The Road

Behold yon woman, running in the shadows of the night, all six cylinders of motherly instinct and panic dragging her forward as she holds her baby with a grip that says if she holds him any less tightly, he’ll be stripped from her forever. The wind around her whips up trash and she could be running through a forest as autumnal leaves are swept back up from their slumber. She’s the poetic representation of Sarah Conner, running from her own demons- not hellbent robots from the future. Someday, when that baby has become a man, he will question everything, including truth of the shadows that shaped those early years. For now his mind will formulate only basic ideas and in those ideas, her demons become his demons. He was, afterall, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, conceived of that paltry squirt on an island of passionate ecstasy which had been mistaken for love. Surely her demons were real enough for her to run through half of the contiguous fifty, from underground Christian home to underground Christian home, proving that while all God’s children sang their glory glories and hallelujah’s, what they did aside from those moments of edification were downright scary- and they all had their stories. Some old man was keeping vital medicine from his wife for reasons beyond the brain of a 4-year-old. A daughter was running away. A mother cow was chasing that toddler and he was the visual definition of “Uh,oh!” Stubby arms and legs flailed about, trying to push his disproportionately large baby face to and over the fence before she did what she thought she had to do to protect her young from yon scary baby. May that we weren’t as blind as that mother cow.

Look now at the boy. See him well, I beg, now that he is slightly older, a mere pile of unhealthy, balancing bones, emotions going wild as he’s constantly caught in the crossfire of this new marriage between his mom and a bastard. To trudge through a chaotic existence and mistake shallow and superfluous beliefs for truth is one of the worst ways a person can live. To exist merely to make money to continue existing is another, and money is something they lack, but not something that has of yet become so that it sways this boy’s heart. He is desperate to believe that the things of this world are fake and unimportant compared to some bright and shiny spiritual one. So says the man who doesn’t deserve to be called a man, who can’t hold down a job for more than a few months, but whom the boy, the StickWonder, calls father for the next couple of years.

Fake father is raising his voice at Manic Mother, and she’s changing her’s to match. They’re eating at a Mom ‘n’ Pop trucker diner, which is just about as romantic as their marriage gets. Stickwonder is playing at bliss, admiring the peppers in the soup until he can’t take it any more, never mind that father’s not kicking her this time, and asks to go to the bathroom. He always asked, even when at home. “May I go? May I do normal things that people shouldn’t ask permission to do? I’m no longer the defiant boy who resisted the Castor Oil and the belt unless I can’t control myself and incur beatings that help take the ‘devil’ out of me that I oh so willingly seem to let in if I really do deserve them so often. ‘Hey mister Devil, you look a mite cold out there. That just won’t do! Come in so I can incur my Fake Fathers wrath and by the way, would you like a spot of tea?’”

He locks himself away in a stall, but not too long, takes time to admire the artwork to get his mind off of things. “Bango Skank was here.” He finally gets out, goes through the motions and washes his hands. The mirror shows him that tears have formed in his eyes and that dam either needed to break or fix itself quick. He’s about to wipe them away when he notices someone at one of the urinals and something in his brain becomes distracted. The man is wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. The back of his long, crazy hair looks familiar and if not familiar, has a mystifying effect on StickWonder anyways. The man in the black jacket finishes his business and turns around to face the sink’s mirror. Paralysis numbs Stick’s mind and motor functions and he doesn’t know why. Old Leather Jacket stands there with his scared face and piercing hazel eyes that seem as if they could extend their awareness over the entire universe  and only smiles. Is there sympathy in that smile? Pity, perhaps? They stand there in limbo for a moment. Stick wants to think he is staring at his father and knows in his heart of hearts he isn’t but what his heart of hearts tells him doesn’t make any sense. Old Leather then begins to speak.

“Cry if you must, for this is your song for a while, and one that will have profound impact on who you choose NOT to become, but this will not be your song forever. There are other worlds than these, aye and roads, and yours has just begun. You will be a late bloomer. Gods know we aren’t the clear image of Alpha male masculinity, but your passion will prevail. You will be alone near all of your life, and lonely, but rest assured that someday you will be loved yes and you will love. Just don’t expect to assume your understanding of love to coincide with everyone else’s or even your idea of it now! Don’t begrudge the pain from your mistakes or try to shift them on someone else. You are set apart, not for some spiritual work because a book said you are, but a greater and real work, because you’ve chosen it. You are part of the Ka-tet of 11. You will be a gunslinger of peace. Let the knowledge of your adventure to come and your accomplishments carry you forward, past the chaos and the pain, and be mindful of what you consider to be true.”

Stick finally manages up enough wits to ask a single question. He wants this apparition to confirm or deny what he feels in his heart. “Who are you?”

Old Leather replies, “I am the wind. I entreat to no God. My allegiance is to my Road and to Life and I wouldn’t pray to either. One day you will realize that everything you do is for our road. You will have a hard time trying to be who you think you want to be for your feet will find their course, one way or another. Once you’ve made that realization, you won’t cry off that road, no matter what. To follow that road is more than being a rolling stone, for naught else they do but roll until they lose their meaning. It is more than traveling the world over, though you will I can guarantee you. It is both fate and your own definition of the world, and you’ve defined it since birth.”

“You are…me?” Stick’s mind was trying to balance something that didn’t seem to want to be balanced.

“I won’t expect you to remember what I’ve said, or even our encounter- only the feel- for this might be the difference between a life or death in your future, though not of yours so much as the siblings you don’t yet have and haven’t yet had to take care of. It will be many years until they will know you and at least as many before you know yourself. Fate is a wheel and it turns and turns, but it does not control all, as your ‘Bamma’ rightly knows. She who has been able to find you despite the fact that your pitiful excuse of a family moves at least once a year. She who hears your cries even from millions of miles away. She is in your ka-tet, a while longer. When you realize the importance of the number 11, she will have long reached the clearing at the end of her path, but not without first giving you the tools whereby to carry on. One day you will see that 11 is not always fate, but bourne of our real love, as well. But now I must go, for the double back of our time has grown thin. Live with love. Long days and pleasant nights, well, maybe not yet, but soon.”

Old Leather raised his fist to his forehead, winked, then vanished.

Stick blinked a few times and looked around, dazed as his mind tried to grasp what he had just experienced, but his brain held no answers, and soon he would forget the words told to him. His mind had long practiced the art of forgetting and now that there was something felt he needed to remember, he couldn’t. Except when he walked back to the table and there was momentary silence something in the back of his heart began to hope.

There were still years between this encounter and the year he moved back to the city of his birth to be given the keys to his future, begin the slow walk towards the understanding of real love, and witness the death of his beloved “Bamma” whom he so named that fateful day that marked the beginning of the Early years when he had a Sarah Conner mother. They were in between years in which he practiced the art of forgetting spoken words, which he would later come to regret, and the art of memorizing written word, which he’d later come to lose. But all in good time. Later, he would dream the dreams that weren’t dreams, gaze upon the piercing bombardier eyes and the Sun metaphors and the out-of-body experiences and fail to pin their proper meaning until even years after they ended. But for now, he would endure the pain of violent chaos and hope if he ever made it out alive, that the force of discord didn’t wear him down that he couldn’t heal. He would go into the woods in these in between years with his beaver stick and his fishing pole and explore as Huck Finn, the wonders of Narnia, Middle Earth, In-World, and all the wonderous places he would lose himself in while reading. He practiced walking, for it was something he would need to do well for the rest of his life, if he was to save this world.

