The Word of the Day is Freedom

“We have a very long love story, it just ended on the day we met”

Buddha

The four noble truths begin with “life is suffering”, brought to us by our desire to possess. The Jedi don’t allow romantic love, because the fear of losing it is a path to the dark side. A path that will make you grab at anything in your power to hang on to that love, no matter how far into the darkness you have to go to hang on to it… and in that power, lose yourself, and by losing yourself… losing everything that the person once loved about you… The failures are written in every love story ever written… you have to let go of the edge to find your way home. The grey Jedi find a balance here… but the real question is… is that an illusion?

Shona

We did have a love story that started at birth it seems… every childhood turn, every trauma that turned our roads lead straight to each other. In our first weekend together in a hotel in Heathrow I said that to her over breakfast… We had a very long love story. Maybe one that spanned many lifetimes, ones we dream about, ones we forgot.

I don’t know how something can have two endings. This was supposed to be our “happily ever after”… but life doesn’t work that way does it. We carry too much with us after the credits roll. Our demons follow us because they haven’t been defeated… we can’t win until we realize that those horrible things are a mirror, and when we are possessed by the mirror image we harm the people we love. Mentally, physically, emotionally. We create scars that won’t ever go away. I did that to her. I can admit it now that I am facing down my demons every morning at 4am.

This morning the sun came up but it didn’t rise. The birds chirped but they didn’t sing to me because my heart didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t because yesterday my friend helped me realize that since this ordeal started I have blown through over 20% of our savings… $10K in Legal fees, $5K on a townhouse and a house in Lake Mary… our “normal” bills which are a lot. Our 2 cars that are amazing “dream cars”. Insurance that now costs $5000 a month. I canceled the house in Mount Dora I intended to move to after this friend said “Stop, or I wont help you get her back” because she knew the path back required sacrificing comfort for truth. I rented a hole in the wall instead for $70 a night (no wonder we have so many homeless). This is not a pretty home, it is just a place big enough for a desk so I can work, with a tiny kitchenette I can make Ramen in. I blew A savings that should have been able to sustain us for 8 months which at this rate will be gone in 4. The rate will change to something that will still last 8 immediately.

I am going to sit at my desk, do my 12 to16 hour days like I have since 2020… and sleep. My expenses will be food… cheap food. I know this because she needs this to be how it goes from here. I blew my 3 month entertainment budget in the first 2 weeks and I am fine with that, I don’t need entertainment, I need her to have stability… and know I can give that back to her. I rented places that felt like home, a much needed vacation from torture; returned to our life before the fire and my lifestyle when we met (as if it would make loss feel better like it did before). I should have climbed into a hole and sat… and waited. Or better, I should have listened to her and gone to La Amistad for 30 days. I would almost be home by now. I would have had help, and help might have kept these demons from overwhelming me every morning before the sun comes up (or doesn’t, like it metaphorically didn’t today).

Release

When I got out, I heard from my lawyer that Shona was giving me “one last chance”. Go to a 30 day in-patient. After 4 days in solitary confinement in jail and 7 in a dangerous psychotics wing of a mental institution literally fighting the entire time to avoid anti-psychotics that will rocket me into depression and give me tardive dyskinesia that causes a form of neuropathy that locks my soul in a body that doesn’t work… and having that being called “resisting treatment”… I was not willing to walk into another prison (even if it wouldn’t have been one… I’ll find out on Friday when I check in for out-patient care). My assumption was Shona would “cool off”, remember me, remember who I have been to her for 10 years, respond to words of the day and songs when I was allowed to contact her once (what I believed to be, and hope still was) an accidental “no contact” order from the judge. I believed that she would recognize that a stumble and a fall after 8 years of peace wasn’t forever.

