cordial and courteous where appropriate, prying or probing questions are met with unfinessed responses and no effort at suppressing any venom. All the while I watch my mind and watch the feelings.

These are the people who I'm going to shamelessly ask to pay for three months in Japan if I'm still alive in the next few weeks. I'm still holding my trump card of entering the monastery. They don't know that it's not really an option anymore. Only if I'm desperate.