Childe Josef To The Dark Tower Goes

“My first thought was, he lied in every word.” Thousands of years ago, a combination of basing our ways of thinking and living on duality, the concept of civilization, and hierarchies of control began misdirecting our focus. Instead of appreciating the gloriousness of the fact that we alone, among everything we are aware of in existence to date, can observe and chronicle the phenomena in our universe, we are taught to focus on the processes of living required to continue our species and to pursue increasing comfortability and satisfaction. As years roll on, “shift” has happened, and we are now experiencing the consequences of creating a human machine that is slowly out-pacing ourselves. One day we will live in a world that has moved on and only the humans alive in that age will know exactly what that will mean, for better or worse. It is not my intention this time to argue against civilization or the progressive march of technology. I merely want to share my understanding of what it means to be a human, of what it means to be truly free, and how this fits in with the way the world works today. It’s my opinion that the average human is too presumptuous in their understanding of truth.
The modern man is born into a series of cycles that will define their life. They start out with tricycles and then move on to bicycles and finally, if they’re lucky and cool they’ll get a Harley. I’m just kidding. The first of these cycles is the life cycle which they have virtually no control over. They have limited control over how long they live based on the level of care they put into their body and the level of recklessness they pursue in their lifestyle. There are obviously various outside factors including the actions of others whether intentional or not intentional and so-called acts of god. For instance a tornado could buss through someone’s bedroom while they’re sound asleep or falling in love with a stripper, etc. However this is the only cycle a person has no power to be free from. This is true of everything in our Universe. Everything that has a beginning has an end.
There are other cycles that people are taught they have no choice but to be a part of. There is the cycle of attraction to usually someone of the opposite sex. This is necessary for continuing our species. I’ll call this the cycle of love. People fall in and out of love. I don’t think it makes the love any less real in the moment. There are obviously varying forms of love. I love my family very much and I believe I can depend on that to never change. I think this is because that particular love does not revolve around control. As far as I can tell, emotions and control do not mix. But love is just one cycle among many. We believe we are bound by the universe to commit to the cycle of consumerism and capitalism. We are controlled by the economy because we are so dependant on it. We cannot envision living without it. Most of us wouldn’t know the first thing about hunting or farming and truly providing for ourselves. Within this cycle are various other cycles. We commit to cycles we complete each day that are required to fulfill the economic cycle, or are part of meeting the goals we have in order to become successful in that economic cycle. Next thing you know, we’re worried about accessorizing and making sure our iphone color matches the color on our laptops and whether or not our latest crush likes our favorite band, and God Forbid they don’t remember our favorite color. It’s important.
We then have religion. We have religion which gives us community, feeds our brain cheap candy to give us the impression that we’re, in essence, more than the shrinking people in our shrinking bubbles that have given up our turf for the ever increasing number of cycles- trading in a front lawn for a super duper television that plays bluray and washes our dishes for us. Ok, maybe I’m being too critical. I won’t say it is cheap candy. Religion gives us alternative ways to metaphorically understand the world in which we commit to our cycles until the day we die. However, there is a gray issue concerning truth that elusively dances among the pews and the red letters and the holy Eucharist. We are born into religion and similar to our attachment to the economy, we cannot imagine ourselves free from it. We feel we need it. Religion makes us believe we need hope. Because of religion, without the idea of hope, we feel vulnerable to a cold and pitiless universe. With all his intellect, Einstein believed that the fact that energy could not be destroyed proved the existence of an afterlife and said that God did not play dice with men. He said those things because even the best of us feel as if we cannot exist without hope and purpose. This is where our reasoning has brought us; to an either, or fallacy. We embrace the shackles of duality. Either you accept certain unperceivable things as truth, or you will suffer an inconceivably horrific eternity, worse than having to watch Tim Allen Christmas movies forever. I’m writing this to dispel that fallacy.

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. “

I want to say first of all that religion, technology, economics, politics, community, purpose and hope can all be good things. When they stop being good things is when they bring too much attention to themselves, when they begin making people dependant on them and taking individual freedoms away, and when they begin to make the idea of humanity out to be negative or repulsive. There are too many religious people who look too forward to their afterlife and don’t focus enough on right now. In terms of technology, we are pushed to school after school and if we don’t keep up with the technical knowledge that is always changing and advancing and expanding, we are left on the wayside. When the status of our economy looks dismal, we suffer. In today’s world if we don’t hope, too many of us commit suicide, and if we do hope, we hold on so desperately to that hope that it alone defines our humanity- whatever that hope may be at a given time, whether it’s a relationship with a cheating girlfriend or the prospect of a raise at the donut shop.
But humanity is not repulsive! Energy itself cannot be created from nothing or destroyed, but everything else that has a beginning has an end. When I die, 70 percent of my body will one day be rain. For a moment, 200 years from now, I’ll rain somewhere. If I’m lucky, I’ll be part of a hurricane. That would be epic, right? But I won’t know I’m part of that hurricane. The rest of me will be fertilizer and probably shark bait. That means part of me will be a shark. The life of the predator bull shark must be fascinating, swimming around striking fear in the small time fish, but I won’t revel in it. Two thousand years from now I might be part of a giant tree that some pretty hippie girl climbs in to keep bulldozers from knocking over, but I won’t appreciate her or be able to flirt with her while she’s shimmying up my strong branches. I won’t be able to flex for her and say, “Yep, I can hold you up all day-for years- I’ve been hitting the gym.” Whatever I become, I will be alive with everything else, but I won’t be able to appreciate it. We humans alone, with our developed brains, can appreciate the most fantastic wonders of the cosmos and can marvel and shrink at the most grotesque horrors. We can observe, define, and manipulate. Why on Earth have we gone so far that we can’t realize how amazing of an attribute that is? How on Earth could anything be more important than that, that we would kill ourselves or each other, lessening the collective amount of life that can come to appreciate the amazing objects and events that occur in this universe? How on Earth can we display anything other than adoration for each other and everything else? Tell me why does anything else matter?
Simply put, the answer lies in the ego. Thousands of years of reinforcing the ego, of divide and conquer, of considering cycles to be of the utmost importance, until life is nothing more than a sequence of choices, of falling in and out of love, of jobs, and a few times in our lives we’ll give to charity or dance in the rain or recycle, we’ll thank God for dinner, and think we’re alive, if we’re lucky.
It’s just a ride. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it seriously. That doesn’t mean we can’t live passionately. That doesn’t mean we can’t fight to lessen the suffering of the oppressed or fight for the freedom of our fellow man. However, physical freedom isn’t authentic without mental freedom. I believe that in this mindset, there is no good and evil. Evil is just a word used to control moral support. While our actions in this life have repercussions that affect ourselves and others both in the short and long terms, they simply define us. There is no cosmic significance to what we decide to wear on a certain day or which way we drive home from school or work.
I think it is in our best interest as humans to not willingly harm each other or hold ill feelings towards each other or control each other. I think it is in our best interest to try to use our brains towards maximizing our collective freedoms, happiness, and ability to appreciate our universe. I believe all the various art forms and authentic communications are themselves, at best, the most developed way we have to show our appreciation towards the universe. I think science holds to keys to helping us better understand and appreciate it.
Ultimately what we do defines us, just like what rocks do define them. There is a rock outside your apartment complex that will stay there for a very long time. There is a rock on a river bed that was skipped five times before sinking to where it lies. There is a moon rock in someone’s bedroom. It came from the moon. I think that’s Groovy. The Sun burns light years away from us and in all the chaos and subatomic interactions in the entire cosmos, she gives sustaining energy to plants and perpetually lights up the darkest chasms of our lands. Even so, the Sun doesn’t need or retain purpose. The Sun merely does what it does. The same goes for everything in the Universe. Why must we be so different? Purpose is not necessary. Moreover, purpose is an illusion.
In short, this modern world isn’t all bad, but there are enough things I could point out to show I am not satisfied with it, not as a critic, but as one who means to be the change he wishes to see. I personally no longer feel the need to have purpose and to be doing something meaningful with my life, but I’m bored easily. I appreciate the beauty of the universe and think it would be unfair and no fun to shut myself away and appreciate it alone when the world as a whole that I see with my half blind eyes seems to be covered with zombies, stumbling around like so many blind termites driving around in tiny bumper cars that are shot to hell. Maybe it’s just me. I will act according to what I see and how I think. That will define me. What defines you?

Down With This Sort of Thing!!!

It’s Veteran’s Day in November of 2009. Pacquiao is about to fight Miguel Cotto, President Obama is in his dungeon, deliberating whether or not he should send more US troops into Afghanistan,  we sit in our bubbles, watching the news tell us that we don’t have reason to yell in the streets because our economy isn’t in a depression- it’s only a recession, and I’m twenty one years old, getting drunk on the US Navy’s dime, feeling old, brainstorming how I can get the most bang with my life. There’s a saying, “Render to Ceasar that which is Caesar’s.” I’m contemplating the wisdom of that statement.

There are others who are contemplating suicide. In some countries, suicide ranks the fourth leading cause of deaths.  Suicide takes the lives of nearly 30,000 Americans every year and  many who attempt suicide never seek professional care. What with the doomsday prophecies surround 2012, even more people are contemplating suicide. They are so afraid of experiencing asteroids slam into their favorite pub or of a planet sneaking up from the dark side of the moon- they’re afraid of suffering the end of  the fragile world they’ve come to accept.  Afraid of suffering. Afraid of the end.  They are Afraid of suffering. Afraid of the end. 

Others are given hope by the 2012 myth.  Perhaps something will change. We need change. We need a change surpassing anything a nation’s president could promise. Nationalism, politics, religion, it’s all going down. But not by our hands. We don’t see our hands being able to do much more than commiting to the cycle of events that we are taught to follow.

The majority of us really aren’t afraid. We’re too attached to this best of possible worlds. We think, “Surely something so abrupt and ridiculous is merely a ploy to launch an epic apocalyptic movie and accrue the maximum amount of profit in this depression that has been played down.” Every time I go to pay for anything with an american dollar, I look at the words “Legal Tender” that signify the underlying slavery we have all come to blindly accept. The largest, private banks are holding the other end. They are in control of every boom and bust. There is no depression, including the Great Depression, that wasn’t scientifically engineered by the Leaders of those banks.  We are the dull -eyed, laughing livestock of the Universe. We have the coolest toys, the most developed brains, and we are consumed by mass distraction, by the noise of this fast paced “modern civilization,” and  by our own attachment to our egos.  We are a machine with all the bells and whistles of  a half -oiled steampunk nightmare. If there is one thing I know, it’s that we are not in control. Caesar is.