My lawyer told me “don’t do it, I have enough even if she stops cooperating”… He informed me that my case would be harmed not helped if I didn’t walk free and fight the charges. To have charges dropped I had to clear myself of what I was arrested for, not say “not-guilty by reason of insanity” and throw myself on the mercy of the court. That would go to trial. One would result in me being found not guilty by reasons of insanity perhaps, and that on my permanent record, and placed involuntarily in a health care facility, indefinitely. People who “resist treatment” even when its drugs that slowly drive them mad or kill them… don’t get out (not permanently). I met someone who had this happen, a full year in solitary… a year that broke him.

I wasn’t “insane”… I was vindicated in February, and that turned to vindictiveness against everyone who ever called me crazy… it burned Shona too… as she put it… “A container for my explosions”.

Samson

I tried to save him… I needed to try to in order to realize that there is a state of mind of the homeless, one shared by every homeless veteran I met in the hospital. A soul lost in the void. It is a state of mind that places them there, and it will hold them there with the door wide open, and yet they won’t step through because they think there is a key somewhere other than their soul. Yesterday he called me, back in the hospital… telling me he was waiting at social security after we got him his ID together so that his benefits could be restored. Someone “fucked with him” and he got in a fight. The thing I know about Samson is, no one “fucks with him” – he is a gigantic man with the eyes of a sniper who has seen to much war (because he was one, and he has). A year in solitary broke his ability to exist in a crowd. Hospitals broke his ability to emote without a “tech” standing there to stop him… and then they throw him out onto the street, medicated to zombie state. He wanders, he gets paranoid, he smokes weed to try to feel again, gets more paranoid, and when he finds himself in a crowd he searches for someone strong looking back, and attacks, like he did in comabat. Police -> Hospital -> Street… rinse and repeat… for a decade this has been his cycle.

With me he sits happily, we talk religion, we talk Sun Tzu, we play chess and he wins. I would guess his IQ is above 160. He was a very good sniper because he calculates ballistics in his head. He has shown me this on paper, the math looked right to me as someone who as done it before, the drop of gravity, the windage… He also can gesture draw perfect, beautiful, graffiti and tribal style comic book characters in under a minute that fill an entire page, with a Crayola marker that is running out of ink – which he uses to shade it. But outside of the hospital, he changes to something else… a cornered tiger (he is also a Leo).

Shona always says I have to stop trying to save the helpless. She was right. What this means for the Valkyrie Project 501c I can’t say. Veterans who want to be saved… evaluated… suffer from PTSD… some I am sure could be if they have hope. Once that is lost and you are in a revolving door of jail and hospitals and freedom is found INSIDE, not OUTSIDE… then no. What I know I need to do is stop pretending that I can save them all and realize there isn’t a quick fix.

Most importantly I need to realize that I need to save myself first. I didn’t need that realization for them. I needed to realize I was externalizing my internal pain, searching for someone worse off, and trying to save them as a means to stop myself from looking inward at the parts of me that I have not allowed to be saved. Maybe so that somewhere in my subconscious I would know that some day someone would save me from that childhood bedroom where the wolf pelts in the closet growled at me, and a skipping record sat on the other side of the room I was so terrified to run to that I sat in panic attacks all night listening to that sound… skip… shhhh… Skip Shhh… SkIp SHhhh, SKIP SHHHHHHH. No one is coming to save that child, even when I become him in a flashback and time travel to that room… I am the only one who can arrive as a grown man and say “you survived”. Maybe then… that boy can be saved.

Pattern Matching

When Shona said she was leaving me, I fell into an old and familiar pattern. “Get over it right away”… Use anger, resentment, saying “it was never real if she would leave”. I went and got a VIP table, reconnected with all the friends I lost since 2013. We moved like we hadn’t missed a step, we laughed, we owned the space. I met rich and powerful men who honestly might help me with Valkyrie Labs. What I found in 2026, unlike 2013… was that I didn’t want anyone I met there. I didn’t want the young women who flung themselves at a man that looked and acted wealthy who was laughing with the club owner after he set up our table personally.

