Japanese Prometheus

I've been working on this entry for the past couple of days. It started out as one thing and quickly morphed into a completely different animal. Maybe that's happened to you? You start out doing something, anything, a trip, a project at work, a simple household chore or even a date and it turns into a convoluted miasma of unfortold complications.

I don't know when your monsters come to you. These are the fiends that tear away all the fallacies that you've allowed yourself to believe. They strike deeply and true.Exposing the one self that betrays denial. For some it's in the dead of night. Others, in the wee hours of the morning, like mine do, scratching and biting at my soul just as the sun battles with the dark to gain prominence of the skies. You could even be an afternoon person confronting the id during a break in the middle of a busy day. It doesn't matter much when they come or how often. What concerns me is the brutal attack on the walls I put up around the image I've built for myself.

I can't help but wonder during the silent battle that goes on in my head about honesty and truth and how far we go to construct fortifications that keep people away from us or obversely, facades erected to attract them. It's not all that easy to take the rose colored glasses off and inspect ones self. And after those moments of intense scrutiny you have to put yourself back and find the right path to continue your adventure.
This kind of reminds me of a movie I saw called the Razors edge, a really good flick about a man coming to terms with himself and the world around him. You need a really great map to walk the straight and narrow. I'm learning that the image of the world we see around us is not the world itself and I'm sitting here wondering if I've got a good cartographer in my head.
My wife often asks me my opinion about things Japanese just to get a Gaijin or male point of view. I frequently surprise her by saying something that doesn't sound "American" to her. I can't help it. I've been here for more than fifteen years and in some ways I'm becoming more comfortable with Japanese thinking and attitudes than I am with American ideas, or rather ideas and opinions I held while still living in America.
Maybe I am Just mellowing with age. It could be that all my efforts of reprogramming my responses and changing negative acts into something positive has started to work. I'd like to think that I'm growing (not just old) and starting to be able to view my world (I say"my" 'cause it's different from yours) from a different plane of awareness. another point of view. I couldn't tell you. I still find myself controlled by primal and sexual urges that keep me anchored to the older portions of my brain.
Anytime that I think I'm making advancements to my personal evolution, some situation incites the rage or passion inside me and takes control of the wheel.
So whenever I get into a discussion about society or psychology, whenever philosophy comes knocking on the door or when I try to explain the harmonizing affects of Aikido I find myself popping in and out of different rooms trying to get my thoughts straight and trying to find an answer from the original position.

Making my judgements and decisions based on a moral position isolated from any benefit to any idea I might present or criteria I may employ is tough cause I just can't seem to seperate me from me.

Does this ever happen to you?