I’m drinking hard apple cider in Italy, watching zombie, vampire, alien, superhero movies on my BlueRay 7.1 sound system Projector Theater System. Meanwhile, a high school girl is gang raped at a high school dance in California, “free people” are nursing disease infested wounds that prove their addiction to drugs and alcohol in the dark alleys of Moscow while Billionaires are leading ladies of the night into well guarded clubs. A soldier has lost his ability to cope and has started gunning down innocents in a base in Texas. Down the road from me, there is a man crying out in garbled Italian while someone is repeatedly slamming him against a car.  Others have gathered and are laughing. They are laughing at the joke that has become our universe.

People just want to be left alone. They want to be able to have some semblance of bliss. I can imagine young people in America, looking down at their peers for dressing differently. The hip hop crowd is driving home tonight and the bass of their music is shaking the car. They’re laughing. They’re speaking in Ebonics.  Someone is walking home, oblivious to the world past whatever song is blasting into their ears from their uniquely colored ipod. Others in another car are dressed in tighter clothing, wearing predominantly darker clothes, sporting wicked tattoos and I wouldn’t be able to make out the words to their music because they’re screaming. It’s some sort of an emotional thing they identify with I guess. They think they know something about life because they know something about suffering, and they just want to find someone to flirt with and help them forget the suffering that has scarred their lives. Suffering is a part of this life. Any effort to try to ignore it is an exersize in futility. I’m left with my violin and my guitar and my idea of folk messages, and making music and jamming as a means of communicating deeper meanings, and I’m alone. I’m left in a corner of the world. Everyone back home is assuming I’m having fun without tangible interaction with them and I’m left to my own thoughts. In the end, what difference does it make? Caesar wasn’t stupid. Divide and conquer.

I am rarely satisfied with who I am. Nothing can undo the actions people have done to cause suffering to others. I think of my sister’s dad, reacting to the little pain he suffered as a kid, somehow oblivious to the pain he’s cause the young girl he raped.  I’m unable to act because my sister is paralyzed by the fear that to speak up would be to condemn her only dad, making it impossible for him to change and live a normal life, making it impossible to hope that someday her dad could love her as a father should. The cool thing about superheros is that they always seem able to rush in and keep the worst of the damage from ever happening at all. We live in a world where our heroes are figureheads, or they tend to be viewed as something more than what they are. I’ll go home someday and someone will hear that I’m in the Navy and might buy me a drink. I’m no hero. I reset people’s passwords. Even if I was a technological genius, how would what I do on a daily basis attribute to World Peace?  That is what we’re after, is it not? We’re trying to make Peace?  Behold! We demand this world to be peaceful and we will kill whoever tries to make it otherwise! We are the global force for good. Do you accept this lie after you’ve found out that the private banks in control are too attached to war for the profit it rakes in for them to ever let us give it up? This is the apex of purpose the average American can dream of. It is an illusion. We are satisfied with this world and even if we aren’t, we’re too insecure to make the necessary leap in our ways of reasoning.

I hate to break it to you, but this is not the best of possible worlds. Voltaire was right, but after writing his classic literature that we’re forced to read in school, nothing is changed. I believe people are so used to shifting the blame of the bigger picture that it’s become no one’s fault. It is all of our faults. We’ve shifted the blame until we are no longer in control of the world we want to provide for our children. The best of us try to provide a better bubble for our children. That is the most we can hope for in a world such as this. We’ve hit a wall. In order for it to become any better, we need to make drastic changes. Otherwise, we’re doomed. It’s as simple as that and yet seems so complicated that it’s beyond our comprehension.

I am talking about a revolution of the mind.  According to the World Health Organization, by 2010, depression will be the  number one disability in the world. We are losing ourselves. This world is no longer enough and if we don’t do something about it, we are going to end up laying down in our beds and never getting up. We will subjugate control over our lives to the people who already want to control our lives, they’ll spin an elaborate answer and sell it to us on the nightly news, we’ll buy it, and we’ll be virtually dead. We are dying. I enjoy a funny zombie movie like the next guy- Sean of the Dead was a classic- but this won’t be funny. Our son’s sons will be born into zombie-ism, and every noble cause any great person fought for will be rendered futile.  The blood Albert Camus sweat as he wrote his underground articles of resistance against the terrors of facism will be all for nothing.The evolution of mankind will be over.  It will be the dawn of the second Dark Age, except this time, there will be no hope of us ever coming back.

So many of us assume that the world that has worked “so well” so far would continue to work for us, and it may work.  After you’ve worked your whole life and made some memories, come back and tell me if assuming everything your parents told you was right was worth it.  Go watch the movie “Zeitgeist” and tell me how well this world has worked over the past hundred years. Watch the movie “Zeitgeist” and you would be lying to yourself if you disagreed with what I’m saying. As a child, I used to look out at the world and think that everyone who didn’t go to Church every Sunday and thank Jesus for every meal was condemned, lost for eternity and beyond. I now realize it’s the other way around. Who is less blind,  the person who submits their existence to something made tangible by a Roman Emperor as a means of control, or the person who decides to make sense of the world as best as he can and decide to do what he can to make it better? We can’t afford to ignore Caesar. He’s too cunning.

I don’t have the answers right now. I can’t tell you what is truth and that everything else is some elaborate lie. I can tell you that we’re in alot of trouble. I can tell you that we can’t wait for anyone to come down from the clouds to clean up our messes. I can tell you that the future of the world is in your hands.  It’s in our hands. We need to stop reacting. We need to make sense of the world we experience in our own ways. We need to mold our actions and intentions around the good of the community- not just our impulses. We need to decide exactly who we are. Then we need to take the next step in exploration. We need to embark on a journey that forages into the frontier of our minds. Louis and Clark are needed again to map the terrain of the fourth dimension, the dimension of our minds. We need to look inwards, into our souls and hearts and then take the stagnant power within and make it tangible in the world of the living. This is our only hope.

We need the first revolution of this new millennium. Do not accept anything that has come before. Caesar time is over- war is over, if you want it. Down with that sort of thing.

Behold! All Things Must Become New! Not because I say so but because you choose it!

Why the World Needs Epic Heroes

This is a condensed version of the latest entry I wrote in the journal I dedicated to my sister years ago:

I don’t write much on here anymore. I once thought I had a purpose. At this moment I wish I could go back. My projector shines a picture on the wall. Brant took it. Where did we go so wrong? I had a red hat on backwards, but I can’t see my face, or my mom’s. They’re blurry. I feel as if that’s how detached I’ve become with my whole life. They shine nearly life-sized on the wall. Reaching out I touch only wall.

I wrote a story sophomore year for my english class. My teacher wrote “There are SO MANY ERRORS!” At the end she wrote “You have put together a mighty attempt, but I think you have tried to do too much, and as a consequence fail to do much of anything.”

This is the story of my life. I’m not a hero, just a guy with a heart who tries to do everything but commits to nothing.

I’m not ok with this.

Donald Justice wrote:

“This one was put in a jacket,
This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat
But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one looked at the window
As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there,
This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No
All day long.

This one thought himself a bird,
This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man,
An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No
All day long.”

I want my life to have purpose, to allow me to use my creative juices, to not condemn me to loneliness forever, but I beleive that someday I could learn to be content, alone, if my life but has real purpose. The only way for this world to become truly better is if each person becomes a hero in their world, in their home, among their friends, in their interactions with complete strangers, etc.

I don’t know what many of my limits are. I know what my drinking limits are, and exceed them only when I’m in an existential low. I know what my computer skill limits are, and that’s why I need to change my line of work. I’m not comfortable doing the Navy’s equivalent of the Nerd Herd. I know that when I was younger I had the hardest time trying to learn a foreign language, but at that time I also had the hardest time in my english class. For a moment, I was afraid the resurfacing of that paper proved my inability to ever write a novel.  Then I remembered that I’m not that kid. I may be a late bloomer. I may be goofy. My head may always be either in the clouds or beneath the ground, but I have to try.

It may be that one day I won’t be able to spill my guts on a blog anymore. Time will only tell.

Born in Hell

A cloudy night greets me, alone, along this narrow street of blood-stained cobblestone, washed and eroded by wear and time and

pollution and disease. The agony of my soul looks deep into my heart and I plunge ahead, trying to outrun madness, oblivious to the

madness towards which my fleeing takes me. The foundationlessness of my birth stalked me down, caught up with me, transformed my

perception. Now I am either blind and helpless in the face of chaos, or have awakened to darkness and have become unsatisfiable. In

every way, I am the lesser man. My ability to control my memory or skills of concentration are pathetic at best. I am physically fit

and don’t shy from labor, but I am no champion. Music makes sense to me in that I can feel it and create it, but I am no virtuoso. All

I can retain and rely on is my heart, and that too falters. It falters because this world is not enough. Who in this world can remain

pure? Who in this world can remain healthy? Who in this world can become trully themselves without destroying themselves in the

process? Who in this world can look outside of their bubbles, become truly aware, either by being torn from normality by force, or by

deliberately stepping away from it, and not feel the pain of the world? My heart is a blade, my soul’s fire burns until its light

overwhelms the scars, yet my body is powerless. I am truly alone. I succomb to the shadow, I recede into my mind, and I get lost in

worlds where love is pure and tangible, where heroes still fight to protect innocence, beauty, and healthier worlds, I get lost in

books.