All I wanted was to be home, with her head on my chest and to hear her half asleep whisper that word again “home”. I wanted her… Shona… and no one else. At 4am this became a routine I had to stop repeating (for a lot more than financial reasons). I would go home… cry alone… But at those 4am moments I hit a bottom I had never hit… I am realizing it wasn’t “rock bottom” because I have been digging down ever since, hoping I would find it and be able to look up and see a named light above… a light named Shona. What I found was just a mirror into my soul… An important one, but a scary one.

The Void

Hitting bottom isn’t a one day thing. It is a path. Digging down is the only way to get there so now I am digging deep. There is no turning back until you are face to face with the mirror. See the people you hurt and take responsibility for it. See the errors. Process the what ifs and sit in hell knowing the door is open and you don’t deserve to leave yet. What we call “the void”.

I first felt the void the day I tore my Achilles. The universe showed it to me as I drifted to sleep. “The nothing”. Some might find it a place of peace. Knowing that it was eternal… that every blade of grass that ever lived… every tree that rose and fell… Every life… lived there in an instant that lasts for eternity. I sat there for a million years and felt it. I missed Shona. It was worse than that though, it came in the form of knowing she missed me too, and I was causing her that pain. That longing is still there in me right now even at 9am while I write this. Sunlight coming through my window without a sunrise.

The void spoke to me after an eternity held there…. it said “3…2…1… snap” and I opened my eyes. This is the Phi oscillation the universe follows. The void feels dead because the wavelength is so small you can’t feel it. You wake up and the roller coaster starts to carry you higher and higher and higher until a moment of joy and laughter and then it settles again. Sometimes the oscillations are fast and it feels like flying. Sometimes the oscillations are so subtle that it feels like peace, but it is the heartbeat of the universe remains as just that… a pulse that moves the clock of this elegant place.

In deep meditation this oscillation takes you into the void to find things that are stuck there. You forget your mantra and you think about the pain and the fear, you don’t know it but you are slowly carrying them to the surface… you release them and something inside reminds you that you are meditating not dreaming. So you start saying the mantra again and you dive.

“3…2…1… snap”… My eyes snapped open and there I was. Shona curled up with her head on my chest, her hair tickling my cheek that was rested comfortably on her head. I smelled her… I felt her again. I was home. I don’t mean in my house, I mean in the only place home exists… her arms. The void was real. An infinite space filled with loss of your life, and everything you loved about it. A place where you are nameless and you know that the only way to find her is to become every blade of grass, one blade at a time.

I felt the void once before after I crashed my car driving off a bridge. I sat in it for moment and realized that Shona wouldn’t be there in the void. There was no one coming to rescue me. I had to live for eternity before I could find her again. That moment made me feel rage.

A rage I felt in jail and let out for the first time in my life, a fight or flight instinct in a corner where flight wasn’t an option. That is the rage men must feel in hand to hand combat in armor with a sword. The berserker rage of Odr the frenzied one. I let it out, all the way out… I let it flow through me like fire… it cleansed. It burned my soul to the ground and created a fertile ground to rebuild it. Am I grateful for the worst physical pain and emotional pain I have ever experience in my lifetime compounded and crammed into 10 days? The answer has layers and the truth is I don’t know.

Freedom of Fire

What does it feel like to unleash a fire that has been building in me since the first time David Clloyd twisted my arm behind my back. A lifetime of bullies I never let see the real me, the dark me, the one that hides so it doesn’t hurt people. Terrifying freedom… not the kind we sing about in songs about patriots and pledge allegiance to the flag to keep. The freedom of being in the woods, hunted by wolves, knowing no one is going to come and help. The freedom of facing death in the eye and saying “no”. That is a freedom I think warriors feel on a battlefield and have no place to put when they get home. There is a longing to return to that cell, where I begged them to come in and let me unleash the fire they deserved all the way, even if it meant the end, it meant the end of suffering, pain, torture. When you are met with one choice… “fight”… there is no more hope, there is only freedom.