Sometimes books are not enough. It is not enough to project a defined fantasy world into the world of the living. Heroes in books find hope and resolve in who they serve. The most noble kings fight serving the land and way of life they have charge over. Noble giants swing their fury in service to their friendship to the heroes. I ask myself who I serve. You could say I serve the Navy, but the Navy is just a job. You could say I serve my family, but they are so far away. Or love, but Dawn too is so far away. You could say I serve the feeling of being alive, but sometimes I lay in bed, eyes too strained to read, fingers too numb to make music, body too bored to sleep, and I find myself in this limbo in which I am too aware of the universe, too unable to content myself with structures of belief that give people reassurance in this life. It is finally raining, the wind is finally tearing at my clothes and dragging the breath from my lungs. The sky is finally dark until lightning cackles and torches the sky. I step out onto my balcony to face the darkness that reflects the darkness I must face nearly every waking moment. Compounded on this is the truth that I reject this world in which a father would commit to rape and beat his own baby daughter. This world is not enough. We act as if there is some Hell for us to be saved from, but I know that this world is the real hell. There is nothing worse awaiting us at the end.

I am finally beginning to understand the story I want to tell in my epic fantasy novel. I’m finally begnning to slowly mold the peices and ideas that have come forth so far. They are completely unrecognisable to the fragments I created at first. They are still not nearly presentable, but the fact I am moving, however tortuously slow the pace may be, it gives me a single dot pitch of hope. I am determined to destroy the predictability of the epic fantasy journey. There will be much tragedy and chaos, for I will be writing a metaphor for our own world. But where I am powerless to change the world, I will conjur power through my words for pure and noble intent. I am no genius, so my ideas will be slow coming, but they will form. They have to.

Sometimes I feel like I am but the amount of a cup of water in a river. Sometimes I experience with rapture the sensation of flying straight to the sky, of feeling the electricity of momentary bliss, and I become heavy again and I rocket to the earth and am bashed against the rocks, and I flow back into the river. I try to become more, I try to drag myself onto land and howl at the moon with wolves or run across wilderland feilds with deer, but I am only water. I can only flow with the laws of my nature.

But I am not water. My body might be made of 70% water, but I am more! I will go the rest of my life trying to prove this means something.

A cloudy night greets me, alone, along this narrow street of blood-stained cobblestone, washed and eroded by wear and time and

pollution and disease. The agony of my soul looks deep into my heart and I plunge ahead, trying to outrun madness, oblivious to the

madness towards which my fleeing takes me. The foundationlessness of my birth stalked me down, caught up with me, transformed my

perception. Now I am either blind and helpless in the face of chaos, or have awakened to darkness and have become unsatisfiable. In

every way, I am the lesser man. My ability to control my memory or skills of concentration are pathetic at best. I am physically fit

and don’t shy from labor, but I am no champion. Music makes sense to me in that I can feel it and create it, but I am no virtuoso. All

I can retain and rely on is my heart, and that too falters. It falters because this world is not enough. Who in this world can remain

pure? Who in this world can remain healthy? Who in this world can become trully themselves without destroying themselves in the

process? Who in this world can look outside of their bubbles, become truly aware, either by being torn from normality by force, or by

deliberately stepping away from it, and not feel the pain of the world? My heart is a blade, my soul’s fire burns until its light

overwhelms the scars, yet my body is powerless. I am truly alone. I succomb to the shadow, I recede into my mind, and I get lost in

worlds where love is pure and tangible, where heroes still fight to protect innocence, beauty, and healthier worlds, I get lost in

books.

Sometimes books are not enough. It is not enough to project a defined fantasy world into the world of the living. Heroes in books find hope and resolve in who they serve. The most noble kings fight serving the land and way of life they have charge over. Noble giants swing their fury in service to their friendship to the heroes. I ask myself who I serve. You could say I serve the Navy, but the Navy is just a job. You could say I serve my family, but they are so far away. Or love, but Dawn too is so far away. You could say I serve the feeling of being alive, but sometimes I lay in bed, eyes too strained to read, fingers too numb to make music, body too bored to sleep, and I find myself in this limbo in which I am too aware of the universe, too unable to content myself with structures of belief that give people reassurance in this life. It is finally raining, the wind is finally tearing at my clothes and dragging the breath from my lungs. The sky is finally dark until lightning cackles and torches the sky. I step out onto my balcony to face the darkness that reflects the darkness I must face nearly every waking moment. Compounded on this is the truth that I reject this world in which a father would commit to rape and beat his own baby daughter. This world is not enough. We act as if there is some Hell for us to be saved from, but I know that this world is the real hell. There is nothing worse awaiting us at the end.

I am finally beginning to understand the story I want to tell in my epic fantasy novel. I’m finally begnning to slowly mold the peices and ideas that have come forth so far. They are completely unrecognisable to the fragments I created at first. They are still not nearly presentable, but the fact I am moving, however tortuously slow the pace may be, it gives me a single dot pitch of hope. I am determined to destroy the predictability of the epic fantasy journey. There will be much tragedy and chaos, for I will be writing a metaphor for our own world. But where I am powerless to change the world, I will conjur power through my words for pure and noble intent. I am no genius, so my ideas will be slow coming, but they will form. They have to.

Sometimes I feel like I am but the amount of a cup of water in a river. Sometimes I experience with rapture the sensation of flying straight to the sky, of feeling the electricity of momentary bliss, and I become heavy again and I rocket to the earth and am bashed against the rocks, and I flow back into the river. I try to become more, I try to drag myself onto land and howl at the moon with wolves or run across wilderland feilds with deer, but I am only water. I can only flow with the laws of my nature.

But I am not water. My body might be made of 70% water, but I am more! I will go the rest of my life trying to prove this means something.

Silence

If you stand at the very edge of the Pensacola beach, where water meets sand, in the darkest hour of the night, you’ll find yourself alone. The signs of the season will be evident. In the summer, the trash bins will be overflowing with empty beer bottles and the lights and sounds from open bars and resturants nearby will reach you easily. But if you look to your left, down the length of the beach, until you can’t see any further, you’ll find a distinct line where the brightness of the city ends and the dark oblivion of the ocean begins.

It just goes to show you that there are still some things in this world that can’t be filled and defined by mankind, regardless of the sure signs of progress.

Humanity has come a long way. We no longer sacrifice tens of thousands of people to our gods or wear the skins of our daughters in ceremonies because society has told us that sort of behavior is stupid. We still sometimes do radical things for religion. Why do people still throw their lives away for causes that seem unreasonable and sometimes even outright evil? The answer is simple. It is always easier to live for someone or something else than oneself. It is easier to live with purpose, even if that purpose isn’t right. Thanks to the idea of faith, it doesn’t have to be.

For the longest time, I had regret giving up the life I had in Tucson for the elusive idea of experience. Sophomore and junior years of high school gave me this window into a normal and happy life that I could have had if I so chose. I had rejected it with the image of my recently diceased adopted grandma in my mind’s eye and this vague notion that it was my destiny to travel a lonely road. Since then I’ve lived in the past, wishing for a second chance, until just recently. We pursue happiness and when we don’t find it on the road we’re on, we look back to a time when we might have had the possibility of finding it.

I remember looking out at the ocean, that night, not even two years ago. I was unable to tear my gaze from it. A storm was coming. My buddies were telling me that we needed to head back, but I just wanted to stand there and face that storm that lit up the inpenatrable darkness. I could relate to it. Here was this unfillable and wild void that stretched out as far as the eye could see and all the lights in the city succombed to it’s enormity. Just when I thought it would stay that way forever, this storm comes rumbling along with it’s cooling winds and sweet, salty smell and thunderous fire that lit up the oceanic depths. If a storm could succeed where manmade lights failed, could I succeed in lighting up the world?

Pensacola was also my first time to a club. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to dance. They might as well have given me a wack a mole machine and told me to use it to turn lead into gold. Looking at my more recent clubbing theatrics, I’ve decided nearly every part of life becomes more enjoyable and memorable if you don’t take it seriously, and that’s something I will probably live by from now on.

I’ve realized since then that I’m not really trying to rage against the dying of the light of the world, but of my own soul. My quest for heroism is merely an attempt to reconcile my own low self esteem. My heart so recklessly throws itself into action because living for someone else is much easier when you don’t see anything in yourself worth living for. When I sit alone in my room for too long, sometimes, it becomes unbearable that I am not actively engaging in life at that very moment for these very reasons. I become too serious alone in my limbo as I wait for my Godot. As soon as someone enters the stage of my life I become the man everyone knows and is fond of again. It is not a masquerade. It is the second side of my coin. The side of silence. Lock anyone in a dungeon for long enough and they’ll start talking to themselves. Happiness is only real if it is shared.

Now that I have finally come to this conclusion, where do I go next? Do I attempt to force myself out of the low self esteem I have acquired since my childhood, or do I simply don my hero costume and continue with my life? You would think the choice would be an easy one, but I have been traveling this road too long to know anything else. Perhaps I am approaching it all wrong. Perhaps I am merely searching for an environment in which I belong. Perhaps I’m searching for the things that made Lana Lang so perfect for Clark Kent in the middle of season eight of smallville. Even the Dark Knight has his Alfred. People want the peace of mind of being individuals among the sea of lives that constantly pass through this bottleneck of time so they alienate themselves. Then they don’t want to be alone, so they fit themselves into the first thing that comes their way. Is it too much to ask for the chance to spend my life with people who are like me?

None of these things lessen the truth that this world I was born into needs changing, saving, inspiring, and so I know what I must do.

My name is Josef Isaiah Green. my passions lie in making music, writing words, and going places. I devote my life to those things and also doing what I can for the ones I love. I am committed to showing love to the people I come in contact with in this life. If there is a just cause I can fight for, I will fight for it. Someday I’m going to save the world, and I’m going to have fun while I do.

But tonight I am alone, waiting.

If you stand at the very edge of the Pensacola beach, where water meets sand, in the darkest hour of the night, you’ll find yourself alone. The signs of the season will be evident. In the summer, the trash bins will be overflowing with empty beer bottles and the lights and sounds from open bars and resturants nearby will reach you easily. But if you look to your left, down the length of the beach, until you can’t see any further, you’ll find a distinct line where the brightness of the city ends and the dark oblivion of the ocean begins.

It just goes to show you that there are still some things in this world that can’t be filled and defined by mankind, regardless of the sure signs of progress.

Humanity has come a long way. We no longer sacrifice tens of thousands of people to our gods or wear the skins of our daughters in ceremonies because society has told us that sort of behavior is stupid. We still sometimes do radical things for religion. Why do people still throw their lives away for causes that seem unreasonable and sometimes even outright evil? The answer is simple. It is always easier to live for someone or something else than oneself. It is easier to live with purpose, even if that purpose isn’t right. Thanks to the idea of faith, it doesn’t have to be.

For the longest time, I had regret giving up the life I had in Tucson for the elusive idea of experience. Sophomore and junior years of high school gave me this window into a normal and happy life that I could have had if I so chose. I had rejected it with the image of my recently diceased adopted grandma in my mind’s eye and this vague notion that it was my destiny to travel a lonely road. Since then I’ve lived in the past, wishing for a second chance, until just recently. We pursue happiness and when we don’t find it on the road we’re on, we look back to a time when we might have had the possibility of finding it.

I remember looking out at the ocean, that night, not even two years ago. I was unable to tear my gaze from it. A storm was coming. My buddies were telling me that we needed to head back, but I just wanted to stand there and face that storm that lit up the inpenatrable darkness. I could relate to it. Here was this unfillable and wild void that stretched out as far as the eye could see and all the lights in the city succombed to it’s enormity. Just when I thought it would stay that way forever, this storm comes rumbling along with it’s cooling winds and sweet, salty smell and thunderous fire that lit up the oceanic depths. If a storm could succeed where manmade lights failed, could I succeed in lighting up the world?

Pensacola was also my first time to a club. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to dance. They might as well have given me a wack a mole machine and told me to use it to turn lead into gold. Looking at my more recent clubbing theatrics, I’ve decided nearly every part of life becomes more enjoyable and memorable if you don’t take it seriously, and that’s something I will probably live by from now on.

I’ve realized since then that I’m not really trying to rage against the dying of the light of the world, but of my own soul. My quest for heroism is merely an attempt to reconcile my own low self esteem. My heart so recklessly throws itself into action because living for someone else is much easier when you don’t see anything in yourself worth living for. When I sit alone in my room for too long, sometimes, it becomes unbearable that I am not actively engaging in life at that very moment for these very reasons. I become too serious alone in my limbo as I wait for my Godot. As soon as someone enters the stage of my life I become the man everyone knows and is fond of again. It is not a masquerade. It is the second side of my coin. The side of silence. Lock anyone in a dungeon for long enough and they’ll start talking to themselves. Happiness is only real if it is shared.

Now that I have finally come to this conclusion, where do I go next? Do I attempt to force myself out of the low self esteem I have acquired since my childhood, or do I simply don my hero costume and continue with my life? You would think the choice would be an easy one, but I have been traveling this road too long to know anything else. Perhaps I am approaching it all wrong. Perhaps I am merely searching for an environment in which I belong. Perhaps I’m searching for the things that made Lana Lang so perfect for Clark Kent in the middle of season eight of smallville. Even the Dark Knight has his Alfred. People want the peace of mind of being individuals among the sea of lives that constantly pass through this bottleneck of time so they alienate themselves. Then they don’t want to be alone, so they fit themselves into the first thing that comes their way. Is it too much to ask for the chance to spend my life with people who are like me?

None of these things lessen the truth that this world I was born into needs changing, saving, inspiring, and so I know what I must do.

My name is Josef Isaiah Green. my passions lie in making music, writing words, and going places. I devote my life to those things and also doing what I can for the ones I love. I am committed to showing love to the people I come in contact with in this life. If there is a just cause I can fight for, I will fight for it. Someday I’m going to save the world, and I’m going to have fun while I do.

But tonight I am alone, waiting.

Stockholm Syndrome

Silence hangs heavy, like storm clouds at the precise moment before they pull the stops and pour out upon a thirsty ground. She’s riding in the beat up truck her father owns that slowly chugs along, used to running off fumes and quiting just as soon as it reaches a main road. Her younger brother sits between her and her delusional father whose hands grip the steering wheel and whose eyes, while on the road, are focused only on the illusion that keeps him from falling apart as he teeters on the edge of insanity. They’re on their way to church. He breaks the silence with the only conversation he ever has with his children anymore. She predicts his every word- God knows he’s said it enough- each time as he tries to merely induce a response from her, even at the price of exposing his own selfish and helpless weaknesses.

“You will never understand how much I’ve sacrificed for you until you have children of your own…”

“It’s your fault for being born.”

“After everything I’ve done to raise you, you still wanted to leave me and live with your older brother.”

“You wanted to leave me…you wanted to go off with some older boy in a foreign country and be happy without me.”

At this point he’s crying and pounding his fist into the dashboard, stopping his truck in the middle of the road every once in a while while cars honk and speed past him.

“You can hate me all you want, but I will always be your father, I will always love you, and I’m not going to let you go to hell.”

“My daughter is a whore. You are emotionless. I don’t want to have to pay child support because I can’t hold down a job.”

“You need to go to the alter tonight and ask God for forgiveness…”

She says nothing. Her brother sits, silently, thoughts of relief flood his mind that he isn’t the one being yelled at by their father. She sits there too, the fire of defiance in her eyes, seeing the pathetic half-man behind his scathing words and yet hurt at the same time that her own dad continuously berates her, saying every word a father shouldn’t and nothing a father should. She doesn’t dare speak out in her defense, for the look in his eyes has gone beyond fear and reached into something sociopathic and something scary. Her father the creep who might react to her words in any way imaginable, except the right way.

They sputter into the parking lot of yet another church. They’ve probably attended every back alley, truckstop, one room, million member church on the move and in a bottle that exists in their corner of this so-called Bible belt. Bible belt. It would be funny if it wasn’t so absurd, how mechanistically the motions were the same at all places, and as well, in the dark corners of their lives they all hid their hells of drugs, incest, and lifelessness. No matter what a person does with their life, Jesus gives them a momentary good life once a week, where they can sit on their pedestals and judge eachother. Her mind wanders no further, for they have reached the front doors, where the ushers stand to welcome them to the House of the Lord.

The order is always the same. She opens up her hymnal to page 355 and sang about how God loved her so much and then to page 294 and sang about how grateful she was for everything God is doing in her life. By this time, older women are already looking at her. She feels their stares bore holes into her as she continues going through the motion of this cultural necessity. She looks over at her brother to make sure he is ok. She does this without thinking. Since she was four a fact of her life has been that she has to take care of her brother, raise him, protect him, be his mother away from mother.

The praise and worship has ended. Announcements have been made, with special references to the christian book store and souvenir shop and thanks to those who couldn’t make it today but were viewing their service live on channel eight. It was time to meet and greet. The thundering herd of women close in on their prey, approaching in smiles, telling her that she is such a beautiful girl and seems to have a very special part to play in God’s ineffable plan. They pick her up in their arms and squeeze her, punching through her insecurities and doubling them all at once. This continues for a moment until it is time for everyone to get settled into their pews and listen to the Word of the Lord as interpreted by another evangelical holy man who’s published books and sold audio CD’s that prove he is both evangelical and a holy man.