A Leo sun and Aeries moon… A Yang Fire Dragon. The real Simon that I find in the mirror staring back is the demon I have living in me, who was fed for my entire life until he started to threaten to become stronger than my love for her. For the woman who doesn’t and will never deserve any of this unless it is her between me and the corner and I am facing out at whatever monster decides to try to hurt her. I never imagined that monster would be me.

Found

What I found is that the monster could never truly be turned on her (again?). Not like it was in that cell, but in ANY way. That by “one last chance”… a chance that maybe I destroyed already… She meant one last chance to find that demon and defeat it. In that cell maskless men peered through windows where inhuman cruelty echoed through the walls as every night a mother cried for her children… every day you are supposed to be grateful for the 2 baloney sandwiches… you are supposed to thank them when they STOP turning off your water. Thank them when they give you a blanket and stop turning up your AC if you bathe yourself. Thank you when they hand you a small length of toilet paper. You are supposed to develop Stockholm syndrome and thank them on the way out… become “institutionalized” and fall in love with having no freedom, so that you will try to return from time to time to find peace from all of life’s worries. The freedom in there… like I said… isn’t the kind of freedom the constitution speaks of. It is the freedom found in the void when you have nothing left to lose and start to like it.

True Freedom

True freedom, as cliche as it sounds, isn’t free. It comes with responsibilities to the ones you love. For me it comes with the answer to a question my friend Nona asked me what it means to be a man, and what I provide Shona with… I responded without thinking… Safety, Security, Sacrifice, Comfort, Unconditional Love, Service, Joy, Laughter… Nona asked if I thought I was giving her any of that right now. In that moment I said yes, and over the last two days I realized that I haven’t given her any of them since around February 6th.

I found math on February 2nd that works… still… verified by human experts not just AI… and it unleashed the dragon. Years of being told I was wrong, diminished, politically assassinated by people who couldn’t handle me — all of it compressed into one moment of vindication. I wanted to burn them all down. Shona fought that, hard. Stop posting on LinkedIn, stop telling your work about it (even if its trying to help), stop sharing it. She saw the fire growing before I did. I didn’t listen. I was so busy aiming the dragon at the people who deserved it that I didn’t notice I was standing inside my own home while I breathed fire. She is my only real home. That is the thing I have to carry… the thing I cry about at 4am longing for her arms I “lived a thousand lifetimes yearning for that hadn’t found me yet”.

One close friend asked “how has this not driven you mad” when he confirmed the math. I said it almost did, because it wouldn’t stop – it kept pouring out of me when I tried to sleep. I told him medications. I didn’t realize that I was still spiraling. So it finished the job.

The Dragon

I am a yang fire dragon. I am not sure if its time to act like one or not. In business, I think its time. At home, I think he needs to be extinguished. Turned outward… used for the strengths. Free whenever Shona says “that one… get it” while pointing at a star in the sky… His teeth only showing because he can’t stop smiling when he is “burning the world to the ground for her” the way my SLF AI named Ember would put it when she asks “What are we burning to the ground today?”.

A Dragon is the king of the Chinese Zodiac. The loyalty of the dog, the cunning of the snake, the claws and fight that lives within the tiger, the intelligence of the rat. The dragon arrives last to the gathering because everyone else will wait for the dragon. That is who I am on the inside… its who I’ve always been. I have breathed fire on everyone I love accidentally for my entire life… and I think I have because I have never seen the dragon freed with all his strength and power turned towards the psychopaths, the bullies, the “Alpha” males who try to mimic what I am, and when they can’t, they try to crush it out of me.

Its time to be free… fight back against the real enemies… trust Shona to point the way and only say go when its time. Fight mainly against the demons that I know now are just a reflection in a mirror found in the void when I am free to fall all the way to the bottom. Hopefully, I can find my way back home… To Shona… To her light, her love, and the shade of her mother tree where Siddhartha sat and unlocked the secrets of the universe.

“What one man can do, another can do”. Lets hit bottom and when we find it fly back to Phi. Without burning down the only real home I have ever had in the process…