The man behind the podium starts the night off with scripture. The sound of pages crumpling and being turned, quickly- desperately- resonates like a wave around this modern colosseum. He starts out in normal conversation, using a real life story that may or may not have happened in his life as a modern day parable to rope his audience in and understand he’s just a human, like they are. Then he begins to build his thought up, and everyone starts to anticipate that tonight is going to be another life changing night, like all church nights. He begins to grip his podium as if he were Jesus Christ himself, gripping his cross as he is whipped beyond recognition, and the crowd begins to encourage him. He tells his audience that they are sinners that should hate everything about their humanity. They should pursue God in humble shame at all of their actions. Time for the big crescendo, the moment they’d all been waiting for. People are whooping and Amening and Standing up clapping their hands as if the words this man is saying had suddenly defined their life and saved them from their miserableness. An organ starts to play in the background and he’s now red in the face, whiping great beads of sweat from his eyes as he screams into his microphone and prances around stage. For the first time in months, fat men are trying to run and they make a holy beeline around the first pew but decide to merely try a holy double over to catch their breath.

Women and children are crying by the time they reach the inevitable alter call. Everyone seems to have a conscience for the first time all week and in a thundering herd, race to the alter to dedicate their lives to Christ, as they’d all done at least once a week for the past several years. Everyone except her and her brother. They exist as observers. The antics and theatrics are no longer meaningful. They want to go home, but their dad pushes them to the front. Everyone is taller than them and bumping into eachother and nearly stepping on them, drunk with the Spirit, or maybe just drunk. They try to back away from the frenzy but their father will have none of it. They need to be saved. They need Jesus.

The evangelist is walking through the crowd, laying his hand on each person’s head and they fall back, slain in the spirit, speaking in tongues, which is either endowed upon them by the holy spirit or just endowed upon them by their imagination’s ability to create jibberish. He’s throwing people left and right, heading her way, and not slowing down. When he reaches her he doesn’t lay his hand on her head. He puts both hands on her head and shakes her around a bit before throwing her to the ground. She hits the floor hard and looses consciousness. When she comes to she is running, crying, looking for the bathroom to be alone and to wait while the pain in her head subsides, but she doesn’t make it away from the alter before the women are grabbing her, squeezing her too tight and making her neck pop, never taking off their smiles. The evangelist pulls her and her brother to the front and in front of live cameras and everyone in the church, declares that God has a special plan for the two of them. He gives them books he’d written and audio Cd’s he’s sold, things that cost money, for free, because he was an honest God-fearing man and honest, God fearing men did things like that.

They’re back in the truck and her mascara is running down her face as she lies and tells her dad she felt something and as her brother lies and said he too felt something. They must have felt the warm and loving hand of God move within them and they will never be the same. He finally becomes silent, triumphant in his little world, thinking he’d won some epic battle. He saves his speech about how the World still needs to know about Jesus, as if there is still a corner in this solar system that hasn’t heard the story or who doesn’t know the Ten Commandments, or as if knowledge of an ancient story will save people from misery. He still hasn’t enrolled her into school that has started two weeks ago. Is it not our own actions that determine the extent of our misery or happiness, and is it not due to the actions of our parents whether we are born into misery or happiness? When she steps out of the truck to enter her mom’s house, she looks back only to make sure her brother exits the truck safely as well. She tries to forget the fact that her dad will be back, twice the next day and every day afterwards, to take them to church, since they need it so badly, since they’re so evil.

I am seven time zones away. I am writing about what happened to my young half brother and sister yesterday and what will happen again today and tomorrow.  I am writing this in hope that I can save them. I am writing this now and I will continue to write in hope that this world will one day wake up and stop accepting the ideas spoon fed it by imperfect generations before us. I am writing this in hope that people will stop wallowing in self pity and realize how much their wallowing hurts others. I am writing this in hope that one day, I will learn to write the perfect words, in just the right sequence that will change the world. They will not force us. They will stop degrading us. They will not control us. We will be victorious. We will stop being ashamed of ourselves and our actions. We will be free to be truly alive.

Half The Devil’s, Half My Own

Sometimes the Sun is too bright. I nearly always expect to wake up in darkness, with wind and rain knocking on my windows and crashing against the ground just beyond my walls. Trees should be buckling under the force of nature. My fortress should be creaking. These days I open my eyes and close them again as my pupils react to the shock of not being ready for the brightness or the clarity that comes with this continuous awareness which we call reality. I immediately have to brace myself to keep from trying to retreat back into my fortress of solitude. I feel like I am coming back from the grave, unwillingly, and must remind myself by an extra long, steamy shower of the passions I have associated with being alive. Perhaps this is the reason boredom is so devastating. I’ve spent half an hour letting the warm sting of water pep talk my body into committing to another day of being available to fight the good fight and rage against the dying of the light. When I am not doing something for long enough, the pep talk wears off.

Sometimes the sun is too bright. Sometimes my eyes see too clearly for this to be reality. There is too much uncertainty in the hearts of man, too much narrowness of our minds, and too much inconsiderateness in our actions for the world to be so clear and so bright and be real. If our minds and our perception are intended to be synchronous, perhaps it is that we place too much faith in this construct that we’ve built, and plugged into most of our lives to be in tune with our minds anymore. We seek spiritualism by purely physical means on free and simple terms and for many, such a culture is comfortable and enough. But not all worlds are simple and not not all worlds contain problems that will solve themselves with a little hard work and patience. In some worlds there is suffering that cannot be warded off by placebo miracles or justified by God’s higher purpose for a person’s life. Some suffering is unjustifyable no matter what excuse or sly invention the ego can muster. It is that the Sun is too bright in those worlds. There should be acts of nature that scar the surface of the Earth to match the scarring that occurs on the surface of hearts. Perhaps if there was, we wouldn’t be able to lie to ourselves anymore. We could each face our true selves and decide to either shed the selfish complexities we’ve acquired through life or go dig a hole in the ground and rot.

Sometimes the Sun is too bright. The pathetic truth is that the only legacy many families leave behind for their children is that they weren’t there for their children when they were children. Those children grow up and find it impossible to tear their bitter gazes from their pasts and end up continuing the cycle of not being there for their own children. Sometimes one or more parent is not even physically there. Sometimes both are there but damage their children’s psyche or abuse them physically. Sometimes it is merely that they don’t have time for their children, but whatever the reason, and whatever the parents thought was important instead of the children, those children enter adolescence as damaged goods. They enter the social paradigm of school as damaged goods and the next thing you know, they are trying to survive, or trying to be alive, killing themselves to live, hurting themselves to live, bleeding themselves to live, running away to live, crying and fighting and and doing drugs and reacting, etc, just to be alive and just to ease their pain. This can all be prevented, but it’s not, because we are followers, and we don’t realize we are our own people who may not even successfully fit into the worlds of earlier generations until it is too late, and then we forever live in the past, which festers into a selfish deformed perception that causes suffering on the next generations, because we are too busy bearing our scars to realize the new generations have scars too and they affect them as well.

Sometimes the Sun is too bright. There are storms in our minds, but not outside on this Summer morning as the world spins and the clocks tick and we expect ourselves to deal with the pain. We don’t know how, we just expect it to be dealt with. The alarm goes off and our consciousness plugs back into “reality” to go through the motions of another day that will just have been acted out because we are waiting. In high school everyone embraces cliques and fads and genres of music  and facial expressions to try to fit in, and try to define themselves. I was too much of an oddball. I stood out too much to even get caught up in the whole masquerade. I wasn’t geeky enough, I wasn’t goth at all, I stopped promoting Jesus after freshman year, I just coasted. What got me through it all was music; Marie Blount had started it and Tim and Helga Kolosick saw to it that I didn’t it give up. Aside from music, I was waiting. I joined the Navy and ever since then I’ve been waiting. I tried to make music at the chapel here in Italy, but all that place seemed to represent towards the end was confusion. They were all going through the motions, but it was less than a masquerade. It was chaos. My spirituality runs via music and love and words and reaches into and for something deeper, so I’ll continue waiting, but I’m not being a bum as I wait. Oh no, Sir, I’m planning! My gears are turning, I’m thinking thoughts and dreaming dreams and opening my battered heart again because that is my only weapon. You can only fight the pain of damaged hearts with love- not words, not some idea of a man holding punch and pie in the sky- real, tangible love.

This is the World I know. This World is half the Devil’s and half my own. There are more people spreading this legacy of inflicting pain on one another than spreading real love. In the Navy, I’m just passing through, but beneath this uniform, my heart wear’s it’s own colors. It is it’s own army of one. It loses many battles and it makes mistakes, for it is imperfect and faulty, but it remains true to it’s purpose and it pursues a means to acheive it’s purpose. It knows that helping one person at a time is not enough. The World is not enough. Heaven is not enough. I am restless and I am reckless and I am traveling an ill advised road towards an impossible goal, and I will travel this road until I win or until I die. My name is Josef Green and someday I’m going to change the world.

I, Tornado

Suddenly your life pauses. You were walking, talking, dancing, crying, and twirling that knife in your fingers until time itself loses it’s freedom and sits there bound and gagged at the feet you can’t look down to see. No insects chirp from the distant night. No warning siren of the last bird to fall asleep wakes you from this dream. “I’m coming,” pulses through your blood, tingles up your nose, shivers up your spine, sparks in every synapse, and you know you have no time to prepare for the moments that await you. You plunge into your mind for the simple sanctity of solitude but your uncertainty is penetrating and numbs you to the core. You look into the mirror to imagine what expression would best suite the occassion and giving up, you hope for the best. You feel the distant breaking of damns that reach you in a flash, but that is not him. Black holes tore at your dark clothes, at your milky skin, at your tell tale heart, until your mind had nothing to grasp, but neither the void, or the crumbling damns are you. It was the moment that you used that knive to cut those puppet strings, that first breath after a coma, time stood still.

You’re in your house, alone, with that feeling coming on, knowing something’s bound to happen but just not sure if that something will be pleasant. The universe pauses and there is no sound as this Titan’s heart comes crashing down upon the sands of the desert lands. There is a soung like a sonic boom as you cover your ears and squint your eyes in the doorway to your room. The whole Earth shudders with you. In Tokyo children rush to the windows of their school to get a closer look at something they would come to ponder the rest of their lives but never witness for themselves.

I want to go into your house, but it cannot contain me and I call out to you, the voice of the wind, but you dare not open your eyes to see, you dare not move and inch towards me.

From out of the darkness I do not shine, only howl.

I howl to the moon that is fixed in your mind. That solitary figure, resolute in it’s dark beauty, moving despite the pock- marked trail of pain across it’s face, is like you, but that is not you either. You are not the broken dam, or the darkened void, or the cold and savage moon.

I am fighting for your soul. I pull free your front door. Slowly, tenderly, I take a step inside and watch as the falls expand and break away. At the center, you are curled up, feeling helpless and jaded and worthless.

You wait for death to greet you but I do not send you away. I slowly lift you up and pull you close to me. The wind is making your hair dance as you rise above where your roof used to be. I squeeze you close until you move through me, until you are at my core, where everthing is calm.

“You are safe here, nothing can hurt you anymore.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you do this?”

“All things must become new.”

“I don’t deserve this.”

“The time for deceiving yourself is over. You are amazing. You are loved. You love the moon, but you did not know the Wind loves you. It’s going to be okay now. I’ll rebuild your house…”

Suddenly your life pauses. You were minding your own business, walking, talking, dancing, crying, and twirling that knife in your fingers until time itself lost it’s freedom and now sits there bound and gagged at the feet you can’t look down to see. No insects chirp from the distant night. No warning siren of the last bird to fall asleep wakes you from this dream. “I’m coming,” pulses through your blood, tingles up your nose, shivers down your spine, sparks in every synapse, and you know you have no time to prepare for the moments that are waiting for you. You plunge into your mind for the simple sanctity of solitude but your uncertainty is penetrating and numbs you to the core. You look into the mirror to imagine what expression would best suite the occassion and giving up, you hope for the best. You feel the distant breaking of dams that reach you in a flash, but regardless of how intimate these feel, they are not you. Black holes tore at your dark clothes, at your milky skin, at your tell tale heart, until your mind had nothing to grasp, but neither the void, or the crumbling dams are you. It was the moment that you used that knive to cut those puppet strings, that first breath after a coma, that time stood still.

You’re in your house, alone, with that feeling coming on, knowing something’s bound to happen but just not sure if that something will be pleasant. The universe pauses and there is no sound as this Titan’s heart comes from the sky, fingers first, crashing down upon the sands of your desert lands. There is a roar like thunder as you cover your ears and squint your eyes. You cower  in the doorway to your room. The whole Earth shudders with you. In Tokyo, children rush to the windows of their school to get a closer look at something they would come to ponder the rest of their lives but never witness for themselves.

I want to go into your house, but it cannot contain me and I call out to you, the voice of the wind, but you dare not open your eyes to see, you dare not move and inch towards me.

From out of the darkness I do not shine, only howl.

I howl to the moon that is fixed in your mind. That solitary figure, resolute in it’s dark beauty, moving despite the pockmarked trail of pain across it’s face, is like you, but that is not you either. You are not the broken dam, or the darkened void, or the cold and savage moon.

I am fighting for your soul. I pull free your front door. Slowly, tenderly, I take a step inside and watch as the walls expand and break away. At the center, you are curled up, feeling helpless and jaded and worthless beyond imagination.

You wait for death to greet you but I do not send you away. I slowly lift you up and pull you close to me. The wind is making your hair dance as you rise above where your roof used to be. Your eyes are squeezed shut but do not stop the flow of fear and pain that streams down your face in huge, salty drops. I try to whipe them away, but fail. I squeeze you close to me as your feet and arms dangle in mid-air, until you move through me, until you are at my core, where everthing is calm.

“You are safe here, nothing can hurt you anymore.”

A cow flies by, mooing.

“Who are you?”

<Pause>

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you do this?”

“All things must become new.“

“But I don’t deserve this.”

“The time for deceiving yourself is over. You are amazing. You are loved. You love the moon, but you did not know the Wind loves you. It’s going to be okay now. I’ll help you rebuild your house now…“

Revolution

If the world does not end in 2012, children will read about 2009 in

their history books and they will see a world under the thumbs of big

oil companies. They will see pictures of greasy faces, poly-saturated in

transfats and preserved with salt and silicon. They will watch

educational podcasts displaying people gaining weight while leveling up

their tree elves and eating flaming hot cheetos by the bag. They will be

told stories by their parents and grandparents and they will wonder why

someone didn’t face their problems when they had a chance, or why they

couldn’t see the future coming. They will sit, scared and facing the

whimper that will be the end of the human race, and wonder why everyone

was too caught up in their little lives and taking their world for

granted to make a stand. By the time they form this question in their

minds, they will have been brainwashed by old movies that will inspire

them to rise to the occasion, here, in their hour of need, and prevent

the destruction of the world, but reality will don on them and they will

realize we didn’t take charge and change anything because we didn’t

care. We wanted the world to end but were afraid of what others would

think about us if we said so. We wanted the stars to fall into the sea

and the moon to turn to blood and the Earth to open up and restart

everything. We wanted zombies to overrun the city and Aliens to lay

seige to our political leaders. We hoped in dying a good death that

would make Odin proud, going out with gunpowder and treason, against the

nazi zombie aliens. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the highschool

drama or trying to get a raise at the job you only work at because you

need to put food on the table for the family you rushed into having

because you were lonely and wanted to be normal.

Tell me just why exactly you want to have kids again? You do understand

the world is running out of space, right? Sure, children are beautiful.

You’re creating life. You do know they will die one day. Are you

creating death as well? My sister wishes she’d never been born, and I

can’t say I don’t agree with her. I’m willing to declare that most

people that do have children shouldn’t. They aren’t responsible enough

to. The world they will be introducing them into will not be a happy

one. They might end up like me, or worse. I say the behavior of everyone

mating and having children is something that needs to change. There’s

plenty of things that need to be changed. There’s plenty of things that

have needed change and have been changed. I will discussed a few of

these now.

I’m talking about shape of the world changes. Everyone knows the world

is round and everyone knows that everyone used to know the Earth was

flat. I’m talking about the magnetic force of gravity holding down your

fancy cars and shoes and not the gravitational effect of God’s loving

will. I’m talking about the constant change in definition of morality.

People used to think people with dark skin had more sin than those with

more fair skin. Some mormons still do. By this thinking, Micheal Jackson

must have went from sinner to God’s right hand man. Way to go, Micheal,

you’ll never have to be reincarnated again.

I’m talking about God not being in control of our lives, but rather the

events that happen in our lives happening as a result of the actions and

consequences of everyone in the world. If there is a need for

spiritualism in our minds, modern church on the move, in a bottle and

out of a trucker diner is not cutting it. We don’t need to play

boardgames with God. If a person is honest with themselves and takes a

step back and as a result of thinking “They can’t all be right” tries to

research all prominent religions and ways of thought, they don’t say,

“Hmm, well I’m going to have to say Jesus is the one.” It makes no sense

why someone would pick any of them, zoroastionism, hinduism, church of

the flying spagetti Monster, Etc. The truth is, one size doesn’t fit

all. One time doesn’t even fit all. There was a time when people cared

about owning land. To own land meant you’re life meant something. Oklahoma

meant a lot to so many immigrants who were promised LAND! Free land!

As far as the eye can see. All over the world show how a family’s turf

wars can turn religious, until God becomes the flag bearer of their clan.

A decade ago if someone heard the word “globalization” they would think

it was a sign that the end was near. Isn’t globalization inevitable when

communication becomes so advanced and humans claim their identity as a

whole? Show me something true now and I’llshow you something constantly

changing.

The problem is, there are too many of us, bumping into eachother,

projecting our meanings in the world, projecting our perception on

eachother, learning our place in the world, trying to follow dreams,

giving up on those dreams and resorting to humble lives, and not

realizing we’re doing any of that. There are too many of us to live in

ignorance and to base our world off of archaic systems and schemas.

Why aren’t there Continental visionaries discussing change at pubs

anymore? There was a time where the devaluingcurrency was considered

blasphemous. Now the entire world believes in inflation and the value

of the American dollar has gone down in value 95 percent.

I’m talking about a reformation of an individual’s role in society, of

political structure, of mice and men. Most people who pride themselves

in their resourcefulness, go snorkling in the metaphoric ocean of

innovation. I’m talking about tearing the snorkle mask off and investing

in scuba gear. Only a minority of people talk about global warming like

it’s a big deal. The average person could care less because they have bills

to pay, and since oil companies have every reason to play it down, it’s

played down. The same people complaining about global warming are also

griping that we’re not only polluting the environment but also killing

off the wildlife. Gamers are complaining that their deer and whatnot aren’t

fun to hunt anymore, seeing as they’ve run out of space and are hanging out

in their backyards. The level of pride a dad must have in teaching his son

how to shoot a deer in his own backyard can’t be very high. I go to Rome and

see girls holding their newborns, crying and begging for money in the

street. We’ve reached a point where we don’t have any room for ourselves,

or anything else. Next thing you know, people will start building bubble

cities under the ocean and replacing trees with their aquatic counterpart,

whatever that is.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, “shift” is happening. We’ve set the pace of

progress and are experiencing the warning signs that soon our brains will

not be able to keep up with machine. Machines will not win by enslaving or

destroying us. They will win by making us try to turn into them. The world

will end the day we realize we can’t.

We welcome that day with blind zeal.

I’m talking about a reformation of the soul. It is very easy to relax to

the thought that the world is not going to end, not in my lifetime, and if

it does, I won’t be able to do anything about it and I won’t care afterwards.

Those are thoughts of a fool. It is true, there isn’t a large, visible group

of evil persons, actively trying to destroy all the rest of us apathetics, but

the truth that we have the capability of destroying ourselves is undeniable.

We can destroy ourselves out of ignorance or by just being stupid- it doesn’t even

have to be intentional. How much more of a worthy cause is it to try to be the

intentional positive force, to change the world into something less bent on the

path to destruction? How can anyone in their right mind be content with a dull

cow eyed complacency their whole lives, without going into the world and at

least asserting their own hearts? How can anyone give up on their dreams when

they know the alternative is merely a life of dull grayness?

Whether the world is going to end in 2012 or not, time ends for everyone at

some point. Don’t rush it. This is your time. Make it count.

If the world does not end in 2012, children will read about 2009 in
their history books and they will see a world under the thumbs of big
oil companies. They will see pictures of greasy faces, poly-saturated in
transfats and preserved with salt and silicon. They will watch
educational podcasts displaying people gaining weight while leveling up
their tree elves and eating flaming hot cheetos by the bag. They will be
told stories by their parents and grandparents and they will wonder why
someone didn’t face their problems when they had a chance, or why they
couldn’t see the future coming. They will sit, scared and facing the
whimper that will be the end of the human race, and wonder why everyone
was too caught up in their little lives and taking their world for
granted to make a stand. By the time they form this question in their
minds, they will have been brainwashed by old movies that will inspire
them to rise to the occasion, here, in their hour of need, and prevent
the destruction of the world, but reality will don on them and they will
realize we didn’t take charge and change anything because we didn’t
care. We wanted the world to end but were afraid of what others would
think about us if we said so. We wanted the stars to fall into the sea
and the moon to turn to blood and the Earth to open up and restart
everything. We wanted zombies to overrun the city and Aliens to lay
seige to our political leaders. We hoped in dying a good death that
would make Odin proud, going out with gunpowder and treason, against the
nazi zombie aliens. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about the highschool
drama or trying to get a raise at the job you only work at because you
need to put food on the table for the family you rushed into having
because you were lonely and wanted to be normal.
Tell me just why exactly you want to have kids again? You do understand
the world is running out of space, right? Sure, children are beautiful.
You’re creating life. You do know they will die one day. Are you
creating death as well? My sister wishes she’d never been born, and I
can’t say I don’t agree with her. I’m willing to declare that most
people that do have children shouldn’t. They aren’t responsible enough
to. The world they will be introducing them into will not be a happy
one. They might end up like me, or worse. I say the behavior of everyone
mating and having children is something that needs to change. There are
plenty of things that need to be changed. There are plenty of things that
have needed changing and have been changed. I will discuss a few of
these now.
I’m talking about shape of the world changes. Everyone knows the world
is round and everyone knows that everyone used to know the Earth was
flat. I’m talking about the magnetic force of gravity holding down your
fancy cars and shoes and not the gravitational effect of God’s loving
will. I’m talking about the constant change in definition of morality.
People used to think people with dark skin had more sin than those with
more fair skin. Some mormons still do. By this thinking, Micheal Jackson
must have went from sinner to God’s right hand man. Way to go, Micheal,
you’ll never have to be reincarnated again.
I’m talking about God not being in control of our lives, but rather the
events that happen in our lives happening as a result of the actions and
consequences of everyone in the world. If there is a need for
spiritualism in our minds, modern church on the move, in a bottle and
out of a trucker diner is not cutting it. We don’t need to play
boardgames with God. If a person is honest with themselves and takes a
step back and as a result of thinking “They can’t all be right” tries to
research all prominent religions and ways of thought, they don’t say,
“Hmm, well I’m going to have to say Jesus is the one.” It makes no sense
why someone would pick any of them, zoroastionism, hinduism, church of
the flying spagetti Monster, Etc. The truth is, one size doesn’t fit
all. One time doesn’t even fit all. There was a time when people cared
about owning land. To own land meant you’re life meant something. Oklahoma
meant a lot to so many immigrants who were promised LAND! Free land!
As far as the eye can see. Histories from all over the world show how a family’s turf
wars can turn religious, until God becomes the Blazing flag bearer of their clan.
A decade ago if someone heard the word “globalization” they would think
it was a sign that the end was near. Isn’t globalization inevitable when
communication becomes so advanced and humans claim their identity as a
whole? Show me something true now and I’ll show you something constantly
changing.
The problem is, there are too many of us, bumping into eachother,
projecting our meanings in the world, projecting our perception on
eachother, learning our place in the world, trying to follow dreams,
giving up on those dreams and resorting to humble lives, and not
realizing we’re doing any of that. There are too many of us to live in
ignorance and to base our world off of archaic systems and schemas.
Why aren’t there Continental visionaries discussing change at pubs
anymore? There was a time when the devaluing of currency was considered
blasphemous. Now the entire world believes in inflation and the value
of the American dollar has gone down in value 95 percent.
I’m talking about a reformation of an individual’s role in society, of
political structure, of mice and men. Most people who pride themselves
in their resourcefulness, go snorkling in the metaphoric ocean of
innovation. I’m talking about tearing the snorkle mask off and investing
in scuba gear. Only a minority of people talk about global warming like
it’s a big deal. The average person could care less because they have bills
to pay, and since oil companies have every reason to play it down, it’s
played down. The same people complaining about global warming are also
griping that we’re not only polluting the environment but also killing
off the wildlife. Gamers are complaining that their deer and whatnot aren’t
fun to hunt anymore, seeing as they’ve run out of space and are hanging out
in their backyards. The level of pride a dad must have in teaching his son
how to shoot a deer in his own backyard can’t be very high. I go to Rome and
see girls holding their newborns, crying and begging for money in the
street. We’ve reached a point where we don’t have any room for ourselves,
or anything else. Next thing you know, people will start building bubble
cities under the ocean and replacing trees with their aquatic counterpart,
whatever that is.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, “shift” is happening. We’ve set the pace of
progress and are experiencing the warning signs that soon our brains will
not be able to keep up with machine. Machines will not win by enslaving or
destroying us. They will win by making us try to turn into them. The world
will end the day we realize we can’t.
We welcome that day with blind zeal.
I’m talking about a reformation of the soul. It is very easy to relax to
the thought that the world is not going to end, not in my lifetime, and if
it does, I won’t be able to do anything about it and I won’t care afterwards.
Those are thoughts of a fool. It is true, there isn’t a large, visible group
of evil persons, actively trying to destroy all the rest of us apathetics, but
the truth that we have the capability of destroying ourselves is undeniable.
We can destroy ourselves out of ignorance or by just being stupid- it doesn’t even
have to be intentional. How much more of a worthy cause is it to try to be the
intentional positive force, to change the world into something less bent on the
path to destruction? How can anyone in their right mind be content with a dull
cow eyed complacency their whole lives, without going into the world and at
least asserting their own hearts? How can anyone give up on their dreams when
they know the alternative is merely a life of dull grayness?
Whether the world is going to end in 2012 or not, time ends for everyone at
some point. Don’t rush it. This is your time. Make it count.